2006 NFL Draft - "From A White Game To A Black Game" - S.I.'s Paul Zimmerman On The NFL Draft, Pro Football, and Katie Couric - Video

I had the pleasure of conducting an interview with the legendary Sports Illiustrated writer, Paul Zimmerman at the 2006 NFL Draft. While our conversation was short -- we were all getting ready for the drama that was to unfold after the Houston Texans officially annouced their selection of defensive lineman Mario Williams -- it was blunt, honest, illuminating, and fun.

Some of the highlight of our conversation: "If I were the Texans, I'd have taken the best player I thought was available, and busted my hump to sign him. Maybe they did that...Football has changed from a white game to a black game. It's a speed game... If I were the Texans, I'd have taken the best player I thought was available. Maybe they did that. Time will tell... You tell me. What has Katie Couric done for $15 million?"

Well, you get the idea. This was totally off the cuff. Paul didn't know this guy was going to come with with a camcorder and ask for an interview. We didn't go over exactly what was going to be asked. I just filmed our conversation. It was that simple.

For those of you who don't know who "Dr. Z" is, here's his bio from S.I.com:

"Paul Zimmerman, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated since 1979, videotapes and charts as many as eight NFL games a week from his home. It's safe to say that Dr. Z has watched more NFL games than any other person on the planet. In addition to his regular columns for SI, he contributes Insider, Power Rankings and Mailbag columns to SI.com.

Dr. Z is the author of seven books on the NFL, including The Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football. His inside analysis and opinions are rooted in more than 50 years of playing and watching football.

As a 15-year-old, Zimmerman sparred with Ernest Hemingway in a Manhattan gym. He sustained four broken noses as an offensive lineman in high school (Horace Mann High in the Bronx, N.Y.), at two colleges (Stanford and Columbia) and for his Army team (the Western Area Command Rhinos, in Germany). He also played semi-professionally in New Jersey for the Paterson Pioneers and the Morristown Colonials.

Before joining SI, Zimmerman worked for the New York Journal-American and the New York World-Telegram & Sun, and spent 13 years at the New York Post, where he covered pro football and three Olympic Games. He was one of the few journalists to get close to the Israeli compound during the 1972 hostage-taking in Munich; he bucked two lines of security guards and took a rifle butt to the head.

Zimmerman and his wife, to whom he often refers in his columns on CNNSI.com, live in Mountain Lakes, N.J.

Dr. Z refered to his wife in our conversation, too.

Here's the video of my conversation with Paul Zimmerman:

2006 NFL Draft - A Neat Sign-Off: Bill Chachkes Takes Us Out, NFL Network's Pat Kirwan and NLS John Murphy Give Views

While it's not the last video from the NFL Draft you'll see on this blog, it was the last one taken there. It's a sign off, and starts with Bill Chachkes of www.nextlevelscoutinginc.com and Fieldposition.com and now nflbusinessblog.com signing off, Mel Kiper giving an opinion just as he's called away by someone at ESPN, NFL Network's Pat Kirwan providing his views, and John Murphy of www.nextlevelscoutinginc.com chiming in as well.

In this, you'll not only get a view of Radio City Music Hall, but also an idea of just how many people are required to put on what really is a TV production. Also notice how fast everyone was working. That's because Radio City's security people kept coming by and asking us to pack up. It was a little much, especially considering that we had not received the on-paper results from the 7th and final round. Some draft attendees write down each pick. I did that last year; not this year and because the NFL's going to give them to us, and I figured I needed the time to produce video and blog content.

Here's the video:

John Kenneth Galbraith - Quotes

In what will be a series of posts in celebration of the man who so shaped my intellectual gantry, I am presenting this set of quotes by John Kenneth Galbraith, and that I found at www.brainyquote.com. They're worth remembering :

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.
John Kenneth Galbraith

A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.
John Kenneth Galbraith

All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.
John Kenneth Galbraith

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Anyone who says he won't resign four times, will.
John Kenneth Galbraith

By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Commencement oratory must eschew anything that smacks of partisan politics, political preference, sex, religion or unduly firm opinion. Nonetheless, there must be a speech: Speeches in our culture are the vacuum that fills a vacuum.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all.
John Kenneth Galbraith

If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
John Kenneth Galbraith

If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should never grow old.
John Kenneth Galbraith

In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.
John Kenneth Galbraith

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.
John Kenneth Galbraith

In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability.
John Kenneth Galbraith

In economics, the majority is always wrong.
John Kenneth Galbraith

In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof.
John Kenneth Galbraith

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought.
John Kenneth Galbraith

It is not necessary to advertise food to hungry people, fuel to cold people, or houses to the homeless.
John Kenneth Galbraith

It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce.
John Kenneth Galbraith

More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.
John Kenneth Galbraith

One of the greatest pieces of economic wisdom is to know what you do not know.
John Kenneth Galbraith

One of the little-celebrated powers of Presidents (and other high government officials) is to listen to their critics with just enough sympathy to ensure their silence.
John Kenneth Galbraith

People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Several times I concluded that there was too much detail; always I returned to continue and enjoy the book.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Talk of revolution is one of avoiding reality.
John Kenneth Galbraith

The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture.
John Kenneth Galbraith

The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor.
John Kenneth Galbraith

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.
John Kenneth Galbraith

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.
John Kenneth Galbraith

The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state.
John Kenneth Galbraith

The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.
John Kenneth Galbraith

The Metropolis should have been aborted long before it became New York, London or Tokyo.
John Kenneth Galbraith

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
John Kenneth Galbraith

The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.
John Kenneth Galbraith

The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself.
John Kenneth Galbraith

There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished.
John Kenneth Galbraith

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.
John Kenneth Galbraith

There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
John Kenneth Galbraith

There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth.
John Kenneth Galbraith

There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.
John Kenneth Galbraith

War remains the decisive human failure.
John Kenneth Galbraith

We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.
John Kenneth Galbraith

We have escapist fiction, so why not escapist biography?
John Kenneth Galbraith

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.
John Kenneth Galbraith

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.
John Kenneth Galbraith

Stephen Colbert Let's Loose On George Bush At Annual Dinner

This video's making the rounds on the blogsphere and for very good reason: it's really funny. What's equally hiliarious is the almost nervous reaction of the attendees at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

He hits just about everyone, including Joe Wilson, but saves his best stuff for President Bush.

After the attach, er, segment, President Bush seemed stone-faced, but then nice-face only to shake Colbert's hand. But watch Bush's expression after Colbert walks by.

Here's Part One....



and Part Two:



..Here's an article on the event, with a link at the title of this post:


Colbert Lampoons Bush at White House Correspondents Dinner -- President Not Amused?

By E&P Staff

Published: April 29, 2006 11:40 PM ET updated Sunday

WASHINGTON A blistering comedy “tribute” to President Bush by Comedy Central’s faux talk-show host Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondent Dinner Saturday night left George and Laura Bush unsmiling at its close.

Earlier, the president had delivered his talk to the 2,700 attendees, including many celebrities and top officials, with the help of a Bush impersonator.

Colbert, who spoke in the guise of his talk-show character, who ostensibly supports the president strongly, urged Bush to ignore his low approval ratings, saying they were based on reality, “and reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

He attacked those in the press who claim that the shake-up at the White House was merely re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. “This administration is soaring, not sinking,” he said. “If anything, they are re-arranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.”

Colbert told Bush he could end the problem of protests by retired generals by refusing to let them retire. He compared Bush to Rocky Balboa in the “Rocky” movies, always getting punched in the face — “and Apollo Creed is everything else in the world.”

Turning to the war, he declared, "I believe that the government that governs best is a government that governs least, and by these standards we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq."

He noted former Ambassador Joseph Wilson in the crowd, just three tables away from Karl Rove, and that he had brought " Valerie Plame." Then, worried that he had named her, he corrected himself, as Bush aides might do, "Uh, I mean ... he brought Joseph Wilson's wife." He might have "dodged the bullet," he said, as prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald wasn't there.

Colbert also made biting cracks about missing WMDs, “photo ops” on aircraft carriers and at hurricane disasters, melting glaciers and Vice President Cheney shooting people in the face. He advised the crowd, "if anybody needs anything at their tables, speak slowly and clearly into your table numbers and somebody from the N.S.A. will be right over with a cocktail. "

Observing that Bush sticks to his principles, he said, "When the president decides something on Monday, he still believes it on Wednesday -- no matter what happened Tuesday."

Also lampooning the press, Colbert complained that he was “surrounded by the liberal media who are destroying this country, except for Fox News. Fox believes in presenting both sides of the story — the president’s side and the vice president’s side." In another slap at the news channel, he said: "I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument. I call it the No Fact Zone. Fox News, I own the copyright on that term."

He also reflected on the alleged good old days for the president, when the media was still swallowing the WMD story.

Addressing the reporters, he said, "Let's review the rules. Here's how it works. The president makes decisions, he’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know -- fiction."

He claimed that the Secret Service name for Bush's new press secretary is "Snow Job."

Colbert closed his routine with a video fantasy where he gets to be White House Press Secretary, complete with a special “Gannon” button on his podium. By the end, he had to run from Helen Thomas and her questions about why the U.S. really invaded Iraq and killed all those people.

As Colbert walked from the podium, when it was over, the president and First Lady gave him quick nods, unsmiling. The president shook his hand and tapped his elbow, and left immediately.

Those seated near Bush told E&P's Joe Strupp, who was elsewhere in the room, that Bush had quickly turned from an amused guest to an obviously offended target as Colbert’s comments brought up his low approval ratings and problems in Iraq.

Several veterans of past dinners, who requested anonymity, said the presentation was more directed at attacking the president than in the past. Several said previous hosts, like Jay Leno, equally slammed both the White House and the press corps.

“This was anti-Bush,” said one attendee. “Usually they go back and forth between us and him.” Another noted that Bush quickly turned unhappy. “You could see he stopped smiling about halfway through Colbert,” he reported.

After the gathering, Snow, while nursing a Heineken outside the Chicago Tribune reception, declined to comment on Colbert. “I’m not doing entertainment reviews,” he said. “I thought the president was great, though.”

Strupp, in the crowd during the Colbert routine, had observed that quite a few sitting near him looked a little uncomfortable at times, perhaps feeling the material was a little too biting -- or too much speaking "truthiness" (Colbert's made-up word) to power.

Asked by E&P after it was over if he thought he'd been too harsh, Colbert said, "Not at all." Was he trying to make a point politically or just get laughs? "Just for laughs," he said. He said he did not pull any material for being too strong, just for time reasons. (He later said the president told him "good job" when he walked off.)

Helen Thomas told Strupp her segment with Colbert was "just for fun."

In its report on the affair, USA Today asserted that some in the crowd cracked up over Colbert but others were "bewildered." Wolf Blitzer of CNN said he thought Colbert was funny and "a little on the edge."

Earlier, the president had addressed the crowd with a Bush impersonator alongside, with the faux-Bush speaking precisely and the real Bush deliberately mispronouncing words, such as the inevitable "nuclear." At the close, Bush called the imposter "a fine talent. In fact, he did all my debates with Senator Kerry." The routine went over well with this particular crowd -- better than did Colbert's, in fact, for whatever reason.

Among attendees at the black tie event: Morgan Fairchild, quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, Justice Antonin Scalia, George Clooney, and Jeff "Skunk" Baxter of the Doobie Brothers -- in a kilt.

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John Kenneth Galbraith - My Hero Passed Away Over The Weekend

I'm going to write more later, but I just learned that Harvard Professor and well-noted writer John Kenneth Galbraith passed away over the weekend. He was the first public figure who caused me to entirely shift my interest in life to that of economics and specifically institutional economics.

More soon.

Video - 2006 NFL Draft - Draft Analysis By Bill Chachkes, Eric Strauss, and Matt Shapiro

Three NFL Draft media veterans totalling 34 years of NFL Draft experience talked about the 2006 NFL Draft with me at Radio City Music Hall. Bill Chachkes (pictured) of www.nextlevelscoutinginc.com and Fieldposition.com and now nflbusinessblog.com which you're reading, Eric Strauss of Raiderfans.net , and Matt Shapiro of cstv.com provide this really interesting take on the draft and which teams did well and why. I really enjoyed filming this. We even picked an interesting place, all the better to escape the loudspeakers.

As to their takes, it's varied and well worth listening to. It's also contains some opinions on where the draft was held, and other views you're not going to get anywhere else.

Here's the video:

2006 NFL Draft - It's Over And Too Bad

The NFL Draft finished with Paul Salada's read of the Oakland Raiders selection of Maine's Kevin McMahan as "Mr. Irrelevant" at as the 255th pick and all the while as fans were cheering for Marcus Vick to be that pick.

Best draft? Well, John Murphy of www.nextlevelscoutinginc.com and a 10 year draft veteran says that "I really like New England for how they filled those long-term offensive needs with Laurence Maroney and Chad Jackson... Cardinals have continued to add value across the board... Leinart, Lutui, Pope and then Gabe Watson who falls into the second day... Eagles have traded around and gotten excellent value, especially Winston Justice in round two... also like how the Broncos added a future starting QB in Jay Cutler and improved for this season by trading for wide receiver Javon Walker."

I've got a lot of video "in the can" as they say, and came away with some new friends and solidified some existing relationships. Longtime NFL Draftnik Bill Chackhes is joining my blog, and I welcome his knoweldge, wisdom, and charm. Now, if I can just get him to acitivate his Blogger account!

(Speaking of Blogger, I thought this little experiment of video / blogging went very well. With some tweaking, it will be huge next year.)

The NFL staff, as usual, were great to work with and feel like family to me. Radio City Music Hall was a great venue to hold the Draft and as I understand it better than the ballroom at Javitz because of the ceiling design there. I liked the space at Javitz but at Radio City everything and everyone was around me, as the videos will show.

Neat.

Stay tuned for a lot -- a large number -- of video clips and pictures. You'll love it.