Keyshawn Johnson: Not Half Bad

OK. Below are Keyshawn Johnson's career stats. Mull them over for awhile, not thinking about the man, just looking at the numbers.

For some reason, there's been a "good riddance" vibe about Johnson's exit from the NFL, but he's been a charismatic and excellent player.

The numbers:

KEYSHAWN JOHNSON
Year  TM |    Rec  Yards   Y/R   TD |
+----------+-----+-------------------
| 1996 nyj |  63    844  13.4    8 |
| 1997 nyj |  70    963  13.8    5 |
| 1998 nyj |  83   1131  13.6   10 |
| 1999 nyj |  89   1170  13.1    8 |
| 2000 tam |  71    874  12.3    8 |
| 2001 tam |  106   1266  11.9    1 |
| 2002 tam |  76   1088  14.3    5 |
| 2003 tam |  45    600  13.3    3 |
| 2004 dal |  70    981  14.0    6 |
| 2005 dal |  71    839  11.8    6 |
| 2006 car |  70    815  11.6    4 |
167 games  814 10571 13.0  64

Hall of Famer? Probably not. The numbers aren't
overwhelming, plus he only made three Pro Bowls
and got bounced from New York, Tampa, Dallas
and Carolina.

But Keyshawn might be one of the best pure possession
receivers of all time. He didn't have the speed for 50-yard TDs,
but he was incredibly consistent. Marking him down
for 70 grabs and 900-1110 yards a year for a solid decade is
nothing to sneeze at.

His career numbers are more like those of a great
tight end -- in fact, they are almost exactly the same
as Tony Gonzalez's (sure-fire Hall of Famer)

TONY GONZALEZ
 Year  TM |   G |   Rec  Yards   Y/R   TD |
+----------+-----+-------------------------+
| 1997 kan |  16 |    33    368  11.2    2 |
| 1998 kan |  16 |    59    621  10.5    2 |
| 1999 kan |  15 |    76    849  11.2   11 |
| 2000 kan |  16 |    93   1203  12.9    9 |
| 2001 kan |  16 |    73    917  12.6    6 |
| 2002 kan |  16 |    63    773  12.3    7 |
| 2003 kan |  16 |    71    916  12.9   10 |
| 2004 kan |  16 |   102   1258  12.3    7 |
| 2005 kan |  16 |    78    905  11.6    2 |
| 2006 kan |  15 |    73    900  12.3    5 |
+----------+-----+-------------------------+
|  158 games    721 8710 12.1 61

Of course, Keyshawn wasn't a tight end (although he was
an excellent blocker), so he's probably going to be
viewed as a good-not-great No. 1 overall pick. But
he had a catch in every one of his 167 games, he's
15th all time in yards and 23rd in catches.

He led the Jets to an AFC title game, and was a key cog
on the Bucs' Super Bowl team. And after his rookie season,
he never played for a really terrible team.

In seven playoff games, his worst performance was
decent: three catches for 40 yards and a TD.
He averaged 5.5 catches for 81 yards in those
seven games, four of them wins.

He was clearly a guy who was too outspoken for his
own good -- had his ego been smaller, he might
have stuck around for a long time in this league.
But he wanted to be the star, and he mostly deserved to be.

Throw him the damn ball?

Wasn't such a bad idea.

Nice Cooter

Turns out Cooter isn’t just a mechanic in Hazzard County. He's a coach in Knoxville, too.

Hey, nobody likes the hillbillies more than I do. These are my people. But finding this headline on the University of Tennessee football web site is just too stereotypically rich to pass up:

“Cooter replaces Clausen as Vols graduate assistant”

That’s right, Jim Bob Cooter – we don't make up the names – is the new graduate assistant for the UT football team.

While you're getting in touch with your inner redneck, check out the original Cooter's web site here and learn all about DukeFest 2007.

Around the web: beer & football

A few nifty links to bide the time during the interminable off-season (during which time we'll try to perfect this little blog addition to the CHFF).

Deere saves horse
From the Dallas Morning News: New Cowboys offensive lineman Leonard Davis (recently acquired from Arizona) used his John Deere the other day to pull a trapped horse out of the mud. The picture is priceless.

Retro look for Steelers
This story is a couple weeks old, but comes to us from the bad-timing department. The Steelers are celebrating their 75th anniversary this year with new uniforms, a new mascot and a fan-voted 75th anniversary all-time team.

But unless you live in Pittsburgh, you haven't heard about it.

There's a reason why: the organization made the announcement the Friday before the draft, when football fans had other things on their mind. They would have made a bigger splash if they made the announcement oh, I don't know, today, with nothing of note going on in the football world.

* See the new unis, helmet and mascot here
* Get the Post-Gazette's take here
* And vote for Pittsburgh's all-time team here

We'll offer up our all-time Steelers team this summer.

They most definitely hate the Patriots
There’s a new blog out there devoted to a passionate hatred of the Patriots. The name says it all: I-Hate-The-New-England-Patriots.blogspot.com.

It looks like it’s run by N.Y. Jets fans, but it's reaching out to all those united by a single common bond: an intense hatred of the Patriots (check out the very funny May 3 post, “Why We Hate”). The site’s pretty clever and an entertaining read.

New uniforms for Boise State
The Broncos pulled off a win for the ages in January, in one of the great televised sporting events ever. So they enter the 2007 season as a new media darling … and with new uniforms. The change is not quite as dramatic as Pittsburgh’s. Now, if they’d only get rid of that obnoxious blue field.

The best QB you don't know
The blog Carson’s Corner has a look at the incredibly productive but incredibly low-wattage quarterback Marc Bulger of St. Louis. Blogger Brian Carson offers up some nifty Cold, Hard Football Facts in his piece about Bulger, long a CHFF favorite, but misses the big one: the anonymous Bulger has the fifth best passer rating in NFL history! Interestingly, we took a look at the most consistent QBs in football two years ago, and Bulger topped the list.

Eagles ready to trade McNabb?
Philly Inquirer columnist Don McKee reports that it’s a possibility.

O.K., it’s not football
Another story out of Philly: columnist Bill Conlin chimes in with an interesting little statistical look at the historic futility of the Phillies as they approach the 10,000-loss milestone in franchise history. They’d need to go 162-0 for seven straight seasons, and 59-0 in the eighth, to reach .500 as a franchise. The Phillies were founded in 1883, making them one of the oldest franchises in North American sports. They have just one World Series championship to show for it (1980).

Philly Sucks
You think your sports teams suck? It could be worse. You could live in Philly. One Philadelphia sports fan has an entire site devoted to the sports teams in his city, “where suckage is a way of life.”

According to the ticker on Philly Sucks.com, it’s been 8755 days+ since a Philadelphia sports team last won a major sports title. That’s nearly 24 years for those of you keeping score at home (Sixers in 1983).

Wine drinkers spit ...

File this under the "Painting with Broad Brush Strokes" category.

I spend a lot of time with serious foodies ... most are cool. And chefs are the coolest. They just like to eat and drink good stuff ... whatever it is. Almost all of them are pretty down to earth and just dig it when people love their food.

But wine people ... serious wine people (you know the type), almost all are pretentious d-bags. Which is one of the many reasons I like beer better ... beer people are definitely much cooler than wine people.

I witnessed Exhibit 4,789 the other night. I was going over a friend's house for dinner. He had spent the day slow-smoking ribs for his friends and family ... mother, siblings, kids, everyone (using our rib dry rub in the process, too). He asked me to bring over a bottle of chianti. So I go to the local "packy" (in Boston parlance) and check out the Italian wines. There's about six different chiantis in one area. I ask the manager, very innocenty, "are these all your chiantis?" Six seemed like slim pickings.

You would have thought I insulted his children.

"Are you kidding?," he said, all snot-nosed and pretentious like. "We have the best selection of chianti on the South Shore."

Serious dick-a-tude on this dude, like I'm some piece o' shit.

All I wanted was a bottle of wine, and wanted to know if there were other chiantis in the store. This guy cops a royal "I am better than all the little people" attitude.

I grabbed the first bottle on display and headed out, reminded of yet another reason why I (and the vast majority of Americans) don't drink wine: you find yourself surrounded by Grade A dickheads when you do.

Remember, wine drinkers spit. Beer drinkers swallow.

Who'd you rather hang out with?

Notifiy Kyoto: Mars getting warmer, too!

For years, those with the sanity to question the religious zealots in the global warming community have pointed to the fact that the sun itself is actually in a warm period and that other planets are getting warmer, too.

Even the European media establishment has taken a break from bashing the Unitd States to publish a piece about global warming on Mars: check out this piece in the Times of London.

It seems that the ice cap on Mars is in danger of melting, too. Last I checked, the evil US capitalist responsible for global warming on earth was not running things on Mars.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1720024.ece

In an unrelated note, China opens one to two new coal-burning plants every day, yet is exempt from the global-warming agreements like Kyoto.

Only in San Francisco

Nobody eats meat as prodigiously, or as proudly, as the Cold, Hard Football Facts crew.

If it bleeds it leads at our tailgates.

But not everyone feels the same. Check out this story from, where else, San Francisco. This woman used to eat meat, but now that she's a vegetarian the smell (not even the taste) of meat makes her gag. I think that's what you'd call a psycho-somatic reaction. It's all in her head, in other words.

And - in typical freak fashion - her miserable lifestyle choices make those around her miserable too.

http://www.chow.com/stories/10480

I don't smoke ... don't like it. But when they started cracking down on smoking in privately owned places (i.e., restaurants and bars) I knew it was only a matter of time before the Freak Patrol tried to ban other unhealthy activities (like eating bacon or red meat) that they don't like.

This story is the pitter-patter over the horizon of the approaching Freak Storm.

Masters of the scare tactic

Nobody has mastered the scare campaign quite like the global warming wackos.

Sure, the planet may be getting warmer ... but so isn't every other planet in the solar system ... not to mention the sun itself.

Yet check out this story about the impending total meltdown of the Greeland ice cap.
http://www.mywire.com/pubs/AFP/2007/05/02/3412497

Funny about Greenland. It's about to disappear as we know it ... yet I was in Maine last week and the Kennebec River was still frozen solid from Bingham on up.

(Conveniently, the article put no timeframe on the epic upcoming meltdown of Greenland ... but baced on the pace of the Kennebec ice melt, I'm guessing in about 1 million years ... long after a meteor has already destroyed human life anyway.)

Of course, at the end of the article you find a scientist begging for money to continue investigating the problem.

But I look at it this way: if man-made global warming has already been proven a fact, why are we spending any more money on it? That'd be like spending money to study the existence of gravity.