The Best Sports Year Ever

Now that both ESPN and Sports Illustrated have declared it so, it is now official. 2008 is the best year in sports ever! Michael Phelps winning 8 gold metals! Usain Bolt running away with sprint records! Kerri Walsh and Misty May-Treanor maywalshing their competition! Tiger Woods winning the U.S. Open on 1 good leg! Nadal and Federer playing the best tennis match ever! Jimmie Johnson winning the Sprint Cup back-to-back-to-back! Danica Patrick finally winning a race! Brett Favre retiring and then un-retiring! The New York Giants beating the previously undefeated Patriots with the greatest catch in Super Bowl history! The Miami Dolphins and Tampa Bay Rays both going from worst to first! The Phillies bringing Philadelphia its first championship in 26 years! The Celtics and Lakers both coming back from the grave to renew the NBA's best rivalry! Kansas winning the NCAA basketball title after a 3-point shot at the buzzer! All of these accomplishments are great, don't get me wrong, but to proclaim that this year is the Best Sports Year Ever! is not only a big stretch but also demonstrates the East Coast bias of the national sports media.

If you are a sports fan in Seattle, San Francisco, or most other cities west of the Mississippi, you might rightfully take exception to this proclamation. In Seattle, the Seahawks just completed a dreadful season where half the team spent the year on Injured Reserve. The Mariners were truly awful, and the Sonics left town to be truly awful somewhere else. Even the Washington Huskies, one of the historically best college football programs in the country, had an awful year to forget. Washington State’s only bright spot this year was beating Washington. In the Bay Area, the San Jose Sharks had a decent run but fell apart in the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs again, and this was the highlight of the local sports year. The Giants, A’s, 49ers, Raiders, and Warriors were all mediocre, and Stanford and Cal’s sports teams weren't much better. Even the perennial arena football power San Jose Sabercats had a down year this year, and may not play at all next year. San Diego, Portland, Phoenix, Denver, Houston, Dallas, and St. Louis all had down sports years this year. Los Angeles had some success with the Lakers, Angels, Dodgers, USC football, and UCLA basketball teams all having good years (plus the fact that Tiger Woods is a LA area native), but even their fans are depressed because all of them suffered heartbreaking defeats at the end of their seasons. Ditto for the university football teams in Texas. The Arizona Cardinals in Phoenix may be the only western team that can say they have had a successful year, but if Atlanta cleans their clock next week as the odds makers predict then that goes away too. However, because a New York won the Super Bowl, a Philadelphia team won the World Series, and a Boston team won everything else, plus the revival of sports in Florida and Washington DC, it is the Greatest Sports Year Ever!

I agree that this is very trivial in the grand scheme of things, but it just bothers me the read and watch this stuff. It is very disrespectful (yeah, that sounds pretentious, but it's true!). There should be some kind of bailout here or something to fix this. Let’s get Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and the other Western legislators working on this. Congress should require Al Davis to either sell the Raiders or move them to an East Coast city, require the Sonics to return to Seattle, ban the Yankees and Red Sox from signing any free agents, and require ESPN to move their studios from Connecticut to Colorado. Now that is change that we can believe in!