Nontroversy

This public service announcement is to be the final word on Tom Brady's Super Ankle Story.

Keyshawn Johnson on ESPN's "Sunday NFL Countdown" made a good point Sunday morning, and this is pretty much where I find myself coming out on the whole Brady nontroversy. "If there was really something wrong with Tom Brady's ankle, he wouldn't have been limping around in New York bringing his girlfriend flowers," Johnson said. "He'd be at the stadium in Foxborough getting around-the-clock treatment."

Emmitt Smith, who usually makes it hard for me to agree with him because I'm usually busy looking up words he's inventing as he speaks, made a good point too. "If I'm the Giants, I'd want to play the Super Bowl today. They went into Tampa Bay and won, went into Dallas the next week and won, and went into Green Bay the next week and won again. The layoff might affect their rhythm," Smith said.

But then, surprisingly, Tom Jackson, far older than Johnson and Smith, and presumably better able to recognize a non-story when he puts his horse-sized teeth around one, returned to the topic of Brady and his ankle, and showed that he completely missed the mark.

"What is the purpose of the boot? To distract the Giants? To distract the media?" He continued on in the same, ignorant direction.

The purpose of the boot is to protect Brady's ankle. Is it broken? Dislocated? Sprained? None of the above. It's just sore. Sometimes that happens in football, the big game played by tough, strong men who love to eat red meat and fornicate deviantly with strippers. Fe fi fo fum.

Does anyone think Brady is going to miss the Super Bowl? Of course not. The boot is just a precautionary step.

And though not classically trained in journalism, Jackson is a splendid analyst with good on-air skills. Alongside host Chris Berman, Jackson is a staple of the network's NFL coverage.

But he's become what so many in the media -- especially sports media -- have become: ignorant to his own shortcomings. Jackson's rhetoric shows he thinks it's logical for TMZ's cameras to wait at Gisele Bundchen's door until Mr. Boyfriend shows up, and how dare Brady give football analysts something to overdissect to fill the 24-hour cycle for each of the next two weeks before the Super Bowl? Do you really think Patriots coach Bill Belichick called Brady into his office and said, "Hey, No. 12, why don't you head down to New York tomorrow and visit your girlfriend? And put a little air cast on your foot in case there might be a photographer hanging around, and limp a little. Distracting the Giants I think is our only shot."

Sure Belichick is a secretive a-hole who will be required this week to release an injury report, but none of what the TV morons have analyzed for the last six days has been worth a fraction of the time they've spent on it. Especially in sports, the media creates the distractions about which they so frequently inquire and ultimately write. They use clever "Bradygate" nicknames as if the quarterback himself is to blame for the tiresome scenario. "Will this be a distraction?" is possibly the most polite way a reporter can ask, "do you and your teammates hate me and all the other idiots in my profession?" And even when they do get an answer to that question, it's not good enough to match up with the story they're wanting to write -- or that they've already written -- so they question it further just to get the last word.