I have to focus on clarifying my thoughts here because my A.D.D. is rampant today and I've had a lot of thoughts that are related but should be separated into different posts.

Every morning when I commute to work I like to listen to ESPN radio because I need something to fill my hour and this time of year, football is the most common discussion. I start my commute toward the end of the Mike and Mike show and arrive at working during the first part of the Herd with Colin Cowherd. I have considered not listening to Cowherd before, but for me Cowherd is what Howard Stern is for Stern haters. The only difference being that I am conscious of this situation. Years ago when anybody actually gave to craps about Stern, he said that a larger percentage of his listening audience was haters than fans. He said this was because more people wanted to hear what he said so they could cry about it later. I'm paraphrasing, but if you listened to anything people were saying about Stern at the time, you'd see that he made an accurate assessment of the situation.

I seem to listen to Cowherd for more or less the same reason. I don't listen to him because I like him. I listen to him because I don't like him. He's a jerk. He's rude, often bordering on close-mindedness akin to many forms of bigotry. He makes black and white, generalized statements. He's pretty much everything I don't like about people that I don't like.

That being said, let me clarify two points before I continue this mock tirade.

1) I don't know Cowherd personally. He could be a really nice guy. He could be Satan's Apprentice. Not my place to judge him as a person. This entire blog entry is just about Cowherd the radio personality.

2) I recognize and admit that Cowherd makes more of his over-generalized statements because it's good entertainment and he is in the entertainment industry. Furthermore, he often follows up his sensational statements with balance and fact. He clearly is adept at saying what gets people's emotional attention and then is intelligent enough to keep his show sane.

Ok, here's the thing. Cowherd does do some things that border on driving me nuts. First of all, he loves to bad mouth "nerds" and people who aren't intelligent enough to "do the things that people that have money do". (Note: I should take the quotes off that last part because he never said those exact words to my knowledge, but I'll just put words in his mouth for now because it entertains me.) The basic underlying message in many of Cowherd's rants are that if you don't agree with him you're either a "nerd" or "poor" and therefore less intelligent. Would he ever say that outright? Maybe, maybe not. Even if he did, I'm sure he'd has some pretty decent arguments for why he feels that way. Either way, I think he's wrong and I can't imagine an argument he'd have to prove otherwise to me.

So far the only conclusion I can come to after reading what I have written so far is that Cowherd is a elitist, judgmental jerk. I went to the "rich school" where I grew up. This means the top 20% of the socioeconomic makeup of my town sent their kids to that school and it was predominantly white. This meant we had good test scores and decent, yet overrated sports programs. We had firmly entrenched cliques and stereotypes. Basically Cowherd would have been a bully. Pick on the nerds! You don't agree with me? That's because you can't afford new clothes! You must be stupid!

The other interesting thing about Cowherd that does manage to annoy me from time to time is he is basically a radio clone of a very intelligent friend of mine. This friend is what I call lazy smart. He's been spoiled by being so smart all of his life, that he doesn't bother to put much real thought into the stuff he says. Many people have an I-thought-it-therefore-it's-true mentality. And for people like Cowherd and my friend, they're usually right. But they stop there. I mean, if you're always right, why try an expend the energy to think about WHY you're right? Heck, just makeup a reason. The people around you are less intelligent and, on some level, know this. So you can say whatever you want to back up your opinions and they'll just accept it as true.

An Example:

My friend - "There's a Call of Duty: Black Ops Jeep? That's retarded. Why? Because the game will be obsolete and forgotten in 3 months."

I will conceded that the demand for a Black Ops Jeep is moronic on epic levels. There are many good reasons to support the truth of that statement. However, the video game will not be obsolete in 3 months, it will be FAR from forgotten if you take into account the current buying trends related to that game franchise and, the most important part, it has NOTHING to do with WHY the existence of this Jeep is stupid. My friend has what I call an amazing knack for being right for all the wrong reasons. It's not because he's not smart enough to think of the real reasons. It's not because he's wrong. It's because he's so smart that he rarely has to actually THINK about why he's right. People just either accept his statements as fact or question him and then aren't smart enough to rebut it on their own.

A Second Example:

Colin Cowherd says that purists are ruining major league baseball (among other sports). He claims that they are ruining baseball because they're fighting against instant replay. The implication in Cowherd's claim is that without instant replay, nobody under the age of 70 will watch baseball anymore.

Are purists ruining baseball as a business (and entertainment) enterprise? Absolutely they are, on some level, do just that. Did everyone under 70 just stop watching baseball because Bud Selig won't put in instant replay? Hell no. That's such an asinine thought to think that something as superficial and crybaby as instant replay is driving away millions of fans. Again, Cowherd isn't really saying that's the only reason. He's also clearly intelligent enough to come up with some real reasons that probably have much more impact than instant replay. He just stuck to that because it was the first thing to come to mind and because the media at large tells us that this is the hot button topic withing the baseball world. I could right an entire post about why instant replay doesn't matter (that much) and many of the other huge things that ARE wrong with major league baseball, but that's another post.

So back to Cowherd being the radio version of my friend. Some interesting (and illogical) connections have come to mind and I couldn't help but entertain those thoughts here on my blog. Extremely intelligent have the potential to be social jackasses. This is because they are so much smarter than many of the people around them, thus having a hard time relating to them. This retards them socially (I mean that in a literal, not offensive way). People who lack social skills piss off other people. Social skills are literally the skills to deal with society. If you don't have those skills, society doesn't like you.

Now my friend's a really nice guy, but because his social skills are lacking, he doesn't always seem like a nice guy. Try as he might, he just seems like a jerk 7 out of every 10 times. Well, when we were in high school, he was being a jerk once and I punched him in the face. He learned his lesson for a while. Do I still punch him in the face now? No, I'm an adult. But once in a while he needs a little verbal punch in the mouth to know he's overstepping bounds. Cowherd strikes me as very similar. He's a jerk on his show and it's not because he's heartless and evil. It's not because he's not smart enough to know better. It's for two reasons. 1) He knows that emotions drive ratings so he says things that feed people's emotions. 2) He's just socially retarded.

Thinking about this I have come to the following radical conclusion. I need to punch Colin Cowherd in the mouth. Like I said, I'm an adult now, so that's not really how I would normally choose to solve things. But he definitely needs a punch in the mouth. Then he needs a regular verbal punch in the mouth every once in a while after that just to remind him that he does still live with other human beings around him.

I vote that I should get to box Colin Cowherd. How about that. Think bodog.net would put up a line for Big-Mouthed Cowherd v. Random Unknown Blog Nerd? I don't mean anything malicious. I'm not trying to break teeth or bones or anything. Plus I'm not really all that big, but I've seen pictures of the guy. I'm pretty sure I could take him. I'm scrappy. Personally, I was thinking an MMA type match would be more fun, but he's got stay pretty for radio (yes, that's a joke) and that starts getting into the realm of violent. But if Dana White were to contact me about this, I would give it serious consideration.

This thought made me come up with a lot of other questions on specifics. It just sounds like to much fun to not daydream about. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people would like to get in the ring with Cowherd. But I have good intentions. I'm just trying to help make him a better person, right?

(Remember, I don't know Colin Cowherd personally so I'm not judging the man. I don't really care. He could be a saint in real life or the devil himself and neither would really bother me. I'm just talking about the Colin Cowherd radio personality that millions of people know.)