OBR News-o-rama |
| Sweaty Rob Finds Life after Cleveland Posted: 19 Feb 2008 07:53 AM CST If Sweaty Rob Smith couldn't hold onto the ball because of the warm temperatures in Cleveland, then I'm not sure how he's going to fare in training camp this year with the Kansas City Chiefs. Smith will be there, though, because he's just signed a two year deal with Kansas City. Smith came to Cleveland as a rookie free agent in 2006, and found himself with an unexpected decent chance of making the roster. The Browns implosion at center that year started as LeCharles Bentley was hurt on the first play at training camp. It goes worse as Bob Hallen mysteriously opted out of the NFL and Alonzo Ephraim found himself suspended for violating the league's substance abuse policy. The smoking crater that was left at the center position provided opportunities for Hank Fraley (acquired from Philadelphia) and Smith, who spent most of the year on the practice squad before starting a game for the Browns. He was jettisoned in the 2007 roster cut-downs and latched on with the Chiefs. While the Browns bizarre 2006 pre-season left the team limping into what became an awful season, the situation created opportunities for Fraley and Smith. The door was left ajar and Smith and Fraley kicked it open. Props to them. Smith's success also says something about the improvement on the Browns roster. Smith isn't a veteran who entered a nomadic phase of his career - he was identified, signed, and developed by Browns, and simply couldn't make the roster. Waived Browns who were successful with other clubs used to be a sign of poor player evaluation. Now it seems to be a sign of growing strength at the bottom of the Browns roster. |
| Posted: 19 Feb 2008 07:38 AM CST I'm wistful and nostalgic for the early days of the web, which for many of us goes only back to 1995 or, maybe 1998 or 2000. Many of my friends who I've met through this site feel likewise. We were joined in those early days through a common bond - the need to fight back against the mighty NFL owners when Art Modell picked up "our" team and moved it to Baltimore. After that, we were joined by a common dislike of all things Ratbird, which temporarily displaced the Pittsburgh Steelers as Cleveland's most disliked NFL franchise. It's been almost a dozen years now since Art Modell took pro football away from the city of Cleveland. As I get older, such an interval seems almost brief, although the memory grows hazier each year. At the time, the internet was a binding force, helping fans to coordinate a counterattack that returned the Browns to Cleveland within three years. Since 1995, the world wide web has gotten both larger and smaller. It has gotten larger in that more and more voices have joined the web. Through blogs, social networks and a stupefying array of independent sports websites hoping to attract an audience, the web has split into a million babbling pieces, all fighting for the eyeballs of the sports fan. The number of unique domains visited by web surfers has nearly doubled since 2001, from 2.8 million to over five million. While the web has more sites and more surfers, fewer websites control the activity. The amount of internet traffic controlled by the top ten websites has increased almost ten percent in the last five years. The predominance of search technology has accelerated this process. Rather than making more diverse sites easy to find and visit, structuring of search results by companies like Google tends to herd more and more fans to highly visited sites which rank at the top of the list, or can spend funds on search engine optimization. What one is left with are a few huge corporate voices where people spend most of their time, with the shrinking percentage of pageviews being scattered over remainder. Large sports sites (ESPN, Foxsports, League Sites, local portals, Yahoo, etc) grab the majority of the time of sports fans while the remainder is dispersed an inch deep over the million contending voices that remain. The power of the few to influence and inform has increased while the influence of smaller fan-fueled sites has virtually vanished. This is a fundamental change since 1995, when we got more of our information from each other, rather than ESPN or a half-million blogs which link to it. Web petitions, considered almost-meaningful in 1995, are essentially worthless in 2008. While in some domains, the web can still make a difference, I fear that the sports web has now become dominated by a few large corporate interests. When even bloggers are taking under-the-table payments from sports teams or spamming corporate boards (even those on Scout), the war is pretty much over. It was nice while it lasted, though. Sigh. |
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