This is the most dangerous week of the year...the week between the conference championships and the Super Bowl, when all us football junkies have to get our fix by watching highlights of past games on the NFL network, or by listening to yet another bit of speculation on Tom Brady's alleged ankle injury. While the latter does get sickening, at least it's made bearable if it's Rachel Nichols talking about it. Anyway, that gives me a chance to catch up on some random thoughts that have been rattling around in my brain for a while. Don't say you weren't warned...

THE GOOSE IS LOOSE: OK, let's start off with a non-football thought and applaud the dolts who vote for major league baseball's Hall of Fame for finally getting off their dead asses and voting Goose Gossage into the Hall. What the heck took you so long? The Goose was one of the dominant relievers of the game, and very few hitters wanted to face him in his prime. Yeah, there are relievers who have more saves who aren't in, and probably never will be. But The Goose pitched during a different ear, when closers weren't confined to one inning or less, and when you didn't have lefty specialists on the team to just face one batter. Many of his saves came when he came in in the eighth inning, sometimes at the start of it, and he was frequently high up in the leage leaders for innings pitched by relievers. This is an honor that's long overdue. Now, let's get Jim Rice in there next year, guys....that should have come this year as well.

WII WOULD LIKE A MRI, PLEASE: I had to laugh when I read a story the other day in the Columbus Dispatch, our local paper here, about the fact that a growing number of supposedly sane adults are now developing "sports related" injuries...by overdoing it playing Nintendo's WII games! Seems that there is a growing contingent of parents who buy these games for their kids, then get hooked on them as well. That's not surprising, video games can be addicting. But apparently what is also happening is that many of them are trying to bowl a dozen games at a time or play an entire golf or tennis tournament in one day and winding up with a wide variety of body aches...or worse.

This just completely boggles the mind. Can you just imagine having to call off work becuase you threw out your back trying to hit a fastball in a video game? I can just imagine THAT conversation with your boss! Or even worse, having to go to the hospital for a sprained ankle or tendinitis incurred while playing WII tennis? Makes me wonder if medical insurers will soon start including clauses in their insurance about not covering injuries incurred playing video games.

The same article also suggested that in order to avoid these sorts of injuries, people might want to warm up just as they would if they were actually going to play the sport involved, since you use the same muscles either way. I'm sure it's a good idea, but personally, I hate to think about having to "warm up" to play a video game.

Of course, the games I play are mostly of the computer variety, and fall into two categories. The first is slots and gambling type games, which is actually much safer, since I can play them to my heart's content and never lose any real money. The second is strategy games, many of them based on TV shows like CSI and Law and Order. I GUESS I could warm up for those by watching reruns of the shows on TNT or Spike TV...

Seeems to me, though, that the logical thing would just be to exercise a little moderation when playing these games...and let the kids play with their own games once in a while!

STOP THE MADNESS! OK, it's time for a rant I frequently do during this time of the year, and I wish Roger Goodel and the other NFL mavens would read this and take heed. The rant is this:

           GET RID OF THIS DAMN WEEK OFF BETWEEN THE LAST GAME OF THE PLAYOFFS AND THE SUPER BOWL!

It's totally unnecessary, and has NFL fans everywhere screraming ENOUGH ALREADY by the time the game actually arrives. You can't possibly believe the extra week is needed to hype the game. The hype for the Super Bowl always begins shortly after the last one ends. The players hype it endlessly...you have guys on a team that's 18-0 saying that streak doesn't mean a thing if they don't win this one, for God's sake! The media hypes it all year long...a great player can't even fart without someone holding their breath hoping he won't hurt himself and destroy his team's chances of making The Big Dance. Advertisers salivate over it all year long, knowing it's going to be be the biggest TV event of the year. In the days before the writer's strike, the network carrying the game even used to pick a show they wanted to succeed during the year to premier after the game, figuring that the carryover might well give the show a good launch.

All this week off really does is have the sportswriters and TV sportscasters scrambling to find that one angle that nobody's covered yet.That's getting to the point that it's soon going to be whether the majority of each team wears boxers or briefs. and that's something I REALLY have no desire to know. There's a couple of female sports personalities I wouldn't mind seeing do an interview or two in a bikini...but I digress.

Let's cut that week out, and just get on with the game. The world won't come to an end without it, and football fans will be a lot happier!