The upper half of the front page of the Oregonian on Monday– or at least the front page of the attention grabber – tends toward the sensational or lowest common denominator to grab attention and suck up a couple of quarters “Street edition” in those boxes — blared out some NFL sports scores: “GOOD NEWS” and “BAD NEWS”.  The good news was the Seattle Seahawks won; the bad news was the Atlanta Falcons lost.

Seattle not being in Oregon; Atlanta being even further from Oregon.  But the market for Portland, Oregon and the state in general has decreed the Seahawks and the Falcons as the team that we are following.  For Seattle, I suspect that the lines of demarcation for what the networks play have expanded and contracted, moving from side to side, over the years depending on the relative strength of the Seahawks and the northern California teams of the 49ers and Raiders.  For Atlanta, we seem to be forced to swallow whatever team former University of Oregon quarterback stand-out Joey Harrington is on — which, because Harrington has had a bad NFL career, means that Oregonians get to follow a bad football team.  (Harrington has had a sort of fools’ luck in ending up as starting quarterback.  He was signed to the Falcons as a backup to dog-killer Michael Vick, who is now either in prison or shortly will be in prison.)

Is this coverage going to continue until Joey Harrington is drummed out of the league, or will there be a final cut-off point where Harrington’s plight is finally cut — maybe when he ends up the third choice on a team?  All I have to go on for comparison is Jon Kitna (a more successful NFL quarterback, for whatever that is worth) of Central Washington University, and I don’t think the Ellensburg transmitter cuts out from the Yakima affiliate to show the team he leads, not since he was with the Seahawks, at any rate.

………………………………..

Random quote from an article on Appalachian State:

“I want to play against real teams,” Connor Vaughan, 19, a freshman from Atlanta, said before the game.

With quotes like that, it becomes deeply satisfying if a lesser team in its division does to Appalachian State what Appalachian State did to Michigan.  (Which, in the end, does not appear to be a massive upset, Michigan being… a bad team and all.)

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