The Meaningful Collateral

Over the last two weeks I ran an NFL season predictions column on CBSSportsline.com and I genuinely thought I was being unique by using Haikus to write an AFC and NFC Preview.

Since I was the kid that had a notebook full of Mark Malone haikus in elementary school and did several live readings of my Antwaan Randle El “Casey at the Bat” knockoff in college, I just thought I was continuing to be clever.

A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
They thought, get it back to Antwaan, one more chance is all
We’d put up even money, now, if Antwaan got the ball.

Naturally, I thought I cornered the market on using lazy and easy prose to crank out a sports column.

Apparently I was wrong.

From Greg Easterbrook (a.k.a. TMQ’s) column on ESPN.com the next week:

Next Week: For seven years, the lead-up to my annual all-haiku predictions column has said, “Still America’s only all-haiku NFL seasons’ predictions.” As readers, including Becky Messengill of Philadelphia, pointed out, last week CBSSports.com ran an all-haiku NFL season prediction. A reader on the CBS message board asked, “What’s next, someone [at CBS] going to start calling himself The Sports Dude? Going to hold your own sports awards show, The CBSpys?” Hey CBS Sports — next time think up your own idea!

Awesome, right? A mild controversy over a 500 year old Japanese art form. (Unless the 16th century Japanese poet and monk, Bagho, stole his idea from TMQ too! Gasp!)

Anyway, this piqued my curiosity enough to wade through Easterbrook’s columns to read his haikus. Oddly, there was no 2007 Haiku column and 2006 didn’t exist on the ESPN Archives either (although, if you Google it, you can locate it elsewhere and 2003 exists like 25 pages deep in the archive). Without a doubt, he did it first and they are enjoyable. It was “The only all-Haiku NFL Preview”.

So here’s the larger question: What happens to the predictions of internet columnists when they go horribly wrong? Is that why they aren’t on the archives? If you go the Google route to find TMQ’s 2006 Preview, his haiku explains that the Colts will choke in the playoffs (or only that they have in the past — it is unclear). However, you cannot find this, or many of boatload of NFL prediction columns authors have written in past years on the ESPN Archives. The same goes for many prediction columns on  SI or Sportsline or Yahoo, for that matter.

So what happens to them? Is there an editor or intern who is assigned to sweep those columns clean mid-season? Or do they wait until the columnist’s Super Bowl winner is elminated? We know that the print version of Sports Illustrated picked Miami (6-10) to win Super Bowl XLI. It’s the NFL. Who the hell knows? But why can’t we look back and find out who the hell actually did know?

Who orders the uncerimonious burial of online predictions? Is it the ego of columnists? Or do editors think that their experts will be docked a percentage of expert points if someone checks on their picks?

I, for one, will stand by my stupidty. I chose the Redskins to win the NFC East and I’m pretty much wrong already. While I did predict on his draft day that Ben Roethlisberger would be better than Phillip Rivers, I also wrote an entire column in college that declared that Kordell Stewart would be a Hall of Famer.

If someone hasn’t deleted that one by now, please don’t search for it.