On The Internet, Everyone Is an Expert

 

 Yesterday was the 2008 NFL Draft. Plenty of people have started to care about the draft since the NFL decided to market it as the most important thing next to the Super Bowl. Most people sit down at their computer the night of the draft and say “Hey, that’s cool, we got that guy” while others sit on sports websites complaining, ranting and raving all day long.  I was somewhere towards the former.

This morning, I log onto CBSSportsLine.com to find some schmuck named Peter Prisco who, like all of us, is an expert on everything. As I run down the list of first round picks and the grade that he gives them, I notice one thing: my team got the lowest grade of the first round. The only two teams that got closer ratings were the Tennessee Titans and the New York Jets with C-’s. The Ravens got a D. Not because they picked poorly or made a bad decision, they got a D because the kid they picked didn’t come out of a big name school and/or this dickhead doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Let’s back up. In the past few years, facts, as we used to call them have become kind of…unimportant. The truth is, if you want, you can find some kind of document somewhere on the Internet that backs your argument, no matter how absurd it is. If you want to convince me that Henry Ford was an amateur boxer or goat milker before he dove into the car business, you can find something.

“Facts” aren’t really important anymore, especially with Wikipedia. On Wikipedia, facts change every day. If you look up how old a certain Senator is, an angry politician could have changed his age from 51 to 58. Take that, Senator! If you look something up at the wrong time, you could report things that are completely wrong just because people like to fuck things up.

Since facts aren’t really the “thing” anymore and everyone has an opinion on everything, we’ve started to develop a culture of experts. Everyone knows everything about every detail about everything and no matter what you say, no matter how grounded in reality it actually is, it’s wrong. So let’s jump back to Peter Prisco.

His bio on CBSSportsLine says that he’s a 5’6 former football player who was too short to make it into college ball. Instead, he wrote about football. He pissed off plenty of people in the process, his bio explains, interviewing coaches and players as he moved from Arizona State University to Gainesville, Florida. So who is this guy again and why is he writing for CBSSportsLine? 

Exactly. He’s a nobody. But then again, who am I? I’m just tired of all of these “experts.”

This guy bounced from paper to paper until he landed a little column job with CBSSportsLine where he got to watch highlight film and make decisions based on knowing nothing.

He says that the Ravens get a D for a bad choice in Joe Flacco because “There were two guys on the board better at quarterback. Brian Brohm will be better. I don’t like this move at all. Isn’t this Kyle Boller all over again?” No. It’s not.

If the Ravens had drafted Matt Ryan, Quarterback from Boston College it would have been Kyle Boller all over again. Ryan and Boller have the same motions and tendencies, Flacco has actual mechanics that will benefit him in the NFL. The two formerly mention QB’s do not. 

The point behind all of this is, this guy’s opinion is not only invalid but it’s wrong. Prisco hasn’t seen anything other than a few highlight tapes of Flacco because Delaware doesn’t get the media coverage that big football schools get. He’s not an expert, he shouldn’t be a senior writer and he probably shouldn’t have even been covering sports. You’ve gotta do a little research before you start waving your hands all over the place on the Internet, Prisco. You don’t know anything about the top 5 Quarterbacks in the draft, you just went with whatever ESPN said. If they were sceptical, so were you. 

Great job being on the bandwagon Peter Prisco! Maybe you can find your own opinion somewhere inside that empty head of yours sometime soon.