I Can Solve Your Quarterbacking Problem, Sure.

You might've noticed: there's some bad quarterbacking going on in the NFL today. Some really bad quarterbacking. And it's reached the point where the announcers are fully willing to call them out for it; not just for bad plays, but for being terrible quarterbacks, which is unusual in an announcing booth - anyone who's ever seen a game where Brett Favre is playing knows that. All across American, people are turning on JaMarcus Russell, Tony Romo, Jason Campbell - and bizarrely, embracing astoundingly mediocre quarterbacks like Kyle Orton. It's a terribly confusing situation, but fortunately, I've solved part of the problem:

Moustaches.

Seriously. Quarterbacks are supposed to be leaders, supposed to be guys that you can trust, guys teammates look up to. And yet you see half a dozen quarterbacks in the league rocking some truly terrifyingly bad moustaches and playing some truly terrifyingly bad games. Nobody trusts a guy with a moustache. He makes a play call, and his receivers don't hit their routes - they're not taking advice from a man in a moustache. And the offensive line isn't gonna hold up - how hard are you gonna block guys to keep them away from a man with a moustache?  I thought so.

These players aren't seeing the same patterns I am - the key to saving their careers is but a razor blade away.

Consider a man whose career plummeted away from its early promise. Want to see why?

Jake Plummer (2005)

Yeah, that's right. That's an epically bad moustache.

Here's the crazy thing: on the year that Plummer grew this moustache, he had probably the best season of his career - went 13-3 as a starter, threw 18 touchdowns and only 7 picks, and averaged 210 yards a game with a quarterback rating over 90. Those are solid figures right there, the sort of season dozens of teams would want from their starting QB.

After the next season, Plummer was out of the league. These things are not unrelated.

Now, consider these examples from this season.

Jason Campbell

This one's a no brainer. Campbell's spent his whole career struggling to show "leadership," his coaches and owner constantly undermine him, and - despite the fact that he (famously) never throws interceptions - team management decided not to bring Byron Leftwich because they were worried he was going to take over the locker room. Really, when team management is worried that Byron Leftwich is going to show more leadership than you, it's time to make a change.

Side note: this may not be totally Campbells' fault - he does play for an organization that last week brought in a bingo caller to revitalize the offense. You could not make that stuff up.

Kyle Orton (Part 1)

Alright, I couldn't find a picture of Orton with just the moustache, but I did find a couple with the full beard. What Orton does is that he starts every season clean shaven and then lets it go until he's got sort of a half-beard/moustache thing, and then he eventually gets to quasi-beard status. At the same time, his skills slowly decline until he's no longer recognizable as a quarterback.

Let's take a look at the current Orton.

Kyle Orton (Part 2)

See, that man looks like a real quarterback. And he's sort of playing like one, the Broncos are undefeated, and we're seeing debates about whether Orton is a great quarterback or not. It's all a mirage. As the moustache comes in, these debates will disappear.

Matt Hasselbeck (2005)

The Seattle Seahawks still blame their Superbowl defeat on the bad officiating, but I know the truth. It was Matt Hasselbeck's "Playoff Moustache."

It should also be noted that since this point, Hasselbeck's career has never been the same.

Aaron Rodgers (2008)

Rodgers is not having a great season. His Packers are 2-2 and he lost to Brett Favre on Monday Night Football in the most-watched event in cable television history. Yet even though he held the ball too long and got sacked 8 times in that game, the announcers never called him out on it, and you know why?

Because he shaved off the moustache.

Now, you might say, "lots of successful quarterbacks had giant moustaches." And it's true. Look at this guy:

Joe Namath

Alright, now that's a man. But that was a different time. It was the 70's. It was loose, relaxed. You could trust a man in a moustache.

You see, the issue is not moustaches. The issue is that a team needs to look at a quarterback and see a guy who you they'd take a bullet to protect. It's the NFL - people get hit so hard they never walk again. You can't have a quarterback who looks like...

JaMarcus Russell

This is a man who wears a ski cap on the sidelines regardless of the weather. It was 85 degrees in Houston last week, and after every series, Russell put the hat on.

In a related note, Oakland lost 29-6 and Russell went 12-for-33 for 128 yards. Yikes.

Tony Romo

He's having trouble getting in sync with his receivers. Is that shocking to you? I mean, if you were a wide receiver in the NFL, would you look at this guy and say "yeah, I'm gonna do what that guy says"?

Turn your hat around, Tony. It's 2009. It's time.

Carson Palmer

And everyone wonders why he's having so much trouble getting his career back on track.

Oh, Carson. I don't even have words.

And finally, the biggest problem of all...

Jay Cutler

Here's the only moustache exception I'm willing to allow.

Because Jay... you've got to do something. Oh, man. I wouldn't let that guy lead me out of a paper bag.

A half-formed thought.

I like going to church because at church things make sense. Left to my own devices, I can never seem to understand any sort of structure to my life. Everything seems to happen randomly, a series of uncalculated, mostly unfortunate coincidences. But at church, I hear story after story of things not going right or things simply falling completely apart. We follow these stories with bouts of desperate prayer - and those bouts of prayer are followed with oddly coincidental, near-miraculous turnabouts. And then suddenly the whole storry starts to smack of patterns and lucky breaks - "if our car hadn't died, we would've been there during the hurricane that destroyed the house," or "and if I hadn't been in the hospital, I would never have met Sarah and Allen, who just happened to be tax lawyers who could help me out."

Outside of church, you only hear those stories on the other side, and it sounds like they're making patterns out of chaos. But when you've been next to people who are truly desperate, prayed for help, and seen their stories turn out in the most unlikely way possible, you wonder how you could have not seen the pattern.

I hate the expression "when God closes a door, he opens a window," but the truth is, without church, I would never even have noticed the house.

Latest Fortune

"Many admire your social and physical appearance." Damn right.

Couple's Retreat Racism Update

In the last post, I talked about how I saw a "black-centric" Couple's Retreat commercial during "The Cleveland Show." Surely an isolated case of individualized programming, right? No movie would dare to launch a series of racially-specific promos - the backlash would be too big a concern.

Well, take a look at this. This is the U.S. poster for the movie:

Faizon Love and Kali Hawk are waaaay in the back, but they are technically in the poster. You might say "well, that's just the way they took the picture." That's not the case - each of these couples are shot individually, and then digitally inserted. So a producer somewhere had to say "let's see how far back into the poster we can put these guys."

Interesting note: Hawk's name is on the top part of the poster, but not in the credits on the bottom.

Alright, that was the U.S poster, and last month they released an international poster:

It's a smart decision to cut the black people out, because everyone knows that the rest of the world is racist.

Now, we can explain all this away fairly easily, because after all, Love and Hawk are the 8th and 9th least famous people in this movie (actually, when you count cameos, they're probably even lower than that), so it makes sense to cut them out of the international poster.

What makes it stand out is that they've kept up a Vince Vaughn-Jason Bateman-Jon Favreau-Malin Akerman-centric line of advertising on every "white" TV show on television, and then created ads that make it look like the black actors are the main characters for all the "black" shows. Then they assumed that no white people would watch the black shows, and vice versa, so no one would know what they were doing.

It's really just kind of insulting to everyone involved.

New Show Update

Alright, I gave a couple of the shows I already looked at another try.

Shows I Watched The 2nd Episode Of:

Modern Family - Y'know, it's really not that bad. It's not must-see TV, but it's got a real appeal to it. The problem is that it follows three differen't families, and only one of those families is consistently funny -  Ty Burrell's family.

Really, it's just that Burrell is great on that show, and that makes it worth watching. He never got enough credit in the vastly underrated "Back To You."

The Cleveland Show - Still underwhelming, I have to say. Not terrible, just not exciting. This week's episode also featured a "black-centric" commercial for Couple's Retreat, which is a movie that features three white couples (of all famous actors and actresses), and then a black couple (of two actors no one's ever heard of). However, this commercial tried to make it seem like they were the main characters of the movie, so that black people will go see it, as long as they missed the thousands of other commercials that let them know that this commercial was a lie. Naturally, this commercial was placed in the middle of "The Cleveland Show," which is a cartoon about black people written and voiced by white actors doing black stereotypes.

All that to say, in just two episodes this show has managed to take race relations in this country back about three decades.

FlashForward - I might as well make this a weekly post where I go over everything that worked and didn't work in each episode. This show is that problematic. I've never seen a show with this much promise and this much difficulty putting all the pieces together since... "Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip." Or maybe Season Two of "Heroes."

This doesn't count as spoilers because the show's only in its second episode. But, if you're one of those people who needs this, SPOILER ALERT.

What Worked: The show has started out at a torrid pace, and that sort of forward momentum masks a lot of problems. Also, I loved that they went right out and dealt with the fact that John Cho didn't see anything in his flash forward, which means he's probably gonna die before then - someone called and told him that yes, he's definitely gonna die, and then gave him the exact date (it'll happen in the spring sometime, assuming that the show will move at real time). Now, that's some legitimately inventive showrunning right there.

What Didn't: Alright, fine, so John Cho didn't see anything in his blackout. He's worried that it means he might die. So when he runs into a female Ranger who also didn't see anything, it's supposed to be a good sign for Cho, right? Maybe he's not gonna die in the next year. The viewer is supposed to be filled with hope Except for the fact that everyone watching this show has seen a television before and knows what's happening. Five minutes later, naturally, this character is dead.

Show runners: we've seen television before. We don't need you to keep flashing back every time someone mentions something to know that a character is "haunted" by the vision he saw. Once a show is enough. Ten times a show is way, way too much.

Bottom Line: I'm about of the same mind I was at the end of the pilot - it looks like the show will be good and entertaining, but it's not must-see TV the way "Lost" is. As shows go, it looks like it'll be about a "B," with the potential to swing up to maybe "A-", and always the worry that the whole thing could fall apart. I'm hoping it pulls it together as time goes along, the way "Fringe" did last season.

New Shows:

Eastwick - I thought I'd give it a shot, in case it turned out to be great. I hadn't heard anything about, but then there's always five or six shows that enter the fall season with no fanfare and one or two of them turns out to be excellent.

It ain't this one. I made it 4 minutes in. It's clearly not worth my time, your time, or anyone's time - best case scenario, it's a cross between "Desperate Housewives" and "Charmed", with less clever writing.

Considerably less clever writing.

No, really, that's the best possible outcome.