Now back at ESPN.com, Tuesday Morning Quarterback author Gregg Easterbrook, while still funny and readable, continues his jihad against all things related to both Oklahoma and football:

Offseason Football-Like Substance No. 2: Over in arenafootball2 -- the Arena League's little brother cannot afford capital letters -- the Manchester Wolves beat the Florida Firecats 79-62 in a game that featured 21 touchdowns and nine missed PAT attempts. The Tulsa Talons beat the Bossier-Shreveport Battle Wings 72-3, as the Battle Wings kicked a short field goal in the closing minutes to deny Tulsa the shutout. Here are the Talons' cheerleaders, who can't seriously be from Oklahoma -- they must fly them in.

No, of course, the pretty girls can't really be from Oklahoma, can they? Tulsa is only the home of Miss America 2006, a fact Easterbrook manages to leave out despite spending three paragraphs talking about beauty pageants as "off-season megababe news."

Easterbrook also continues his rants about football teams that "run up the score," when often, as with OU vs. Texas A&M a few years ago, he means "Offenses that refuse to insult the opponent by simply kneeling on First Down with 10:00 left in the third quarter." In the above-linked column, TMQ praises the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference for a new rule: "Any high-school football coach whose team wins by more than 50 points will be disqualified from coaching the next game."

In his praise for this "sportsmanship," TMQ again neglects the basic facts: if people believe that 50 points is an insurmountable margin of victory, why not change the rules so that gaining a 50-point lead means the game automatically ends? It would be like the fabled 10-run-lead rule in many little league baseball games: if one team goes up by 10 runs, that's the end. You can reasonably argue for that, I think.

But no, Easterbrook insists that even if you're up by 50 points by doing no more than snapping the ball and running up the middle, the game must continue. You have to put an offense on the field and make sure they don't, even accidentally, gain any points - no letting your second-string or even fourth-string players pass the ball or run because they might score, no running out of bounds to stop the clock - and you have to put a defense on the field that might get hurt while your opponents try anything they can to narrow the margin. You have to play if you're up by 51 points, but you can't win that way or you get punished.

What idiotic reasoning. If you think 50 points is the absolute margin, then end the game if one team goes up by that much. Save everybody the time, trouble, and risk of injury. Don't make teams play and then punish them for not taking a dive on those plays.

I want to make it clear that I read Easterbrook because I like his writing and agree with him on many topics, though not all. His bit in this same column on Sen. Charles Goodell, the late father of the new NFL commissioner, is well worth reading. His asides about Norton AntiVirus recommending that he block all communications from Norton is typically funny stuff. The bit about Enron stock all being ill-gotten gains, even for non-culpable employees, is unpleasant but true.

When someone writes this well, and then gets the basic facts about sportsmanship and your home state wrong, it makes you want to whack the facts into his head with a stick all the more. Nothing's more frustrating than the smart guy who "almost" gets it. His bias that seems to be against Oklahoma in all things is just inexplicable, and now includes ignoring Miss America! Ye gods.

Footnote #1: The ESPN.com page for Easterbrook's writings has an RSS link near the top. If you click on it, you get an RSS feed that returns "404" errors for every item in the feed. You have to click on the small XML button next to the words "Gregg Easterbrook Archive" to get a valid XML feed.

Footnote #2: ESPN.com has restored Easterbrook's columns from 2002 and 2003, until the unfortunate incident, but has marked them all as accessible only to people who pay $40/year for "ESPN Insider" services. Many of this "In" links return incredibly bizarre Web errors. And don't even think about trying to validate one of the current columns' HTML. My weblog system may not always generate valid HTML 4.0, but then again, I don't have Disney's resources.

Footnote #3: For more on TMQ's inexplicable animus towards Oklahoma and football, one so strong that facts have to date been unable to penetrate it, see here, here, here, here, and especially here.