Some sportswriters can’t get enough of the unheralded pluggers who survive in the brutal world of pro football despite lacking a star’s skills or a star’s paycheck. Sports Illustrated’s Peter King is the other kind of sportswriter.
King, who confided to the Wall Street Journal last year that he earns ”
a ridiculous amount of money
“—largely for rambling about how much he loves drinking Starbucks caramel-fat bombs and for being
Brett Favre’s personal cheerleader-stenographer
—took to his Twitter account yesterday to declare that second-string Dallas Cowboys lineman Alex Barron
did not belong in the league
:
How does Alex Barron have a job in football, other than selling beer in the stands? He is a disgrace.
Barron, who was pressed into service as a
last-minute emergency starter
in last night’s Dallas-Washington game, earned King’s disdain by
throwing a breathtakingly stupid and reckless interception that cost his team a trip to the Super Bowl
committing a holding penalty that erased what would have been the game-winning touchdown.
The Cowboys were trailing at the time because, despite 380 yards of offense, Pro Bowl quarterback Tony Romo had led the team to only one touchdown, and they had handed a defensive touchdown to Washington on a botched pass play just before halftime. On the final play, the Cowboys had left Barron to block All-Pro linebacker Brian Orakpo one-on-one.
Hey, everyone gets a little careless and angry on Twitter, right? Not Peter King! Today, Poynter has an interview with King in which he brags about his very high personal Twitter standards :
“If I have any sincere doubt about the validity of anything I’ve heard, I’m not going to put it up there,” King said. “I’m not going to say, ‘Hey, I’m not sure if this is true or not but I just heard that Eli Manning is retiring.’ I wouldn’t do that. I feel like if I put something up there, people are going to believe it. And they should believe it.”
So believe it: if the Cowboys had put a different second-string lineman out there to try to block Orakpo, victory would have been theirs. Sports Illustrated’s football expert says so. To underscore the point, King
stomped on Barron some more
in his column:
According to footballoutsiders.com, Barron’s 78 penalties since the start of the 2005 season are the most in the NFL. Amazingly, Barron started his last two holding calls by corralling Brian Orakpo around the neck … not even a semblance of trying to block him properly.
Maybe that is part of why he lost his job as a starter with the Rams and is trying to hang on as a backup with the Cowboys?
