HOMER ALERT!

Now I usually shy away from my pro-Denver leanings when writing in my own little corner of cyberspace. Whether it is my loathing of the Raiders, the Diamondbacks or the Lakers, I try to lay off expressing my true feelings in an effort to stay neutral. But things have gotten so bad in the Mile High City, that I needed the collective shoulder of the Dog Pound to cry on.

Denver has always been such a great sports town. We have world titles in both football and hockey and it looked like our little brother of a team – the Rockies, was going to mature in front of our eyes and bring home a World Series crown. Alas, it wasn’t to be as our little brother ran into Boston’s big brother and sent us home in four games last year. 

We are used to getting no respect when it comes to baseball. The east-coast, major-market bias has never gotten to us. So we weren’t surprised when early MLB picks for the 2008 season left us out of the pennant conversation. Heck, they even left us out of the NL West conversation, but we took it all with a grain of salt. We were gonna show them! Well, not so much.

The Rox are tied with the toothless Giants for third place in the tough NL West and just a pair of games ahead of the Padres. The Rox have put together back-to-back wins and are showing signs of life, but how pathetic is that? I mean our lone bright spot in sporting circles here in Denver is a two-game burp of a Rockies winning streak? Oh jeez. Wake me up when it’s football season.

Wait a second, scratch that. Our football situation in Denver has also been dealt a blow. It was reported last week that our starting QB Jay Cutler has been diagnosed with Type I Diabetes. This can’t be good. I understand that his disease is treatable, manageable and thank everything that’s orange – isn’t life threatening. Still, many questions remain as to how this condition will effect his playing. The experts say not that much, but I have to believe that when the insulin levels in his body begin to change, how will that effect things his decision-making ability in the heat of a game?

I should be super-pumped for the start of the season, but I am not. After another draft where the NFL picks the best and brightest college football players to go to war next season, yet the Broncos draft has left me more questions than answers. So what am I supposed to be pumped about? Boss Bailey?

The Mastermind’s pedestal in Denver is getting warmer and warmer and should the Broncos make an early playoffs exit or miss them all together, I’m gonna be the first to go on record as saying Bill Cowher ending his retirement to coach the Broncos sounds like a very good idea.

Speaking of early playoffs exits, what has been going on inside the Pepsi Center? The Avalanche barely looked like a flurry against Detroit. Many people that play on the NHL season and make their own NHL picks knew that the Redwings had a great shot at winning the cup this year, but c’mon guys ya’ gotta’ win at least one. Being on the stink-end of a 4-game sweep including losing the elimination game 8-2 (at home!) hardly seems worth the rent.

Which brings me to my beloved Nuggets. When ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith was making his NBA picks at the beginning of the season, Mr. Smith predicted the Nuggets would win the West and face the Celtics for the NBA crown. At the time it seemed like a plausible scenario, but as the season wore on, that prediction looked more like a hallucination.

The Nuggs did get hot at the end of the season to post 50 wins again, but that is not going to cut it in Denver. Sure a 50-win season is a nice sidebar if you win a championship, but for the Nuggets, a 50-win season is starting to look more like a novelty act. We don’t need another novelty in Denver, we already have MLS.

A team that on paper has the most talent in the league, two of the biggest superstars in Carmelo Anthony and Allen Iverson plus a young sharpshooter that is developing into a premier player right before our eyes in J.R. Smith, and the team can’t get out of the first round. Not even all the preferential treatment by the Denver Police Department couldn’t motivate Melo and the boys to win at least one against the Lake show.

There is an old saying about how in inept person would need two hands and a flashlight to find popular parts of their own body, so my question to the Nuggets is: Who is holing the flashlight and whose hands are you using? Because you haven’t found anything yet.