Posted on 04/01/2008 11:18:15 PM PDT by Cedar
The Giants unveiled the design of their Super Bowl championship ring today, a white gold sparkler that will feature about 1.5 carats in diamonds.
The new ring will even make seven-time Pro Bowl defensive end Michael Strahan happy. Shortly after the Giants won the NFL championship with a 17-14 win over the previously undefeated New England Patriots, Strahan said he wanted a “10-table ring.” Loosely defined: He wanted a ring that could be seen 10 tables away in a restaurant. “There was some discussion about maybe one of the rings was too big,” said center Shaun O’Hara, who was among group of players and team executives who designed the ring with officials from Tiffany and Co. “I threw out the fact that it was a big win, it was a huge win, so the ring should be designed accordingly,” O’Hara said. “Michael said it best when he said he wanted a 10-table ring. I think everybody is going to be very pleased with the design. It is very clean, very classy, but at the same time it is very strong.”
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.nypost.com ...
Once again, thank you Giants for knocking off the Cheatriots. That was a delicious end to the season.
Cool!
Big Blue fought hard for it and if they want big rings, I can’t say I blame them. Nobody took this team seriously, but they overcame all the odds and all the obstacles.
Now comes the tough part: winning another one.
I agree. One of the best games ever.
NFL ping.
Awesome ring. :D
I still get an ear to ear grin watching replays. Not a big sports fan myself but what an amazing game it was !
From an aesthetic point of view I always thought the the '85 Bears had the nicest design...
Thanks to the Giants for restoring a semblance of honor to the NFL, despite itself.
Somewhere I read of all the book deals that never will be printed because the Pats choked on that last game. I tried to find that magazine cover that was to adorn their perfect season. I'll leave with this article that still brings a smile to my face. I loved it.
“World Champions”?
How many countries took part in this “World Championship”?
And just what does the “N” in “NFL” stand for....?
Oh, be quiet. You’re just silly. Let them enjoy the moment. It will change soon enough.
Is the NFL considering expansion abroad? I think it has fancifully....is it anything more?
Does it matter?
The joy of being the winner lasts really less than one year. If someone wants to think they’re the World Champions, it does not hurt anyone to let them think it.
Why do you hate the Giants? Did they cheat also?
I have been a Giants fan since I was a kid. That was the most enjoyable game in Big Blue history. Brady is still flinching. Couldn’t care less about offense-just loved seeing a wave of defenders crashing into QBs.
Spoken like a true Patriots fan.
Haha! Suck on this, Belicheater!
As my daddy likes to say, “on any given Sunday.”
I just wish I had the pic of me wearing it along with Stormy online somewhere so I could post it.
Oh man! You need to upload that.
I use Imageshack now, and it works very well.
It amazes me that Freepers are so into American Football considering what a hotbed of socialism it is..
Lucky!! What an awesome picture.
Haha!! I love the haircut, man. How long before he’s rocking to Master of Puppets?
He loves Metallica and makes me play it LOUD!
That is great!
Couldn’t have said it better!
He is also getting into Black Sabbath.
Is there another NFL in the world? Well then that makes them the World Champions.
Nothing socialistic about it. Sounds like you’ve just got a big phat load of sour grapes about it. Too bad for you.
A few years ago I was at the Husker Nation gathering at the University of Nebraska where all of the former players were invited back for the game and a big reunion thing. After the game I was with some friends at the Champions Club across the street from the stadium having a couple of adult beverages. I was introduced to Jamie Williams (a Husker alum) who played on three of the ‘Niners Super Bowl teams. Shaking that guys hand with Super Bowl rings on the pinky, ring, and middle fingers was pretty impressive. You dont get to see too many of those out here in the sticks let alone three on one hand.
Lots of hardware on display that day with Super-bowl, National Championship and Big 8 and Big 12 Championship rings on display. Lots of fun for a football fan.
I guess they are intergalactic champions on that basis.
They can be whatever they want to be. The league can give their champions any title, they can be the Universal Champions of all Things Good and Decent if it strikes the NFL’s fancy, it’s their title.
Nothing socialistic about it?
Well let’s see..
It’s an industry that controls wages with a salary cap. - ah! wage controls, sounds like socialism to me.
It’s an industry that rewards failure and punishes success as it attempts to level the playing field through it’s Draft rules.
Any self respecting sport runs leagues where the Champions are feted and the divisional losers get relegated to a lower division with severe financial consequences. Meanwhile the winners of the division below get promoted - that’s the essence of COMPETITION which is what sports are supposed to be about.
The amateur (college) game doesn’t even have a championship, it’s “champion” is based on the “feelings” (votes) of the sports writers.
The game is structured as a “make work” endeavor - A one hour game takes three hours to play and of that one hour of play clock there is only about 12-15 minutes of actual “ball in motion” action and it takes 30 or so different players on each side to do the job of 11 men.
That means there are 180 man hours of resource applied to a task that provides five and a quarter man hours worth of entertainment product. That’s efficiency for you, sounds like a government dept to me..
Because the entertainment is so sparse they have to also employ bimbos dressed in skimpy costumes to prance around and flash their underwear at the crowd when there is absolutely nothing else going on in the stadium.
Then for six months of the year the players do absolutely nothing whatsoever. In which time a hugely disproportionate number of them abuse drugs, abuse women, abuse dogs, and father out of wedlock children. Do you recognize that demographic in the voting pool?
When one of them gets caught, they are usually “rehabilitated” but very rarely punished. - very socialist.
Then to cap it off the NATIONAL Football League holds a domestic playoff competition and declares the winners “WORLD Champions” - typical socialaist behavior - make up exclusionary rules and then declare the winners as winners of an open competition - it’s just like democrat vote rigging.
Dude, chill out, it’s entertainment.
Not really, there's a World governing body of American Football and it is NOT the NFL, and that governing body does sanction and organize competitions around the globe.
Now, granted the NFL is the 400LB gorilla of American Football, but you can't have it both ways, you can't declare that it is an international sport then exclude every other country from the World Championship.
Clearly the NFL is not an international body it is the NATIONAL Football League (of AMERICA), therefore any Championship they stage is an AMERICAN Championship.
Of course, as you say, they can call it what they like, but calling it a World Championship doesn't make it one. It's a bit like conferring the title of "Leader of the Free World" on the President, It's true in theory, but legally he is only the President of the country that elected him.
Note that The NBA never refers to the NBA Playoffs as anything other than "The NBA Playoffs", it is the players and teams that declare themselves "World Champions" when they win.
What you’re missing is the fact that the NFL is a franchise system of corporations. Franchises have used those systems since day one, because you want each franchise to be able to contribute to the success of the whole. There’s nothing socialistic about franchises. McDonalds doesn’t want one franchise store in a city to steal talent from the others and reduce their value, so they set out wage structures so all the stores in an area will pay basically the same. The don’t want one store to be putting out products the others don’t have and stealing their business, so they all get the same menu to work from. They don’t want one store in an area being terrible and ruining the reputation so they use various method to bring up the bottom. It’s the franchise system, it’s built some of the largest financial empires in the world, it’s not socialism.
Now you’ll have to excuse me for laughing uproariously when you present the European sports model, kicking teams to a different league, as the “self respecting” non-socialist alternative. Giving teams a chance to “succeed” against weaker competition is socialism.
As for the college game, we’re talking about the NFL so I ignore that stupid and pointless red herring. The lack of a championship is one of 2 dozen great reasons to ignore college football and has less than zero to do with your accusation that the NFL is socialistic.
Now as for the “make work” thing, boy do you not get it. Really that shows you just don’t understand anything at all about sports or the entertainment industry. They provide 3 hours worth of entertainment, with it’s incumbent ability to sell advertising and merchandise. That 180 man hours created a game that was sold for broadcast for 38.9 million dollars (the current contracts work out to $3.7 billion a year and there were 96 game slots this season), that’s $216,145 per man hour by your calculation, hardly “make work”.
Cheerleaders are a source of revenue in their own right. Around 2002 one market research group worked the numbers and found that teams with cheerleaders make an average of $1 million more in revenue a year than teams without, not a lot when looking at the bottom line of your average team, but again clearly not “make work”.
Actually the down time for NFL players is only a couple of months. Minicamps began for most teams last week. And the number of players that get in trouble with the law really isn’t disproportional to the general population at all. On opening day there’s going to be 1908 players in the league (and that number will climb as guys get injured and replaced), and half a dozen to a dozen of them will get in trouble, less than 1% of them, and having done payroll processing and seen how many people are getting wages garnished for various reasons I can tell you that any disproportionality in those numbers is the good way, less than the average.
As for very rarely punished, tell that to PacMan Jones and Chris Henry and Michael Vick. And what the hell does punishment have to do with socialism, you are once again diving into devoted RED HERRING territory.
There’s no exclusionary rule to the NFL playoff. NFL teams get in, it’s their playoff. Socialism is thinking they should change their title just because you don’t think they represent enough of the world. You are more socialist than the NFL, congratulations.
I'm just yanking chains...:-)
Though you make a good point. American sports are packaged far more as entertainment than sports are in other countries. By that I mean that if you are, say, a soccer fan in Europe or South America you are only interested in the soccer, and you would rather see your team win 1-0 in a dour performance than lose 4-5 in a goalfest. The sports schedule there has a clear competitive nature. Each team plays every other team in it's division at home and away to determine a divisional Champion and there is usually a separate, sudden death knockout competition run in parallel with the league competition to determine a Knockout Cup Winner. That competition may require up to 8 or ten rounds to get to the final.
On the other side of the coin they don't have cheerleaders and people don't watch the televised final just for the TV ads. A 90 minute soccer match is completed in under two hours elapsed time so thee is no significant "down time" except the 15 minute half time interval.
Good for the world governing body that nobody gives a damn about. The NFL is the NFL and they can call the champion of their post season what ever the hell they want, because it’s THEIR champion of THEIR competition.
There’s no “both ways” about it. It’s their league populated with their teams that compete in their season and play in their post season and eventually their championship game and they can bestow whatever title they want because it’s THEIR TITLE to label.
Notice that the NBA championship games last year got worse rating than any NFL game nationally broadcast. The NBA needs to be following the NFL’s lead, they know how to make money.
There’s lots of down time in an international soccer game, the difference is they pretend that something is actually happening during that down time. The reality is the whole damn game is nothing but down time as the teams pointlessly kick the ball far and don’t bother to chase it because there’s hardly any substitutions. The fact that World Cup champions can be decided by a shoot out shows that whole sport is seriously lame.
"A team that will live in infamy......."
You clearly know a lot less about Soccer than I do about American Football.
American Football, which as you point out is an entertainment business, not really a sport, is relatively minor in terms of world sports. There are less than 300 games a year, and the biggest game, got a worldwide TV audience of 90 million (After forecasting an audience of 900 million).
Compare that to Soccer, it is played in over 140 countries and has national leagues, international club competitions such as the Champion’s league, International competition between countries, both regionally as in Euro 2008 and worldwide as in The World Cup, whose TV audience runs into the billions.
Big clubs like Barcelona or Chelsea or Ac Milan etc have worldwide followings and are marketed aggressively worldwide. Those teams tour the world in their pre-season preparation and fill stadiums for exhibition games. They make more money from merchandise each year than the NFL teams do
You can watch live soccer on TV on about 5 different channels in this country most of the time, there are tens of thousands of competitive games a year worldwide.
England, for instance, which is smaller than Oregon, has over 80 professional soccer teams, including four of the World’s mega clubs. Some of the clubs struggle to make money but most are going concerns.
So there must be something about the product that works despite your view of it.
I know all I need to know about soccer, that it’s a fairly dull game and most of the reason it’s a dull game is because it’s 90 minutes of limited substitutions and if it wasn’t a dull game the players would collapse and die before half time.
ALL sports are entertainment business. If you think they’re two different things you just don’t get it. Super Bowl 42 had an American audience of 97 million, so your numbers need some serious work.
How many countries it’s played in doesn’t matter. They still get to make the WORLD CHAMPION. Because they said so.
The something about soccer that works is what you outlined earlier: in most of the world it has absolutely no competition. It’s a cheap game to put on, easy to form a league, and easy to sell to a poor audience.
I think the NBA and Major League Baseball have less claim to being “World Champions” than the NFL does. Does anyone seriously think there’s football team anywhere outside of the US that could give any NFL team a game? In basketball, the USA would probably win, but you can’t prove it by the Olympics anymore. There are also some competitive baseball leagues, probably not on US level, but good.
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