ESPN's "Featured Comment" Again Really Misses The Mark

All that's missing is Stu Scott's, "you see what had happened is..."
ESPN's commenting feature and quasi-Myspace situation has had its ups and downs since it opened up a couple months ago. One of my favorite new features is ESPN's "Featured Comment" on its front page. Every 3 hours or so they will post an actual user's comment on the front page and tell you who wrote it and point you to the story about which it was written. The comments range from the fantatical: "RED SOX NATION CANNOT BE STOPPED" written by Sully4Life to the thought emotional: "Martina Hingis, you were one of the all-time greats" written by HingisUpSkirt.com. And then there was today's head scratcher. A gent who goes by the perplexing sobriquet "natural8blue" wrote the following about Norv Turner:

"Norv Turner is going to waste his superstars' prime years the way Mike Martz did in St. Louis."

Now say what you will about Norv Turner--in fact, you can say anything you want about him. He's fucking awful--but why the unmerited dig at Mike Martz? I know Martz left St. Louis kind of unceremoniously with a vague health issue but I'm not sure I'd call his tenure with the Rams in anyway indicative of underachievement.

First of all, the "greatest show on turf" was Matz's offense. And when he came on board, they had no superstars other than Marshall Faulk. Mike Martz made Kurt Warner a star and won him a Super Bowl. And he took Marshall Faulk and got him in the endzone twice as much as he ever had before he met Martz. Faulk's 3 most productive years were under Martz. I'm not sure you could have utilized Faulk better in his prime. That team won a Super Bowl and lost on a last second drive to the greatest postseason QB of all-time in the other. What more do you want out of a coach? And to top it all off as a head coach, when his meal ticket QB went down with an injury, he threw in some scrub from West Virginia and that offense didn't miss a beat. His ability to prepare Bulger for that situation saved the Rams from a rebuilding process 4 years earlier than necessary.

Now listen, I understand that any yahoo with enough intelligence to navigate the interweb can post whatever the hell stupid shit they want to (see The Smittblog), but what's more interesting to me is that some editor of the content at ESPN felt this comment so compelling and spot on that he flagged it for front page publication when in fact it doesn't make a lick of sense. Mike Martz took his team of overachievers to the playoffs in 5 of his 7 years as a head coach with 3 different QBs. To compare him to a guy who is single-handedly submarining a 14-2 team in a bad division out of the playoffs is absurd and to be honest, a little offensive (pun intended).