Phil Watch: Lil Nugget

Today's offering will be like a tweet.

That becomes more relevant now that Phil tweets.

In Phil's mid-week column that follows the GM meetings near O'Hare, he brags a bit about talking to "at least half of MLB's 30 teams" regarding the salary cap. Don't know why he couldn't have just counted up the number in his notes and come up with something exact but he didn't. So...Phil stood in the grand ballroom at some hotel in Schaumburg and did something resembling speed dating, replacing 'salary cap' for 'what do you do?'

Figure in a 40 minute roundtrip on the Kennedy and poof! Two hours worth of work and he has a column.

The finished product is the usual lamentation over the absence of the salary cap. Nothing new. Feels a bit like a journalism class assignment where you have a two-hour gap between classes and decide to do a 'word on the street' reaction piece. Ask only five people, meeting the minimum level of sources for a reaction piece, use all five, come up with some shallow angle and go about your day.

But that's not why we're here.

We're here for Phil-Math.

Baseball, the one uncapped sport, has produced eight different champions over the last decade, with 14 different teams going to a World Series. The NFL has had six champions in this time, with only 10 going to a Super Bowl. The NBA has had five champions, with 11 going to the Finals.

Some parameters - Decade = Ten years. Always has, I believe.

The NFL:

I count seven champions with 14 going the Super Bowl.

Oh, Christo. You're being nit-picky. Phil means the aughts, or nine seasons starting at 2000.

Okay. I count six champions with 13 going to the Super Bowl, "not six champions with only 10..."

Remember that we're comparing it to baseball's "eight different champions with 14 different teams going to the World Series."

Problem = it's with 10 World Series being played in baseball compared to nine Super Bowls being played. Even with Phil getting the math wrong. Wrong. Twice.

So...we have 6-10, which is really 6-13 in nine seasons compared to 8-14 in ten seasons.

Where's this dramatic disparity again?

But hey...he got the NBA math right.