As we count down the hours to Rex Grossman’s first real chance to kill another season before it even starts, we have some things to ponder. Like:

Bears’ writers are wondering if Cedric Benson’s shoulder injury was the result of some “hazing” by Bears’ defenders who apparently appeared to be hitting Cedric harder than normal, perhaps trying to send a message that they think Thomas Jones shouldn’t have been demoted to second team. This brings up three questions of its own.

1) Are all Bears’ reporters as dumb as Comcast’s William Jackson, or do they just cook up these theories because Bourbonnais is so boring? Wait, it’s probably both. And I only say that William is dumb because the next time he strings two coherent sentences together on the air will be a first.

2) Can the Bears’ defenders actually hit harder than normal at will? Is there some kind of turbo button on their pads? Is there a cheat code for “separate shoulders at will?” I’ve got to find that code.

3) If the Bears’ defenders are so concerned about Thomas’ job security, maybe they should have advised him to not pull a hamstring during his physical.

This is why I wish I could hate the Cubs enough to quit them (cue a shot of Heath Ledger spitting into his hand)…Carlos Zambrano finally picks the road gray jerseys and they lose. Meaning he’ll never pick them again, and we’ll have to go back to watching them wear the blueberry tops every time he starts.

Bruce Miles says that it’s a 50-50 proposition that Dusty will be offered, and sign, a contract extension. I love how the Cubs continue to offer us unmistakable proof that they have no clue, will never get a clue and really, have no desire to find a clue. Thanks.

Last year at this time I had to find a bandwagon to jump on to make the end of the baseball season interesting, and I picked the Indians. They then turned into the 2004 Cubs in the final week. Now they are the 2005 Cubs. Can’t wait until next year, eh, Tribe fans?

Who gets my unwanted rooting interest this year? Right now there’s a short list of possibilities.

1. The Red Sox — The Yankees appear to be putting it all together and could pull ahead of Boston enough to render the Wild Card the only chance for either shade of Sox, red or white, to get into the playoffs. The Red Sox have a lot going for them. David Ortiz is fun to watch hit, I like the NESN crew of Don Orsillo and Jerry Remy and the wildly varied talent level of their “guest” analysts on any given night — from the simplistic Jim Rice to the babbling Sam Horn to the surprisingly good (and downright mean) analysis of Dennis Eckersley. But I can’t really throw myself onto the Red Sox bandwagon. Bill Simmons manages to still turn every column into one about them, so it all just seems superfluous.

2. Minnesota Twins — The Francisco Liriano injury casts a pall over their playoff run, but they’ve still got Johan Santana and the productive death rattle of Brad Radke’s final season, their bullpen is the balls, and they’ve got Joe Mauer. What’s not to love about that? I also love the story in Sam Walker’s Fantasyland about the first time Doug Mientkiewicz got to first base after the trade to the Red Sox and Justin Morneau said to him, “You know, if you could hit, you’d still be here.” I’ve loved Justin Morneau ever since I read that. What a prick. It was literally six hours after the trade! Tremendous. But in the end, I can’t shake the reality that Twins fans are Vikings fans. So…fuck them.

3. Los Angeles Dodgers — I grew up hating the Dodgers. For some reason I had a particular hate for Ken Landreaux. What 11 year old in the Midwest had any reason to hate Ken Landreaux? I still don’t know why, I just did. Then they let Garvey go and he was supposed to come to the Cubs, but at the last minute decided he wanted to impregnate most of San Diego County and we all know how the 1984 playoffs turned out. (By the way, you just know that Harry Caray would have turned on the Garv and his bullshit perfect public image in May or June at the latest and the whole thing would have been a complete mess. Fun, though. And you thought Harry’s rant about George Frazier was bad, imagine what he’d have had for the Garv?) I do watch a lot of Dodgers games, though, now. It’s because of Vin Scully. On the MLB Extra Innings package, you almost always get the home team broadcast and so with the Dodgers, it means you get Vin…alone. No Charley Steiner or Steve Lyons, just Vin. That makes it watchable. Vin is a million years old and he’s still the best. The Dodgers have Nomar, and that’s an appeal to me. Now they have Greggie and you all know how I feel about Greggie. So the question is, can the excellence of Vin, Nomar and Greggie, and the potential hilarity of any game managed by the functional retard that is Grady Little, outweigh the fact that I’d have to root for a team that I grew up hating, who employs the unctuous Jeff Kent and who stole Rafael Furcal, Breathalyzer and all right out from under the Cubs last winter?

For eight weeks? Sure. I’m going with the Dodgers. Which means I’ve now cursed them. But I want you to all note that I did this after their 11 game winning streak ended. You can’t blame me for that.

The Bears do, of course, open the preseason on Friday against the 49ers. I haven’t read who the announcing crew will be. I am of course hoping for Da Coach and Dick Stockton. I think it’ll be Dave Barnett and he’s good, but you can’t beat any pairing of Ditka and Dick. Neither guy will have a clue who’s playing for either team. You can’t beat that kind of entertainment.

The Bears wouldn’t be the Bears without the potential of ruining what should be a very good season with one horrific weakness. So they decided not to address their wide receiver problems. Thanks. We were worried we’d have nothing to obsess about. Right now everybody’s hurt except for the guy who just had the ACL resewn back together in one of his knees. Last year we found out that Muhsin Muhammad was just another overpaid farce. Kind of like Bryan Cox, only on offense this time. And I don’t mean the Brian Cox who plays the head of acting troupe on Deadwood, either.

Now the Bears are trying to trade for Ashley Lelie from Denver. Ashley’s got good size (6’3, 200) was a 1,000 receiver in 2004 and is only 26. Sounds like a plan. Except for the fact that most of his career he’s been a disappointment, he doesn’t like the cold weather in Denver (no cold weather in Chicago) and he pouted when the Broncos traded for Javon Walker because he wanted to be “the number one receiver.” You know how you get to be the “number one receiver” Ashley? You get open, you catch passes and you score touchdowns. Why suddenly, the fact that Ashley’s still on the market makes more sense.

College football has changed some rules to try to speed their game up. I love college football, but the game lengths are absurd. A Notre Dame game on NBC will never come in at under FOUR hours. The ABC Saturday night games will take just as long. Even D-III and Juco games, not on TV, take three and a half at the fastest. The damn clock stops too much. The NFL changed their timing rules a few years ago and shaved a few minutes off, and even the announcers don’t know the rules. For example, in a game last year, Brian Baldinger got on Thomas Jones for running out of bounds with 6:30 to go in the fourth quarter of a game when the Bears had the lead. What Baldy forgot (or never knew) is that the clock would start again as soon as the ball was spotted, and so Jones really didn’t cost the Bears any time at all.

The college rules are more straight forward and only one seems odd. OK, maybe two.

The clock will continue to stop on first downs, but will start again when the ball is spotted, so you don’t have to wait for some school’s 280 year old chain gang to run down the field before the clock will start again. That’s a good rule. Honestly, you could go farther and only have the clock stop on first downs in the last two minutes of each half. I know I wouldn’t mind.

The clock will start on kickoffs now when the ball is kicked, not when it is touched by the return team (or the kicking team if it’s gone 10 yards) . This rule seems weird, and JoePa claims he will now have his team practice kicking off into the air to see if there’s a way to run the final “eight to ten seconds” of a game out by just kicking the ball really high. I think somebody else is really high. Maybe JoePa’s having a drug interaction? I can live with that rule.

The other one is going to be interesting. But as soon as I heard of it, it reminded me that Illinois High Schools have (or at least had) this same rule, because it happened to us once. The clock will stop on a change of possession, but start again as soon as the ball is respotted. So if you recover a fumble you have to get your offense on the field, get it huddled up and get a play off 25 seconds after it’s spotted. That’s not so hard, but how about this? Say you recover a fumble with :10 left in the game and you’re down four? You have to get your team to the line to kill the clock as soon as it’s spotted. That ought to make for some fun scrums with two offenses and two defenses coming onto and leaving the field at the same time. In our case, we recovered a fumble with :04 left in the half, and the clock expired while were in the huddle leisurely calling our play. Oops.

There are many reasons to like the NFL Network, but the best is that they offer non-Berman alternatives to major events.  You didn’t have to watch Berman ruin another draft this past April, and last Sunday you didn’t have to listen to him butcher the Hall of Fame inductions.  Instead you could watch Rich Eisen and (the born to be a TV analyst) Steve Mariucci and they wouldn’t send you to the podium until Berman was finally gone.  Now when they have Bryant Gumbel calling football games this season…well, I might change my mind.

Speaking of announcers, in the past two months I’ve heard, or read, a couple of priceless quotes about the immortal Brent Musberger.  On Fox Sports Radio with Steve Czaban, New York Post sports media columnist Phil Mushnick said of Musberger, “He’s been ruining sporting events for 35 years.”  In Sports Illustrated last week, Ian McShane, the man who plays Al Swearengen on Deadwood said of ABC’s World Cup coverage, “Brent Musberger should go back from whence he came.”  All in all, those two quotes are pretty much the same.

While we’re (kind of) on the subject of TV, I want to point out that this summer has been the worst for TV…ever.  Just awful stuff on all the networks.  It was capped last night when the unfunny, cerebral palsy sufferer “won” Last Coming Standing.  But, that’s not to say that there hasn’t been anything to watch.

Rescue Me (FX) — This isn’t just the best show on TV in the summer, it’s a contender for best on TV, period.  Just this season alone, it has shown the best, most brutal, and longest fight in TV history (Tommy Gavin kicking the crap out of his brother when he figured out that his brother is banging his wife), a story line where the “Probie” unwittingly outed himself when the dumbest firefighter (Sean Garrity) thought that when he was told the Probie was “playing for other team” it meant he was going to play softball on the team of another firehouse, and they managed to take a realistic look at the ongoing (and encouraging) trend of hot teachers sleeping with their high school students.  What’s not to love?  I could do without the weekly reminders of what a skank Tatum O’Neal turned out to be, but the other women on the show (Marissa Tomei, and the ladies who play Tommy’s wife and his cousin’s widow) are smokin’ hot.

Life on Mars (BBC America) — The very idea for this show was ludicrous.  A cop in 2006 London is hit by a car and wakes up in 1973 London with a job on the police force.  But the way they handle it like it might be a) real, b) a coma delusion or c) a nightmare makes it seem less ludicrous.  The acting is excellent, especially the guy who plays Gene Hunt, the crusty DCI (whatever that is) who would just as soon beat a confession out of…anybody…than wait around for forensics.

Brotherhood (Showtime) — One of my favorite shows of all time is HBO’s The Wire, and Brotherhood is kind of a weird hybrid of The Wire and The Sopranos.  The tempo and look of the show remind you of The Wire, and the violence, drugs and sex have The Sopranos fingerprints all over them.  What makes it good is a somewhat believable plot, and some great characters.  Jason Isaacs (Malfoy’s dad from the Harry Potter movies, and the bad British soldier from The Patriot) plays an Irish-Catholic Rhode Island gangster named Michael Caffee (yes, from those notoriously tough Rhode Island gangs) returned home after seven years away (on the lam).  His brother, Tommy, is a state representative and having his ass-kicking, criminal brother around is a bit of a problem.  Probably my favorite part of the show is Annabeth Gish (getting better looking as she gets older–she’s in her mid-30s by now) who plays the state rep’s wife and spends most of her time smoking pot in the bathroom and wondering why the loser high school buddy of hers who she used to hook up with in a motel a couple times a week won’t return her phone calls.  Some of the violence is downright cartoonish, (like the guy whose ear Michael cut off, and now continues to rip off) but it’s great stuff.  The show got all kinds of rave reviews when it premiered, and for once, they were all deserved.

Lucky Louie (HBO) — Deadwood has been better than ever, and Entourage has been solid, if unspectacular, and sangwiched in between Entourage and Dane Cook’s Tourgasm on Sunday nights is the long awaited Louie CK sitcom, Lucky Louie.  Louie CK’s been one of the funniest, most underrated standups in recent memory and his sitcom brings a lot of his act to the screen.  It’s filmed on very sparse, Honeymooners-esque sets, and it’s damn funny.  Jim Norton (best known from his turn as the third leg on the Opie and Anthony radio show) plays Rich, Louie’s pot-dealing friend, Mike Haggerty plays Louie’s boss at the muffler shop and Rick Shapiro plays Jerry, Louie’s loser (often nude) brother-in-law.  All three are consistently hilarious.  Not funny, mind you, but hilarious.  Pamela Adlon plays Louie’s wife.  She’s the voice of Bobby on King of the Hill.  She’s not pretty (so she’s kind of realistic as Louie’s wife) and she’s not really very funny.  But the show is really good.  HBO has not decided to pick it up for a second season yet.  These stupid bastards renewed Arli$$ like 14 freakin’ times, they can renew Lucky Louie a few times.  Oh, and as for Tourgasm?  Dane Cook is funny, Bob Kelly is funny sometimes, the other guys stunk on ice.

OK, so maybe it hasn’t been the worst summer for TV ever.  But it’s close.

Finally (mock applause fills the Internet) what is with the new NFL referee shirts?  They look like they ought to have the Prison Break logo on them.