As someone who has listened only a little bit the last few days, some of you are way too thin skinned about your/our teams. Felger and Mazz haven't been waving pom poms or anything, but they've given plenty of credit to the Sox and Patriots and have tried to also analyze what problems still exist or might exist. This isn't negativity, it's just moving on to the next week/game/situation/etc.
A good example, since there are so few of them ever posted in this thread, has been Felger's very consistent take on tonight's hero, Mike Napoli. He said before the playoffs and series started that he thinks Napoli has a role to play and will show up in a big spot. While Napoli proceeded to shit himself over the last two weeks, Felger spoke openly about how it's scary and maybe he's wrong, but he still thinks that guy will show up. Tonight he did, and he'll probably end up talking about it tomorrow, something POSITIVE about the Red Sox. May all of you rest easy.
In regards to the Pats, he's quite consistent on them, and I don't think he's saying anything particularly inflammatory. Fundamentally, I think it's entirely possible to appreciate and applaud this team's immense success while questioning some of the avenues and specific decisions that have gotten us to this point. They've repeatedly and consistently been on the team for how and where it chooses to spend its money, BB's treatment of the media, and how to win in the NFL. Pretty much every game or situation is viewed through one or more of these lenses. Some of their analysis has been hilariously wrong, but I don't see that as a huge problem, personally. I do think they occasionally troll the Patriots audience, mostly because I'm pretty sure Felger finds some of the provincialism of Pats fans off putting. A lot of the "they should have seen this coming!" in regards to hernandez seems this way to me, since Felger got a lot of mileage out of using Hernandez as an example of why he favors drafting the weed guys. It sort of amuses me that nobody has credibly called him on this.
But maybe this is really the issue. I don't listen to talk radio to hear nothing but pure, provable, indisputable fact. I don't want a priest reading the holy scripture to me and teaching me the word of God, so to speak. One of the most beautiful things about sports is that there is no answer key, no matter how much we wish there to be one, and there's all these wonderful shades of grey about strategy, team building, situations, and all the other things that go along with it. I know it's sort of anathema to the mission of this site and as a result to the people who would value a site like this, but I genuinely take interest in hearing people explore these shades of grey even when I don't agree with it. They take positions, seek out information related to their opinion, try to make a case. In your head, you counter the argument or add onto it, depending on where you stand. This is entertaining, it passes the time, and when callers aren't sucking you get all sorts of crazy different perspectives on the same situations, strategies, etc. Personally, I find enough entertainment in this stuff to keep my radio tuned to sports radio for most of my far too lengthy commute. So when I see people getting so mad about what Felger is saying or thinking, it seems so strange to me. This is pretty much everything we love about sports, arguing about right and wrong with our friends and family, no matter how crazy and off the wall our friends and family's opinions might be. I mean, don't we all have our own admittedly semi zany off the wall theories? Don't we all have an uncle or cousin or someone with an irrational hatred of someone random like Ryan Allen or Junichi Tazawa, and no matter what they somehow always end up finding fault? The radio show merely expands that platform, exposing you to more of these opinions and puts a host there to contribute and push his own particular idiosyncrasies. To come back to Napoli, I think it's awesome that Felger had a "hunch" about Napoli, openly wavered a bit but held onto it, then got "rewarded" by being right at least for a night. It doesn't mean he's always or even often right...hell, it doesn't mean he was even right for the right reasons, but this kind of spitballing about sports is just something I grew up with.