This absolutely idiotic story over at MickeySports has earned my biggest eye-roll of the day.

When do you think Parcells will knock off the bullshit and just tell it like it is:
“Yes, I’m really going to retire from coaching– until I decide to come back again.”

It’s like he’s playing the real-life version of Madden ’04: in ‘franchise’ mode, if you turned off the ‘owner’ features, you could hop from team to team every year if you wanted to, re-building, de-building, trading, drafting, and basically forming the entire league however you saw fit.*

I first picked this story up from the AP wire, and I guess it sort of floors me that they have it framed like this will “really be it” this time. At least ESPN has a note about how Parcells has “retired” 3 times before. Who knows? Maybe we’ll see him in Oakland next year. The only NFL owner possibly more obnoxious than Jerry Jones, after all, is Al Davis.

* – I can remember being in the throes of a particularly severe Madden addiction some time during 2004, and saying to myself on the eve of a simulated conference championship weekend 10 or 15 years in the game’s future: Hey: I’ve coached all 4 of these teams…