Why Sportswriters Should Stay Away From Historical References, (Forde-Yard Dash edition):

Sportswriters are not generally deep thinkers. There's a reason many of us got into the business in the first place. We enjoyed watching games, and thinking about them afterwards. We are simple people with simple appetites (but do not underestimate the appetites. Seriously, the things that sportswriters will do for a free meal would chill your soul.)

But sportswriters don't like being thought of as part of the "toy department" of newspapers, so sometimes, you might see them throw a line in one of their stories -- usually a hackneyed simile or metaphor whose raison d'etre (see how I did that?) is basically to show the reader that, "hey! I'm a smart guy! I went to college, and I didn't even take the athlete classes or nothin'!"

Suffice to say, this rarely ends well. Which bring us to Pat Forde, ESPN's resident college football scribe and "Forde-Yard Dash" columnist, who seems a bit out of his element in Beijing:

"There are a lot of problems with China and how it handles its people and how it conducts its business. But, beginning with this show, these Games could be the country's real Great Leap Forward."

In case you missed it the first time, that was Pat Forde, name-checking Mao Zedong's central planning experiment and starvation machine, The Great Leap Forward.

The Great Leap Forward of the People's Republic of China was an economic and social plan used from 1958 to 1960 which aimed to use China's vast population to rapidly transform mainland China from a primarily agrarian economy dominated by peasant farmers into a modern, industrialized communist society. The Great Leap Forward is now widely seen – both within China and outside – as a major economic failure and great humanitarian disaster with estimates of the number of people who starved to death during this period ranging from 14 to 43 million.

Oh, excuse me. "Forde-three million."

BONUS: "There's a new China Syndrome, and it's called China gold!" -- Al Trautwig, after China's men team clinched gold in the gymnastics competition. What this has to do with a 1979 film about coverups at a nuclear power plant, or nuclear spills, or 1970's films, or anything...well, that secret may stay with Al. 

BONUS: TPM's first blind item! Which famed reporter once wrote a story about the changes to the Penn State defense and tried to call Joe Paterno's new product the Nittany Lions' "Final Solution"? Thankfully, a desk editor squashed that one before it hit the press.