Before I begin, let's get it straight: I understand TV and film are fictitious (mostly) and meant for entertainment.
While watching one of my favorite channels last night, ESPN Classic, I came across "The Replacements," a 2000 film loosely based on the NFL player strike of 1987. Much like Oliver Stone's "Any Given Sunday," the teams and players are made up. However, my issue is with one of the scenes where the team's quarterback, played by Keanu Reeves, gets some bad news.
Sean Falco (Reeves) has learned from the team's coach that the team's normal QB will be crossing the picket line in time to join them for the final regular-season game, relegating Falco back to his houseboat recliner.
Falco waits several hours to tell his teammates the bad news at a local watering hole. End scene.
As this is all going on, I learned the New York Jets had finally signed holdout cornerback Darrelle Revis. The story had progressed in the duration of the movie, the crawl being updated every 20 minutes of the show.
I'm wondering how, we're expected to believe that even 10 years ago, the news of a quarterback switch wouldn't have reached Falco's teammates. I'm willing to suspend some reality when watching movies, but not all sense. It's especially difficult to relax my news sense.
In that era, the Internet had already begun to play a significant role in breaking news and the four-letter network introduced us to scrolling scores and news updates decades ago. There's no way even "way back then" Falco would have been the first one to give his team the news of his benching.
Imagine this scenario today in the context of the Revis situation. Surely he had texted his friends and probably even tweeted about it. That after his agent leaked word of the deal, no doubt.
The 24-hour newscycle wasn't invented yesterday, and watching a washed-up college QB try to make it big as a replacement player helped remind me.