Howard Bryant's Pirate Earring Doesn't Pay For Itself

This summer, Howard Bryant left the Redskins beat at The Washington Post (which he shared with Jason La Canfora) to write for ESPN. That I never formed an opinion on Bryant's work indicates that he was, at worst, a competent writer and, at best, a good one.
There were rumblings that Bryant wasn't very well-liked by the Redskins press corps (apparently he thought quite highly of himself), but his stories were always pretty straight-forward and readable. When I heard Bryant had bolted for ESPN, I was curious to see whether he'd be able to make the transition from newsman to columnist. The answer was clear after the first two paragraphs he wrote for ESPN.com. To begin a bizzare criticism of Gene Upshaw's handling of the Michael Vick situation, Bryant wrote:

And so it is done. Michael Vick is finished and likely heading to prison. His battle is now with the federal government and the cold reality that whenever he emerges from his punishment, he will not be the same man he is today.
While the federal government, the NFL and Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank all stand tall today, it is the NFL Players Association and head Gene Upshaw who stand to lose the most.

Wait... What? On the day Michael Vick pleaded guilty to charges that will likely land him in jail, Gene Upshaw and the NFL Player's Association stand to lose the most? And in what possible way were the NFL and Arthur Blank "standing tall"? Blank was humiliated by the whole Vick affair and the NFL took a massive PR hit for almost the entire summer. Nobody was standing tall after this. Except maybe Howard Bryant on his pedestal.
Bryant's next piece was a boilerplate "Vick's road to redemption" story that was about 1/5th as insightful as the stuff being written by Terrance Moore, Michael Wilbon and others. He followed that with an unnecessary defense of David Ortiz, who had been hot at the plate for a full two weeks before the column defending his lack of production appeared. The story made even less sense when you consider that, during Ortiz's "slump", he was mostly immune from criticism since everyone knew he was injured.
Even though the story ideas weren't the most original, Bryant hadn't really embarrassed himself yet. Then came a piece on Terry Francona. It began:

It wasn't so long ago that the Red Sox front office resembled a banana republic, a comparison at the time that insulted every banana republic around the globe.

Alright, seriously? I don't even know what the hell that means. The Boston front office wasn't going to be featured in business school textbooks, but the new owners made the team into one of the most profitable in sports and oversaw the building of a team that would win the franchise's first World Series in over 80 years. I'm sure every banana republic in the world would kill for the kind of inefficiency.
(An aside: It's almost impossible to read an entire column by Bryant, which is why I'm only focusing on the ledes. Plus, they're almost all awesomely bad.)
After a week-long break, Bryant return to the Worldwide Leader with a criticism of Bill Belichick and his cheating, lying ways. The lede paragraph:

His transformation from Cleveland disaster to guru complete, his legacy as a Hall of Fame coach secure, Bill Belichick standing diminished in front of his public would be considered incongruous, but for the times in which he lives.

After sending the excerpt to a friend of mine who writes for a living, he responded, "that sentence right there is why editors invented the term, "kill fee"." Go read it again. It makes even less sense the second time.
There's too much gold in Bryant's subsequent piece on Norv Turner, the Red Sox and the Yankees to get into here. Go read the whole thing. But, if you don't want to subject yourself to that, here's the lede:

On Sunday morning, you will head to Gillette Stadium on a tour bus along Route 1, just a baby step on America's oldest highway, whose expanse stretches from Maine to Miami, and watch the leaves change. That means this is the beginning. In football, fall is just the start. There are no absolutes now.

Sweet Moses, that's bad. As is today's opening to an mind-numbing 3,500 word dissection of the racial divide in America as seen through the nation's reaction to Michael Vick's stupidity:

The letters sit heavy for weeks. They do not yellow, for in the paperless society people do not write the way they once did. They use e-mail, and it is now impossible not to be aware of the exact number of people who want to talk to you about him: from 255, when the federal government closed in on Michael Vick, to 974 later when it became clear he would plead guilty, to 2,208 on Sept. 20. That many from his first comments 'til today, 11 weeks of fresh air left before his Dec. 10 sentencing.

In Bryant's defense, his opinions in the piece are pretty well-grounded and he makes decent points during his rambling epic. But using emails from idiots (both white and black) is hardly the way to go about beginning a serious discussion on race. We can all agree that, at both ends of the racial spectrum, there are ignorant people. Why advertise them?
Back to that paragraph though: "11 weeks of fresh air"? What the hell does that mean? Whose air is fresh? Why will it become unfresh when Vick gets sentenced? It works on absolutely no levels. I mean, maybe Bryant's trying to say that his "air" (or e-mail inbox) will be fresh, but doesn't that go against the fact that he has received 2,208 emails over the past four months, some of which doubtlessly were sent on days where there was no Vick news? And, if that is indeed the case (believe me, it took multiple readings to come to that conclusion), why did Bryant stop counting on emails on September 20 when the piece was published today? It's not like he had to get his story in before a magazine went to press, he could have updated those numbers this morning. It doesn't make any sense. Plus, what's with the use of "'til". Is it supposed to be folksy? And why are the non-yellow, paperless letters heavy? Is Bryant bench pressing his computer?
My buddy supposes that Bryant's editors love him and let him post as he pleases. But that still wouldn't explain why the editors at ESPN.com have given almost all of Bryant's stories top billing on the site. It's nearly impossible to find Rob Neyer or Buster Olney, yet Bryant gets the main page?
I guess this shouldn't be surprising from a company that has turned what used to be a wonderful television station into a borderline-unwatchable network that thrives on self-promotion, self-congratulations and Chris Berman. I suppose it's only a matter of time before Bryant gets a plumb gig on SportsCenter. That might make my ESPN-xodus complete.