Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, where losing has become something of an art form over the past 50 years or so, I’ve endured an insufferably large number of completely awful sporting events over the years both in person and on TV, and I’ve come to develop a curious sort of fondness for sports done badly – a fondness which is usually accompanied by strong beer, of course.
Sports done badly wildly vary, however, in terms of entertainment value. Take baseball, for example. Bad baseball teams usually have a propensity for doing one or both of a couple of things: a) their pitchers issue a lot of walks; and b) their batters strike out a lot. The walk and the strikeout are two of the most fundamentally boring aspects of the game. Consequently, bad baseball tends to be boring as sin. The exception to this, of course, is that high comedy can be found on the defensive end. Witness my post from two days ago. But for the most part, it is boring.
Bad basketball is also boring because basketball teams universally share one fundamental deficiency: THEY CAN’T SHOOT! Watching a bunch of bricklayers chuck enough bricks to build a new fieldhouse gets old really fast.
Bad hockey is sort of like Public Skate Night at the Eagles Ice Arena on a Tuesday night. It’s a bunch of guys skating around in circles who don’t seem to know where they are going.
Bad soccer is ... well, soccer is a whole different animal that we’ll get to at some other point in time. That’s an entirely different cultural phenomenon. Still, the occasional own goal or a striker missing an open net from 2 yards away is mighty entertaining.
Bad golf and tennis can be interesting, just because the guys and gals doing it who are otherwise juggernauts and drone suddenly seem shockingly mortal. "Oh look! He hit his tee shot into the trees! I do that!" But those games don't interest me in general, for a variety of reasons I will surely get into at some point. And god help us, we NEVER wants to watch bad auto racing, for the safety of everyone involved.
For my money, only one sport done badly truly stands out, and that's football. This is because football is really an incredible team effort – it takes 11 guys carrying out their assignments and working in unison on every play for the course of 120 plays or more during a game to be successful. For all of the brute strength and physicality involved, what makes the game so challenging is that it's also all about attention to detail – and there are LOTS of details, which means there are also LOTS of ways to screw up.
Football done badly is an endless series of mistakes. Jumping offside, lining up incorrectly, missed blocks and missed tackles and missed assignments and missed field goals. Fumbles, interceptions, dropped passes and blocked punts. Penalties of all sorts, the best being 12 men on the field. 12 men on the field! For heaven’s sake, people, learn how to count!
For someone who appreciates all that is done badly, it can get no better than bad football – a showing of brute force and strength often undone by a complete lack of IQ or competence. And this is after a week's worth of preparation, mind you. Guys spend all week drilling and then promptly jump offsides on the first play of the game. What are you doing? What the hell is wrong with you?
Here is a summation of what was the most amazing game I’ve watched in the NFL in quite some time, a game that occurred on Nov. 18 in Dallas between the Cleveland Browns and the Dallas Cowboys. The first 3½ quarters were rather unremarkable, a run-of-the-mill failure of a game full of miscues and mistakes. The Browns can’t stop committing defensive penalties which sustain Dallas drives, and the Cowboys then return the favor by allowing Tony Romo to be sacked repeatedly. Dallas is leading 17-13 with, I think, around 5:30 to play when this amazing series of events commences:
• Browns QB Brandon Weeden fumbles the ball away deep in Cleveland territory, thus giving Dallas the chance to close the game out once and for all.
• Tony Romo then fumbles the ball back to the Browns. He is not blameless in this, of course, because you just can’t fumble in this situation. And were the Cowboys to lose, he would most likely be skewered among the frenzied Dallas media, who like to blame Tony Romo for everything from global warming to the national debt. But to be fair, the poor guy has spent the whole game running for his life, as the Cowboy offensive line more resembles a group of toreadors twirling their capes and sidestepping bull-rushing defensive lineman. He’s been sacked something like 8 times, and it’s amazing he’s still standing upright at this point in the game. Nevertheless, not a good time for Turnover Tony to cough one up.
• Given new life, the Browns promptly march down the field, aided by the fact that the Dallas pass defense scheme apparently involves leaving vast acreage of space open for the Cleveland receivers to run through freely.
• The Browns get to 1st and goal and run three unimaginative plays. It’s 4th down at the Dallas 1 yard line and they decide to run the fade pattern in the end zone. Dallas, of course, is looking for the fade pattern, which is pretty much what every NFL defense is looking for down at the goal line, and the Browns’ passing formation more of less telegraphs that this play is coming. The fade pattern only works when you have some superstar receiver on your team like Larry Fitzgerald or Calvin Johnson who is big and who can just go up high and catch the ball in spite of whatever coverage is being offered. The Browns possess no such no such receivers, nor do they possess a QB with the sort of precision and accuracy necessary to throw such a pass. So this is truly a terrible play call all-around by the Browns offensive coordinator.
• Weeden throws the ball about 4 yards out of bounds, anyway, giving his receiver no chance whatsoever to make a play. Turnover on downs. Egads.
• There are little more than 2:00 left at this point but the Browns have all their timeouts left and can stop the clock, while Dallas is pinned at their own 1 yard line. The Cowboys run the ball thrice and net about 1½ yards and then have to punt. They need a good punt to get out of this mess. A good high kick that’s unreturnable, or something angled close to the sideline.
• And you can hear a stream of profanity on the TV coming from the Cowboys punter, who more of less flubs the kick in almost every way imaginable. It’s a low wobbler that’s right to Josh Cribbs, one of the game’s best return specialists and pretty much the only guy on the Browns who ever seems to know what he’s doing. Cribbs jukes and cuts across the field and returns the punt well into Cowboys territory, finally being tackled around the Dallas 30.
• The Cowboys are then assessed a 15-yard penalty, a personal foul for a horse collar tackle. It turns out this is a bad call, since the Cowboys tackler didn’t grab the back of Cribbs’ jersey but instead grabbed Cribbs’ hair, which flows freely out the back of his helmet. You cannot tackle by the back collar of the jersey (and understandably so, because it is a dangerous play) and yet hair pulling is somehow legal in the NFL. So on top of the general incompetence being exhibited by both clubs and their respective coaching staffs, you now have the officials screwing up as well.
• With 15 yards tacked onto the end of the play, Cleveland now starts really deep inside Dallas territory. They start from about the Dallas 15 and there is about 1:30 left on the clock and, in an ideal world, the Browns would somehow eat up that time and score with scant seconds remaining, giving the Cowboys no chance to respond. But it takes Cleveland all of one play to score, as Weeden finds a wide open receiver running free again in vast acreage of open space.
• Like I say, in an ideal world you wouldn’t want to score so quickly if you’re the Browns, but given the fact that Dallas defense has ONLY 9 MEN ON THE FIELD, how could they not score? Somehow, amid the heated debate between the Cowboys coaches and referees over hair pulling which ensued after the punt, they had forgotten to count to 11. So at the very moment they are being called upon to save the game and possibly the season – Dallas has underachieved all year and desperately needs this win over the hapless Browns to stay in the playoff race – the Cowboys defense is, instead, completely disorganized.
• So now it’s not looking so good for the home team, who start deep in their own territory down 3 points to the Browns without much time left. But during the ensuing hurry-up drive, the Browns defense commites 50 YARDS IN PENALTIES, thus greatly aiding the Cowboys’ driving the length of the field in short order and kicking the game-tying field goal to send the game to overtime, where they would eventually prevail.
Now, occasionally there are swaths of time in a game where one team totally goes on the fritz and forgets how to play – witness the Jacksonville Jaguars recently giving up 28 points in 6 minutes vs. Tennessee without the Titans ever running an offensive play. But this particular comedy of errors involving Cleveland and Dallas was notable because both teams were doing seemingly everything possible to try and give the game to the other team while simultaneously refusing the gifts. It was the most incompetent 5½ minutes of professional football I have ever seen. It was absolutely spectacular to watch, simply because I had NO IDEA after a while how they would fuck up on the following play.
And it was no sure thing the game would go to OT, of course. My buddy Chris Cree down in Dallas was watching this game and theorizing how the Cowboys would mess it up – his favourite theory being that, with :06 left on the clock as they lined up for the tying field goal, the Cowboys would jump offsides. (A penalty by the trailing team in the last 2:00 is considered to be a deliberate attempt to stop the clock, and a :10 runoff is required.) Or, the Cowboys could lose their minds and let Tony Romo hold for the field goal again:
"There is nothing automatic in football."
I'm sorry, I couldn't resist. I'm a Seahawks fan. That was one of the best moments in franchise history.
The point is this: bad football can be spectacular entertainment if you allow it to be. It's a wonderful release, a celebration of idiocy and mayhem. Bad football is beautiful in the most absurd sort of way. It's far better to laugh off the foibles of your favourite team than it is to get all bent out of shape because you lost. Guess what! Lots of people lose! In play lose, remember? The difference being that they fail on national TV, of course, whereas most of us just fail on a small, local level.
But we can feel a kinship to those who flounder. It's hard to truly feel connected to the winners – hell, those people do things with their bodies we cannot even imagine. But when the gladiators fumble or drop passes or the kicker misses WIDE RIGHT (ack! Scott Norwood! I lost money on that game!), it is only then that they seem somewhat human.
And in no way do I want to see players fail, of course. I like winning. There was no greater joy in my pro football viewing life than getting to be that guy in the office on Super Bowl Sunday. In every newspaper gig I ever worked at, there was always that guy who was a huge fan of one of the teams involved, and he'd be wearing the jersey and screaming at the TV instead of doing work. Well, when the Seahawks made it to the Super Bowl, there I was dressed in my Shawn Alexander #37 jersey screaming at the TV in the offices of the Examiner. I got to be that guy for a day and it was the best. (Even though the Seahawks got screwed. But I'm not bitter.)
