XLVIII Things On My Mind XLVIII Hours Before Super Bowl XLVIII

I. 90% of the internet is made up of porn, cats, and lists of stuff. This blog post about the Super Bowl will contribute to at least two of those categories.

II. The LOSE got to be that one guy the last time the Seahawks reached the Super Bowl, which was in 2006. At every newspaper I’ve ever worked at, there is always that one guy who is a fan of one of the teams in the Super Bowl. And come Super Bowl Sunday, they’re dressed in their team’s colours, screaming at the TV, stomping about the office, jumping up and down with excitement, and generally making a fool out of themselves. In 2006, that was me. For once. It was fun to be that one guy for a day, even though the game didn’t go so well.

III. The LOSE couldn’t help but giggle a little bit this past fall when, in the last week of the season, the playoff fate of the Pittsburgh Steelers was determined, in part, by a bad call in the Kansas City-San Diego game. The officiating crew working that game at Fuck Qualcomm it’s uncool to overwrite a stadium named for a dead guy like Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego was headed by Bill Leavy, who was the referee in the 2006 Super Bowl between Pittsburgh and Seattle – a game so poorly officiated that the NFL has used parts of it as a textbook for teaching new referees how not to call a game. Now you know how it feels, Steelers fans, to have Bill Leavy & Co. contribute to the breaking of your heart.

IV. The LOSE doesn’t believe the officials cost the Seahawks the game, however – 90% of the bad calls went against the Seahawks, but there were some doozies that went the other way as well. The Seahawks organization, however, was rather annoyed at the time because the game in Detroit, for all intents and purposes, turned into a Pittsburgh Steelers home game – and if you’ve done your proper IN PLAY LOSE related reading and read the book Scorecasting, you’ll know that one of the chapters deals with the nature of home field advantage, which comes down a lot of the time to the home side getting the breaks from the officials. Players know this in all sports, of course, and play through it, knowing that those little things which don’t go your way during an away game are likely to go your way at home, which is why bitching about it, from a player’s standpoint, is pointless. That Pittsburgh got the breaks from the zebras in a home game wasn’t that surprising. That it had become a Steelers home game was the problem. Huge swaths of the supposedly neutral field in Detroit were awash in black-and-gold, as Pittsburgh was a reasonable driving distance and Steelers fans scooped up every available ticket possible. And the primary narrative in the media was about how vaunted Steelers RB Jerome Bettis was going home to Detroit to play his final game. And don’t think for a minute that such narratives aren’t orchestrated. The NFL is the most media savvy enterprise out there. The Bettis angle made for a catchy hook, of course, and the Steelers are an easy sell, given that they’ve won 6 Super Bowls and are a model franchise, whereas those weird guys dressed in all blue from somewhere near Alaska had/have never won anything. In the moment, the Seahawks and their fans resented Bill Leavy and his officiating crew. In the larger sense, the Seahawks and their fans didn’t like being treated as 2nd-class citizens.

V. The dominant narrative of this upcoming Super Bowl was likely to be that it’s one last hurrah for Broncos QB Peyton Manning, and this is understandable. Manning is 37, is arguably the greatest QB in NFL history, and who just had the greatest season by a QB in NFL history. His intelligence, affability, and willingness not to take himself serious has also made him a great pitch man and one of the game’s best spokesmen. But just as he jumps routes, Seahawks CB Richard Sherman seems to have hijacked all of the media attention. As someone who tired rather quickly of the whole “Driving the Bus Back to Detroit” narrative in 2006, I’m glad for this deviation from the predictable script. The Seahawks aren’t playing second-fiddle this time around.

VI. As for what Richard Sherman did in the aftermath of the Seahawks 23:17 win over the 49ers in the NFC Championship Game: good for him. I didn’t care what Sherman said, nor would I have cared if Crabtree had made the catch on the critical play and then yakked on and on about how Sherman was actually a chump. (Well, I would’ve been sore about it in the moment, but only because the Seahawks had lost.) The LOSE doesn’t care what people say on the field – and when you’re interviewing players on the sidelines, it’s still on the field. You’re in their house. You play by their rules. Even the game’s greatest spokesperson loses it from time to time in the heat of battle. Sherman trashing 49ers WR Michael Crabtree was somewhat refreshing in its honesty. This idea that we expect athletes to be polite and modest and bow to their fallen opponent after the game is nonsense, of course – it takes enormous ego and arrogance to be great at anything. On the field, games are always full of chirping and woofing and chattering. It’s part of the game. It’s a ploy to try and take the edge off the other side, make them lose their focus. And sometimes it works. (Whatever it was that Materazzi said to Zidane, the LOSE can’t believe that, in the course of his long and storied career, he hadn’t heard it before, if not something worse.)

VII. That Sherman was condemned in the media for this violation of decorum and post-game protocol was silly. The media loves a good interview and a good story, and Sherman is both of those. That some dumb, ignorant, redneck, white trash muttonfuckers came out of the cyber wordwork and threw racial slurs and innuendos Sherman’s way was somewhat disturbing. Noted trashtalker Sir Charles Barkley covered both of these points during a press conference in Seattle I happened to be attending: “there are a lot of idiots in the world, and most of them happen to be reporters.”

VIII. And a few athletes chimed in as well:

All I have to say to that is that maybe Justin Verlander should have thrown some fastballs high and tight to Pablo Sandoval in Game 1 of the 2012 World Series, instead of tossing up these softballs. I’ll make a prediction at the end of this post on the Super Bowl, even though I’m generally terrible when it comes to predictions, but one prediction I am most proud of came up in 2012, in talking about the World Series while walking in the rain with The Official Girlfriend of IN PLAY LOSE after the Giants’ 9:0 clobbering of St. Louis in Game 7 of the NLCS: “sure, the Tigers have Verlander, but what happens to them when Pablo takes him deep in the bottom of the 1st inning of Game 1? The Tigers won’t seem so invincible anymore, will they?” That and basically nailing South Africa 2010 – Spain-Netherlands final, 3/4 of the Semis and 7/8 of the Quarters – are about the only times I’ve ever predicted anything right. So take none of this to Las Vegas. Gambling is wrong! Except if I turn out to be right, of course, at which point I will say, “why didn’t all of you listen to me!”

IX. Getting back to Detroit in 2006: the Seahawks didn’t lose the game because of the officials. It certainly didn’t help. It also didn’t help that an injury to their starting safety created a gaping hole in their defense through which the Steelers scored two of their three TDs in the game. Nor did it help that the Seahawks genius gameplan – the key to which was getting the ball to matchup nightmare TE Jerramy Stevens – was undone by Stevens dropping multiple passes. Yeah, the officiating sucks in an away game, which is why the away team needs to play even better than the norm. The Seahawks didn’t that day. They had the right game plan and didn’t execute, and there will certainly be some wrinkles in the game plan for both teams this coming Sunday, but we’ll get to that here a few more Roman numerals from now.

X. The LOSE and his B-Zero chums threw a Super Bowl party in 1990 while in England. The Brit kids who lived with us wondered what the fuss of the Super Bowl was all about, so we all stayed up until god-knows-what-hour it was to watch the game. The Denver Broncos were playing the San Francisco 49ers, and the Broncos were down 27-3 at the half, which meant everyone else went home early. The Broncos were a walking buzzkill in the 1980s, their regular appearances in the Super Bowl being equivalent to putting on some terrible 1970s soft rock record like Seasons in the Sun or something when you want to get people to leave the party. They would get beat early and beat often, the outcome would be decided by halftime, and then everyone could go home.

XI. The LOSE was living in the Rocky Mountain states when the Broncos won their Super Bowls in 1998 and 1999. On the Sportin’ Life front, my time in Western Colorado in 1998 was pretty cool, not only because the Broncos won the Super Bowl, which generated a whole lot of excitement in the state and the region, but also because of the Winter Olympics, which is a big deal in a winter sports paradise like Steamboat Springs, which has produced more Olympians per capita than any city in the country. I listened to the Super Bowl on the car radio, in fact, as I was driving back from Salt Lake City. I remember the day of the Super Bowl well, not only because the Broncos beat Green Bay 31:24, but because it was also the day that a suicide deer sprung from out of the darkness along the highway and ran right into the front right side of my car, which was slowing mightily at the site of said deer but probably still going a significant rate of speed. This could’ve been disastrous, but the LOSE was driving a Saturn with those springy, dent-resistant panels. The suicide deer bounced off the side panel, stumbled and then ran off into the brush to live another day – albeit likely with some sort of deer concussion. The car didn’t even have a dent.

XII. But yeah, it was kind of neat to see people get excited over their favourite team’s successes. Having grown up in the Northwest, I know very little about this, as only team I grew up following ever won a championship, and that team no longer exists. (Die in a fire, OKC Blunder.) It definitely put a little extra spring in everyone’s step, even in a town 270 miles away from Denver. That sort of effect on the collective psyche of a city, and an extended community, shouldn’t be discounted. We have a tendency to take our games and pastimes far too seriously, but success on the field of play translates into a heightened sense of community and shared purpose which, I believe, is a good thing.

XIII. New Mexico seemed evenly split between Broncos and Cowboys fans, and I gravitated towards the Broncos in 1999, simply because the Cowboys are evil incarnate, and also because a local rooting interests doing well tends to make things easier when you’re primarily working the Sports Desk at a daily newspaper. It’s much easier to come up with an issue on a daily basis that way. Winning is good for business. The LOSE had never been a Broncos fan, of course, owing to the fact that I grew up in the Northwest, and the Seahawks and Broncos were rivals in the AFC West back then. I’d never much cared for Broncos QB John Elway (who, by the way, is actually enshrined on my hometown’s Walk of Fame) but pragmatism ruled the roost during those two years in the Rockies. And I could appreciate the fact that such a great player and great competitor as Elway was ultimately capping off a career with two championships. Elway was fortunate in that he got five chances to play in the Super Bowl in his career (the first three times, his team got blasted). Lots of great players never even get a sniff. To that end, this is an interesting series on ESPN about great players who never reached the Super Bowl.

XIV. The Broncos beat the Atlanta Falcons 34:19 in 1999. The Falcons were enormous underdogs to begin with, and it didn’t help matters that Atlanta FS Eugene Robinson was arrested the night before the game for soliciting a prostitute. This is taking the idea of trying to kick back and relax the night before the game a little too far. (This is also as close to porn as this entry is going to get.)

XV. Speaking of relaxing, the Super Bowl is always a carnival rife with distractions. The tendency, among coaches, is to try and wall their team off somehow from the fêtes going on around them, imploring their players to stay 100% focused. That seems like the right approach, except for the fact that these are human beings we’re talking about here, and human beings are capable of multitasking and being focused when needed. I’m reminded of the 1981 Super Bowl between the Raiders and the Eagles in New Orleans. The Raiders’ entire franchise ethos had been established by recently retired coach John Madden, who only had three rules: be on time, pay attention, and play like hell. Quite a few of the Raider players made sure to get out and enjoy Bourbon St. prior to the 1981 game, which they ultimately won 27:10 in an upset. The Raiders were free spirits and, to a man, the former Raiders have said that they were loose and relaxed for that game, whereas the Eagles seemed tightly wound, and it made a huge difference. It’s never made that much sense to me to try and shudder guys up and pretend that nothing is going on around them. The Super Bowl is a huge spectacle, and one of the things you should do in that situation is ENJOY THE MOMENT, because you do not know if/when it is going to come again. The team that seems most like themselves come game time is the team that’s likely going to be the most successful.

XVI. Which, going back to the Richard Sherman bit, is yet another reason why I couldn’t care less that he said what he said about Michael Crabtree. That’s who he is. Nor do I care that he’s said in the past that Peyton Manning throws some passes that are wounded ducks. The Seahawks are boisterous, confident, brash, obnoxious, and they have fun with the game. They’re not going to try to be anything they aren’t – nor should they. And, like most great trash talkers, they don’t actually take themselves all that seriously, since being willing to dish it out also means being able to take it, and a part of being able to take it is being able to laugh. 

XVII. Like I say, the Super Bowl is something of a carnival, the day having become something of a national holiday. I explained this to all of my friends in Bangladesh that they asked why we were up at 5:30 a.m. watching the Patriots play the Panthers on ESPN India. It was an actual national holiday in Bangladesh – it was Eid that day –  so we got to celebrate two ‘holidays’ at once. (Don't ask me to tell you what became of the cow that was tied out front of the hotel.) And speaking of that trip to Bangladesh, the other person who was on that trip with me – Kate, who is saxophonist extraordinaire for the House Band of IN PLAY LOSE – is breaking out her Brazilian trio for a gig on Sunday night after the game and any Bay Area readers of this blog would do well to check it out.

XVIII. My other foreign Super Bowl witnessing experience came in 1988, when the Redskin Potatoes unleashed one of the greatest single quarters in the history of football on the Denver Broncos. I was in Belgium and I have don’t remember which TV network I was watching or even what language(s) it was in. There were networks on the cable system in Brussels in French, Flemish, Dutch, English, German and Italian, so pick one. The Broncos went all Seasons in the Sun in the 2nd Quarter and went from up 10-0 to down 35-10, but I stayed up until 4:00 a.m. and watched the anticlimactic 2nd half of the Potatoes’ 42:10 victory out of annoyance. If I’m going to stay up that late for the game, damn it, I want to watch ALL THE GAME. Same applied in 1990, when the British Super Bowl party had basically been reduced to me and a handful of 49er fans, who didn’t think trouncing the hapless Broncos 55:10 was enough and wanted the 49ers to score even more, and who also never wanted the game to end.

XIX. Read that score again. The 49ers won the Super Bowl in 1990 by a score of 55:10. Gads, I’ve watched a lot of terrible Super Bowls over the years. It always seemed odd that a league which strove so much to create parity consistently wound up with championship games which were so lopsided. 55:10, 46:10, 42:10, 52:17, 49:26. Yuck. There were some dominant franchises during that time, to be sure – the 49ers, the Cowboys and the Potatoes pretty much took turns, and you can add in the Bears from the mid-1980s as well – and the AFC teams seemed either to be dogs or choking dogs. For someone who doesn’t care a whit about neither the commercials nor the halftime show, this was always something of a downer.

XX. I’m now realizing I’m going to be hard-pressed to write 48 things in this list, as I’m free associating all of this in my head and just sort of vamping on whatever idea came up beforehand.

XXI. I mentioned legendary Bronco QB John Elway’s connection to my hometown before. (His father was an assistant coach at W.S.U. at the time.) Peyton Manning’s connection to my hometown is that his first collegiate start at Tennessee was against The Good Guys in Knoxville in 1994. The Volunteers won 10:9 in an ugly slugfest. That W.S.U. team went 8-4 and led the country in total defense, but couldn’t score. Manning's Vols and W.S.U. simultaneously put a stamp on collegiate football history on New Year's Day 1998 when they lost to eventual national co-champions Nebraska and Michigan, respectively – the former never in doubt, as the Vols got waxed by the sodbusting Cornhuskers; the latter subject to perpetual controversy, as Michigan eked out a 21:16 win over the Cougars in a Rose Bowl with a disputed ending. Manning was the #1 pick in the 1998 draft, taken right ahead of W.S.U. QB Ryan Leaf, whose pro career was somewhat less successful and, ultimately, extremely sad. There were, in fact, pundits at the time who thought the Colts should’ve taken Leaf.

XXII. Manning’s first TD pass as a pro was to Marvin Harrison in an exhibition game against … the Seahawks. When asked about the play afterwards, he said something along the lines of that it was a play called ‘Throw the Ball to Marvin Harrison.’ One of the things which is fascinating about this particular Super Bowl is that, in the complex scheming world of pro football, the juicy matchup of this game, the Broncos best offense v. the Seahawks defense, features two sides whose actual schemes are, by NFL standards, not all that complicated. For all of his running around screaming with his arms flailing and shouting Omaha and such, the offense Manning runs in Denver, much like it was in Indianapolis, is pretty straightforward stuff, while the Seahawks 4-3, cover 3 defense is not far removed from high school sets. That both teams can be this good in the modern NFL speaks to the talent levels. These guys are sick.

XXIII. And here at IN PLAY LOSE, we tend to focus a fair amount on the business aspect of sport, and that so much talent is going to be out on the field on Sunday is a testament to the administrative skill of both squads. The Broncos have done it with some underappreciated free agent moves, and also a bit more bona fide star power – signing the Peyton Mannings and the Wes Welkers and such – whereas the Seahawks have been built through the draft and through shrewd moves by their GM. The Seahawks have done such a good job drafting players, in fact, that a great number of their top flight players are young stars who were low round draft picks. QB Russell Wilson came to them in the 3rd round; badass DBs Richard Sherman and Kam Chancellor in the 5th round. Lower round draft picks are also cheaper in their first contracts. Most franchise QBs command $10 million or so, but Russell Wilson in his 2nd year in the league makes around $500,000 – and that extra $9.5 million you’re not spending on a QB you can then use on a couple of badass pass rushers, like Cliff Avril and Michael Bennett, and a playmaking WR like Percy Harvin (more on him in a minute) and still stay under the salary cap. Many of the Seahawks best players are basically underpaid, which means more money available to sign more good players.

XXIV. The two clubs also have two of the best coaches in football. Pete Carroll just won a poll of NFL players as being the coach they’d want to play for, which is a ringing endorsement (good thing they have some cap flexibility to sign more guys, since Seattle may be high on a lot of FA’s lists here pretty soon). Denver’s John Fox, meanwhile, is someone I have always thought was among the élite minds in the NFL. He managed to maximize the abilities of Tim Tebow and win a playoff game in the process, so clearly he knows what he’s doing. And that’s not a slight against Tebow, to whom I hold no personal animus but an awful lot of other people seem to. Fox built an offense for him emphasizing the run game and controlled passes, and did so believing it gave the Broncos, in 2011, the best chance to win. And he was right. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you coach. But then Peyton Manning came available, and when you have the chance sign Peyton Manning … well, duh, you should do that …

XXV. Quite simply, this is one of the best matchups the Super Bowl has ever seen, two enormously talented teams and two of the smartest, best-run organizations in sports. And MY TEAM IS ONE OF THEM! And The Lose doesn’t really know what to do about this. Not even two World Series titles by my favourite baseball team in recent years has gotten me used to winning. I posess that skepticism and sense of dread and doom that is engrained in Northwest sports fans after years of failure. (And for those of you who don’t understand my allegiance to the San Francisco Giants, I was rooting for the Giants before the Mariners existed. Some would argue they still don’t exist. No argument here.) The Seahawks went from not quite good enough to not quite good at all to not quite good enough again, the Mariners have had about 10 good years out of 42, the Sonics squandered the golden opportunity in the early 1990s and then disintegrated and ultimately left town, the Vancouver Canucks always finish their seasons exactly one playoff level below where their talent dictates they should finish. Seattle ranks down with the likes of Cleveland and Buffalo on the Misery Index when it comes to professional sports. So to have this badass team in the Super Bowl is fucking cool. Not just a really good team, mind you – the Seahawks who lost in 2006 were a really good team – but a badass team that really represents the id of the place from whence I came.

XXVI. And I plan on talking a whole lot of shit and being a pain in the ass to Broncos fan and IN PLAY LOSE East Bay bureau chief Phonerz J. Magratheazaphod at the Super Bowl party on Sunday.

XXVII. But first I need to figure out what to make for the party. Hmmm … I am leaning towards muffuletta for Sunday, because it rules. I made Cajun food when the Saints reached the Super Bowl – poboys and muffuletta. We also had a scrabble tourney that day and I played the word ETOUFFE(E) for some ungodly amount of points. I had the whole Saints thing dialed in that day. I suppose I could go regional with this and do salmon or something. What’s important to remember is that it doesn’t matter if you win or lose so long as you’re drunk and well fed.

XXVIII. I’ve always preferred going to Super Bowl parties to going to bars, although last year I went to about 10 bars. I told a pal of mine working the news desk here in S.F. that I would amble about the Mission and let her know any goings on, particularly if the 49ers won the game, so I would go to a bar, have a drink, watch the game for a series or two and then amble on to the next one. Hey, I’m being asked to go to 10 bars, what’s not to like about that? I supposedly should loathe the rival 49ers but this rivalry is still too new to be on that level. AFC West teams like the Broncos were the sworn enemy during my formative years of fandom. It would’ve been fun for the city if the 49ers had won last year (and it would’ve done all of us a service, since the Baltimore Ravens are about the most thoroughly annoying franchise in sports), and I was somewhat disappointed when they lost. I felt like they were the better team and let the opportunity get away from them. And, as we saw with the 49ers this year, those opportunities can be hard to come by. And I was probably more animated in wanted a 49er win than I should’ve been, me being a Seahawk guy and all. I’ll sight my pragmatism again along with a time-tested excuse: “I was drunk!” Going to 10 bars will do that to you, since you should patronize the establishments accordingly.

XXIX. OK, so who wins? Or, better yet, who loses? (This is IN PLAY LOSE after all.) First of all, the Broncos lose if they turn the ball over. Can’t do that. That’s a 100% surefire way for them to lose, and the Seahawks force more turnovers than anyone in the game.

XXX. The Seahawks lose if they try to outsmart Peyton Manning. That will work for all of one series before he figures it out. No gimmick defenses and such. As I said before, the Seahawks keep it simple on defense and you need to do that against the Broncos.

XXXI. The Broncos lose if they don’t come up with some wrinkles on offense. The Seahawks are a strangely constructed team that seems uniquely problematic to Denver’s receivers. They have big CBs who are physical, they have LBs who are tall and rangy, and they have a safety in Kam Chancellor who has systematically destroyed TEs all season. Seattle are also good tacklers, which means fewer yards after contact. Denver will move the ball, because they can do that on anyone, but this will likely have to be in smaller chunks of yardage, which means longer drives. The longer the drives, the more likely a mistake. A lot of the Broncos’ favourite plays aren’t likely to work so well, so they’ll need some different looks. (EDIT: Phonerz J. Magratheazaphod has argued upon first read of this post that Denver is likely to win through primary use of the running game, instead of the pass. I actually agree with this and it was damn lazy of me not to mention that RB Knowshon Moreno is probably the key player in this game for the Denvers.)

XXXII. The Seahawks lose if they can’t block anyone. The offensive line for Seattle has been something of a mess, mostly due to injuries. Russell Wilson winds up running for his life at times on dropbacks.

XXXIII. The Broncos lose if they don’t get any QB sacks. And I don't mean pressure, I mean sacks, because Russell Wilson is so elusive. Denver’s defense has been good against the run, but their secondary is a bit suspect. And when Russell Wilson is running for his life is also when he can be the most dangerous – Seattle is one of the best teams in the league when it comes to improvisational, free form pass plays where Wilson seemingly makes something out of nothing.

XXXIV. The Seahawks lose if they don’t run the ball. Marshon Lynch doesn’t need that many blocks, as he runs behind his pads and simply runs over a lot of people. The Seahawks have avoided Russell Wilson QB read-option running plays most of the year, simply because they don’t want to their 5’10” QB smashed, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they decide to pull out some of those sorts of plays and try to use Denver’s overpursuit against them, particularly since they now have a secret weapon to stretch and spread the field ...

XXXV. The Broncos lose if they can’t figure out what Seahawks WR Percy Harvin is going to do. This is one of the more intriguing twists in the game. Seattle traded for Harvin from the Minnesota Vikings in the offseason, signed him to a $67 million contract, and he promptly got hurt and missed the first 10 games of the season. He played one game and did stuff like this:

He then got hurt again, missed the rest of the regular season, played against the Saints in the playoffs and got knocked out of the game. He’s played all of about 30 plays all year. Harvin is apparently now fully healthy and is the ultimate X factor. Percy Harvin is one of the fastest, most dangerous players in all of football. And for the Broncos, there is basically ZERO film from which to gameplan for him. There is basically a whole swath of the Seahawks playbook they haven’t even run all year involving all phases of the offense. If Harvin is a big factor in the game, the Broncos are in big trouble.

XXXVI. The Seahawks lose if Harvin get hurts again. Which seems to happen a lot. He’s had a fairly checkered career. Although some of his ‘injury’ issues last year in Minnesota may have had more to do with him getting into a row with the Vikings coaching staff. The Lose has always been of the opinion that such sideline squabbles often say more about the coach than the player. And the Vikings just fired everyone this offseason after going 4-12, so clearly whatever they were preaching wasn’t working.

XXXVII. The Broncos lose if the officiating crew follows their usual form. Apparently, the crew tabbed to work the game is known for being more defense friendly in nature, calling fewer pass interference and defensive holding penalties than the league average, and calling more offensive holding penalties than the league average. The Seahawks defense is tight, physical, aggressive, and some would say not entirely legal, so this would likely benefit them and hinder a pass-first offense like Denver.

XXXVIII. The Seahawks lose if the zeebs get whistle happy. Seattle is already one of the more penalized teams in the league. Penalties mean free first downs for Denver, instead of making them earn it. Can’t do that. For the sake of the viewing, let’s hope this doesn’t happen, just because too many penalties makes the game insufferable.

XXXIX. The Broncos lose if this comes down to special teams. Because of the altitude, Denver is a kicker’s paradise, a place where you can hit 64-yard FGs, loft punts that hit the moon and launch kickoffs out the back of the end zone and into the third row of I-Don’t-Care-Who-Sponsors-It-It’s-Always-Going-To-Be Mile High Stadium. At sea level, however, Denver’s kick coverage is terrible – worst in the NFL – and along with his prowess as a WR and running the reverse, Percy Harvin is also one of the league’s best kick returners. Denver’s return man is dynamic but also fumble prone, and the Seahawks have the best kick coverage units in the league: they gave up an average of 1.0 return yards for every time they punted this year.

XL. We all lose if the weather doesn’t suck. Part of the fun of having the Super Bowl in New York should be that the weather for the game is terrible. Football is played in all sorts of weather, from 100% humidity in Miami in September to -20° in Green Bay in January. The weather conditions are part of the game. Part of what makes the game so interesting, in fact, is the enormous number of factors and variables that you have to prepare for, with the weather just being one of them. My thought would’ve been that bad weather, in this particular game, would slightly favour the Seahawks simply because the wind would’ve messed a bit with the passing game of the Broncos. But it wouldn’t make that much difference, as both these teams are used to lousy winter conditions, and it would be cool to see them slopping about in the snow. Apparently, after a dreadful winter back east, the forecast has improved for the weekend.

XLI. The Broncos lose if Peyton Manning throws too many of those ducks Richard Sherman was talking about, and particularly in Richard Sherman’s direction. My suspicion is that Denver won’t throw too much to Sherman’s side of the field, but instead try to pick on the CBs on the other side. (Not that that’s worked very well, either – Seattle has the #1 pass defense for a reason.) Denver needs to find a matchup that works and do it quickly, because Seattle also has eight healthy defensive linemen they will rotate and keep fresh, which means it will be hard to wear them down. The Broncos don’t give up many sacks, but the Seahawks aren’t a team that needs sacks to be effective. They get pressure and disrupt.

XLII. The Seahawks lose if they can’t control the ball. As good as the Seahawk defense is, you don’t want to give Denver all sorts of chances. That offense is lethal. The old adage of the best defense being the good offense comes into play here. Seattle’s offense got mired in the muck at the end of the year, but is actually better statistically than it sometimes appears. I think their ability to sustain drives, and Denver’s ability to get the ball back for Peyton Manning, is where this game will ultimately be determined.

XLIII. The Broncos lose. Which is what I ultimately think is going to happen, because as good as Pot Roast and the rest of the Denver defense looked in their two playoff games, I don’t think they can contain Wilson, I don’t think they can pen in Lynch, and they have no answer for Harvin if he’s heavily involved in the Seahawks game plan. Much has been made in the media of what happens when the league’s best offense goes up against the league’s best defense, but the end result of such games is often, if not always, due to what happens on the other side of the ball.

XLIV. My thoughtful, rational pick for this game is that Seattle wins 27:17.

XLV. My irrational, completely nonsensical, wishful thinking homer pick for this game is Seattle wins 55:10.

XLVI. If I had to pick an MVP, I’d guess either Marshon Lynch or Percy “Mr. X” Harvin.

XLVII. Remember the following for your Super Bowl Squares Pool. In 47 previous Super Bowls:
The number 0 appeared 101 times - 26.86%
The number 7 appeared 78 times - 20.74%
The number 3 appeared 58 times - 15.43%
The number 4 appeared 39 times - 10.37%
The number 6 appeared 31 times - 8.24%
The number 1 appeared 23 times - 6.11%
The number 9 appeared 17 times - 4.52%
The number 5 appeared 10 times - 2.66%
The number 8 appeared 10 times - 2.66%
The number 2 appeared 9 times   - 2.39%
And since I'm too lazy to do the math, here is a chart showing the most likely squares to pay off:

And also that remember that gambling is a sin.

XLVIII. Since I’ve already covered porn (albeit briefly) and lists of things, here is a picture of my cat:

We Are Better Than This

I generally reserve this space for fun and games. The games that we play, and the way that we approach them, generally speak to the sort of society in which we live. We treat games as pastimes, diversions from our day-to-day existences, yet we allow ourselves to get wholly absorbed by them from time to time. And that’s actually a good thing, I think. Right now, I’m far more interested in focusing on the Seahawks being in the upcoming Super Bowl and far less interested in dealing with an assortment of personal life issues and quandaries and challenges. Those problems will still be there on the 3rd of February. They can wait.

But sometimes real life intrudes. Real life can be really ugly. And sometimes it gets personal:

COLUMBIA, Md. (AP) — Someone armed with a gun opened fire at a busy shopping mall in suburban Baltimore on Saturday. Three people died, including the person believed to be the shooter, police said.
The shooting took place at the Mall in Columbia, a suburb of both Baltimore and Washington, according to Howard County police.
Someone called 911 at around 11:15 a.m. to report a shooting at the mall. Police responded to the scene and found three people dead, including one person who was found near a gun and ammunition. No details were released about their identities.
Police said they believed that one of the people found dead was the shooter. Two people with minor injuries were transported to a hospital for treatment.
The mall is at the center of the town and typically opens at 10 a.m. on Saturdays. It was busy with shoppers and employees when shots rang out before noon.
Joan Harding of Elkridge, Md., was shopping with her husband, David, for a tiara for their granddaughter's 18th birthday. She said she heard something heavy falling, followed by gunshots and people running.
"My husband said, 'Get down!' and the girl that worked in the store said, 'Get in the back,' " Harding said. That is where they hid until police gave the all-clear.
At a news conference, Howard County Police Chief William J. McMahon said police are relatively confident that there was only one shooter.
"We don't know a motive yet," McMahon said. "We are very confident that it was a single shooter, and there was not another shooter in the mall."
The mall was closed to the public as police went store to store looking for people who might still hiding, McMahon said. He said the shooting occurred at a store on the upper floor.
He said it wasn't clear whether the shooting was random or whether the shooter and victims knew each other.
Witnesses described moments of panic as they heard a succession of gunshots and screaming as people ran for cover into nearby stores and hid behind locked doors.
Tonya Broughton of Silver Spring, Md., was with a friend getting facials for a 'girls morning out,' she said. "The only thing I heard was all the people running and screaming and saying 'There's a shooter! There's a shooter!' " she said.
Wearing a gel face mask, she and her friend hunkered down in a Victoria Secret store.
People were directed out of the mall and into a parking lot, where some boarded a bus and others walked toward their cars. Some people were seen crying. McMahon said detectives were interviewing witnesses as they emerged from the mall to try to get a better picture of the events that had unfolded.
Laura McKinzles of Columbia works at a kiosk in the mall. She said she heard between eight and 10 gunshots, followed by people running and screaming. She ran into the backroom of a perfume store and locked the door.
Allison Cohen, who works at the apparel store "Lucky Brand Jeans," said she always felt safe at the mall.
"I truly never thought something like this would ever happen here," Cohen said. "It's really, really shocking."

My future in-laws live in Ellicott City, Md., which is near to Columbia. They were shopping in this mall at the time. They were apparently at the opposite end of the mall when the shooting began, near an exit. They were able to run from the mall to safety. But 15 minutes earlier, they were in the area of the building where this occurred. 15 minutes. That small sliver of time being difference between safety and potentially being in harm’s way. They are OK, which is a great relief. I am thankful for that. I am very, very thankful.

But I am also livid that I live in a nation where something like this happens at all. That several people have suffered the ultimate loss in this incident – the loss of one’s life – makes me extraordinarily sad. It also makes me angry. Really angry.

This sort of violence is senseless and needless. This is not how a supposedly civil society conducts its affairs. It’s unacceptable. If we cannot ensure the basic safety of our citizens, then we, as a society, have failed. And this sort of thing happens FAR TOO OFTEN. It seems to happen almost every day in one area or another of this country. That we, as a supposedly civil society, have not taken more steps to prevent these sorts of incidents from happening should be infuriating to every person who lives here.

My outrage is genuine. This isn’t me speaking in the abstract. People who are very dear to me were very nearly in harm’s way today. And in recent times, there have been two instances where people that I know have been killed in acts of gun violence. That’s two times too often. Any number larger than zero is too often. It’s not acceptable. In one case, it was a murder-suicide. In the other, it was someone I know who is an attorney and was attempting to mediate a dispute who was in the line of the fire when one of the parties pulled a gun. I mention the situations because violence takes many forms. The end result was the same in both cases, however – a senseless loss of life. Two incidents which have forever altered the ways that I see this life of mine.

The thing is, it should not take personal connections, a personal feelings of loss, to make us care. This shooting today in Columbid, Maryland, should outrage you even if you know not a single person in the greater Baltimore-Washington area. We, as human beings, should not be doing this sort of thing to each other.

And I have ZERO interest in debating the politics of gun control right now. Whether I do or do not favour gun control isn’t really the point. What is the point is that there are an awful lot of gun control apologists out there who will quickly respond to an incident by using an excuse other than the prevalence and easy accessibility to firearms. “People are crazy,” they will say. “Crime is everywhere,” they will say. To which I say this: OK, well if the problem is crime or people being crazy, then what are you doing to solve that problem? Don’t pay lip service to ‘bigger’ life issues. If those are the real problems, then try to solve them. Go on, do it. Make your community and your society a better place. I urge you to do it.

Same for gun control advocates: don’t just bitch about guns. Strive to make change. But what if you cannot make grand societal changes, at least in the short term? Then make small change. The solution is larger societal issues is found in often found in small ideas. Find commonality with people, find common purpose. Surely, we can all agree that a gunman shooting innocents in a mall is unacceptable.

It would be easy for me to be hardened and inflexible, to be cynical, having not only seen three people I know killed by gun violence in recent years, but also having been a victim of a violent crime in the past in which my life was threatened. Yes, it happened to good old, whitebread, milquetoast, middle class me. I was fine, in the end, the victim of an act perpetrated by a couple of junkies who likely didn’t remember they had even done it. It would be easy to call this a random act, but it was nothing of the sort. Two guys who wanted the means with which to get high chose to commit a crime so as to make it easier for them to do so. We should be careful using the word random to describe incidences of violence. It is not random. It is a choice, though not necessarily a conscious one.

And imagine how I felt when, a couple of months after that, I came across one of the perpetrators while walking along Mission St. And I did know it was him. I could never forget that face. I will remember those two faces forever. And there he was – strung out, yellow-eyed and trembling, leaning up against a lamppost near a bus stop. And I stopped in my tracks, I just froze there in place and glared at him, glared right through him, wondering if he remembered me.

But no, he did not remember me. He had no idea who I was. No idea at all.

And in that moment, of course, I was outraged that this scum junky was out on the streets, having evaded capture by the S.F.P.D. All sorts of cynical ideas go through your head in a moment such as that – what a joke, the criminal justice system is in this country. What a laughingstock. Guys like this motherfucking sleazebag are free to just roam about, pickpocketing and thieving and doing whatever the fuck they want. The cops don’t care. No one cares.

It’s when you give in to cynicism that vigilantism suddenly seems like a good idea. In that moment, I could’ve killed him. And I really do mean I could’ve killed him, as in physically, as he was so meek and pathetic and I was so angry that I could’ve beaten the living shit out of him right there on the street, leaving him begging for mercy, but also leaving him wondering why it was that this seemingly random dude was using his face as a punching bag.

But I did nothing of the sort. Instead I just moved on. I pitied him. I felt sorry for him, because I was certain that this guy – who was willing, with an accomplice, to pull a gun and a knife on a guy for $7 and an iPod – had completely lost who he was. He wasn’t a human being anymore. He was a zombi, as good as dead. Me using violence as a response to violence, and doing so at a time of my choosing when I had the upper hand, would have been the easy way out.

What is far more difficult, however, and also far more important, is committing to finding solutions to problems which lead to people behaving in the way this person had behaved towards me. This shouldn’t happen to others. It shouldn’t happen at all. If I can do something to prevent that from happening to one other person, I have made this society better.

I regularly donate not so insignificant sums to institutions devoted to the study of mental illness, something which I care deeply about. I have done so now for quite some time, believing that knowledge is power. We humans are a dangerously flawed species, but we are also gifted with the ability to learn and understand ourselves, to learn why it is that we do the way we do things, and to ultimately change both individuals and the individuals who come after them. While I do not believe that mental illness is the reason that all crimes of the nature of this shooting in Columbia occur, I believe there is often a strong correlation. It seems inherently irrational to me that we, the human race, so easily hurt one-another. I believe that the seemingly soulless shells of individuals who sought to hold me up could have been prevented from reaching that point somewhere in their lives. That behaviour seems preventable to me. There are reasons why this happens. Lots of reasons, some of which make no sense. Me personally, I am not smart enough not well-learned enough to explain this, but that doesn’t mean I should do nothing. If by contributing financially, I am able to enable those who are smart enough to find some answers, then I have made a difference.

And that is what you should do. Make a difference. Care about your community, your society. There are many angles to a story such as what happened in Columbia. There is some aspect the act of a gunman going on a spree in public space which should make you uneasy, which you should want to change so that it happens less often, if at all. So pick one and go about solving it, whatever that might entail. Do not be cynical. Do not just sit there and do nothing. Even small things are enough – acts as small as standing on my soapbox here in this small corner of the internet and imploring others to be involved. It should not require an enormous act of violence to compel us to action, but sometimes we need to be shaken to get off our duffs and act. (And I admit that I am just as guilty as succumbing to inertia as everyone else.)

The cynic would say that another violent act such as this will inevitably occur. I do not share that view. This sort of loss is not inevitable. Losing is only the default in sports and in games.

We are better than this.

Free Spirits

My heroes

Many thanks to IN PLAY LOSE East Bay correspondent Phonerz J. Magratheazaphod for pointing me to this story crossing the wires on Monday evening.

The NBA will pay two brothers $500 million to end a deal that required the league to give the former ABA owners an annual share of the league's television revenue. As part of the NBA-ABA merger in 1976, Ozzie and Daniel Silna accepted a share of the NBA's "visual media" rights in exchange for folding their ABA franchise, the Spirits of St. Louis. The deal was to last "in perpetuity." With the growth of the NBA and its television revenue, the brothers were receiving 1.9% of the revenue in recent years, or about $17.7 million annually.

This is one of the most entertaining stories in the history of sports, and certainly the greatest boondoggle. The NBA wanted the Silnas to fold the Spirits because they were big-time money losers. The Silnas have now made almost $300 million off this deal since 1976, which would make the Spirits of St. Louis one of the most profitable of all NBA franchises over that time – without ever playing a game. And the money the Spirits owners received all these years was a share of the broadcast revenue from the four former ABA clubs who had abandoned the league in their rush to join the NBA. So not only did the Silnas make a killing, but they also got to thumb their noses at the clubs who were quick to jump ship and abandon them. The NBA was willing to cut this enormous cheque because it would like to believe its broadcast rights are going to continue to grow, and three of the four franchises ponying up this coin every year – Denver, Indiana, and San Antonio – are smallerish franchises who were tired of forking over $4+ million a year to some rival from three decades ago that had bamboozled the NBA and taken the league for a ride.

The fourth of those former ABA franchises which has been paying up all this time, the Brooklyn Nets, don’t have quite so much trouble doing so, of course. But the Nets also flirted with moving to St. Louis at one point. The situation was so pathetic at the Meadowlands in the late 1980s-early 1990s that Michael Jordan played before 80 sellouts in 82 games one season, the only two non-sellouts being Nets home games. It was also about this time in their inglourious history that they considered changing their name to the Swamp Dragons. The league discouraged this courtship with St. Louis and ‘worked with’ the franchise to find yet another local owner at the time – ‘local’ meaning anyone who would keep that turkey of a franchise mired in the Meadowlands morass, because hey, it’s New York, and so long as you’re in the New York area you’re relevant even if you suck. The league also basically nixed the idea of the then Vancouver Grizzlies relocating to St. Louis, whose original NBA franchise had moved to Atlanta and, for several decades, was one of the largest and most logical markets in the U.S. without an NBA franchise. But so long as the NBA was paying out millions to a St. Louis franchise that didn’t exist, there was ZERO chance an actual existing franchise would relocate there. (Although calling both the New Jersey Nets and Vancouver Grizzlies existing would’ve been charitable.)

Now that the Silnas are being paid off and the little Napoleon in the NBA commissioner’s office is retiring, St. Louis could conceivably have an NBA franchise again down the road. It would be unlikely, given that the market has slipped in size and status and the fact that the Blues have first dibs on the arena, but NBA franchises are currently toiling away in far dumber locales than that.

I love the game of basketball, but I also make no secret of my contempt for David Stern and his joke of an operation. For sticking it to the NBA all these years, the Silnas are my Heroes of the Week for this week and pretty much every week since 1976.

Lose Tunes

The LOSE is going to diversify the portfolio here in 2014. Since IN PLAY LOSE is my personal corner office here in cyberspace, I figure that I should actually move in and make myself at home – which means I definitely need to have some music playing. Yes, IN PLAY LOSE does, in fact, have a soundtrack which lives on my laptop, and which I'm usually playing as I composing these long essays which I post. It's rare when there isn't music playing, in fact. Usually I'm streaming KCRW out of Santa Monica, which is the greatest radio station on the planet. Or I'm listening to a playlist, such as the one I call Lose Tunes.

So every now and then (most likely on Fridays, when I'm usually drunk), I am going to add some musical selections to the blog from the Lose Tunes. My tastes are pretty eclectic. I listen to just about every style of music and tend to go in phases – right now I am in something of a techno/electronica phase for reasons I cannot fathom.

And this song is maybe as close to a theme song for this blog as presently exists. It's assembled by a guy from Wales who now lives in that sleepy little Welsh fishing village named New York. And the video is apropos to this blog as well, as it's culled from one of the best films about out-and-out, dimwitted, self-destructive, self-inflicted defeat which has been made in recent memory, Spike Lee's 25th Hour.

Fear not, we'll resume our regular programming here in the next few days. There is always more time for LOSE. As we say at the San Francisco scrabble club, once you've found a bad play, always take the time to look for a worse one.

Fit to be Tied

What a beautiful scene.

More than 105,000 hockey fans – the largest attendance in the history of the sport – braved snow flurries and 13° temperatures to fill up Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor to watch the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Detroit Red Wings play in The Winter Classic. The annual outdoor game has become one of the coolest traditions in sport, if not the coolest (and certainly one of the coldest). The Winter Classic celebrates the origins of the sport and gives a nod to the game’s lore and nostalgia – the idea of kids playing on the frozen pond or on some makeshift outdoor rink in the dead of winter, ignoring the elements and simply playing for the love of the game. And the since you get is that the players love playing in The Winter Classic, as it’s a unique experience in an otherwise plodding 82-game regular season. Sure, the falling snow made for some difficult conditions to play in, but it’s a 1-off deal and, in the bigger picture, the Winter Classic celebrates all that is good in the game.

And this year’s Winter Classic also showcased one of THE WORST aspects of hockey, which is the shootout: tied at 2-2 after regulation, the Leafs and Wings played 5:00 of sudden death, 4-on-4 OT, then settled matters with a penalty shootout, which was ultimately won by Toronto.

The LOSE absolutely, positively hates shootouts. The lose likes to see winners and losers determined by legitimate means in the flow of the game, and not through artificial means. The shootout in hockey is just as contemptible as the penalty kicks in soccer, if not moreso because it now is a possibility in every single game, whereas in soccer it’s reserved only for knockout matches. The method for settling games in college football – each team possessing the ball at the 25-yd line – is also hokey, but at least there is something akin to real football involved in the proceedings.

Basketball and baseball, of course, have always had traditions of playing OT as long as is necessary to determine a winner. Such games take on a unique character to them. The more OTs a game goes in basketball, the more exciting is tends to get; the more extra innings a game goes in baseball, the weirder it gets. I understand that for a sport of such physicality such as football or hockey, or a sport like soccer in which you’re constantly in motion for 90 minutes, the idea of regularly settling games by playing as many OTs as possible is unrealistic.

The NFL has struck a balance that I think is reasonable. It used to be sudden death – first team to score would win – but teams didn’t like the fact that a team with receive the kickoff, drive down and kick a FG and the game would be over, so now if the first possession of OT results in a field goal, the other team at least gets a possession. (If the first possession of OT results in a TD or, even cooler, a safety, the game is over.) After each team has had the ball, if the score is tied the game becomes sudden death, and in the playoffs you play on and on until someone scores, but in the regular season they call the game after the 5th Quarter is over and declare it a tie – which happens rarely, maybe only once in a season.

The NHL still has play-until-you-drop OT in the playoffs, but regular season games that ended deadlocked went down as a tie in the standings. The league added a 5:00 OT period in the late 1980s, a single period of 5:00 at 5-on-5, and it did reduce the number of ties somewhat, but risk aversion strategy kicks in if you’re a coach at that point – are you better off playing to win in OT when losing gets you nothing, or are you better to go through the motions for 5:00 and get the single point? Long-term, the latter is definitely the smarter thinking.

So in an effort to further revamp a game that really didn’t need revamping to begin with, the league switched to playing 4-on-4 in overtime. And in 2005 the league decided to adopt the shootout to determine the outcome of all regular season games that remained deadlocked after the OT. The standings used to be simple – you get 2 pts. for a win, 1 pt. for a tie, 0 for a loss. Now you get 2 for a win, 1 for a loss in OT or a shootout, and 0 for loss in regulation. And The LOSE thinks this is bullocks. Losing is losing. You shouldn’t be rewarded for failing to do what’s necessary to be declared the ‘winner.’ The NHL’s glass half full argument is that, instead, the game is basically a tie and teams are striving to gain the extra point in OT – which makes sense until you actually see someone do some of this stuff in a shootout. It is just an exhibition, a glorified skilled contest, and the fact that you actually get an extra point in the standings for this is nonsense. The attitude of the players seems to be that a shootout is “meh, whatever.” At least you get a point for showing up.

This also makes an OT game more collectively valuable, since there is 3 pts. total awarded as opposed to only 2 in regulation. The International Ice Hockey Federation has now gone a step further to correct this mathematical quandary away from the North American continent, awarding you 3 pts. if you win in regulation and 2 for winning in OT or a shootout – which makes the standings even more confusing. The IIHF was actually responsible for making this mess to begin with, instituting shootouts as a decider in World Championship and Olympic play back in 1992. This was done as much for logistical reasons as anything else – when you’ve got 4-5 games scheduled for one day in an arena, a game that goes 2OT screws up your schedule pretty badly. The NHL following suit in 2005 marks about the first time in history that the NHL has agreed to follow some guideline from the IIHF, an entity the league makes a point to show the middle finger on a regular basis. The NHL likes to think of itself as being vastly superior to the rest of the world when it comes to the game of hockey, and with good reason – it has the best players, the best salaries, and generates the most revenue. But compared to the other major professional sports leagues in North America, the NHL languishes far behind, not just in terms of popularity but also in terms of competence. Not much of the ways the league operates has ever made much sense, and this instituting of the shootout is simply one of many, many examples.

What’s wrong with a tie? I grew up playing basketball and baseball, which don’t have ties, but I also was a goalkeeper in soccer, where ties were commonplace and considered to be an acceptable result. Honestly, my experience in soccer was that draws were usually filled with enough mistakes by both sides to warrant either one losing, so ending up with the draw was fortuitous, or maybe you were playing a game against a superior side and you fought hard to wind up stalemated. More often than not, a draw felt OK. It’s still better than losing, which is something I know far too much about. There is a reason this blog ain’t called IN PLAY DRAW.

This doesn’t actually happen as often in the NHL as it might seem. In the 2012 season (the last full season), only 12.2% of regular season games ended deadlocked after regulation. That really isn’t that many. I’ve never really understood why the game of hockey felt a need to institute something is part lottery, part dog-and-pony show and pretend that it’s a legitimate way to be deciding games.

Then again, I’m reminded now of a quote I heard once after a particularly lame game around about the turn of the millennium, a 1-1 tie between the Vancouver Canucks and (I think) the Mighty Ducks of Disneyland Anaheim in which the teams combined for something like 29 shots on goal total in the game. It was afterwards that Canucks coach Marc Crawford said something along the lines of “I can’t believe the fans paid $68 a seat to watch this crap.”

This seemingly throwaway quip from a frustrated coach (and in those days, coaching the Canucks was definitely a frustrating endeavour) actually speaks to the NHL’s motivations behind moving to a shootout – the idea that tie games are somehow unsatisfying to the rank-and-file, paying customers. Unlike the other three major sports, all of which have massive national TV deals, the NHL is far more dependent on actual gate receipts to pay the wage bills and keep the lights on. The top brass in the league offices essentially decided that, as a way to keep fans entertained, and thus willing to continue to shell out the cost of high ticket prices, it was always important to have a winner. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, a disciple of NBA commissioner David Stern, was essentially copying from the NBA business model – if the game seems somehow to be lacking in excitement, then go about trying to manufacture some.

And given the poor financial state of the league about 15 years ago, you can understand why they were thinking along those lines. The league cancelled the entire 1995 season in a nasty labour dispute; franchises from Québec and Winnipeg relocated, as the Canadian dollar was sucking wind at the time. The league has continued to struggle ever since, as the overall accounting numbers are somewhat deceiving. The league collectively posts annual profits, yet most of those black numbers on the balance sheets are the result of only 6-8 or so of the 30 franchises. During the recent economic depression, it was rumoured that as more than half the franchises were in serious financial peril and were for sale on the downlow.

And you can also understand the league’s thinking about upping the entertainment value in the hockey-going experience, since the single-most exciting and entertaining aspect of the sport – scoring goals – seems to have become a lost art form. I first started following the game religiously zealously fiendishly a lot in 1982, a year which marked the start of the game’s great offensive zenith. In the 1982 season, the average number of goals scored in a game was 8.025. In 2012 – the last full season, as the league went through yet another work stoppage a year ago – the league average was 5.320 goals per game, a 51% decline. But you might think that, as the game of hockey has become more defensive in nature, and the scores have decreased, that the number of ties would increase – a game with fewer total goals being more likely to produce an even distribution.

Actually, no. In 1982, when offense was aplenty, 17.6% of the regular season games ended in ties. The number of draws has, in fact, decreased by 5% in the 30 years since, even though the goal count is down. It would seem that, as the game has become more defensive in nature, and defensive strategies have improved, so have the strategies for protecting leads.

And just because the game has become more defensive over time, it doesn’t necessarily mean the game is any better or any worse. It’s simply different. Similar declines in offensive output have occurred in basketball over the past 20 years, both collegiately and on the professional level, and I do think the game is the worse for it, simply because watching guys throw bricks is boring as sin. That Connecticut-Butler game which posed as an NCAA championship in 2011, won by UConn by a score of 54:41, was quite possibly the worst basketball game I have ever seen. At least Butler’s horrid display – they shot 18.8% from the floor – erased another dubious Washington State record from the books, which is worst FG pct. ever in an NCAA championship game. (And speaking of W.S.U. and bad basketball, what the fuck was this shit? Then again, for my study abroad program in college, I technically transferred to Butler for a year, which makes me as much as Butler alum as a W.S.U. guy. I was displeased that Butler lost twice in the NCAA final. Displeased but not surprised – this is IN PLAY LOSE, after all.)

The NHL had the perfect opportunity in 1994 to make some headway against the NBA, their prime competitor for winter sports entertainment dollar, as the Stanley Cup Final between the Canucks and the Rangers was widely regarded as one of the best finals ever, while the NBA final in the first year A.M.J. (after Michael Jordan) featured a cynical Knicks team reaching the final and ultimately losing to Houston in an ugly series which set the game back about 50 years. Hockey was hot and basketball was not, but then the NHL went and screwed it all up with a yearlong work stoppage. The NHL has never had much of an ability to stand prosperity. And the league should look in the mirror if it wants to start figuring out where the offense has gone in the game. For years, too much of the game – both in how it’s been administered and how it’s been played – has been for the benefit of the marginal player at the expense of the skilled player. The league should have cracked down on the clutching, the holding, and the obstruction in the neutral zone far sooner than it did.

But having said that, I don’t think the NHL of 2014 is necessarily better nor worse than it was in the past. It’s just different, but I happen to still enjoy it. I do know the players are bigger, stronger, and quicker than ever before, and the speed of the game is remarkable to watch in and of itself, even if the puck isn’t going in the net all that often – and part of that decline in offense, of course, has to do with the goaltenders being bigger and quicker as well. And for someone like me, adding a shootout just seems like a cheap sideshow. The game is fine as it is, even if the game ends in a tie.

But see, the shootout wasn’t instituted to satisfy people like me, nor was it instituted to satisfy the core constituency of hockey fans, who are the most diehard of fans in any sport. Hockey fans are hard core. They love the sport like none other. And they deride the 1 pt. awarded for OT/shootout losses as a “Bettman Point” for a reason – few decisions that Gary Bettman has made in his tenure as NHL commissioner have had the hard core fans’ interests at heart. He’s spent most of his time attempting to turn what is essentially a regional sport into a national one, be it through gimmicks to try and keep the interest of casual fans, or be it in the location of NHL franchises in places like Miami and Phoenix. A good rule of thumb here is that a game involving ice isn’t likely to flourish in a climate where ice doesn’t naturally form. The NHL’s Southern Strategy has been a flop financially, as most of those franchises are in perpetual financial trouble, and the league offices are simply too stubborn to admit their mistakes. The league would rather let a perpetually inept-performer like the Phoenix Coyotes continue rather than see them moved to a hockey-friendly city Seattle, or to a Canadian locale like Hamilton or Québec City where the Coyotes would be adored. (Never mind, of course, that the strong Canadian dollar has made doing business north of the border, in the hotbed of the sport, better than ever. I said before that 6-8 teams make most of the money in the league, and you can bet that none of those are south of Philadelphia.)

The NHL will tell you, of course, that their market research would indicate that people like the shootout. I would suspect that isn’t the case at all – marketing research is notorious in that you can slant it to pretty much reveal any outcome you want to reveal simply by asking the right sorts of questions. I would further suggest that the sorts of fans who would like a shootout ending are the sorts of fans the NHL has been failing to grasp ahold of for the past decade. The TV contracts for the league have basically gotten worse over that time, and the league continues not to fire on all cylinders. All of the NHL’s efforts to make the game into something it isn’t have, in the end, failed to yield the desired results.

We come to understand the way that a game is played. We come to understand the rules of the game, the tactics of the game, and the culture that surrounds it. Those inherent qualities are still what ultimately appeal the most. Draws are inherently a part of soccer, for example. Last year in the EPL, 28% of the games ended in draws – but given that the EPL is most popular professional sports league in the world, having more than a quarter of the games end in a draw doesn’t seem to affect business all that much. In the 1970s, the NASL top brass believed that Americans didn’t like draws, so they instituted a shootout to end every game. They also thought that Americans wouldn’t like the game because there wasn’t enough offense, so they jerryrigged a point system in the standings based upon how much your team scored. The end result was the most confusing table imaginable. Look at these standings, but scroll down first without looking at the key at the topof the page, and then tell me you can figure out how it actually worked. But people know a gimmick when they see one, and they weren’t impressed for long. Some would say the NASL going defunct was a sign that soccer could not succed in North America. To me, it made no sense to come to that conclusion, since what was being presented on the field wasn’t the game of soccer that anyone knew. The MLS tried a few gimmicks as well when it first started, but then it dawned on the league’s top brass that most of the fans of the game liked the game exactly the way it was. There wasn’t any reason to “Americanize” the game. Doing so meant that you didn’t fundamentally understand what Americans wanted.

And this is an important point to consider. What do you get when you watch a soccer game. You get 45 straight minutes of play that is rarely interrupted. There aren’t even commercials as such, only sponsor’s logos flashed on the top of the screen. Going to a sporting event in the U.S. is an act of sensory overload. I don’t go to see the Giants for the jumbotron or any of the artificial entertainment in between innings. I don’t go to Warriors games for the laser light show introduction and the bells and whistles during timeouts, all of which are basically the same at every single stadium or arena in the country. The game itself is what is ultimately appealing. If the product isn’t any good, then all of that other stuff won’t hold your interest. And if the game does hold your interest, all that other stuff is superfluous.

But even soccer changed when it needed to, and did so for the right reasons. When it was clear that lack of creative play was choking the life out of the game, soccer changed the system from 2 pts. for a win to 3 pts., while keeping the draws worth 1 in the standings. This has, over time, encouraged more teams to be less risk averse and try to win games instead of trying not to lose. It seems like this would be a natural fit in hockey, but that would first require hockey moguls to acknowledge that what they have now is something of a joke. Pride can be a difficult thing to overcome.

In the case of the NHL, maybe there is always going to be a regional appeal. But that’s fine. A lot of sports are. (Think anyone outside the state of California cares a whit about water polo?) The game can be great in and of itself. It doesn’t need tacky, artificial endings. Doing so simply cheapens the traditions that an event like the Winter Classic is supposed to uphold and celebrate. Even that event, as cool as it is, is turning somewhat into overkill this year, as there are no fewer than six outdoor games scheduled this year: two of them are at Yankee Stadium and serve as showcase events that lead up to the Super Bowl in New York, and one of which is in that bastion of winter sports, Los Angeles, which is far more likely to resemble beach hockey than anything else given this ludicrously warm winter we’re having in California. (Gloat gloat.)

I love the game, and one of these days I’ll get around to writing one of the more personally painful Profiles in Lose, which is that of my beloved Canucks. (How beloved? I was at two of those 1994 finals games with the Rangers I referenced earlier.) But the game doesn’t need gimmicks. It doesn’t need lotteries and trickshots. None of that should be part of the game. It was fine the way it was. Since they were making an exception to the norm in having the Maple Leafs and the Red Wings play outdoors in Michigan Stadium, I would’ve liked for them to make an exception and let the game end in a 2-2 tie. I know that you can’t, of course, for logistical reasons. But if you’re harkening back to the days of players’ youths when they were playing on a frozen pond, you should also point out one other wrinkle of playing pond hockey or freeze football or any other game as a kid – if the score was tied and mom said it was time to come home for dinner, the game was over. End of story. Moms make very effective pond hockey commissioners. Maybe the NHL should hire one and fire Gary Bettman.