Quick Misses

Always a fan of the work of David Maiki !     http://wondermark.com/1k67/

LOTS to talk about. To the buzzard points!

• It was somewhat fitting, in the season we can christen The Year The NFL Couldn’t Do Anything Right, that the only thing anyone talked about after the first week of the playoffs was an officiating controversy in Dallas. Instead of talking about the games themselves, and the players making plays on the field, everyone was talking about how the arbiters and administrators of the game should’ve all been fitted with clown shoes.
To be fair here, after the play in question, which came with about 8½ remaining in the game, with the Lions leading 20-17 and possessing the ball on Dallas' 46 yard line, it wasn’t the officials’ fault that a) the Lions wimped out and didn’t go for it 4th-and-1; b) their punter shanked a 10-yard punt; c) they aided and abetted the Cowboys scoring drive with two defensive penalties, both of which were obvious infractions; d) the defense couldn't get a stop on 4th-and-6 when every single person who has watched a Dallas Cowboys game in the past decade knew that Jason Witten would be the primary target of the pass [miss of the blatant holding penalty aside since, you know, it was only right in the middle of field where everyone was looking, and thus was hard to see]; and e) Matt Stafford fumbled twice on the Lions’ final possession after Dallas had taken the lead. That right there is enough mistakes for two games, let alone 6½ minutes. The Lions still had their chances, and basically beat themselves down the stretch.
Having said all of that:

Picking up the flag on this play is terrible. Absolutely terrible. The defender makes contact and makes no effort to play the ball. That’s a penalty. Tack on another 15 for Dez Bryant screaming on the field of play (which should’ve been called, but the dysfunctional group of zeebs were too busy making a mess of things and didn’t throw a flag), and the Lions would’ve had the ball inside the Dallas 20, primed to score again and possibly put the game out of reach. Now, given that it’s the Detroit Lions we’re talking about here, the potential for them to screw it up was still there, but this play very much changed the tone of the game. It definitely shifted momentum (well, the shank punt did probably more so). Dallas caught a break and, given a second life, made the most of it, which is what good teams do.
 Which is saying something, because Dallas looked comically awful in their first game of the year against the 49ers, and somehow have figured it out on the fly this season and become a pretty good team. This particular game was the best of the playoff weekend in terms of on-field talent, and The Lose was curious to see whether the 2013 TLOTY Award Winners or the 1st ballot inductee into the Hall of Lose be the one(s) to mess it up. Turns out, everyone involved had help in messing it up for them from the guys in the stripes.

• The Lions and their fans were livid about this, of course, and the frustration led to an abundant number of clever memes online, which I approve of, but enough with the conspiracy theories already. The game wasn’t fixed. That mess in Dallas doesn’t even come close to seeming malicious, unlike this debacle, where the fix was clearly in, nor this, nor this, nor this curious run, nor the granddaddy of them all. The Lose inherently subscribes to the theory of Hanlons razor when it comes to officials, and I never assume malice if incompetence is in the neighbourhood. (And my faith in this concept has already been tested to the extreme, but I still believe it to be true.) The NFL has a ways to go when it comes to on-field corruption. This is certainly one area they could use some work on.

• The NFL is planning on floating a proposal at their upcoming league meetings to add two playoff teams in 2015, but the game last Saturday in Charlotte was an advertisement for playoff contraction if there ever was one. The 7-8-1 Carolina Panthers, who were counted among this sad lot before ‘miraculously’ winning their last four games and the NFC South title (‘miraculously’ meaning they beat four really terrible teams and won an awful division), won 27:16 over an Arizona Cardinals team QB’d by Ryan Lindley, who put up a 6.1 QBR in the game, but what can you expect from what is basically their 4th-string QB? The Cardinals gained 78 yards in the game, which is a playoff record low. The Panthers, dominating the stats and outgaining the Cardinals by over 300 yards, negated these advantages by turning the ball over routinely. Had the Cardinals not coughed it up twice in the 2nd half – a half where they gained all of 13 total yards – they actually stood a chance to win the game. The two teams combined for six turnovers and any aspect in the game involving kicking the football was fraught with disaster on either side. It was an astonishingly bad football game which made you wonder if it was really the best the league had to offer.
What a strange end to the season for the Cardinals, who started the season 9-1 and finished the season losing to a sub-.500 team in the first round of the playoffs. It was a shell of the team that had started the season 9-1 and had a 3-game lead in the NFC West. (A team which, truth be told, was pretty fortunate to be 9-1). Between using a QB who they had cut and then resigned off the Chargers practice squad, and having a revolving door at the running back position due to injuries, the Cardinals essentially attempted to try and play the game without a functioning offense. Their defense then wore out and started getting gashed at season’s end. They looked more like a 5-11 team than an 11-5 one, and there were almost certainly a few homebound teams in the NFC watching that performance by the Cardinals, who looked truly terrible, and wondering why it was that the Cardinals were in the playoffs instead of them.

• One such team would have to be the 49ers, who fired ‘mutually agreed to part ways’ with head coach Jim Harbaugh. All Harbaugh did in four seasons was compile a 49-22-1 record and take the 49ers to three straight NFC Championship Games and a Super Bowl two seasons ago. The 49ers had gone almost a decade without being relevant, then Harbaugh rises and they suddenly become a power, and now he’s gone and why, you ask? Well, he was ‘fired’ for one of the most common of reasons in the workplace: his bosses thought he was a pain in the ass.
There were rumblings about this last off-season, of course, when weird reports started surfacing about the possibility of Harbaugh winding up coaching the Cleveland Browns. Which, on the surface, made no sense, given that the 49ers were less than 10 yards away from winning the Super Bowl two seasons ago, and the length of Richard Sherman’s fingertips away from going back to the Super Bowl a season ago. They were on a terrific run of success. Why fix what ain’t broke?
Well, what was broke, obviously, was the working relationship between Harbaugh and the 49ers front office. We forget, sometimes, amid the flurry of statistics and the immediacy of the results, that sports are, like any other enterprise on earth, about people. People have to find a way to work together. (Viewing the game exclusively as a bunch of numbers, and forgetting that these are actual human beings prone to mistakes and irrationality, is one of the reasons why rotisserie league sports are stupid.) In the case of the 49ers, that apparently was no longer possible.
But shouldn’t it matter that Harbaugh was such a successful coach and the team thrived spectacularly? Of course it should. This is some proof that the business of sports isn’t much different from businesses of every other sort, many of which are run badly and a good number of which fail to live up to their potential, often times for the stupidest of reasons. Reading the financial news these days is a lot like reading a Hollywood gossip column. It’s all about corporate politics and in-fighting and bickering and everything else. A couple truths I’ve come to discover in business, however, are that 1) if you’re boss thinks your a pain in the ass, (s)he will find a way to get rid of you; and 2) that (s)he will do that in spite of how well things may or may not be going in the organization as a whole. Bosses willingly make bad decisions if, in the immediate, it gets rid of the pain in the ass. Foolish? Of course it is, but we’re talking about petty personality conflicts here, and no one – no one – seems to be above them.
There were rumblings for months about ‘friction’ and ‘tension’ among the 49ers collective inner circle, and that sort of stuff gets reflected in the on-field performance. The 49ers always seemed distracted out there. They were constantly doing things – taking delay penalties, burning timeouts needlessly, jumping offsides – that indicated a lack of focus. The 49ers played a great first half in Dallas, and then proceeded to play about 15½ games of mediocre football. Toss in a few bad injuries, and they never looked like a serious contender this year.
Now, Harbaugh made out of this deal pretty well – receiving a 7-year, $40 million contract to coach at Michigan, his alma mater – and the 49ers, meanwhile, have now contined their yearlong trend of looking stupid. Their new stadium in Santa Clara hasn’t exactly garnered great reviews, the team grossly underperformed at 8-8, there were off-field conduct issues and an abundance of self-created drama. Now they have to find a coach who will be willing to take over a team that isn’t aging terribly well, that lacks speed on the outsides, lacked continuity in the trenches, and whose $126m QB, Colin Kaepernick, horribly regressed during the season. Oh yeah, and he has to replace a guy who was wildly successful, and also genuinely popular with players and fans alike. Good luck with that.

• And I wondered, at the time, just how much the 49ers would come to rue losing the Super Bowl two seasons ago to the Ravens. The 49ers had a better team than the Ravens, in my opinion, but they were nervous and fidgety and made mistakes, had defensive breakdowns and let it get away from them. This after essentially fumbling away, to the New York Giants, the NFC Championship Game the season before. Those are the sorts of games that really get to you, after a while. It’s one thing to be terrible at something. It’s quite another to be really, really good at it, but never be quite good enough.

32,000 pts. means the guy should go 1-on-5. Of course it should.

• Having lost 14 in a row, plummeting to an overall record of 5-34, and actually supplanting the 76ers in the dog house of the Atlantic Division, the New York Knicks have now signaled their intent to throw in the towel, as they made a trade this week which sent J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert packing in exchange for three guys they promptly waived. The trade done simply to make people go away is a telltale sign your NBA team is tanking ... no, don’t call it tanking, it’s clearing cap space so as to pave the way for a brighter future! Pfft. Whatever. NBA trades are always astoundingly, hilariously and deliberately lopsided, the idea behind them being that if you’re losing with a guy on your team, you can go on losing without him. Easily the most hilarious trade of the year is the continuing Andrei Kirilenko saga in Philadelphia – or not in Philadelphia, as the case may be, since he has refused to report and has now been suspended, which isn’t any big deal to him since he doesn’t want to be in Philly to begin with. He was acquired by the Sixers to prop up the salary cap numbers and be dealt at the trade deadline, and for no other reason than that. They couldn’t give a shit whether he can actually still play or not. Being well aware of what the Sixers think of him, he doesn’t want to go there. He’s on a personal leave from the Nets, hasn’t reported to Philly and has no intention of doing so. So now the Sixers have no trade piece to dangle, in their ever widening attempts to create so much cap space that they can then foolishly throw at free agents who wouldn’t want to be caught dead with that team. Other teams who might want Kirilenko can simply wait it out. Why make a deal? Why give up anything for a player whose trade value is now essentially nothing? It’s dumb moves like this make me question the though process of the entire 76ers organization. The whole “be bad until you’re good” line of NBA reasoning, in the end, rarely pans out. Far more often, you’re just bad ad infinitum. About the only business that’s good for is the business of writing this blog.

• Finally this week, this thought: If you do not like the way that you are being portrayed, and your response to it is to promptly behave in that very way, all you have managed to do is prove their point. The joke is on you.