Missing the Mark

Oh, for fucksake.

JEEZ, I can’t even go on vacation. I gave you The Lose of the Year post, and then everyone in the sporting world seems hell bent on doing even more stupid stuff. Sigh. The Lose’s work is apparently never done.

To the buzzard points!

• “If you’re worried about being fired, you should already have been fired.” – Chip Kelly
The firing of Chip Kelly seemed inevitable after watching the Philadelphis Eagles’ comedic 38:24 loss to the Redskin Potatoes on Saturday night, dropping Philly to 6-9 and out of the playoff race. The Eagles were fraught with mistakes – eight penalties, at least 10 dropped passes, five sacks allowed. One dismal sequence in the third quarter featured, on consecutive plays, a fumbled punt, a botched handoff, a dropped pass, and then a fumble by Demarco Murray that the Taters returned for a game-clinching TD. The defense, meanwhile, made Kirk Cousins look like a Pro Bowler and couldn’t be bothered to cover a Washington receiver for the better part of the evening. The Iggles were so dysfunctional that all-pro LT Jason Peters pulled himself from the game in the 4th Quarter, saying “I don’t want to get hurt for this.”
Kelly should certainly be commended for bringing some of his approaches to sports science and injury prevention to the league – the Eagles were generally a much healthier team than most others during his 3-year tenure – and he brought some great ideas to the pro game from Oregon regarding spacing and tempo on offense which helped make the Eagles an exciting team to watch when their offense was firing on all cylinders. But Kelly brought with him some of the naïve sort of ideas too many college coaches bring with them when jumping to the pros, the most notorious being espoused in his comment, “culture is greater than scheme,” that NFL Films captured him saying on the sideline during training camp.
Kelly’s offensive scheme was actually quite simplistic in nature, his thinking being that a well-conditioned team who executed to perfection would prove to be successful, particularly in a no-huddle situation where they could simply wear down opposition. This attitude works great in college – assuming you’ve gone out and recruited all sorts of better athletes than your opponents. College football is all about recruiting, amassing enough talent so that you can simply overwhelm most of your opponents. You don’t need brilliant schemes in college. You just need to keep your bigger, faster, stronger guys from screwing up too often. But in the NFL, everyone is bigger and faster and stronger. Talent tends to generally equal out. The first 22 guys in any NFL starting lineup are pretty damn good. (It’s depth, injuries, and mistakes that make the difference.) NFL play books are huge, in part, because over the course of a 16-game season, you’re often going to have to go to Plan B or even Plan C, since whatever you were trying to do gets figured out or you’ve got too many injuries at key positions, or what have you. You never need to go to Plan B or Plan C at an enormous college football factory like the University of Nike Oregon, where the 2nd- and 3rd-string guys are probably better than most of your opposition, anyway. This is part of why a lot of great college coaches, even championship ones – Dennis Erickson and Nick Saban immediately come to mind – ultimately made terrible NFL head coaches. Gaudy college records implied they were tactical geniuses, which turned out not to be the case at all. Scheme is, in fact, more important than culture in the NFL. You have to know what you’re doing. If you don’t, your players – who, along with being bigger and stronger and faster also happen quite often to be smarter, as well – catch onto it quickly and, just as quickly, start tuning you out.
Like far too many others who come from the Cult of the Coach that is big-time American college sports, Kelly brought a messianic complex with him to Philadelphia, and also brought with him an attitude that made him seem like he was the smartest guy in the room. He also wanted the personnel powers in Philly and eventually got his wish, and spent the offseason making bad trades and illogical decisions. A team consisting of “his” players looked woefully ill-equipped, unprepared and, ultimately, bereft of ideas. If you’re going to tout yourself as being an innovator, you have to keep doing innovating, because the game catches up to you fast. The Chip Kelly Eagles played fast and furious at first, but their decline wound up happening even swifter.

• Your NFC East champions:

Kirk Cousins tears the ACL in his brain

Here are the Potatoes taking a knee at the end of the first half against the Iggles, and letting the clock run out, instead of killing the clock by spiking the ball. Uh, whoops.
A potentially amusing bit of gamesmanship arises this coming weekend, when Green Bay hosts Minnesota. The winner of the game captures the NFC North title, and also locks down the #3 seed in the playoffs. The loser, meanwhile, gets the first wild card and gets the #5 seed.
Being #3 gets you a home game, but also gets you a matchup with the Seattle Seahawks – and Vegas oddsmakers have said that the Seahawks would be favored in a neutral field matchup against pretty much any other team in the NFC. The Packers had to rally to beat Seattle early in the season at home, while the Seahawks tore Minnesota to shreds in Minneapolis a couple of weeks ago. Even without a functioning running game and offensive line, the Seahawks are probably the most undesirable postseason opponent, and beating Seattle would then slot you against the Arizona Cardinals in Phoenix – the same Cardinals who made Green Bay look stupid over the weekend.
The #5 seed, meanwhile, slots you against the aforementioned Redskin Potatoes, winners of the most comically awful NFC East, and if all games go to form, then gets you a game against the Carolina Panthers, who are 14-1 but whom everyone around the NFL thinks has wildly overachieved.
Which path through the playoffs is easier? Is playing a .500 and decidedly marginal Potatoes team on the road a better postseason bet than having a home field against an ornery 2-time Super Bowl attendee? And, as a coach for either the Vikes or the Pack, how do you approach this game? Do you go all-in and play to win? Do you rest guys who are 50-50?
Quite honestly, I think losing this game is better in the long-term: not only do I think the Taters are a weaker opponent, but finishing 2nd in your division also gets you a slightly easier schedule the following season (the schedule being the NFL’s greatest single parity-generator which no one really talks about). In the here and the now, however, I suspect Green Bay views itself as desperately needing a home playoff game, since the Pack’s season has come off the rails, and if I’m the Vikes, I probably give it a go but ease off the throttle pretty early if it isn’t going my way. I don’t think Minnesota minds losing this game.

• Bill Belichick’s decision to kickoff at the beginning of overtime against the New York Jets was nonsense. It was complete nonsense, and if that was the head coach of the Cleveland Browns or the Jacksonville Jaguars doing something like that, we’d all be talking today about what an idiot he is. Hell, Marty Morninweg doing the same thing in Detroit was the straw that broke the camel’s back and ultimately got him fired. But since Belichick has won four Super Bowls, there must obviously be some higher, sensible rationale for what he did.
Which there isn’t. It was dumb of the Pats to kickoff and don’t bother trying to argue otherwise. Such a ploy makes some sense on a day where the conditions dictate it (as was the case when the Pats got away with this before a couple of years ago, when the direction of gusty winds put a premium on having those winds at your back), but on a 60° day in New York with the wind not a factor, it’s dumb. The numbers don’t back that strategy up, and I personally have far more faith in Tom Brady winning me a game than a defensive unit that’s been decent, at best, for most of the season.
But Belichick has never been one to shy away from thinking outside the box. I personally thought his game-theory approach at the end of the Super Bowl, while unorthodox, also put the Seahawks in a position to fail – which is precisely what they did. In that game, I think Pete Carroll got it wrong in that Super Bowl. Well, sometimes even the best coaches in the NFL get stuff wrong. And in the end, this game didn’t mean that much to the Pats, who’ve clinched the decision and are well on their way to a #1 seed in the playoffs. There’s nothing wrong, in the bigger picture, with taking a shot here to see if your defense is good enough to win you a game. In the end, he has enough cred built up – an indisputably so – to withstand a strange coaching decision here and there.

• Speaking of Detroit ...

“False start … offense … nine guys moving before the snap …”

• The Philadelphia 76ers are so bad, and losing to them so inconceivable, that doing so results in a full-on crisis unfolding. The Sixers notched their second victory of the season over the weekend, winning 111:104 at Phoenix, after which the Suns went into near supernova, firing two of Jeff Hornacek’s assistant coaches over the weekend and holding meetings between players and management. Along the way, leading scorer Eric Bledsoe hurt his knee and is out for the season, disgruntled forward Markief Morris threw a towel at Hornacek and got himself suspended. The Suns are 12-21 and have lost 7 of their past 8 games. It’s crisis management mode once again in Phoenix as everyone tries to figure out what went wrong.
What actually went wrong, in my opinion, is that Phoenix were supposed to be lousy two seasons ago, but first-year coach Hornacek found a winning formula with the players on hand and wildly exceeded expectations, very nearly making the playoffs that season when thought by most experts to be a 25-win team, at most, at the start of the season. Quite honestly, that team was somewhat designed to tank, but the coaching staff and the players refused to play along. But with those unexpected results came greater expectations, and what’s transpired since is regression to the mean. The Suns are still owned by Robert Sarver, who has been a genuinely lousy owner in his time since taking over from new Philly “consultant” Jerry Colangelo. They still make dumb trades and bad personnel decisions, and now they have a misfit side of malcontents which also doesn’t make any sense as a unit. PHX was marginally successful in spite of their front office, but you can only overachieve in pro sports for so long.

• “Steph Curry’s great. Steph Curry’s the MVP. He’s a champion. Understand what I’m saying when I say this. To a degree, he’s hurting the game. And what I mean by that is that I go into these high school gyms, I watch these kids, and the first thing they do is they run to the 3-point line. You are not Steph Curry. Work on the other aspects of the game. People think that he’s just a knock-down shooter.” – Marc Jackson
This is yet another example of why Marc Jackson needs to stop talking. Unfortunately, in his role as lead color commentator for ESPN’s NBA telecasts, he won’t. Between he and blowhard cohort Jeff Van Gundy, they make the telecasts verge on being insufferable.
Jackson says a lot of weird stuff about the Warriors, of course, who went from garbage to being a playoff team during his reign as head coach – and who promptly launched into the stratosphere once he left. I get that he has an axe to grind, even though the evidence would indicate the Warriors made the right decision. The idea that Steph Curry is “hurting the game,” however, is ridiculous. That kids aspire to shoot like Steph is, logical. We all wanted to “be like Mike” in my day, even though it was impossible to do what Jordan did. It’s hard to aspire to be LeBron James or Kevin Durant if you’re not a 6’10” freak of nature. The idea of a kid patterning himself/herself after a modest, regular-sized guy who perfected the art and craft of shooting a basketball doesn’t really seem like a bad idea to me. That kids can’t shoot like Steph Curry is unsurprising, since no one ever has shot the ball like Steph Curry. But eventually, someone will, and the game of basketball will be better because of it.

• My Hero of the Qeek is Derris Devon McQuaig, a San Diego transient who legally owns the title to Petco Park in San Diego. This is one of the nuttiest stories I’ve seen all year. Everyone involved with the Padres insists this isn't a big deal, and that they can conduct business around this, but their attempts to wrest the title away from McQuaig, who filed a claim on the title and slipped through a legal loophole in the process, have proven to be unsuccessful. For a bumbling franchise like the Pads, being mired in such a ridiculous situation seems oddly appropriate.

We’ve not offered up enough music here of late, so I thought I would send the year out with this selection from Afrolicious, the Official House Band of In Play Lose, who recorded this groovy tune this past summer at Bottle Rock Napa and who are ringing in 2016 at the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco. Happy New Year to everyone.