EVEN as a Seahawks fan, I cringed a little bit when I saw this. To the buzzard points!
• Have you ever seen a team play so scared with a 31-point lead as the Carolina Panthers did on Saturday? Carolina had a 31-0 lead on the Seahawks at the half, and when the Seahawks scored almost immediately after the break, the Panthers started looking as if they were running through a swamp. The Seahawks soon scored again and a palpable unease overtook the stadium. This is the Seahawks, after all, the 2-time Super Bowl attendees who’ve shown a penchant for the improbable comeback in recent years, mainly because they are at their best when they turn to the section of the playbook called “Russell Wilson Make Stuff Up.” The Panthers held on, in the end, winning 31:24. They did absolutely nothing in the second half, but the Seahawks simply ran out of time. The Panthers are a terrific young team, and this was certainly a good learning experience. It’s one thing to take your foot off the gas, but it’s another to go completely passive and just hope the clock runs out. Dialing back up 31 against Tampa Bay in the middle of the season is probably a good idea. Dialing it back in the playoffs? Not so much.
It would’ve helped the Seahawks cause if Pete Carroll could do the math. They trail 31-7 in the 3rd Quarter. The fastest route to 24 points is scoring on three possessions: three TDs and adding three 2-pt. conversions. The Seahawks score a TD to make it 31-13 and they then kicked the PAT, meaning they’re down 17 points and still need to score on three possessions (2 TDs, 2 PATs and a FG). If you miss it, you’re down 18, which isn’t much different than 17 and still requires three scores. Going for two here is a no-brainer. You have to follow the most direct route to even the score, even if it’s far-fetched. Is converting three straight 2-point conversions unlikely? Most certainly it is. OK, so, if you miss one, you have to wing it and make stuff up from there. That’s what happens when you’re losing the game.
WHY DO NFL COACHES DO THIS? Carroll’s done this sort of stupid thing before, mind you: last year, during this fine mess against Green Bay, the Seahawks trailed 19-0 when they scored a TD and they then kicked the extra point, meaning they were down 12 (needing two TDs) instead of possibly down 11 (needing a TD, a 2-pt., and a FG). My personal favorite act of dumbness is when a team is down by eight, score a TD and kick a PAT because “it’s too early in the game to be going for two.” It’s never too early to do the math!
NFL coaches have always seemed to consider the 2-point conversion to be some sort of annoying college gimmick imposed upon them. Most college coaches have a handy chart made up which they carry around, the margin of the game dictating whether or not to go for two, but the NFL gaffers have always eschewed this for some reason. I know that Bill Belichick did a little informal research back in his days coaching the Browns, which happened to be when the 2-point conversion came into the game. He would go for two at odd times during the game, curious as to how it impacted the outcome. (Which is how you wind up with an 11-8 game.) Going for two infrequently was something that made more sense with kickers converting 99%+ of PATs. Why give up a guaranteed point, when the 2-pt. conversion rate is less than 50%? But now that kickers are missing the longer PATs at a 10% clip, it’s not quite as safe a bet as it used to be, and teams would probably convert a higher percentage of twos if they actually bothered to practice them with some sort of frequency. Regardless, it’s about time coaches start doing more math to help their teams out. Come on guys, be a little smarter here.
• Speaking of Green Bay and fine messes, what the actual fuck was that game on Saturday night? That had to be the most confounding 5-play sequence in the history of the NFL. Up a touchdown, with the Packers facing 4th-and-forever on their own 4-yd. line while out of timeouts, the Cardinals somehow contrived to allow the Packers to go 96 yards in 55 seconds, and permitted Aaron Rodgers to complete not one, but two Hail Mary style passes to Jeff Janis. The Cardinals said after the game they were mindful of being Detroited (and their actual use of Detroit as a verb pleases me greatly), and their genius idea for defending the NFL’s Hail Mary master was to blitz – which doesn’t make any sense at all, since the QB is rolling out on a Hail Mary anyway, to buy time and let his guys get down field, so he’s likely rolling away from the blitz, and now you have fewer defenders available to knock down a pass. Granted, these are low-percentage plays we’re talking about here, but it’s probably a good idea not to somehow make it easier for the offense to pull it off.
The Packers had just cheated death, and after a bizarro double coin toss (and, seriously, how hard is it to toss a coin and make it flip?), the Packers had to play some defense. And I know that NFL defensive schemes are complex, and a game plan is a lot of information to process in a short period of time, but somehow, I suspect “cover #11 in red” was probably near to the top of it. The Cardinals protection breaks down and Palmer improvs it, winging a pass to Larry Fitzgerald … who actually pauses for a moment as he looks around, shocked that there isn’t a single Packer defender within 20 yards of him. 76 yards later, he’s tackled inside the Packers’ 5-yard line and the game is as good as over, with a nifty little shovel pass to Fitz for the TD doing the trick.
This is just the latest brutal postseason loss in a rather remarkable string of brutal postseason losses for the Packers, a model NFL franchise that’s always a title contender but has somehow become prone to the preposterous.
• Between fumbling within the last 90 seconds and the needless back-to-back 15-yard penalties on Vontaze Burfict and Adam Jones pushing the Steelers in position for a winning FG, the Cincinnati Bengals reinforced their reputation as the dumbest team in the NFL. Marvin Lewis has always had a penchant for employing players with million dollar talent and 10¢ heads, and once again it came back to bite him in the ass.
I find it interesting that with each playoff failure (this is five years in a row now) come rumblings about Lewis’ job security in Cincinnati. This is what happens when you raise the expectations. Cincinnati hasn’t been to a Super Bowl since 1989, and were atrocious most of the time between then and when Lewis came along, but being a perennial one-and-doner doesn’t mollify the masses for very long. Progress is always relative. Once you plateau, you grow stale and regress, and then you start heading in directions you don’t want to go.
I’m not sure the Bengals are to that point yet, but they aren’t on the level of the Pats nor Denver in the AFC, and it’s pretty obvious from all of the goings on in that playoff game that the Steelers are in the Bengals’ heads. Lewis is going to be under considerable pressure to have his team take the next step. But considering the job he’s done there – Cincinnati was a terrible job before his arrival, and likely will be again after his departure – he won’t be unemployed for long. As we saw with this year’s bloodletting (the number of NFL head coaching positions open pushing double digits), there are always plenty of bad jobs available.
• When I see something like the Rams/Raiders/Chargers three-way tussle over the open L.A. market, I start wondering if the NFL is actively trying to make people hate them. The Raiders and Chargers had formed a pseudo-alliance under the guise of being joint tenants at a new football facility in Los Angeles, but the NFL owners were ultimately wooed by Rams billionaire owner/certified douchebag Stan Kroenke’s plan to build an NFL Valhalla in Inglewood.
Along the way, all three franchises have gone scorched earth with their home municipalities and fan bases, burning all of their bridges and acting as if they already had one foot out the door. Not so fast. After this latest vote by the owners in the NFL, the Rams are leaving St. Louis immediately, while the Chargers will have an “option” to relocate in another year – unless, of course, they somehow strike a deal in San Diego. Yeah, sure. I’m sure there will be hugs and kisses and a love-in for all parties involved. The Rams are gone, and the Chargers are as good as gone as well.
Who knows what the hell the Raiders do at this point? I can certainly understand that they hate the Oakland Coliseum. The Coliseum is a dump. There are Roman amphitheatres which are in better condition than the Oakland Coliseum. (Quite honestly, and scarily, Qualcomm in San Diego is worse.) But there is no incentive for anyone in Oakland government to help them out in building a new stadium, and the Raiders are steadfastly opposed to sharing Levi’s Stadium with (and thus paying rent to) the 49ers. I’m not sure what they do.
And for all of you would-be Los Angeles football franchises, I say this: good luck. L.A. hasn’t really cared much about not having football. The joke for years has been that watching football is literally the only thing you can’t do in L.A., a lot of it outdoors in that beautiful weather and a lot of it a whole lot cheaper than the season tickets and PSLs will be in Kroenkeville. You have to be entertaining in L.A., or the fans will tune you out in an instant – and this incarnation of the St. Louis Rams isn’t good at any aspect of football other than acting boorish and piling up needless personal foul penalties.
About the only thing good about this move by the Rams and, eventually, the Chargers, is an end to the L.A.-based extortions. The NFL has been milking this L.A. sow for decades now, using the vacant and massive market as leverage in
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| Dubs run a 1-on-5 fast break with two guys tying their shoes. No problem. |
It was on King’s watch, under direction from owner Mikhail Prokhorov, that the Nets went on a ludicrous spend-and-trade rampage in concert with the 2012 move from the New Jersey swamplands into the opulent Barclays Center in Brooklyn: foolishly overpaying for Joe Johnson; trading for Deron Williams and Gerald Wallace and, worst of all, dealing all sorts of picks and draft conditions in exchange for acquiring Celtics graybeards Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett. In doing all of this, they also bloated their payroll obligations to $186 million, meaning they’ve had almost flexibility for modifying the roster since then, and they sold off so many futures that they don’t control any of their draft picks until 2019. Not only are the Nets terrible, but they have no young talent and very little in terms of rebuilding options. Few teams in the NBA, or all of sports, are quite as hopeless as the Brooklyn Nets.
Prokhorov wanted to make a splash when he moved the Nets to Brooklyn, hoping to assemble a team that would immediately challenge for Eastern Conference supremacy in the NBA. The slow, old, oft-injured Nets barely stumbled their way to a #8 seed in the playoffs that debut Brooklyn season and have been generally irrelevant since. Nowadays, they make so little of a ripple on the New York sporting scene that both the New York Times and New York Daily News have actually stopped covering them on the beat. All Prokhorov managed to do was mortgage the future to pay for a house that was on fire.
Whomever inherits this mess has arguably one of the worst jobs in sports on their hands: the Nets have a few decent players, but no great ones, and certainly no one you’d consider a franchise cornerstone. You could tear the whole thing down and trade everyone, but everyone knows you’re desperate for draft picks and you’re likely to only get fractions of the dollar on the deals. There has been some suggestions that the Nets should go the other way and go shopping for some serviceable vets to try and win a few more games, if only to lift the miasma hovering over the franchise. There are no easy answers here.
“My opponent says there are no easy answers. I say he isn’t looking hard enough!”
– Bart Simpson
• Can we please do something to get the NBA to modify the rules so we don’t have to endure games like this? No NBA fan wants to plunk down $65 a ticket to watch Andre Drummond shoot 36 free throws. Honestly, I’d rather go to the dentist. I hate the Hack-a-Shaq strategy, I think it makes a complete mockery of the game, and the simple solution is just to consider such a ploy to be an intentional foul, award a team two free throws and then also give them the ball back. No one wants to watch that crap.
• The Lose has been tardy when it comes to writing the blog here in January, partially owing to real life interceding – tight deadlines this month – and partially owing to my annual pilgrimage to New Orleans for the Crescent City Open. It was a typical scrabble tournament for me, one including a mediocre finish (10-9-1, 33rd place) and a range of play running the gamut from mediocrity to periodic incompetence. The Official Spouse of In Play Lose, meanwhile, had one of her best tourneys to date and came home with a Top 10 finish, so the household is certainly happy.
I love the fact that a broken down, crumbling former athlete like myself still has a competitive outlet in scrabble, even though I’m not any good at it. What always seems to amaze me about scrabble is just how many people involved in the enterprise at the top level seem to forget that it’s actually a competition. Read the epigram of this blog. Sartre’s quote about soccer applies to scrabble, and just about everything else in life. Scrabble is a game between two players. It’s not a math problem. It’s competition. Your opponents don’t roll over and play dead for you. Sometimes, they actually make their own good plays and beat you because of it. Sometimes, they make bad plays and beat you anyway. Sometimes – gasp! – you lose!
But I’m of the opinion that in most walks of life, people don’t actually like competing – they like winning. None of us are particularly good losers, perhaps me worse than most. I used to be notoriously bad when it came to (not) handling defeat. But at least I’ve come to understand that failure in any of life’s many arenas is a source for good material, so I’ve come to approach defeat with humor and curiosity, and I’ve mellowed out. Mostly. I only broke one pen in New Orleans, so that counts as progress.
• And finally, RIP David Bowie, whose music I’ve always liked and, more importantly, who I always admired for his willingness to take artistic risks. I didn’t always like the strange art house, experimental phases he frequently went through in his music, but I appreciated the hell out of him for trying it. More musicians, and artisans, and people in general, should dare to be so bold. And I’d rather remember him fondly for his beautiful music than mourn his passing, so I’ll close with my favorite tune of his:
