Check Mate

I WAS going to update by NBA Losability ratings, seeing as how we are at the ‘halfway’ point of the season with the NBA All-Star game happening this past weekend in New Orleans. Sure enough, as we were nearing the break, there were a few teams establishing themselves as prime candidates for some Lose pontification. For starters, you had Miami go on a 12-game winning streak and pretty much wreck every plan the front office had to tank, which I think is awesome. As a professional athlete, I can’t think of a worse situation to be in than that in which you are expected, by your bosses, to fail. No one gets to be that good at a sport without anything other than supreme confidence in your ability to be successful. The Heat were 11-30 and had ‘tank job’ written all over them, but then the players sucked it up and pulled it together and went on a 12-game streak, and good for them for doing that, because I would be pissed off if I was one of those guys. I’ve mentioned previous in this blog how the Warriors went so far in their desperately attempts to tank and protect a draft pick they might lose that they started five rookies – and the rookies then went out and won a game and almost messed up the plan. Being deliberately bad has no place in sports, so I commend the Heat for this incomprehensible run, and I must admit that the Dion Waiters Experience is a long, strange trip.

And then there are the Heat’s in-state brethren, the Orlando Magic, who haven’t done anything right and have managed to construct the league's least appealing roster outside of Brooklyn despite having five straight picks in the Top 10 of the NBA draft. The Magic just atoned for a bad trade this past summer – giving up Victor Oladipo and their 1st round pick to OKC for Serge Ibaka – by making an even worse trade – flipping Ibaka to Toronto for Terrence Ross and a 1st round pick likely to fall at the end of the draft – thus managing to trade something good for something bad. I have no idea what the hell Orlando is doing, and haven’t had any idea for years.

Oklahoma City, of course, always finds a way to clamor for The Lose’s attention, and that game last Saturday against the Warriors pretty much summed up every single thing wrong about this entire organization – starting with the hillbilly fans who were so fired up to boo and heckle Kevin Durant the whole game, the novelty of which wore off by the time the Warriors were up 26 in the 2nd Quarter, and continuing on with Russell Westbrook, the “hero” of OKC who chose to “stay at home,” in part because OKC gave him about $8,000,000 more, and in part because being in this situation allows Russ to continue to do what he does best, which is play Don Quixote and take on all-comers and be the most selfish player in the league. Want to know a big reason why Kevin Durant left OKC? Because who wants to play with a guy like that, particularly in what would’ve been his contract year? Go back and watch that game over again and see how the Warriors basically sucker Westbrook by switching KD on him, at which point Russ goes full-on windmill tilt and abandons the OKC game plan completely, which is precisely what the Dubs wanted him to do. Most of his 47 points were essentially in garbage time – complete with him woofing “I’m coming” at KD, to which KD replied, “so what?” – and the Warriors scored nearly as many points off Westbrook’s turnovers as his teammates scored off his assists.

But then the Knicks simply can’t accept not being in the limelight for 10 minutes, even if they have to do something completely utterly stupid like have Charles Oakley – a former Knick, a loyal Knick, and a longtime fan favorite at the Garden – be ejected from the Garden for talking shit to owner Jim Dolan, who is one of those idiot owners with more dollars than sense. And the NBA has some of the worst sorts of these types in comparison to other sports, because unlike in other sports, where owners sit in boxes, the owners like to sit court side in the NBA – a good number of them foolishly believing that the fans in attendance are actually there to see them instead of what’s on the floor. The Knicks are a total disaster this season, of course, having doled out the single worst contract of the offseason when they signed Joachim Noah at 4/72, and having traded for Derrick Rose, who is a shell of himself and a walking distraction on a team full of distractions, most notably the distraction of Phil Jackson constantly going about bad-mouthing Carmelo Anthony and seemingly just trying to annoy Melo to the point where he’ll agree to wave his no-trade clause – which is something Phil gave to him in the first place, and did so for no apparent reason other than Melo asked for it. There were rumors of a trade with the Clippers – Melo for a bunch of stuff – and then came the rumors of Melo for Kevin Love, which is a deal the Cavs wouldn’t make anyway, but now they really won’t make with Love out injured for two months. The rumors in New York are always much more interesting than the truth – the truth being that the team on the floor is trash.

But the Zen Master himself, who has proven now to be so bad as an administrator in New York that you start wondering if his incredible résumé-filler of nine championships as a coach had anything whatsoever to do with anything other than having great players, is now free and clear to opt out of his deal and go back to L.A. and start fucking up the Lakers, with news today that Jeannie Buss has fired her brother Jim and also GM Mitch Kupchak – of course “Special Advisor” Magic Johnson might have something to say about that as well, even though Magic should probably be doing something like trying to find a way to get the blackout lifted on the games for that baseball team for which he’s a minority owner/face of the franchise. The Lakers’ season has gone from being fun to fun bad to just bad, and they’re presently on a crash course with the bottom, trying to lose as many games as possible to avoid giving away their draft pick to Philly this summer. Oh, wait, Magic is now the President of Operations for the Lakers. Come Thursday, he might be the starting point guard. Apparently the front runner for the GM job is Rob Pelinka, who was Kobe Bryant’s agent. Pelinka did a nice job scoring Kobe the biggest contract in NBA history at the time, of course – and the Lakers went 84-220 during the length of that contract. And I’ve seen this agent-to-GM route in the NHL before – in Vancouver, where Mike Gillis turned one of the most powerful franchises in the sport into a joke during his tenure. This sort of thinking doesn’t bode well for the Lakers. I find it amazing that I’m now reading reports where the Lakers wanted Bob Myers, the GM of the Warriors, to do the same gig in L.A., which speaks to just how delusional the Lakers are at the moment. Why would Bob Myers take that job? That’s a BAD job! Magic’s biggest task is going to be trying to convince people the franchise is still relevant. Good luck with that.

So there is a whole lot of lose fodder going right now, but the Kings had to go and flex their muscles over the All-Star weekend and reassert that they are, without a question, the masters of Losability, and remind all of us yet again that they are the worst-run, most disorganized, and single most incompetent franchise in all of North American professional sports, as they went out and traded Boogie Cousins, their one decent player, to the New Orleans Pelicans for what amounts to about 30¢ on the dollar.

Now, The Lose was speculating back in January about the availability of Boogie, suggesting Toronto might be an interesting destination if the Raptors wanted to make that kind of a bold move. But I said that based upon the idea that the Raptors were one of the few teams which could make a deal like that, given that they sort of assets to do it – which was obviously wrong on my part, when you see the return the Kings got from the Pelicans: Buddy Hield, a mediocre rookie shooting guard who has actually made fewer 3-pointers this season than Boogie; Langston Galloway and Tyreke Evans, who are both salary filler and the latter of which will probably ask to be bought out so he can go sign with someone like the Cavs; a first round pick in this year’s draft, which likely won’t be worth much since the Pelicans will possibly make the playoffs now and thus be out of the lottery; and a second round pick. That’s it? That’s the best you could do?

And some of that is on Boogie, of course, who has a pretty solid reputation, at this point, of being a clubhouse cancer. There has always been a question in Sacramento of whether the problem there is the organization or the problem there is Boogie, seeing as how it’s almost incomprehensible that an NBA team with such a good player can be so bad for so long. I’m inclined to think the former, but pretty much no one who has been around this team on a regular basis seems to have a whole lot of good to say about him. (For the play-to-play man, Grant Napear, to fire off a tweet storm like this in the aftermath of the trade speaks to the sort of day-to-day misery he, and everyone else in this organization, have had to put up with.) Boogie has clearly been a problem here, and the Kings were in a bad spot owing, in part, to the unintended consequences of the new CBA. Thanks to all of the knee-jerk reactions to Kevin Durant signing with the Warriors, the new CBA has provisions to allow clubs to offer massive sums in order to keep their All-NBA players, and the Kings were going to have to decide this coming summer if they really wanted to invest $210 million in a guy who was clearly a pain in the ass. Given that there are so many stories circulating about what a bad locker room guy Cousins was, you can understand them being hesitant to do so, since you’d be stuck with him for years. And given how bad Boogie’s rep has become, and how poor his behaviour has been on the court as well – he’s accrued so many technicals this season that every time he gets another, he’ll be suspended for a game – his rep is so low that the offers started getting lower, and lower, and lower. The offer New Orleans made was something of a fly-by. That offer wasn’t good enough to get them Jalil Okafor from the Sixers a couple of weeks ago.

This is an incredibly bad trade for the Kings. It may be the best they could get, at this point, but that doesn’t make it a good one but the Kings got themselves into this mess and are now, apparently, forced to choose between a bad deal and no deal. They could’ve traded Boogie last summer and scored a big haul. They could’ve waited until June and surveyed the lay of the lottery land. Hell, they could’ve just waited three more days to see if they could somehow get a better offer than what New Orleans gave them. And GM Vlade Divac put forth a brave face in trying to explain himself in the aftermath of this seemingly hasty All-Star weekend trade, but most of what he said made no sense when you consider that he and coach Dave Joerger were singing Boogie’s praises in the media a week ago and saying there were interested in re-signing him. None of the justifications make sense. Vlade mentioned that “character matters,” which seems pretty hollow when you consider that their point guard, Darren Collison, was suspended for domestic violence and their backup point guard, Ty Lawson, has been arrested four times and last year’s point guard, Rajon Rondo, outed a gay official on the court, not to mention the fact that any team willing to employ Matt Barnes doesn’t get to play the character card. There have also been comments about how high they are on Hield, going so far as to say that owner Vivek saw his pre-draft workout and thinks Hield has “Steph Curry potential.” Buddy Hield may not even Seth Curry potential. His only Curry potential is to go pick up some Thai food. And the Kings are spinning this as a chance to rebuild through the draft, which doesn’t make any sense, because you just made a lottery team in New Orleans a possible non-lottery team, so the pick is likely to get worse, and the Kings can’t really rebuild through the draft anyway, since their pick goes to the Bulls if it falls out of the Top 10 – unlikely at this point – and goes to the Sixers if the Kings wind up picking higher in the draft.

And the Kings got themselves into this mess because, for the last few years, they’ve been attempting to mollify Boogie, essentially letting him play coach and GM even though his teams have never even come close to sniffing the playoffs. They let Isaiah Thomas walk because Boogie didn’t like playing with him. They made short-sighted, win-now moves – like the awful trade with Philly which is now going to come back and bite them – thinking they were going to be good, but no one with a basketball IQ higher than that of a garden variety tomato would have looked at those moves, and those constructed rosters, and conclude that. The USA Today correspondent Sam Amick, a Sacramento resident, put forth the idea that the Kings were suddenly willing to part with Boogie because the team beat the Celtics in a game where Boogie was suspended, which typifies the sort of knee-jerk, small-sample thinking that has just killed this team: thinking which starts at the top with Vivek, who clearly knows nothing about operating an NBA basketball team, and doesn’t understand that a good owner doesn’t meddle in the affairs of the club but instead shuts up and signs the cheques and otherwise stays out of the way.

And this is what you get, Sacramento, for making the deal with the devil that is David Stern, who so desperately want to keep the NBA out of Seattle in Sacramento that he cobbled together a phony ownership group, with Vivek investing pennies on the dollar of what he should have in order to become majority partner, and the rest of whom know little to nothing about how to run a franchise. This is what you get. You can still have the NBA, so long as you’re okay with Kevin Johnson shoving $700 million or so down your throat in new taxes to pay for your new arena, but so long as you have clowns like Vivek in charge, you will never, ever have good basketball. Quite honestly, this is what the NBA deserves for the dumb way in which that all shook out.
 
Oh, and by the way, the fact that Sam Hinkie managed to figure out that the Lakers and the Kings were dumb and make long-term deals which benefit the Sixers does not make him a genius of a GM. I’m reading lots of revivalist shit about his tenure in Philly all of a sudden. Stop it. It’s a whole lot easier to make those sorts of moves when you’re not actually trying to be any good, and it doesn’t change the fact that the roster he left behind in Philly is still a clusterfuck, and that no one in the NBA is all that interested in dealing for the guys – Okafor and Nerlens Noel – that the Sixers have to deal in order to make any significant progress. I read on one of the Kings message boards that they should fire Vlade and hire Hinkie as a GM. Well, you’re going to have a lot of losing anyway, given that Vlade now has the roster of a 20-win team, and will more likely be the roster of a 15-win team by the time the spring fire sale in Sacramento has conclude, and given the fact have been so bungled in the misguided attempts to win in the present. Hinkie could scarcely do worse in Sacramento, were the Kings fans willing to endure three 10-win seasons in a row. Then again, Kings fans are so used to colossal failure by now that they’d probably handle it better than most other fan bases.

Now, for the Pelicans, of course, this move was a no-brainer, as the price was so low, how could they resist? Boogie’s signed through 2018, you now have a second star caliber player in Boogie to pair with Anthony Davis, and you basically had to give up nothing to get him. Grand predictions of Pelican success may be a big hasty of course – neither Boogie nor AD is a classic back-to-the-basket center, as both have pick-and-pop mid-range games, and it’s not really clear how they’ll mesh as Alvin Gentry has to rejig his pace-and-space offense on the fly. The guard position is still a trash pile, there is not enough shooting and not very much depth. Having said all of that, we saw how simply adding Jrue Holliday back to a team consisting of AD and a bunch of muppets suddenly made the Pelicans into almost a competent team. Having three quality players on the court should assure a nice haul of wins here at the end of the season even if they do little more than ignore the offense and just make stuff up on the fly. The Pelicans are 2½ games behind Denver for the 8th Seed, and making a push to get that #8 spot would bring some positivity to a franchise desperately in need of it. There really is no downside for the Pelicans on this deal. If it doesn’t work out, Boogie walks in 2018 and you still have AD to build around. If it does work, you’ve got a fascinating counterweight to all of the trends in the NBA, going big where others are going small, which makes the game a whole lot more interesting as a whole. There is really no downside here for New Orleans.

But there is no underestimating the intelligence of the brain trust behind the Sacramento Kings. Just when you thought they couldn’t do anything stupider, they do something stupider. There really isn’t any point to me doing any more Losability ratings, because there is only one true master of Losability in the NBA and it’s the Sacramento Kings. Check and mate.

Super Blow

Dear Falcons, this gentleman carrying the football here and scoring is called a running back. Please give him the ball.

PERHAPS what’s most remarkable, and most telling, about the New England Patriots winning five Super Bowls is how utterly dominant they haven’t been. Consider that the total margin of victory in those five games is 19 points. The most “one sided” of those games, if you will, was a 3-point win over the Eagles which was 14-14 going into the 4th Quarter, after which the Pats scored 10 points, the Eagles got a late TD and New England recovered an onside kick. The first two wins were decided by field goals at the gun, the last on a TD in OT, and in between you had a goal line stand in the last 30 seconds. Bill Belichick has won five Super Bowls in New England, but he very easily could have lost six.

And this is in no way a criticism of the Patriots. In fact, it speaks to their excellence. The Patriots have had some incredible good fortune in those games. But you would do well not to fall into the fallacy that The Lose cautions of frequently, which is to think that luck and skill are mutually exclusive. You have to be good enough to be able to take advantage of good fortune. What it also speaks to is something that I’ve felt for years about Belichick, which is that he is the master of situational football. The weird little bit of game theory he employed at the end of the Super Bowl two seasons ago against the Seahawks can be, and has been, debated, but at least he had some sort of an idea to try in a situation where all of the options are bad. And Belichick was definitely on the ball yesterday in terms of situational awareness – made most apparent, in fact, in a play that didn't work, which was the onside kick down 28-9 in the 3rd Quarter. The Pats don’t have a quick strike offense and needed three more scores. As such, the situation called for the onside kick. It didn’t work, which it often doesn’t, but it was the right play.

And this speaks to an idea I’ve often tried to express when teaching scrabble to new players. One of the things which I often say is that what separates good players from great ones is not how much they win by, but how much they lose by. Because when you’re losing, and it’s all going bad, you have to try crazy stuff in order to win the game, and most of the time it doesn’t work, so you end up losing by even more than might otherwise have. But in trying crazy stuff in order to win the game, you also steal a few games here and there which you wouldn’t otherwise win – and it’s those wins which mark the difference between good and great. The objective is to win the game, and ultimately the low percentage play is still better than the no percentage play.

And sometimes, in scrabble, and in other competitive endeavors, you’re left in a truly terrible predicament, one in which the only hope to win is to make your best play and then hope that your opponent screws up. It isn’t that much to go on, but again, it’s still better than the no percentage play. Who knows? Maybe they will screw it up.

Just like the Seahawks screwed it up in the Super Bowl two years ago when, for some god knows why reason, the Seahawks wouldn’t just line up and RUN THE DAMN BALL from the 1-yard line.

And just like the Atlanta Falcons screwed it up yesterday, when they contrived to commit what was probably the greatest choke in NFL history.

To put this in some context here, when the Falcons scored to go up by 28-3 midway through the 3rd Quarter, 538.com had the Falcons listed as 99.63% to win the game. To put that in some perspective in comparison to some memorable NFL gaffes in recent years, when the Seahawks were on the 1-yard line in the closing seconds against the Pats, they were only at 87.4% to win in that situation. A better comparison would be two weeks prior to that Pats-Seahawks Super Bowl, which was the NFC Championship game, where the Green Bay Packers were 96.2% favorites to beat the Seahawks with 5:13 left in the game and still managed to lose – but this scenario in Super Bowl LI was even more unlikely than that one. It’s basically impossible to lose a game when you’re 99.63% to win if you just go through the motions and let the clock run itself out over time. You almost have to try to lose in that circumstance. You have to screw up, and screw up royally.

The gold standard of NFL chokes has long been the Houston Oilers, on Jan. 3, 1993, blowing a 35-3 lead in the second half and losing 41-38 in OT to the Buffalo Bills. That game was a little bit weird though, in that the comeback was basically an explosion by the combustible Bills offense, which scored four touchdowns in six minutes in the 3rd Quarter. The Oilers still had time to actually rally in that game, kicking a FG in the final seconds to tie the score at 38-38 and force OT. That one was bad, but given all that was on the line yesterday, and given was a calamitous collapse that occurred, this one takes the cake.

I was not surprised at all to see the Falcons winning this game. I’ve been saying for two weeks that I’d thought they would win. The defense isn’t élite, but you could see that they were extremely well prepared, which was always one of Dan Quinn’s hallmarks when he was in charge of the defense in Seattle. When you’re well prepared, you can keep the game simple: keep the ball in front of you and react, make the tackle, make New England exert a lot of energy on the offensive end. And the Pats had to try to keep the ball and chew up time, even when losing, because the Falcons offense is explosive and capable of gashing anyone. The Falcons were averaging upwards of 9 yards per play in the first half on offense, and it was the Pats and not the Falcons who were making all of the mistakes. This is a good team in Atlanta. They were quicker than the Patriots, and they absolutely blitzed them on both sides of the ball in that first half. They have a lot of talent there, but what they don’t have, above all else, is experience – and that includes Quinn, who is only in his second year as an NFL head coach, having taken over for the perpetually underachieving Mike Smith, a guy whose rap included, among other things, poor attention to detail when the game bogged down and required situational awareness.

Up 28-9, the Falcons are still okay. Even up 28-12 in the 4th Quarter, the Falcons are okay. They take over the ball again after a New England field goal with 9:44 left in the game – and proceed to put forth 9¾ minutes of the most astonishingly bad football imaginable. And keep in mind as I’m recounting this, that for New England to win this game, pretty much all of these things have to occur. That’s how much of a long shot we’re talking here. Let’s take it from the top, with some proper buzzard points for emphasis, because the buzzards were circling when all of this was over:

• I think I said to The Official Spouse of In Play Lose at some point during this mess of an ending – the two of us enjoying some bar food and whiskeys at The Official BBQ Joint of In Play Lose – that if the Falcons lost this game on one play, it was this one: 3rd-and-1, with just over 8:00 to go in the game. What do we do here, Falcons? Here’s an idea: RUN THE DAMN BALL! Atlanta is averaging almost six yards per carry in this game. Furthermore, the Falcons pass protection hasn’t been very good. Further still, the Falcons defense has been the field forever, thanks to a combination of quick strikes by the Falcons offense plus the return of a pick six shoehorned in between a pair of long New England drives. By the end of the 3rd Quarter, the Pats had run 62 plays and the Falcons had run 33. And even more important than anything else, the Falcons need to kill the clock. The clock is the enemy at this point, not the Patriots. If the Falcons run the ball and don’t make it and punt, New England’s starting 60 yards away from the goal line, if not more. If the Falcons do make the first down, they’re going to kill another 2:00-3:00 on the next series of downs.
But the Falcons love the passing game. It’s their bread and butter. Okay, so here’s an idea: throw it short, or throw it out to the scat back in the flat and tell him to beat the linebackers to corner – which is something the Falcon backs had been doing all day. Just get rid of it. They don’t want to take a sack here.
And I have no earthly idea what play the Falcons were trying to run – and I’m not even sure the Falcons knew, either, but there goes Ryan taking a 7-step drop and no one’s open and the play design is a mess, and the back who should have the ball in his hands instead doesn’t know where he’s going and he whiffs on a block, and Matt Ryan seems to be moving in slow motion back there with his big, long, slow windup to his delivery. Strip sack, fumble recovered by the Pats on Atlanta’s 25 yard line and suddenly the Pats have life.
This is absolutely, positively the worst possible thing Atlanta could’ve done, because the tired defense goes back on the field and the Pats have finally figured out how to move the ball, and now all of the momentum and belief is over on the New England sideline. In some ways, the Falcons would have been better off if the Pats had somehow managed to run the fumble back for a score, because at least they keep your defense off the field and out of a high leverage situation. This just can’t happen in this situation. New England was only going to win this game is the Falcons gave them easy opportunities. Well, they just did.

• So the Patriots score and now it’s 28-20 and the Falcons mess-up the kick return, are stuck back on their own 10-yard-line and full panic is starting to set in. But they bust a big play for 39 yards by … hey, look, it’s a short pass to the scat back in the flat, gee whiz, where was that play a couple of minutes ago? At this point, the clock is running again, the Falcons line up for their next play and then snap the ball with about :25 left on the play clock.
And at this point, it’s pretty obvious to me that no one out there for the Falcons is thinking, because running the play clock down to :01 or :02 before snapping it is just basic football here. If I’m Kyle Shanahan, the Falcons Offensive Coordinator, I’m screaming this into the radio in Matt Ryan’s helmet. You would think that, when you’ve played as much football in your lives as these guys, that this sort of tactic would be common knowledge and almost come instinctively. And apparently, you would have thought wrong.

• So the Falcons get themselves stuck again after running a couple more plays which make no sense, only to then be bailed out by Julio Jones making one of the sickest catches that I have ever seen, and now they’re at the New England 21 yard line with about 4:45 to go. What to do now? How about this one: RUN THE DAMN BALL. You’re in field goal range here, you have a solid kicker, and three running plays will also force New England to take their three timeouts. Even if you just ran three straight times up the middle and then kick it, you’re up 31-20 with about four minutes left, the Pats have to score twice and have no timeouts.
So, of course, Atlanta goes empty backfield and tries to throw it.
I give up.

• Hey look, Matt Ryan just took another 7-step drop and took a sack for a loss of 13 yards. Throw in a holding penalty on the next play, and the Falcons are going backwards. They’ve lost 23 yards and taken themselves out of field goal range, when all they needed to do was just RUN THE DAMN BALL and this game is as good as over. Instead, they have to punt, Brady has two timeouts left plus the 2:00 warning to work with, and the Atlanta defense is gassed.
And if you’re the York family down at The Pants in Santa Clara, you might start wondering, at this point, what you’re getting with Kyle Shanahan as a head coach for the 49ers. Shanahan is one of those guys I generally don’t like in the NFL who has used nepotism to get himself into some plum gigs, a la the Ryans and the Grudens of the world. I was talking online to a rueful 49er fan after the game, and I said to them, “so, you realize this guy calling these awful plays is your head coach next year, right? Good luck with that.”

• So the defense is just basically dead on their feet out there for the Falcons, at this point. In the game, overall, New England ran 93 plays and Atlanta ran 46. It’s not really a surprise that the Patriots chew them up here, as Brady thrives in this situation, but there is still time for another awful coaching move, which occurs with 2:03 left in the game when Edelman makes a circus reception of a ball that seemed to bounce off about six guys. The Falcons kept getting hands on Brady’s passes, but they could never corral the sucker, and this one boings off hands and feet and everything else and Edelman comes down with the ball – and for some inexplicable reason, Dan Quinn decides to challenge the call.
Now, here’s the thing. The obvious reason to challenge it is if you think it hit the ground, but you have an official out there adamantly gesturing that it didn’t, you have a giant replay board up there where every person in the stadium can see that it didn’t, and you almost certainly have someone looking at that replay in your booth who can see that it didn’t. Furthermore, the Patriots are likely to scramble up to the line of scrimmage to get a play off, as teams are coached to do when a potentially challengable call occurs that is in your advantage, but they’re probably not going to beat the 2:00 warning, which is an opportunity lost. So DON’T STOP THE CLOCK FOR THEM!
But Quinn uses his last timeout here for this foolish challenge – the Falcons having wasted the other two previously, including having to burn one earlier in the 3rd Quarter on a play where their defense only had 10 guys on the field. Do not do this, Dan Quinn! You just gave the Pats a stoppage of the clock. You gave them extra time and extra plays at a moment where those things are absolutely precious.
And when the Pats do score to tie the game, Atlanta only has :57 left and has no more timeouts, and all of the options are terrible at that point. Atlanta has to try running the kickoff back even if it goes in the end zone, which they then make a hash off, and now they don’t have any good options. Even just having one timeout in that situation would have afforded them a chance to throw the ball 20-30 yards down the middle of the field, stop the clock, and give them the opportunity to get into field goal range.

What. A. Mess.

And there was zero doubt in my mind that, having won the toss to start the OT, the Patriots were going to win that game. Zero. None. Goose egg. It was the only thing predictable about this game.

So the Patriots have now wriggled off the hook twice in a row in the Super Bowl, owing entirely to the fact that their opponents have messed it up. But you know what? The Patriots ultimately didn’t mess it up and that counts for something. It counts for a lot, actually. It counts for two more Super Bowl rings. And I don’t even know where the Falcons go from here. Yes, they’re a young team with good talent that seems to be on the rise, but you don’t blow a Super Bowl and instantly snap it all back into shape. You don’t just get over this kind of thing. You just don’t. The game of football is too hard and too demanding, and just getting to the Super Bowl in the first place usually involves a confluence of events going your way: maybe you have a decent injury run, maybe your biggest adversaries have injury problems of their own like the Panthers and the Seahawks did, or maybe you catch a break when an opponent who you were wary of trips and stumbles all over themselves like the Cowboys did against the Packers in the playoffs. A lot of times, in order to be successful, things have to break your way which you have no control over. So for godsake, when you do have that control, you just can’t go about giving it away.

That, and RUN THE DAMN BALL FALCONS! Sheesh.

I feel bad for the long-suffering fans in Atlanta, which is a stunningly-awful sports city. The Falcons have never won a Super Bowl, the Braves only won a single World Series despite making the playoffs 15 years in a row, the Hawks are the epitome of mediocre, the city has lost two hockey teams, and Atlanta is also the only place on earth to host two enormous events – the Super Bowl and the Olympics – and have no one coming away with anything good to say about either experience. Cool city, though. It might make a good location for the future Hall of Lose, since losing seems to be what they know and do best.

I’m Going to Say This Once

I’M GOING to say this once, and once only, and then we will get back to the fun and the games. I posted this last night on my Facebook wall, but I feel as if it needs to be said here, in this personal space and corner of cyberspace of mine and I am going to modify it to fit this forum. And if you do not like that, then tough shit.

“What America does best is create Americans.”
– Bernard-Henri Lévy

I post pictures of these tacos all the time across social media, which are made by David. David makes his own sauces, his owns mixes and marinades. These are the best tacos in the world.

David is an immigrant. He has a wife and 2-year-old daughter. He does all of this, by hand, every day, and he makes $3.50 a taco, which isn’t a helluva lot. He works his ass off, like pretty much all of the immigrants who live in my neighborhood. They work construction, they work in restaurants, they take shit jobs that are beneath cushy white people like me.

David was originally working selling tacos outside of his building down the street, which is where a really popular local Salvadoreño restaurant was located, but it closed in order for the building to be seismically upgraded. It will come back, but for the mean time, some people are out of work. People just like David who work their asses off.

David now sets up his taco stand in a new location, having been welcome to do so outside the corner store – a store which is owned by a Yemeni national. He and his partner work really hard, work from 7 am to 2 am, just the two of them. They’ve managed to get some help recently, as the owner has finally managed to bring his family over to the U.S. after about a decade of trying and his two teenage sons also work in the store. And they had to get out, because Yemen is in chaos. With as much vile venom being spewed forth about “those kind of people” in this country, being in this country is still, without a doubt, better than being over there.

And the Yemenis who run the corner store are our friends. They are friends to everyone in this neighborhood – the whites and the blacks and the Latinos, the rich and the poor, even the police, some of whom I’ve noticed have taken to eating at David’s taco stand out front. They want a better life for themselves and their families, which is exactly what your ancestors and mine wanted when they came to this country.

These people are not my enemies, nor will they ever be. Where they may have come from does not make them my enemy. We make far too many enemies out of the people who are not, worrying about people from far away lands when it has been shown, time and again, that the real enemies often lie within.

But when you decide to cast people as enemies, based upon from where they come, it’s amazing just how many enemies you ultimately wind up creating. If you do that, they then come to see you as the enemy, and they are quite right to do that.

And if anyone who is reading this cannot comprehend this fact, then they should probably just unfriend me now, because as much as I appreciate speaking to a wide range of people with a wide range of views about a wide range of topics, and value that, and as much as I appreciate strenuous debate, someone who cannot understand this is clearly a fucking idiot, and is not worth one more goddamn ounce of my time.

And do not argue with me on this point. If you cannot see just how counterproductive, pointless, and fundamentally un-American this behavior has been which has come out of Washington, D.C. these past few weeks, then just leave this corner of cyberspace and carry on someplace else. Sorry to see you go – and I mean that will all sincerity – but I have nothing more to say to you. We have nothing left to say.