What a Glorious, Glorious Mess

We’re so screwed …

THE OFFICIAL Spouse of In Play Lose suggested that we go out for burgers and beer and catch the end of the Seattle-Arizona game at a local watering hole appropriately named The Phoenix. They were midway through the 4th Quarter at this point, and I hadn’t been watching the game, nor had I been the least bit bothered by this fact, since by all accounts online it wasn’t a particularly good game.

Which is putting it kindly. To be fair, the defenses were incredible for both teams, but …

When I had last looked at the stats online, with the game well into the 4th Quarter, the Seahawks had amassed a total of 3 first downs and 83 total yards. Their offense had run 28 plays the entire game up to that point, as opposed to Arizona’s 62. Yet they were only trailing 3-0 because they’d blocked a field goal and also stuffed Arizona on 4th down. Somehow, they were still in the game.

And if there were any team in the NFL I’d expect to find in a 3-0 game late in the 4th Quarter, it’d be the Seahawks, who have the best defense in the league and who have given up the fewest points in football in each of the past four seasons. They’ve invested heavily in their defense, which is loaded with some of the game’s best talent on that side of the ball: Earl Thomas, Richard Sherman, Kam Chancellor, Michael Bennett (the last two of whom are hurt at the moment).

But the Seahawks also have an offense which is absolutely terrible. The Seahawks’ dilemma on the offensive side of the ball is, in my opinion, somewhat emblematic of the struggles I am seeing throughout the league as a whole – only in the Seahawks case, there is still enough overall talent in the squad to overcome most of the problems.

The Seahawks got to be one of the best organizations in football through scouting and player development. They beat the bushes looking for players and found gems all over the place. Other than Thomas, who was a #1 pick, most of their best players have been acquired later on in the draft. Being lower-level draft picks means they signed for cheap as rookies, meaning the Seahawks had money to spend on even more good players they found and developed. They won a Super Bowl through accruing an enormous stockpile of young, inexpensive talent on both sides of the ball. But young players who grow up to be stars ultimately have to be paid like stars. You can’t pay Russell Wilson like a 3rd round draft pick forever.

The Seahawks have chosen to invest heavily in their defense, and done so at the expense of their offense – and in particular, in their offensive line, which is a complete mess and can’t block anyone. It doesn’t do much good to invest $100m in Russell Wilson if you can’t keep him standing upright. Their offense line has been atrocious the past couple of seasons, and only seems to get worse. They could get away with it when they still had the now-retired Marshawn Lynch in the backfield, since Lynch was the best in the game at running behind his pads and being his own blocker, but now they have no running game to speak of and the normally fleet-footed Wilson’s been beat to shit as well and can barely move. The Seahawks one good drive in this entire game was ultimately stymied by holding penalties on consecutive plays – which, in the bigger picture, is probably an improvement over letting Wilson get clobbered two times more, but in the moment is utterly galling. I hate this team’s offensive line.

I mentioned in my last post, after watching that abysmal Broncos-Chargers game, and after watching some of that terrible Colts-Texans game last Sunday night, how I think the quality of play in the NFL isn’t very good – and the reason that is, I suspect, is entirely due to roster churn. In the NFL, when you have a 53-man roster and a salary cap to work with, you have to make choices how you’re going to spend your money. You have to pay your stars, of course, because they’re stars and you need them in order to succeed, but the trade-off is trying to pay less down the roster. The Seahawks, for an example, have an enormous number of rookies on their team this season, and they aren’t alone in that. Young players are cheap and available, but young players also make a lot more mistakes, and there is no opportunity to build any sort of continuity with all of this turnover. Football is, first and foremost, a game of attrition – at some point in time during a season, you’re likely going to need everyone on your roster other than your 3rd QB to make a contribution. This isn’t like other sports, where you can just bury young players deep on the bench for the whole season. Everyone on the squad needs to play, and often needs to play a lot, and more inexperienced players mean fewer cohesive units, which means more mistakes, which means the overall quality of play suffers across the league.

And where this is most evident, of course, is on special teams, which is usually composed entirely of said youngsters alongside a few return specialists and the obligatory flaky kickers. We saw some doozies today on special teams in the NFL. The 49ers gave away a possession against those pewter pirates from Tampa Bay with this rather remarkable return in a game seen by dozens at The Pants down in Santa Clara:

Meanwhile, the Jacksonville Jaguars – the league’s closest equivalent to the Sacramento Kings – did somehow contrive to let the Oakland Raiders punter, who fumbled a snap, run 30 yards on 4th-and-24:

Which brings us back the Arizona Cardinals, who are getting ready to punt with 4:45 left in the game right about the time I sit down with a Harp and order a burger at The Phoenix. The Seahawks offense has been inept, and basically all they need to do is play good defense and be sound on special teams and they’ll sneak out with a 3-0 win. Ugly? Sure, but they all count the same, in the end.

So, of course, the Cardinals get the punt blocked.

And what’s worse, the Seahawks don’t even have the block on. They were playing for the return. They block the punt because one of their guys just basically pushes an upback right into the Arizona punter while everyone else is running down field to set up a return. Had the block been on, this likely would’ve been a Seahawks TD. As it were, the lone other Seahawks guy in the general vicinity comes up with the ball at the Arizona 30 yard line. And this is inexcusable from Arizona. The blocked punt is one of the single worst plays to give up in football, because of the field position and momentum swings. You just can’t do that.

But it’s the Seahawk offense we’re talking about here, and they do nothing at all. But their kicker Steven Hauschka somehow wobbles a long field goal through the uprights to tie the score. Hauschka has generally been a good kicker in his career but he’s had some particular problems in games in Phoenix. Apparently, it’s not a great surface for kickers – it’s a weirdly unique surface that actually gets rolled out of the domed stadium after games. In any case, the score is now 3-3 and it’s off to OT, at which point the game gets preposterous.

The teams swap FGs on the first two possessions in OT, so it is 6-6 and now it is sudden death, but you really feel like Arizona is going to win the game because the Seahawks defense is gassed. They have been out on the field for almost 90 plays and over 46 minutes and the Cardinals march to the 1 yard line but the Seahawks manage to stuff the Cards there and then, after a delay of game, on come Arizona kicker Chandler Catanzaro to win it with a 24 yard FG. A gimme. A chip shot. A piece of cake …

Doink! Off the upright. No good.

Earlier in the game, the Seahawks had blocked a FG by having LB Bobby Wagner time the snap and jump over the center into the backfield, which is a legal play so long as you don’t use the center to gain any sort of leverage. Wagner did it again on this kick at the end of the game – you can see it really well on the slo-mo replay from field level and imagine how unnerving this is for a kicker, because the ball is being placed down and there’s an opponent right in your face! So Catanzaro gets spooked, shanks the kick and the score remains tied, and a tie in this situation is as good as a loss for Arizona, since they are 1½ games behind the Seahawks in the NFC West and desperately need a win. They’ve literally kicked this game away.

And the Seahawk offense then marches down the field in what is as much as garbage time, since this game still being tied is playing with house money and since the unit is still somewhat fresh, seeing how they’ve scarcely been on the field all night. They get down to the Arizona 10 with :10 on the clock and on comes Hauschka for a 28-yard chip shot of his own …

… and he misses wide left. Good snap, good hold, no pressure. Hauschka just spazzed.

What the actual hell is going on?

I don’t think you’ll see a weirder game in the NFL all season. This game ends 6:6, pretty much like it was meant to be. Ties don’t happen very often in the NFL – and usually when they do, it means that both teams probably deserved to lose.

Amazingly enough, I’ve actually been in attendance for an NFL game which ended in a tie, which happened in 1997 at New Jack City in Landover, a game which ended 7:7 between the Redskin Potatoes and the New York Giants which was most notable because Potatoes QB Gus Frerotte scored on a 1-yard run, ran out of the end zone in excitement, head-butted a wall and concussed himself and had to leave the game. I was actually saving mention of that game for a piece I’m working on about the worst sporting events I’ve ever seen, but tonight’s nonsense in Phoenix demanded being blogged about and, thus, that nugget of a night back in 1997 needed to be unearthed.

This was a truly terrible game tonight between two of the league’s supposedly better teams. As terrible as the NFL has been about, well, almost everything, it’s always been a league that does try to figure out ways to improve the game and make it better. They were the first to add replays, they’ve adopted rule changes when the balance tilts too much towards the offense or the defense, etc. But from what I’ve seen so far this season – which, admittedly, isn’t much – the overall quality play in the NFL seems really, really poor right now, which goes a lot father towards explaining why the ratings are down than any other excuses like elections or hurricanes or discontent with guys protesting the national anthem. The game just isn’t very good right now.

But for the last 5:00 of the 4th Quarter, and the 15:00 of OT, this was bad football at its finest. Inept offense, woful special teams, strange coaching decisions, penalties, along with a few moments of brilliant defense to remind you how the game is actually supposed to work. What a glorious, glorious mess this was. I’ve not enjoyed such an awful display in ages. It almost makes me want to watch more NFL … almost, but not quite.