The City of Brotherly Lose

A photo no one ever thought they’d see

BEFORE he was the greatest QB in the history of football, Tom Brady was Plan B. Brady was the 199th pick in the draft, a guy who had started the 2001 camp as the 4th string QB for the New England Patriots, who already had a franchise QB in Drew Bledsoe.

People forget how good Bledsoe was. I remember his first college game, when he did some mop up duty for Washington State in a loss at U.S.C. Bledsoe was the 3rd string QB as a freshman, then came off the bench and threw two TDs in the 4th Quarter, and could pretty much make all the throws. A week later, he was named the starter. Mike Price, the W.S.U. head coach at the time, told the story of going to the weekly booster club luncheon in Spokane, where he was asked by an alum why he’d elevated Bledsoe to the starting spot ahead of the two pretty good QBs the Cougs already had, and Price looked right at the guy and said, “because he’s going to be the #1 pick in the NFL draft one day.”

Bledsoe was that good, and people also forget just how bad the Patriots had to be in order to land him. The Patriots were 2-14 in 1992, earning the #1 pick in the draft after having been beaten 10-6 by the 2-14 Seattle Seahawks during the regular season in one of the worst games of football that I have ever seen. The Pats were truly a horrible team, at that point, bereft of talent and ideas, frequently owned and operated by guys with big names who didn’t have any actual knowledge of how to run a team. But the #1 pick fell their way in a year a franchise QB was available, which is a gift from the football gods when it happens. Bledsoe would then go on to set some records along the way, and lead the Pats to a Super Bowl appearance in 1997. The Pats were set at QB. They had their guy.

Right up until they didn’t in September 2001, when Bledsoe got crushed by the Jets’ Mo Lewis, leaving Brady – who’d impressed enough to earn the back-up spot during the summer – as the Patriots starter. There were modest expectations, to say the least. The Patriots had what looked to be a nice team that season – solid defense, balanced offense – but losing Bledsoe was a huge blow. Optimism regarding the backup QB was, well, not high:

“Most NFL fans have little knowledge or confidence in what Tom Brady can do.”
– Alan Greenberg, Hartford Courant, Sep. 27, 2001

Teams in the NFL pretty much deserve a mulligan when their starting QB gets hurt. A long-term injury at the QB position pretty much ruins your season. The general role of the backup QB, when pressed into service, is to do what they call “game management.” Basically, don’t screw it up. Make smart decisions, don’t turn the ball over, etc. But Bledsoe was going to be out of the lineup for a long time, and the novelty of “game management” only works for so long. If you’re trying simply to manage the game and simply hoping to get by, you’re eliminating large swaths of the playbook. This means defenses have less to worry about and it becomes easier for them to key in. Over time, it gets harder and harder to win.

So what you have to do, then, is not simply turn to Plan B but, more importantly, to embrace Plan B. In New England, head coach Bill Belichick has always been the master of Plan B. He’s never gotten near the credit for this, in fact. If something doesn’t work, he’ll try something else. He’ll shape shift on the fly. The Patriots offense has radically changed from season to season, depending on the personnel available. Some of his more impressive coaching jobs have come in years where the Patriots were injury-riddled and he was forced to get creative. He’d have receivers playing corner, linebackers running pass routes. What Belichick had figured out was that of the 53 guys on your roster, probably 52 of them were going to be necessary during the course of the season – pretty much everyone except the 3rd QB, and who knows, maybe he can return punts or something. Not only do you need depth, but you need versatility and, more importantly, you need to embrace the uncertainty and be prepared for it.

So Bledsoe goes down in Sep. 2001 and is going to be out of the lineup for a long time. Okay, now what? Well, you have this Brady kid and he’s your QB, so figure out what he does well and go with it. Buy into it: “okay, guys, this is how we’re going to win games,” which is precisely what his team did. And, of course, it turned out pretty well for the Pats that season.

You have to embrace risk. This notion is so, so hard for so, so many people to grasp. As someone who runs a scrabble club, I wind up being a de facto coach for new players, whose propensity when playing a superior opponent is to play very defensively. This is the wrong strategy. In playing very defensively, you’re actually limiting your options in a situation where your options are limited to begin with. The superior player probably has a better idea of what to do in a tight, defensive game than you do. The solution, then, is to play more openly and aggressively, take risks and increase volatility and uncertainty. When I point this out, the immediate response is almost always the same: “but they’ll kill me if I do that, they’ll play flashy bingos and I’ll lose by 200,” to which I say, “yes, they might do that, and quite possibly will do that, but what if they don’t? What if you get the good tiles instead of them? How are you going to use the good tiles to win on a closed board where you can’t make any plays? The low-percentage play is always better than the no-percentage play.” It’s usually at this point that the light goes on, although it can take quite a while to convince yourself this is true. Risk can be your friend.

That doesn’t mean be stupid about it, of course. Don’t be reckless. You have to know the situation. Don’t be like the Atlanta Falcons and stupidly keep throwing the ball downfield when all you need to do is run the ball three times and kick a field goal. Be smart about it. But if something isn’t working, or if you’re matched against a superior opponent, you have to be willing to try something else and, more to the point, you have to be committed to trying something else. Go all-in on it. Losing is the default, after all: you can do everything according to plan and have it still not work out. You’re better off trying something different.

We saw that already once this year, in the NCAA Championship Game. Alabama was toast. Georgia was killing them. So out of nowhere, Alabama turns to the big Hawaiian kid at QB in the 2nd half and basically threw their entire playbook out the window. It’s desperation, of course, but these are desperate times. You’re down two TDs in the 3rd Quarter of a championship game, you can’t move the ball, you can’t score. And then, all of a sudden, you’ve got this kid coming in and flinging the ball all over the place and Georgia has no earthly idea how to stop him, because Alabama are suddenly doing stuff they haven’t done all year, and not only are Alabama moving the ball but, more importantly, the belief in winning returns to an Alabama sideline where guys had previously been arguing and fighting with each other.

Alabama went all-in on Plan B and wound up winning in OT. It may not have worked. It could have been a disaster. But the game was already a disaster, because Georgia was kicking their ass. I’m reminded of a quote by Alabama coach Nick Saban after a game where his usually defensively stout Crimson Tide won 55:44 over Auburn but got absolutely shredded by the Auburn QB: “you have to be able to win these types of games.” Yes, in a perfect world, your defense would stuff the other side, you’d control the clock and move the ball and win handily. But it doesn’t work that way. This is why we say it’s complicated by the presence of the opponent. The other side is trying to do stuff, too, and sometimes, they do it really well. Games aren’t a perfect world. Sometimes, you have to make stuff up on the fly.

Embracing risk and unpredictibility can be a wonderful thing. Several weeks before the Royals were 90 feet from tying Game 7 of the 2014 World Series, they were getting worked by the Oakland A’s in the Wild Card game – a game which they then turned around by running all over the A’s to the tune of seven stolen bases. Conventional wisdom was that the Royals shouldn’t be doing this, of course, as outs are precious when you’re losing and you don’t want to risk getting thrown out on the bases. But the Royals needed runs and, more importantly, they needed to make chaos – to which Oakland’s relievers responded by coming completely unhinged. Louisville won an NCAA basketball title by essentially making a decoy out of their best player, as Russ Smith basically stood 25’ from the basket for the entire second half, but Michigan had their best defender on him, and he had to go out and guard him, which then opened up the floor for the Cardinals to take advantage of. But if someone had suggested beforehand that Louisville would win a national title by having their leading scorer not shoot, you’d have thought they were nuts.

And see, I’ve never bought into this ridiculous idea of playing like you have “nothing to lose” as it pertains to something like the Super Bowl. You have lots to lose. You have the chance to lose the game that you’ve pointed towards for the entirety of your career, with no guarantee that you’ll ever get there again. What you do have to do, however, is figure out how to win, and figuring out how to win sometimes means doing things differently, rerigging and rejigging and shifting things up.

Which is certainly what the Patriots have done in reaching eight Super Bowls since 2002. Yes, they’ve had the Plan-B-turned-franchise-QB in Tom Brady, who I do believe is, in fact, the greatest QB in history, but that fact alone doesn’t guarantee success. I’ve referred to the Patriots as The Fragile Dynasty in the past, not as a means of deriding their success but as a means of praising it. The NFL is a league which has made it a point of attempting to institutionalize parity – which, for a long time, was really hard to do, and you can run through the litany of awful Super Bowl blowouts in the 1980s and 1990s as proof of that. We don’t get those sorts of awful blowouts in the Super Bowl too often any more. Oh, sure, you had the Seahawks beat the stuffing out of the Broncos a few years ago, both otherwise, we’ve had two decades of good, often great, and usually exciting Super Bowls. The operations in the NFL have become more sophisticated than ever, they are more data-driven and more savvy than ever before. The margins are narrower, the differences between one team and another are getting smaller and smaller. In that light, New England simply getting to eight Super Bowls in 17 years is the great achievement.

I call the Patriots the Fragile Destiny because they’ve won five of those eight Super Bowls and could easily have lost seven of them. The most “one sided” of those games still involved recovering an onside kick in the final moments after the Eagles had cut the lead to three points. (The first Pats-Eagles game. We’ll get to the second in a moment.) Can you imagine all of the ridiculous narratives that would have been spun over the years if the Pats had, in fact, lost seven Super Bowls? “Brady can’t win the big one!” “Belichick is a choker!” Blah blah blah. Even if they were 3-5 in those games – let’s say that the Seahawks run the damn ball, and let’s say that the Falcons don’t go and throw up all over themselves in the last 9:00 of the game – they’d be viewed negatively. Instead, of course, we hate them because they’re successful, and because they’ve always seemed to find a way to wriggle off the hook – which isn’t really true at all, as the best team they ever had, in terms of talent and record, got beat by the New York Giants in the Super Bowl, partly something miraculous and ridiculous took place. Managing to win five of these eight games – all of which came to the end, and some of which required great escapes that Houdini would be proud of – is, in fact, dynastic. No, they don’t just roll over the opposition like the 1986 Bears or the Montana/Young Niners or the Jimmy Johnson Cowboys. Those sorts of games just aren’t going to happen very much any more in the modern NFL.

The point is that the margins here are really, really thin, and while we look to craft and construct narratives based upon final outcomes, Super Bowls are still one-off contests and small sample sizes. All games are, in fact, with the difference being that for this particular game, you have extra time to prepare and don’t have to focus on the long-term. This is the long-term. This is the end. You’d better have a Plan B in mind if things aren’t going well and, more importantly, not only be prepared to take risks but be committed to take risks.

Which is exactly what the Philadelphia Eagles did against New England in the Super Bowl on Sunday. Your first thought, when you see the Eagles going for it on 4th Down, and you see them pulling out a crazy razzle-dazzle trick play for a TD, is to say, “wow, the Eagles are being really aggressive in this game!” Your second thought, right after that, is to say, “why don’t teams always play like this?” Football is chess on grass. There are so many things that you can do, there are so many choices. Why play it safe? Why do what is expected? The Eagles didn’t just stash that crazy trick play away on page 600 of the playbook, either – they actually walked through it the night before the game in a hotel ballroom. They were going to run if they needed to. They were the underdog, after all, against the 5-time champion Patriots. They were going to take all the risks.

Which is actually a weird thing to say, because the risks they took on Sunday were, in retrospect, smart. This trick play – reverse and throwback from a backup tight end to QB Nick Foles – came late in the first half, with the Eagles up 15-12 on the Pats. You could kick the field goal here on 4th down to make it 18-12, but you’re then giving the ball back to the Patriots, most likely around the 25-yard line, ahead by only one score with time remaining on the clock, and Tom Brady has already shredded your defense for 250 yards. You could easily go into the locker room only up three, or maybe even behind 19-18. (Although, given how pathetic New England’s kicking game was on Sunday, you might have liked your chances.) You’re on the 1-yard line, so if you go for it and don’t make it, the Patriots have 99 yards of field in front of them and are likely to just run the clock out and be glad they’re down three points. So the bold play here – going for it – is also the right play. Go for it, score and you’re up 10 and the pressure is back on the other side. Brady may have been amassing zillions of yards, but so long as they have to chase the game, the Eagles have the advantage. So go for it, damn it! And going for it on 4th down in the 4th Quarter was the only right choice: the Eagles are down a point, they might not get the ball back if they punt, and if they turn it over on downs on their own 35-yard line or something, and New England goes in and scores, at least you get the ball back again.

But this is “radical” thinking in a league where far too many coaches can’t do the math and far too many of them fail to realize that you need to stop trying to establish the run and start trying to actually win the game. The reason for conservative play-calling, of course, is that if it doesn’t work, you look bad. But so what? LOSING LOOKS BAD! Had the situations been flipped, I think the Pats would have gone for it in both of those instances, because Belichick gives ZERO FUCKS about looking bad. He cares about winning football games, and amid all of the second-guessing afterwards, had it not worked out, he would have said, “we thought it was our best chance to win.”

Doug Pederson gave zero fucks as well. The Eagles were one of the most aggressive teams in the league during the season when it came to going for it on 4th down. And the Philadelphia Eagles had already embraced uncertainty and risk, because they’d been forced to turn to Plan B when QB Carson Wentz, who was likely to be the MVP, went down with a knee injury, and the Eagles had to turn to backup Nick Foles. The first few games after Wentz went down were, well, a mess. Even though they were the #1 seed in the NFC playoffs, the Eagles were still underdogs at home in their first two playoff games.

But there is stuff Nick Foles does well. Nick Foles went to the Pro Bowl when he was the Eagles QB the first time around. No one gets to a Pro Bowl in their career who doesn’t do stuff well. So during the bye week, which the Eagles earned for being the best team in the NFC, Doug Pederson and his staff went back and looked at the film and figured out what it was does Foles did well and adjusted the offense on the fly, adapting the passing game to create more play action and what they call run-pass options or “RPOs.” It was sort of murky in the first go-round, as the Eagles stumbled past the Falcons, but then the new offense kicked in against Minnesota, a 38:7 rout in which the Vikings – who had the best defense in the NFL – looked completely flummoxed. The Eagles were the best team in the NFL before Wentz got hurt, not just because of Wentz but because they have good players all over the field, and now, all of a sudden, here they are running all of these weird plays Chip Kelly drew up back when he was at Oregon – plays designed entirely to take advantage of speed mismatches in space – and now you’ve got big strong receivers running free all over the place, and more room for the backs to run, and they’re throwing it out in the flat to scat backs who can beat you to the corner. Foles can make all of those plays. Whereas the tendency is to play it safe and game manage with a backup QB, the Eagles went the other way: turn the disadvantage into the advantage, use the element of surprise, be hyper aggressive and, above all else, trust Foles to make the plays he’s capable of making.

And if Foles is making plays he’s capable of making, and doing what he can to cancel out – even a little – the enormous Brady advantage at QB, then guess what? The Eagles have better players than the Pats at almost every other position on the field. They have a great offensive line, they have more speed on defense and in the skill positions. I had taken the Eagles +4½ bet offered me by my Pats-lovin’ columnist buddy Piano because across the board, save the QB position, the Eagles were a better team. In the end, I wasn’t that surprised that the Eagles won.

I was, however, surprised at how they won. I would have expected the Eagles to win by making some big plays on the defensive side. Instead, they made exactly one of those, but one was enough, because the Patriots made none.

(Streeter Lecka/Getty Images)

It was a crazy game, an astonishing game with more total yards than any game in league history. It looked like some college game from the Big 12, some Oklahoma-Texas Tech game where they run up oodles of yards and “good defense” constitutes holding the other side to a field goal. Brady threw for 505 yards, often in massive chunks, but Foles threw for 373. I would never have thought that Foles would be going toe to toe, shot for shot against Brady and matching him. If anything, the Pats scored too quickly – it’s sort of hard not to if you’re moving in 30-yard bursts – because their defense couldn’t get off the field. The Pats defense was terrible: the Eagles scored eight times, including several long drives lasting more than seven minutes. In that sense, it reminded me of the Giants-Bills Super Bowl of 1991, where the Giants managed to hold the ball for 40 minutes – which is what they had to do, because the Buffalo offense were gaining 20 yards a minute, but the Bills just simply ran out of time. And on Sunday, there were the Pats launching the unsuccessful Hail Mary into the end zone with :09 left, out of time. The Eagles had done just enough to win.

But just enough is good enough, and I’m happy for my many, many good friends from the City of Brotherly Lose … I mean, uh, Brotherly Love … because Philadelphia has been an underratedly terrible sports town over the years. Philly has seen it all, when it comes to losing. The Phillies have lost more games than any team in the history of sports. The 76ers have managed to post the 2nd- and 3rd-worst seasons in NBA history. But then it goes the other way as well: since the Broad St. Bullies won a couple of Stanley Cups in the mid-1970s, the Flyers have lost in the Stanley Cup finals six straight times. In the heyday of 76ers basketball, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they managed only one title. Those Sixers teams were great. They really were truly great teams – but the 1980s Celtics and Lakers were simply better, and I have no idea how they managed to lose to the Blazers in 1977. That ’77 Sixers team was one of the weirdest, zaniest, funnest teams ever, and also one of the best. It sort of sucks they didn’t win a title.

And the Eagles, of course, had never won a Super Bowl before this past Sunday. In fact, there is no question that, prior to Sunday, they were the best franchise in the sport that hadn’t won one. It’s cyclical, of course, with ups and downs along the way,  and they’ve had a few down years like most everyone, but the Eagles have generally played at a high level for the past 40 years, losing several Super Bowls and a gaggle of NFC Championship games along the way. And that sort of consistency matters in the end. All you have to do is compare them with the 76ers, who tanked and lost on purpose for three years and less resembled a basketball team than an interpretive dance troupe. Sure, maybe all of that losing will result in enough talent to win an NBA title, but there is no guarantee of that, and in the meantime, 76ers fans had to put up with a shitty-ass product. Seriously, fuck the process. I take issue with any pundit in sports who is an advocate of tanking, because they usually are media people who don’t have to actually buy tickets to the games. Who wants to watch that crap? Anyone who thought Sam Hinkie’s Process wasn’t bullshit obviously didn’t have to pay to see it.

We’ve come to overvalue losing in creating this sports culture of “RINGZ.” Being good all the time matters. Being consistent matters. The Eagles have usually been pretty good, and what’s wrong with that, exactly? Winning is hard. It’s really, really hard. Anyone can lose. Losing doesn’t impress me. It’s good job security, but it doesn’t impress me.

Being good matters, in the end. The idea that being terrible is somehow what’s necessary in order to some day be good is complete folly, and always has been. I’ve always admired teams like the Patriots for being so good for so long. Being consistently good is impressive. And it’s cool that, for once, the Eagles finally figured out how to be great.

All hail the gooey cheese of bliss!

 And we’re the big winners in this household, because we had cheesesteaks for lunch on Sunday. I like to regionalize the cuisine on Super Bowl Sunday. I did po’boys for the Saints, salmon for the Seahawks, I even did clam chowder for the Pats back when they played the Packers in the mid-1990s. (No small feat, mind you. Try finding good clams in the mountains of New Mexico in the middle of winter.) But cheesesteaks? Oh, be still my foolish heart. Cheap beef, gooey cheese, a mountain of onions. One of life’s great guilty pleasures. So wrong, yet it feels so right.

Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Would you like to commiserate because your team sucks? Drop me a line! You can email me at inplaylose@gmail.com, and when we get enough questions and comments gathered up, I’ll do another Hate Mail edition of In Play Lose.

Job Security

I have no idea what Marcus Williams was doing here

THE LOSE is in New Orleans for MLK weekend, like I am at this time every year, and it was fun to be out and about, walking in the city on Sunday afternoon during the hometown side’s NFC playoff game against the Minnesota Vikings. People love the Saints here. They love them far more than they do the Pelicans, that’s for sure: we braved the unseasonably frosty conditions here in the Crescent City on Friday night and went over to Milk Shake Arena to watch the Birds play the Portland Trail Blazers – two pretty good teams, two playoff teams – and the building was basically half-empty. So there is indifference on the basketball front, but New Orleans was locked in and tuned in for the Saints. They were watching in the bars, in the fancy restaurants, even in the Jimmy John’s and the Domino’s Pizza franchises. You could tell what was going on in the game simply by hearing the collective cheers and groans filling the air periodically. I didn’t need to be watching the game. I could tell what was happening simply by listening.

So what was the reaction on the final play? I think the Times-Picayune summed it up quite nicely with their headline in the Monday morning edition:

But actually, I think the expletives were the secondary reaction, the first having been a state of stunned silence. I’d made my way back to the hotel, and the dining area was filled with both hotel guests and staffers alike – including one frenzied parking attendant who’d run in, hoot and holler with delight at the Saints’ growing fortune, run back outside and hurriedly park another SUV. The Saints were :10 away from completing an incredible comeback, rallying from down 17-0 to lead 24-23. The Vikings were out of timeouts, were on their own 39-yard line, and were pretty much out of options. They basically needed a miracle.

Which is what happened.

And as this play was unfolding, I kept thinking that there has to be a flag on the play. There has to be a penalty, an infraction, because this can’t possibly be happening! Nope, no flags. A 61-yard pass from Case Keenum to Stefon Diggs, on the final play of the game, and the Vikings win 29-24 to advance to the NFC Championship in Philadelphia. 29-24 to advance to the NFC Championship against the Iggles in Philadelphia. The Vikings may have gotten that miracle they needed, but one team’s miracle is another team’s mistake. And to call it a mistake by the Saints would be an understatement. Quite simply, it’s one of the worst plays by a defense in the history of the NFL.

Or, as we like to say here at In Play Lose, this game was job security.

Nope, still don’t know what Marcus Williams is doing. (photo by Hannah Foslien/Getty Images)

But before we kill the Saints for this, we need to show some love for the Vikings, who are a tortured franchise in a generally tortured sports city. The Vikings were losing all the Super Bowls long before the Buffalo Bills made it cool. They’ve not been to a Super Bowl in over 40 years – during which time, the most noteworthy thing they’ve done is make the Herschel Walker trade with the Cowboys, which is the worst trade in the history of the NFL. They are never all that bad, but rarely all that good, and when they have been good, they’ve found a way to screw all of it up, often in cataclysmic fashion. The 1998 Vikings were arguably one of the best teams in NFL history, going 15-1 and setting an NFL record for points scored, only to lose to the Falcons in OT in the playoffs, thanks in part to kicker Gary Anderson, who hadnt missed a kick all season, flubbing a field goal. Bad kicking is a long-running theme in Minnesota: more recently, they were the subject of a horror film called The Blair Walsh Project.

So the Vikings have a well-earned reputation for being chokers, and what will be lost in the aftermath of Sunday’s miraculous ending is just how hard they tried to choke this game away as well. What do you do when you have a 17-point halftime lead? Maybe not be throwing interceptions, or having punts blocked, or allowing Drew Brees to shred your defense. The Vikings were terrible in the second half in all phases of the game, and the Saints were primed to steal one. It was all set up for yet another colossal Minnesota failure, and you can understand why it is that the Vikings fans might feel like they are cursed.

Which is sort of how the New Orleans Saints felt, in fact, before they won the Super Bowl in 2010, before which they were a joke of a franchise whose most memorable contribution to NFL lore was its fans donning “New Orleans Aints” paper bags over their heads during a 1-15 season. The Saints’ path that year went through the Vikings, in fact – who blew their chance to win the NFC Championship by getting penalized for having 12 men on the field with :19 left and getting pushed out of FG range, and the Saints went on to win in OT. When you feel like you’re cursed, a lot of time what breaks the curse is a break here and there, a fortunate bounce here and there. All sports are games of inches – for example, it was the length of Richard Sherman’s fingers which finally broke the Seahawks jinx – and when you come out the other side with a win and a breakthrough, after so much frustration, you can understand taking on the mindset that you are a “team of destiny.” And now it’s all lined up for the Vikings, of course: they play the Eagles this coming weekend, who are missing their starting QB, and if they win that, they’ll become the first team in history to play the Super Bowl on their home field. Team of destiny, anyone?

Now, The Lose doesn’t believe in destiny – but The Lose suggests you not poo-poo the notion of belief. Confidence is everything, and so much of excelled performance comes from the simple notion of believing that you can, in fact, succeed. This is why so many guys will wildly outperform expectations, often for prolonged periods of time. It may be a one-off or a fluke, and come the following season, they’re not as good any more, but in the moment, the Vikings probably believe they have fate on their side. Fate won’t win the game for you – that comes down to preparation and execution – but fate, and faith in fate, can sometimes seemingly will you to wins.

But as I said before, one team’s miracle is another team’s mess, and the Saints made one of the most preposterous messes I’ve ever seen on a football field on Sunday night. Let’s keep in mind the situation here: there are :10 left, the Vikings have no timeouts, and they are on their own 39-yard-line, and they can’t stop the clock if they are tackled in bounds. If you’re the Vikings, you have some options here, all of them bad. You can fling up a Hail Mary and hope for either a lucky bounce of the ball or maybe a pass interference call. You can try some sort of a hook-and-ladder play, or try to lateral it and rugby style your way down the field. About the best bad option is a throw to the sideline and having the receiver somehow get out of bounds, as the Vikings need about 25 yards in order to get into reasonable field goal range.

But the Saints are ready for that, as they’ve got defensive backs stacked two-deep along the sidelines, intent on funneling the Vikings to the middle of the field. Indeed, Keenum’s throw to Diggs achieves basically none of the necessary objectives for Minnesota. It’s a deep throw, which takes too much time. It’s not close enough to the sidelines for Diggs to get out of bounds. There is another Vikings receiver in the area, which you rarely see, and which makes me wonder if they had some sort of a miracle lateral idea in mind. As far as last-ditch, last-second plays go, it’s not even a good one from the Vikings, and all Saints safety Marcus Williams has to do is grab Diggs and tackle him and the game is over.

And he didn’t tackle him. What the actual fuck just happened?

It seemed as if Williams was of two minds on this play. He could have tried to make a play on the ball, but was wary of the possibility of a pass interference penalty. Instead, he tried to go low and completely whiffed on hitting Diggs, instead taking out one of his own guys in the process. The simple play here was the answer: let Diggs catch the ball and just grab him, hold onto him and the game is over. He went for a big hit instead and he got it all wrong.

It’s a truly terrible play, as bad a defensive play as I’ve ever seen in the NFL. The Mile High Miracle of 2012 immediately sprang to mind, of course, when the Broncos somehow contrived to allow a 70-yd TD pass in the final minute against the Ravens. But even in that case, the long bomb over the top is one of any number of possible outcomes. Part of why the Ravens were successful is that, given the circumstance, the Broncos still couldn’t expect the long bomb, as the Ravens had other things they could run. But in this case, the Vikings have no good options at all, the Saints can easily account for whatever the Vikings may try, and it all goes according to plan … except for the fact that the plan involved actually tackling the guy.

And I feel bad for Williams, a rookie who had a great season and whose interception in the 3rd Quarter had a lot to do with the Saints being ahead in the first place. These sorts of  fatal, individual errors can come to define your career. (Mention the name Kyle Williams to any 49ers fan and they will start to seethe before your eyes.) When you commit such a dramatic, colossal gaffe, with little or no recourse, it magnifies the mistake, of course, even though it shouldn’t. Every play leads to the next one, and in a game of several hundred plays there are hundreds and hundreds of mistakes. The Saints were in this position to win because Minnesota had messed up all over the place in the second half – but the Saints were forced to rally because, in the first half, they were terrible on both sides of the ball and got completely dominated. But even so, the last mistake is always the worst mistake.

2018 has been a good year for The Lose so far. Georgia coughed up a 2-TD lead in the BCS championship, the Chefs somehow blew an 18-point halftime lead against a meh Tennessee Titans team, and now the Saints safety goes full-on Toro! Toro! Ole! in the dying seconds in Minneapolis. I suspect I’m going to be busy this year.

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.

Ring Out Your Dead

Welcome to Jacksonville. Good luck. You’re going to need it.

ONE of the biggest days of the year in Lose occurs the day after the NFL regular season ends, when teams cut bait, cut their losses and clean house. We’re up to six head coaching vacancies already, which is almost a third of the league. Three coaches had already gotten axed during the regular season – Gus Bradley in Jacksonville, Jeff Fisher in Los Angeles, and Rex Ryan with the Buffalo Bills, who promptly showed their general enthusiasm for this season by getting waxed by the Jets in a loss that included quite possibly the dumbest play we’ll see all of 2017. You can add San Diego’s Mike McCoy to the list, as well as Chip Kelley in San Francisco, who was fired along with GM Trent Baalke in the classic bumbling 49ers fashion whereby they go about leaking it to the media before ever talking to anyone whose about to lose his job.

The sixth vacancy is in Denver, where Gary Kubiak is stepping away for personal reasons, and there are likely to be more: Sean Payton may be a hotter commodity outside of New Orleans than within, and may try to finagle out of his contract if the Saints don’t can him first; there are rumblings of discontent with Chuck Pagano in Indianapolis; the Potatoes sure look like they have quit on Jay Gruden in Washington, given how poorly they played in a must-win game against a Giants team with nothing to play for and their minds somewhere off the Florida Coast; and who the hell knows what the Jets are going to do?

J-E-T-S  MESS MESS MESS!

So if you’re an aspiring NFL head coach, it’s time to get that résumé in order – or, if you’re an ex-coach, it’s time to go into spin control mode and try to position yourself to get another gig. And welcome to the mess, because wherever you go, it’s likely to be one.

Being a head coach in the NFL has to be one of the worst jobs imaginable. Your life’s work is judged in the public eye on a weekly basis in black and in white: a loss is a loss, and the results speak for themselves. You’ve got a huge base of customers – not just fans, mind you, but paying customers who but their asses in seats eight times a season – who will second-guess everything you do, win or lose. You’ve got rich fat cat bosses who can’t help but meddle and interfere with what you’re trying to do. You’ve got GMs and personnel guys over your head whose job it is to provide you with the talent necessary to be successful, and quite possibly have a far different opinion of what constitutes talent than you do, and then you have 53 players that you’re responsible for, all of whom think, to some degree or another, that you’re a tool. It’s perhaps because the job is so bad in the first place that there are so few people who seem to be any good at it.

I mean, let’s be honest here, who out there in the NFL who still has a head coaching job is someone that all of us armchair QBs would actually argue is “good” at his job? I passed this question along to Scott Pianowski, The Official NFL Guru of In Play Lose, since he follows the league a whole lot closer than I do and, from my distant and somewhat detached vantage point, it sure as hell seems like a lot of these guys don’t know what they’re doing.

We tried to compile a list of NFL head coaches that we like and this what we came up with: Mike Tomlin in Pittsburgh and John Harbaugh in Baltimore immediately came to mind. I think Bruce Arians has done pretty well in Arizona while Scott suggested Andy Reid, who gets pilloried every time he mismanages the game clock but has successfully won both with the Iggles and the Chefs. We both think Adam Gase and Dan Quinn have shown some good things in Miami and Atlanta, respectively. And then it gets a little murky. Marvin Lewis? Well, Cincinnati was a joke before he got there, and now they’re merely disappointing. Then there are a whole bunch of guys – Mike McCarthy in Green Bay, Jack Del Rio in Oakland, Ron Rivera in Carolina – where it’s hard to discern if it’s a case of good coaching or simply really good QB play. And the rest? Meh.

But to me, at least, Bill Belichick and Pete Carroll are on an entirely different level – and Belichick and Carroll are interesting test cases for what constitutes great coaching in the NFL.

Belichick is the ultimate shape-shifter, his schemes constantly adapting depending upon personnel and the ways that the NFL is trending. If you look over his tenure at New England, you’ll notice just how frequently he adapts, particularly on the offensive end: they’ll emphasis power running one year, scat back receivers in the slots the next, and then they might go with two big tight ends and a centralized passing game after that. He’s always zigging where people are zagging, coming up with new looks and wrinkles on the offensive end. He is always looking for players with high football IQs who can be versatile, able to transfer over to multiple positions to fill whatever need arises.

Carroll, meanwhile, has built a near dynast in Seattle by emphasizing defense and physicality while imposing the tenor and the tempo of the game upon its opponents. The Seahawks have gone about redefining the sorts of physical specs you want in players. They want big corners, swift linebackers, and linemen who are high-energy players that he can constantly rotate and keep fresh. Carroll’s approach emphasizes having position coaches on his staff who are excellent teachers, believing first and foremost that skills and techniques can be taught. As such, the Seahawks have constantly been able to restock their talent base. It can look a bit ugly on the field at times, as young players are obviously engaged in some intense on-the-job training, but eventually they figure it out and the Seahawks go back to whacking people.

Keep in mind, both the Pats and the Seahawks are perpetually drafting in the 20s, if not the 30s. Literally every team in the league has a better shot of landing players through the draft, and yet the Pats and Seahawks keep drafting in the 20s and the 30s year after year because they keep winning all of the time. And we should also keep in mind that Belichick and Carroll both got fired from their first head coaching jobs. Carroll got fired twice, in fact – in 1994 after a 6-10 season with the Jets, and then in 1999 after three seasons coaching the Patriots, where he was replaced by … Belichick, who’d failed miserably in Cleveland, winning only a single playoff game and antagonizing the entire Browns fan base in the process with his impromptu cutting of starting QB and local hero Bernie Kosar. I mentioned previously that I attended the first post-Kosar Browns game, which was against the Seahawks at the Giant Concrete Mushroom Fungus in Seattle, and it was one of the worst football games I’ve ever seen. At no point did it seem like either the Browns or Belichick knew what they was doing. So as you can see, this isn’t an exact science by any means. The guys who are clearly the best also screwed up a lot and, after failing at previous jobs, there was naturally a bit of skepticism in Boston and Seattle about being hired to their present job.

But if you go back to that list we put forth above – which, admittedly, we sort of just threw together off the top of our heads – that’s not a lot of guys. That’s far fewer guys then there are jobs. In the NFL, just like any other business, it appears to be hard to get good help these days.

But like I said at the beginning, this is also one of the worst jobs imaginable. Why would you want this job? Sure, being great at coaching requires enormous self-confidence, just like being great at anything else, and that hubris might lead you to think you could take over coaching a franchise like the Jacksonville Jaguars – which has been, and continues to be, one of the worst ideas for a franchise off all time, never mind one that exists – and make them successful. I mean, look at these jobs that are available at the moment. Other than the Denver gig, which is a no-brainer, and maybe the Indianapolis gig if it comes open, the rest of them are really bad jobs! Who wants to work for Jed York in San Francisco after he’s one-and-doned head coaches in consecutive seasons? Who wants to work for Stan Kroenke? Or you can report directly to this guy in Buffalo. But in the end, people take the gigs, simply because there are only 32 of them. A bad job that’s a dead end road to nowhere somehow seems like a better option than not taking a job at all.

Coaches are hired to be fired, in the end. Even good ones can wear out their welcome and grow stale over time, like Tom Coughlin did with the Giants. And while both the Pats and the Hawks have spent quite a while trying to develop an organizational philosophy, from top to bottom, if you take a guy out of that system and plunk him in a head gig elsewhere and he doesn’t necessary flourish: witness the endless number of failed head coaches plucked from Belichick’s staff over the years, and ex-Jag coach Bradley worked under Carroll in Seattle, which has become the en vogue team to raid for coaching talent in recent years. And, of course, the truth is that most of the time, teams are bad because their players are bad. You can make bad players better, but it’s hard to make them good – and it’s often the guys making this very hire, the GMs, who are responsible for the dire state of the talent base and are firing coaches in order to save their own skin. You have to get this hire right, lest you end up showing up in this corner of cyberspace a year or two from now.

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.

Please Keep Punting

Two against five. What could possibly go wrong?

KEVIN KELLEY has achieved underground celebrity and cult status in the football world for his unorthodox strategic approach. Kelley is the head coach at Pulaski Academy in Pulaski, Arkansas, where he has won multiple state championships against much bigger schools and done so by turning the game of football into a math problem. He onside kicks after nearly every touchdown, has periodically resorted to 11-man blitzes on defense, is currently trying to work more rugby-style laterals downfield into the game, and, most famously, his teams rarely, if ever, punt. He’s punted something like four times in the last three years. He will almost always go for it for 4th Down, no matter where he is on the field. All of this is done with the numbers on his side. Statistically speaking, you’re actually better off not punting most of the time. (Read the book Scorecasting for a nice explanation of how it works.)

The Lose, however, must take a stand here and say that what we need is more punting in football, and more activity out of punt formations, because it we eliminate punting, what on earth am I ever going to talk about?

Seriously, I’ve seen more dumb stuff involving the punting game in the first two months of football season than ever before. Texas got the ball rolling with this howler which cost them a game, and then W.S.U. decided to join in the fun and turn a potential upset of Cal into a come from ahead loss in the process. Then came one of the most confounding endings to a football game I’ve ever seen this past weekend, when Michigan’s punter dropped the snap on what turned out to be the last play of the game, the ball recovered and returned for the winning score by Michigan State. In terms of lunatic endings to college football games, only The Play and Team of Destiny vs. Team of Dynasty can probably top it. I made a bold statement on facebook later on Saturday evening that, while The Worst Play of The Year Award had already been determined, Michigan had done well to firmly encamp themselves in the second spot.

A spot which Michigan held until Sunday night, when the Indianapolis Colts attempted what has to be the single-worst conceived play in the history of the NFL. Bill Barnwell from Grantland compiled a collection of the worst plays in NFL history earlier this year, but he’s going to have to reshuffle the order and make room for this one near the top.

What the actual fuck was that?

Coach head coach Chuck Pagano took the blame for this after the game, saying that his players didn’t execute the play correctly and that there was some miscommunication. For the life of me, I can’t imagine what would have happened any differently if they’d actually executed this play correctly. And it’s been funny to read some media outlets this morning talking about how the Patriots were brilliantly prepared and brilliantly reacted to this play. (Contrary to popular narrative among New England fans, there are plenty of Patriots apologists in the media.) What, it was somehow brilliant to look at two guys lining up 20 yards from the rest of their teammates and have three guys stand over them? This game already had the added absurdity of the Patriots vowing revenge, since it was the Colts who narced on Tom Brady and triggered the Deflategate melodrama, thus creating a situation where a team was avowing to avenge a 45-7 victory. Go figure.

There is no legitimate justification for this play. None. Down and distance people, down and distance – it’s 4th and 3 and you’re on your own 37, down six points with a minute left in the third quarter. What is the desired outcome here? The Pats jump offsides? How would that happen, when everyone can see the ball so clearly in wide open space? The Pats get stuck with 12 men on the field? Why would that happen, when they didn’t have 12 men on the field before you swung the gate and lined up 9 guys on the right? OK, so the Pats call the Colts’ bluff by brilliantly doing nothing at all, so now what to the Colts do? Take a timeout? You need to save those, because this is a close game. Take a 5-yard penalty for delay of game? That’s dumb, too. You’re giving up field position and wasting time in a game that you are losing! And never mind the fact that the Colts line up incorrectly, and thus have more guys offsides on a play from scrimmage than has probably ever happened before in NFL history. Everything about this play is asinine.

Grateful to the Colts for having lost their minds, the Patriots promptly took this gift – taking possession at the Indy 37 – drove in and scored what proved to be the decisive score in the game, and thus a potentially winnable game for the Colts promptly went by the wayside. That was the single-dumbest thing I ever seen attempted on an NFL field. The Colts brass need to rip that page out of the playbook, stand on the steps of the Indiana state capitol building and publicly set it ablaze.

I’ve sworn off watching football, but I feel as if football is trying to win me back by simply getting stupider than ever, and thus more compelling to The Lose. Along with all of the punting miscues, I’ve seen Texas miss an extra point to lose a game, Kansas fumble a snap when attempting to spike the ball and Rutgers spiking the ball on 4th down. It’s like teams are trying to invent new ways to lose, since the old ones are apparently stale and passé. Whatever it is you guys are doing, just keep punting, or threatening to punt, anyway. Please. Keep punting. It’s job security for me.

The Thrill is Gone

I’M NO longer interested in the NFL, the NCAA, or pretty much any other variant of American football. I have been meaning to write a post about the following subject for a while now, but first, I wanted to see for myself just how disenchanted I had become. This past weekend marked the opening salvo of the NFL season and, other than a snippet here in an evening newscast or crossing an online stream, I watched none of it.

I did flip through a few of the highlights from the implausible game on Saturday between The Good Guys and Rutgers, since bad football is high comic art and there are few purveyors of bad football who have done it better (worse?) over the years than Washington State and Rutgers. Sure enough, the game followed a predictably wobbly script: Rutgers committing a boatload of turnovers and stymying their own potentially game-winning drive by committing 30 yards of penalties on three successive plays; WSU giving up TDs on a kickoff return and punt return to the same guy in the same quarter, the latter coming with 90 seconds left to give Rutgers the lead; the Scarlet Knights then playing no defense whatsoever, allowing WSU to drive 90 yards in a minute, a drive which included Rutgers jumping offside on 4th down, affording the Cougars another opportunity, and a winning TD pass by the Cougars with :13 left on what was essentially a free play, as Rutgers had about 13 men on the field. It was all an utter shambles, and the Cougars’ march through the mess will continue this coming weekend against Wyoming, who is so bad that they’ve lost home games to North Dakota and Eastern Michigan, who hadn’t won a non-conference away game in 27 years. More comedy is likely to ensue, and I may check the boxes out of morbid curiosity from time to time, but I’m not going to watch it.

In the abstract, bad football is hilarious and in the abstract, the game itself is remarkable. It’s a chess match on grass, requiring 11 players to work as one in intricate detail. It’s the most complex game we have ever created. But there is an inherent intellectual dishonesty to it all, as you have to suspend your disbelief, viewing the players as chess pieces rather than actual human beings. There have been numerous portrayals of live action chess in cinema and literature (Harry Potter immediately coming to mind), the act of Knight taking Bishop being a violent battle to the death. It’s something of an alarming image, in fact, since we think of chess as a game that is purely about intellect. Seeing the actions of the pieces physically rendered is something of a shock to the system – and yet, we watch that very thing happen on a football field every week, as players crash into and collide with one another hundreds of times over, yet somehow, we’re immune to the violence.

But I just cannot be immune to the violence any longer, and I’m not alone. What follows is a piece written by the Good Rev. Jeremy Cahnmann, the Official Officiant of In Play Lose, speaking of his disenchantment with the game of football. I am reprinting this here with his permission:

---

So I don’t want to get too preachy … but you may have noticed my profile picture has changed. The two men in my profile picture were two men who gave me a lot of enjoyment growing up.
On top is Dave Duerson, who was my favorite player on the 1985 Bears. (The greatest team ever in any sport – just an FYI.) On bottom is Junior Seau, the Hall of Fame linebacker who was just awesome.
Today, neither of those men is alive. Both men took their own lives. I saw a lot of people talking about Suicide Prevention Day, which happens on September 10th every year. I find it ironic that it often coincides with the start of football season.
I grew up loving football, I dreamed of playing it, I watched every Sunday. I thought the day after the Super Bowl should be a national holiday. I was always excited when my birthday (January 25th) fell on Super Bowl Sunday. I was pretty bummed when the Super Bowl started being in February, as I knew that meant no more Super Bowl Birthdays. In college and beyond, various football jerseys made up much of my wardrobe. Drew Bledsoe, Kurt Warner, Warrick Dunn, Brian Urlacher, etc. etc. etc. When I got my first apartment, the first thing I did was buy a big screen TV (it was all of 36” – that was a big screen then and cost $1000), and I made sure I got DirectTV so I could get the Sunday Ticket so every week I could invite the guys over to BBQ and watch football. I always ran my office football pool and Super Bowl squares and was often doing 2-3 fantasy football leagues.
I say all this because I want you to know how much I LOVED FOOTBALL and LOVED THE NFL. Many who know me, know that I no longer watch or even follow the NFL. The game disgusts me.
When Dave Duerson killed himself it made me look long and hard at the game I Loved. Was it worth it? I had heard of players having health issues (Mike Webster and others), I knew some suffered from dementia and other illnesses but I never wanted to admit that playing football was the culprit. When Dave Duerson took his own life, and shot himself so that his brain could be preserved and studied, it made me think what part did football play in his death.
After Duerson’s death, I tried watching football but it wasn’t the same. Then, the next year Junior Seau took his life and that was it, I couldn’t do it anymore. In the last 6 years at least 6 players (former players) have committed suicide and countless others have suffered head trauma, and who knows how many former players suffer with dementia and other brain related injuries due to the abuse their bodies took? The truth is, we will never know.
Football is a violent game. When you ask people to hurl their bodies at one another, it is only logical that injuries will happen. Yes, NFL players get paid handsomely, but is it worth the damages they do to their bodies? Players are bigger and stronger these days, and the game has grown increasingly violent because of that. I love sports, I love teamwork, I love the idea of a group of people working towards one goal, but I no longer love football.
America has an obsession with football. I get that, as I was once obsessed. I know most of you just want to watch the games, play in your football pools and survivor pools and set your fantasy lineups. I don’t expect many people to join me in boycotting football, but when you watch the games, think about the Dave Duersons and Junior Seaus of the world. If you have kids, think long and hard before letting them play football. At a young age, the hits won’t be as vicious, but the risk of serious injury is still there.
I won’t be watching any college games or NFL games this year. I haven't watched a game since Super Bowl XLVI. (That was the 2nd Giants/Pats game.) I promise to not preach every week about this, but I thought I would share it this week, as the NFL season has now officially kicked off.
So enjoy your games. I’ll be watching baseball and waiting for the NBA season to tip-off.

---

I find myself thinking in much the same ways, and my discontent from the game has been slowly growing for much of the past seven years or so – interestingly enough, through extrapolating what it really means for a team to be ‘bad’ at the game of football. It was seven years ago that Washington State fielded one of the least competitive football teams that I have ever seen. They were the first team in NCAA history to give up more than 60 points in a game four times, and they also gave up 59 and 58, for good measure. One particularly atrocious game was a 69:0 loss at home to USC – and amazingly, the score was merciful. USC had a 41-0 lead towards the end of the first half and the ball on the WSU 10 yard line – and the Trojans took a knee and ran out the half. They then did nothing more than run the same play over and over in the second half, a routine handoff to the 2nd-string and 3rd-string tailbacks, who each racked up 100+ yards, anyway, as the Trojans scored four more touchdowns in what amounted to a glorified scrimmage. USC’s coach at the time, Pete Carroll, did this because he realized that he was up against a team who was only playing the game because they had to, since the game was on the schedule, and that WSU was doing little more than trying to avoid getting people hurt – because a large reason why WSU was so bad was that so many players had already succumbed to injuries that year. Season-ending injuries and, in the case of their starting QB, a career-ending spinal injury. Nasty injuries, all of them – back injuries, torn up knees, dislocated shoulders. Horrible stuff.

And for what? What was being gained by breaking your body for the worst football team in America? (Actually, that’s not true. The Cougars beat Washington that season, who were 0-12. The Huskies were worse. LOL.) Is that really worth it? I mean, losing gets funnier over time, of course, and anyone who endured that death march of a season in Pullman will have a lifetime of good stories to tell. And being a college athlete, in fact, does afford you the opportunity to get an education (which far more athletes take advantage of than narratives in the media would indicate), but was busting yourself up, in what was ultimately such a failed endeavour, really worth it? But, when you get right down to it, is busting yourself up for the purposes of winning championships worth it, either? I mean, the long-term effects of the injuries sustained playing football seem to be so devastating that you wonder, in this day and age, given what we’ve come to understand, why any parent would willingly let their son play this game. (Indeed, there was a report of a death recently during a high school game in Louisiana.)

And to be clear here, there are no safe sports. I’ve written at length about this before. If you play a sport at any sort of high level, you’re going to get hurt. I have a dead right ankle from playing basketball. My good buddy phonerz has had two knee surgeries from playing ultimate. My friend Laura, who’s my age and who used to be a dancer, has a bad back, bad knees, and has already had a hip replaced. Athletics mess you up, plain and simple. And yet, it’s easy to intellectualize your way out of this realization, of course. You can play basketball a thousand times with nothing happening, but then maybe there’s that one play in that one game where it goes wrong. Once is all it takes and once is all you need. What’s far more damning about football is the extent to which the NFL, and the NCAA to somewhat of a lesser extent, have gone about attempting to conceal all of the evidence suggesting the sort of negative long-term effects from playing football. Indeed, the league is going to be employing a fleet of high-priced attorneys to fight off all of the lawsuits related to the subject for decades to come.

This article published in Sports Illustrated earlier this summer about Chris Borland, a promising rookie linebacker for the San Francisco 49ers who walked away from the game after a season in the NFL, is shocking simply in his description of the extent to which he and his teammates at the University of Wisconsin went to play, and the sorts of horrid injury troubles they were facing. It’s really disturbing. And in that article, Borland echoes a sentiment predominant in A Few Seconds of Panic, the in-depth look at the NFL by Friend of the Lose Stefan Fatsis. One of the most surprising things about that book, which focuses on Fatsis’ training to become a placekicker with the Denver Broncos, is just how seemingly indifferent the players are to the game that they’re actually playing. So few of them, in fact, seem to even like what they are doing. The best quote of the book comes from WR Charlie Adams about training camp coming to an end. “Actually, the season kinda sucks, too.” To them it’s just a job after a while. I don’t think many of them actually like playing football, but they are professional athletes, who are the most competitive people on the planet. What they do like is winning. There is a big difference.

I was writing a column here the other day for an auto racing magazine, concerning the horrible accident which happened recently at Pocono International Speedway during an IndyCar race which claimed the life of driver Justin Wilson. It was a terrible tragedy, and any time something like this happens in racing there are calls to “take action” to make the sport safer. But the fact of the matter is that the sport is, truthfully, about as safe as it’s ever been, and the accident which claimed Wilson’s life – another car crashed in front of Wilson, and he was struck by the bouncing debris on the track – was something of a fluke. Now, of course, IndyCar and NASCAR and Formula One should always be looking for ways to make their sport safer, if for no other reason than the advancements they make in auto racing safety are often then passed on to a similarly dangerous activity, which is the act of actually driving a car at all. I mean think about it: you’re placing your body inside a metal cage powered by a volatile explosive and hurtling at a high rate of speed. What could possibly be wrong with that? Accidents will happen from time to time in auto racing. You simply cannot account for every variable.

Some commentators have suggested that auto racing, as a sport, threatens to lose its popularity every time a fatal accident occurs – and, worldwide, it’s one of the most popular sports of them all – but if that were really true, we’d have lost interest in it ages ago. Centuries ago, even. As I’ve mentioned before, the most popular sport in ancient Rome was chariot racing, which often drew 250,000 to the Circus Maximus on a weekend afternoon. A large part of the strategy of chariot racing was having your back marker team members attempting to force the opposing chariots to crash into the columns in the center of the track – which generally resulted in gnarly injuries, if not death to both humans and equines alike. The Romans ate that shit up, and we’ve been eating that sort of thing up for centuries. We love it when people push the envelope. We love it when they take risks and put themselves in jeopardy. We, as a species, love to watch and, even more importantly, we love to gamble on it. In this day and age, Americans wager billions of dollars on football every year, just as the wealthy Romans gathering at the Circus Maximus would wager outlandish sums on the chariots, and just as the Aztec chiefs in Central America would wager entire kingdoms on the outcome of matches in their primitive form of soccer. Now, whether we should be doing this is another question entirely. The more sordid and violent the contest, the more compulsion we seem to feel to personalize the outcome, while still depersonalizing the game and detaching from the violence as much as possible.

Humans, as a species, have always loved conflict and combat and competition – so long as it’s someone else who’s doing it and we can watch from the sidelines. The fascination with bloodsports goes also back centuries. (We think of football players as gladiators on the gridiron for a reason.) For some reason, we as a species just love watching people beat each other up. (Sugar Ray Leonard once said he couldn’t believe so many people would pay so much to watch two guys in their underwear beat the hell out of each other in a hotel parking lot.) Interest in boxing began to wane finally after about 2,000 years, but not because of being aghast at the violence. No, it began to wane because spectators got sick of all of the accompanying corruption – which always seems to go hand in hand with anything that is both extremely violent and potentially extremely profitable. But what do we have now? Instead, we have MMA, which is basically human cockfighting. That sport is absolutely frightening. Instead of getting rid of sanctioned violence in the name of sport, we’ve simply come up with one even more violent than before.

And I mention all of that historical stuff because football in America isn’t going away. It’s a deep cultural institution in much of this country. We’ve woven it into our educational institutions to the point where the Homecoming game and the tailgate are inherent aspects of the educational experience. It’s been woven into our psyche to the point where we have to make an active choice to disdain it.

What’s baffling to me about football is that there is, in fact, a lot of things you can do to actually make it a safer game. The obvious parallels can be drawn to rugby, a rough-and-tumble game of full contact and yet one which is considerably ‘safer’ even though players wear no helmets and no pads. Quite obviously, the reasoning for this is that, as a rugby player, you are perpetually behaving in a self-protective fashion. Since your head is exposed, you never make a tackle where you lead with your head, and you’re taught from the moment you start playing to never, ever do that. So much of football coaching is the preaching of sacrificing oneself for the betterment of the team, this militaristic sort of jingo which really doesn’t make much sense, if you think about it – after all, it seems like the best way to help your team on the field is to figure out how to stay on the field. Doing things which would actually prevent injuries seems the smartest course. But the entire game of football needs to be retaught for that to happen. As such, it’s a generation of players away from ever truly being ‘safer,’ if we even want it to be safer in the first place. In the end, I’m not entirely convinced that we do.

About the only reason I’ve even been as interested of late in football as I have been is that the Seattle Seahawks, whom I grew up watching fail in every way possible, have suddenly risen to the level of being a Super Bowl champion. Winning is awesome, and everyone in the Pacific Northwest has endured far too much losing over the course of their sporting lifetimes. But not even that is holding my interest any more. I guess I’ve just reached a point where I can no longer detach myself from the consequences of the actions on the field. As someone who endures the after effects 20+ years on from serious injuries which occurred while I played a sport, seeing the routine sorts of injury reports that come out of the NFL – torn ACLs, broken collar bones, broken hands, broken wrists, etc. – just sort of makes me shudder for the players’ futures. And it’s all of the other unreported injuries that are even more alarming, the various grades of concussions that go unreported, that go undiagnosed over the course of a game. You’d have to be a fool to think that so much blunt trauma wouldn’t ultimately have long term consequences. (And I haven’t even gotten into the culture surrounding football, which I find, at turns, baffling and revolting and perverted, but we can save that for another post.)

I just cannot bring myself to watch it any more. I like baseball too much. I am in love with basketball again. My beloved Canaries from Norwich City are back in the EPL. I am with my buddy Jeremy on this one. I’ve fallen out of love with football, and just cannot bring myself to be that interested any more. Oh, I’ll still pay attention, if only because it’s a source of excellent material for this blog. (The New York Giants loss to Dallas on Sunday night was about as stupid as they come.) But the interest has faded for me. The thrill is gone.

And one of the things I’m going to start doing more of here at In Play Lose is providing a proper musical soundtrack to these posts. To that end, I give you B.B. King, who is still my favorite interview of all time, and who I would love to just sit and listen to as he played for me one more time: