Category: On Sport

(Every year now, social media around the 716 lights up on the anniversary of the Bills-Oilers wildcard playoff game in January 1993, almost always simply called “The Comeback Game”. I wrote these thoughts a couple years ago when that record comeback was finally exceeded. I’ve been thinking a lot, more recently, about the degree to which numbers have taken over sport discourse in this country, and some of these thoughts might be pertinent to the current “race” for the NFL MVP award.)

From The West Wing, Season Three, “Stirred”:

VICE-PRESIDENT HOYNES: I heard you had Caps tickets.

SAM: Yes, sir.

HOYNES: How was the game?

SAM: Not very good.

HOYNES: Have you ever seen a good hockey game?

SAM: No.

HOYNES: Me neither. I love sports, I just can’t get next to hockey. See, I think Americans like to savor situations: One down, bottom of the ninth, one run game, first and third, left handed batter, right hand reliever, infield at double play depth, here’s the pitch. But scoring in hockey seems to come out of nowhere! The play-by-play guy is always shocked. “LePeiter passes to Huckenchuck who skates past the blue line. Huckenchuck, of course, was traded from Winnipeg for a case of Labatts after sitting out last season with–Oh my God, he scores!”

A warning for those who don’t care about football: Football blathering ahead!

In the Wild-Card weekend following the 1992 NFL season, the Buffalo Bills famously fell behind by 32 points, 35-3, to the Houston Oilers before coming back to eventually win the game in overtime, 41-38. The comeback was the greatest in NFL history…until just a few weeks ago, when the Minnesota Vikings fell behind 33-0 to the Indianapolis Colts before coming back to win, 39-36. So the Vikings now hold the record for the greatest NFL comeback of all time.

But…do they?

Well, obviously in one very key sense, yes, they do. The numbers don’t lie: a 33-point deficit is greater than a 32-point deficit. And much of the “debate” that followed as to whether this was really the greatest comeback of all time centered on Buffalo fans who just don’t want what’s probably their franchise’s greatest singular on-field accomplishment erased. That’s the problem with records like that: every record can be erased, or pushed to second place, eventually. Championships are forever, but records are transitory, and a record that stands for 30 years before being pushed to second place is still the second-place record. So yeah, I get it.

But…that’s a pretty starkly numerical way of looking at things, isn’t it?

You can’t escape numbers in sports. Numbers are bound up in sports. They are inescapable…probably because numbers are inescapable in life, but really, numbers are sometimes everything in sports. Tom Brady’s 7 Super Bowl rings, Nolan Ryan’s 7 no-hitters. Ted Williams, last guy to hit .400. The idea then shapes out that numbers, more than anything else, tell us everything about what happens on the field. I remember quoting Fox Mulder from The X-Files a while back, talking about how he can look up a fifty-year-old box score in a yellowing newspaper and know exactly what happened on the field that day, all because of the numbers captured in that box score.

But…can he?

I mean, he can, to a certain degree. But the numbers don’t tell everything.

You can’t look at a box score and tell how blue the sky was that day, or what it smelled like in the park because maybe the breeze was coming from the lake or the industrial park the other way (in Buffalo, with the cereal plants downtown, it often smells of Cheerios). A box score won’t tell you how scuffed up the first baseman’s jersey is after several close plays, or how the catcher is still trying to work off the gimpy ankle from that play at the plate last Tuesday night. The box score won’t tell you the crowd’s mood: Are they giddy and jubilant, or are they kind of grumblingly negative because the team’s having a rough season and they’re sarcastically cheering the guy hitting .197 who just managed to leg out a weak grounder safely to first?

The box score won’t tell you if the players are attacking an early season game with vigor, or if they are visibly just playing out the last few weeks of the schedule, mired in fifth place and just wanting nothing more than to go home and rest for about a month. The box score will tell you that a particular player homered in the sixth, but it won’t tell you that he was on a hot streak and he came up against a tiring pitcher who probably should have already been pulled and who had of late been surrendering homers to right-handed hitters at a surprising rate for a guy who, up to a few weeks before, had been almost unhittable.

Numbers are great and important and useful…but they are also a flattening force, a force that tends to flatten out story. A baseball player who collects more than 3000 career hits is almost guaranteed a spot in the Hall of Fame…but is that all that player does? All I really know about Robin Yount is that he hat 3000 hits in his career. That’s numbers: for me they reduce a Hall of Fame player to a guy who had roughly 150 hits a year over his 20-year career.

But, what if I ask a person who has been a Milwaukee Brewers fan their whole life, “Hey! Tell me about Robin Yount?” Then, I’m not going to hear about 3000 hits. Then, I’m going to hear stories.

Sport isn’t just numbers, it’s also stories. I think that’s why we follow sport so adamantly as a species–well, partly, anyway. I don’t want to discount numbers, after all. But numbers aren’t the whole story.

This suggests to me that there’s another kind of greatness at play here, when we talk about “Greatest Comebacks”: situational greatness, we can call it. Or storytelling greatness? The New England Patriots trailed the Atlanta Falcons 28-3 a few years back in the Super Bowl–and they came back to win it. That’s a 25-point comeback, still a full touchdown “less” than the Bills’ against the Oilers…but 25 points down in the Super Bowl? You have to give that some special consideration, I think, because comebacks just don’t happen in the Super Bowl. The previous record for biggest comeback in a Super Bowl had only been 10 points. That means something.

And it also means something that the Bills’ comeback against the Oilers was a playoff game, at home, after a season that had been a bit of a struggle, when the Bills were banged up and missing several starters (including their quarterback and running back), and had been beaten soundly just the week before by that very same Oilers team. The Vikings’ comeback? A regular season game, at home, relatively healthy, against one the worst teams in the NFL that built its lead on a pile of field goals. The box score will tell you the Vikings overcame the biggest numerical point deficit in an NFL game to date. The box score won’t tell you the other stuff, and the other stuff is what we talk about when we sit over a beer and discuss old sports memories.

So. Is the Vikings comeback the greatest in history? Numerically, yes. Absolutely. Thirty-three points is more than thirty-two points.

But I doubt as many people will still be talking about that game thirty years from now as are still talking about that game in January 1993 when a backup quarterback erased a 32-point deficit in a playoff game.

(Credit for West Wing quote. Disclaimer: I do not endorse the fictional Vice President’s opinion of hockey.)

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I rarely write about sport on this site anymore, but I’m going to broach the topic here just for a few minutes because there’s an interesting debate raging across social media right now regarding the NFL MVP award, and which players are worthy. As of this writing, there are four players I see mentioned most frequently. The two that I think aren’t likely to win it are Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow and Eagles running back Saquon Barkley. The debate is really swirling around the other two guys: Bills and Ravens quarterbacks Josh Allen and Lamar Jackson.

I’m not going to actually lay out the case for either player here. As a Buffalonian and someone who roots for the Bills, I openly admit that yes, I think it’s perfectly clear that Josh Allen is the MVP this year. It’s obvious, you weirdos! Just give it to him already. It’s a done deal. It’s in the bag.

But…is it?

Obviously, not really. Lamar Jackson is having an amazing statistical season; in fact, if you were to only look at the numbers, Jackson is obviously the MVP. It’s a done deal. It’s in the bag.

Only, it’s not.

The problem is with the nature of the MVP award itself. It’s an award that’s voted on by a number of sports journalists, and like all such things, it’s a weird blend of stats and narrative. Some years the stats win out, sometimes it’s the narrative that wins out. Sometimes the MVP is given to the player who obviously had the best statistical season, while others it’s a vaguer justification–the best player on the best team, perhaps. That last is one of the bigger reasons for supporting Allen over Jackson this year: as of this writing the Bills have the better record, having already won their division and being on the brink of clinching the Number Two seed in the AFC playoffs, while Jackson’s Ravens have lost more games and may not even end up winning their division (though that looks likely at this point).

It’s the word in the award itself: the most valuable player. And that makes the whole thing a judgment call, basically an opinion. Is Lamar Jackson more valuable to his team than Josh Allen? I don’t know that he is. I also don’t know–really know–that he isn’t. So what we end up with is conflicting opinions, and let’s be honest here: those opinions can shift and change depending on who it is we’re rooting for. (Right now we’re not even going to mention the fact that NFL MVP is now a de facto award for quarterbacks alone; it’s been 12 years since anyone other than a QB won it, and it’s been 38 years since anybody on the defensive side of things won one. And in a pass-whacky league, a wide receiver has never won it.)

Here’s a thought experiment: consider all the argument for Josh Allen for MVP, and all the arguments for Lamar Jackson as well. Now imagine if these two guys were having the exact same seasons–but they played on the opposite teams. Imagine Allen leading the Ravens to a 12-3 record (again, as of this writing), having set all manner of offensive records over his first bunch of years, and the stunning individual performances he’s had in single games this season. And imagine Lamar Jackson playing for the Bills, and putting up the passing numbers he’s put up this year.

If that happened, you would see each camp still advocating strongly for their guy–but with the exact opposite set of arguments.

I do tend to react strongly against purely statistical justifications for MVP awards. I’m not a fan of reducing everything to stats, because I’m a storyteller and a story-lover at heart, and stats aren’t stories. Stats can be a part of stories, but they’re not the whole thing. Josh Allen’s story in Buffalo is amazing and compelling, and when one considers the degree to which he’s played a role in the resurgence of a franchise and the emotions of a fandom (we can talk another time about how maybe a football team’s fortunes in the field probably shouldn’t be this big of a factor in a region’s emotional life), and the role he has come to inhabit in this community, it’s hard to make a case that he’s not incredibly valuable. And most people agree on this point. So is he the most valuable? Maybe, maybe not.

The NFL MVP award turns out, in some ways, to be similar to the Oscars: it’s all about aesthetics and recognition, as opposed to rewarding a true “objective” standout. It’s clear that even with the statistical arguments, there’s no real “objective” standard of a player’s value, so again it’s the narrative that comes in to play. That also happens with the Oscars, where sometimes an actor is awarded an Academy Award less for the particular role for which they’re nominated but as a nod of respect to a career. For Josh Allen, the narrative case is strengthened when various aspects of his career are noted: the degree to which he has been responsible for the Bills winning a lot, the fact that the Bills have enjoyed an even better season this year after an offseason that left many thinking the Bills would take a step back, the further fact that Allen has significantly improved the major aspect of his game that was often criticized before this year (his turnovers).

The other problem with stats is that if a player with gaudy stats is truly the most valuable, then surely it should show up in the win-loss column. One standout weird example of this is from Major League Baseball, which in 1987 awarded National League MVP to Andre Dawson, because he had an outstanding season at the plate (49 HRs). Never mind that his team that year, the Cubs, finished dead last. Was Dawson “valuable”? Well, I’ve seen that debated here and there over the years. The NFL does have ways of avoiding this sort of thing, with its additional awards of “Offensive Player of the Year” and “Defensive Player of the Year”. MVP, then, becomes something else. Something more elusive, dealing with those pesky “intangibles”.

So, what’s my solution? Obviously, I’m a Josh Allen guy. However, there is precedent for doing something more daring: in 2003, the NFL MVP was split, and we had co-MVPs in Peyton Manning and Steve McNair. If that happened again, it would not bother me at all. (Nor, really, would Lamar Jackson winning MVP outright.) Another thing that’s always struck me as odd is why the NFL’s awards are singular. Baseball has multiple sets of awards for each league, so there is no one Baseball MVP; there’s a NL MVP and an AL MVP. Why not a AFC and an NFC MVP? (This wouldn’t help the current situation, obviously, since Allen and Jackson are both AFC guys.)

But ultimately, aside from my thinking there should be awards from both conferences, I don’t much have a problem with any of this. It gets people talking about sport and it shows the passion in the fanbases. More than anything, all these MVP candidates show what a glorious period of football this is, and how much it’s an embarrassment of riches right now. Unfortunately not many people are taking it this way, and that’s a shame. Rooting for Josh Allen surely doesn’t have to mean that I can’t appreciate the amazing football that Lamar Jackson is playing right now.

One last point: sooner or later in all of these discussions one point inevitably gets made: “Neither Allen nor Jackson has ‘won anything’ yet.” This refers to the fact that neither guy has won the Super Bowl (or even been to it) yet. And yes, that does suck. One thing I dislike about the NFL is that for whatever reason, it’s much more conducive to dynasties forming, and this is compounded by the weird way that sports fans (and some commentators) overvalue championships above all else. This is natural, I suppose–winning the Super Bowl is everybody’s goal–but I have a problem with looking at someone’s career as “lesser” if they simply never managed to win it. There’s only one Super Bowl every year, after all, and many fine careers play out in the NFL (or in any sport) that don’t include a championship. Every time I see the “Allen doesn’t have a ring!” thing on social media, I like to respond along these lines: “I have bad news for you if you ever visit the Pro Football Hall of Fame, because I’ll bet most of the guys in there never won a Super Bowl.”

So much of sport is narrative, as much as the folks who love stats would pretend otherwise. Look at Aaron Rodgers and the narrative over the course of his career. Of course, right now the narrative on Rodgers is pretty much that he’s a washed-up weirdo who is going to leave the Jets on the verge of a full-on rebuild, but for years, his story was that he’d have a great regular season, lead the Packers to one of the best records in the NFC, and then faceplant in the playoffs. Year in and year out, that’s what happened…and if any other player had that kind of record, our sporting world would label him a “choker”, fairly or not. So why was Rodgers never labeled a “choker” at all? Because one time, early in his career, he actually won a Super Bowl.

Winning a championship completely changes the narrative of a player and a coach. Win one, and all previous “failures” (and again, it’s a hell of a thing to view all sporting effort that doesn’t produce a championship a “failure”) are forgiven and forgotten. Win one early in your career, and nothing that happens after will ever diminish your sheen: you are a Champion forevermore. Rodgers illustrates the latter, and the former is illustrated perfectly by Chiefs coach Andy Reid. Reid coached the Philadelphia Eagles in the late 90s and the 2000s, and he took them to multiple NFC Championship games (losing all but one) and to one Super Bowl (which he lost). Until Reid won his first Super Bowl with the Chiefs, he was the most recent poster child for the “He can’t win the big one! He coaches small in big moments! He can’t manage a game! He can’t get the team ready to win a Super Bowl!” crowd. But all those years of falling short still happened! They’re right there in his record! But he won a Super Bowl finally (along with, as of this writing, two more), so all of that is forgotten and ignored.

Ultimately, the NFL MVP is a shifting blend of narrative and statistical excellence. This season, there’s enough of both to go around for multiple players, so much so that the award will honestly feel partially incorrect, no matter to whom it’s given in the end.

Unless it’s Josh Allen. If that happens, everything is right in the world.

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He retired. Again.

Will this retirement stick?

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe He’s retiring so he can just wait until the first week of August, after training camps are half over, and then sign wherever He feels like signing to keep on keeping on.

Do I want Him to go? Sure. He’s been an annoying presence in the part of my brain that can’t quite give up on football (stupid part of my brain, I hate it so much) for twenty-three years. Put it another way: He has been an irritating presence for forty-five percent of my life. It’s long past time for that percentage to start going down.

Is He the “greatest of all time”? I suppose He is, for multiple ways of defining “great”. But remember, numbers aren’t the only measure of greatness, and I’m a storyteller at heart anyway. For me, all of This Guy’s stories were annoying stories, maddening stories, stories that shouldn’t have ended the way they did if not for the people opposing Him doing stupid shit at key moments.

He didn’t make the other head coach decide to only hand the ball off to his running back, who at the time was the best RB in the game, only 17 times against a defense that was bad against the run, thus playing into His own head coach’s defensive scheme.

He didn’t make the other team’s kicker boot the ball out of bounds immediately after the other team tied it up with a minute to go, thus giving Him only needing to move the ball about 25 yards in 60 seconds to set up a game-winning field goal.

He didn’t make the other head coach engage in very odd clock management in a close game, thus seriously damaging his team’s ability to overcome in the end. (That particular head coach is an interesting case, because he was once the poster-child for the “Can’t win the big game!” trope, but now, since he did win the big game a single time three years ago, he is currently viewed as one of the reigning super-geniuses of football.)

He didn’t make the other team decide to, in Gregg Easterbrook’s terminology, go “pass-wacky” with a big lead in the second half and thus manage to kill no time and wear out its defense so He could execute a 34-28 win after being down 28-3. (A reminder: as thrilling as it is when your team executes a big comeback, big comebacks are always at least partly due to the losing team getting dumb when it has the lead.)

He didn’t make the other team decide that throwing the ball from a goal-to-go situation when they had a RB who was, at the time, one of the very best RBs in football, was a good idea, and He further didn’t make the other team decide that the passing play to call was a low-success rate play that ended up getting picked off by His team.

He didn’t…well, you get the idea. And yes, anyway, those dumb errors are (for the most part) gifts of situations, and it was still up to Him to make the best of those situations. But it certainly felt that He got way, way, wayyyyy more than his fair share of flukey situations.

He didn’t somehow manage to make the other three teams in the division he played most of his career suddenly get very bad at drafting talent for the better part of two decades.

He was involved in multiple significant cheating scandals, resulting in His team getting a couple of wrist-slaps from the league. That first wrist-slap was particularly egregious, with the Commish destroying all the evidence without letting anybody else see it and then handing down a punishment designed to seem harsh but really amounted to, yes, a wrist-slap.

He also somehow managed to play 23 seasons (He missed one entire season with an injury sustained in Week One, and the next year He came back like he’d never missed a beat), but more than that, He played 47 playoff games as well, which means that He played almost 26 seasons worth of football over those 23 years, which is mind-boggling given the nature of this particular game. I’ve heard it said that “Everyone has a conspiracy theory that they actually believe,” and mine is that there’s no way His longevity is explained by good offensive lines, His getting the ball out quickly, His avoiding inflammatory foods, and His going to bed every night at 8pm. Maybe at some point Gisele lets something slip about weird medical procedures he had done every off-season in Buenos Aires or some such thing.

He also benefitted greatly from a gradually-shifting NFL rulebook that literally made beating him harder. The book on beating Him has always been pretty simple to state, if hard to do in practice: get physical pressure on Him, especially from up the middle. He hated getting hit, and in any game where He started getting hit more than usual, He would start getting jittery in the pocket and His accuracy would suffer and if the pressure kept coming He would eventually just start making bad decisions. The best example of this was Super Bowl 42, where He played under pressure all game, His NFL-best offense could only muster 14 points, and when He got the ball back with a minute to go and down by three, He couldn’t even get His team to field-goal range. (A similar scenario unfolded again just four years later, against that very same Giants team, and when he missed a key pass by throwing the ball behind his intended receiver, his wife came out after the game and criticized the receiver publicly!) If I had Aladdin’s lamp, I might well burn one of my three wishes to see Him start a full NFL game against, say, the ’85 Bears, the ’89 49ers, or the ’91 Redskins. I do not believe He would have flourished quite so well against a defense built to succeed under that NFL rulebook.

(An aside here about His most recent Super Bowl defeat, in Super Bowl 52: Is there any more flukey championship in recent sports history than that one? The Eagles rolled through the regular season behind a quarterback who was having a terrific year until he got hurt, and then the backup quarterback stepped in and kept right on rolling all the way to victory in that Super Bowl, despite the fact that He had probably the best single passing game in Super Bowl history that day, throwing for more than 500 yards, 3 touchdowns, and zero interceptions! He lost that game, and after that, both of the Eagles’ quarterbacks from that season regressed to the point where now they’re just journeymen guys knocking around the league and not really doing anything impressive at all. The one game He had where I have to admit His greatness was an unbelievably improbable loss.)

Oddly, He recently got some very odd flak on social media when He posted something about spending time with his kids. I guess even that was a bridge too far for the self-appointed alpha-males of the world. Even I have to admit that when He isn’t “alpha” enough, maybe we need to rework the concept a little.

So, assuming that He is actually ending his career now, He is moving on to a broadcasting gig at FOX. This means that I will rarely see him, since I watch almost zero football on teevee these days. (I don’t know what the nature of His broadcasting work is supposed to be–whether He is going to be a studio guy or one of the booth commentators on game day.) I’m sure He’ll be fine at that job, and I certainly don’t wish Him ill…but like many other fans, I certainly wish Him off the field for good, because He was just that annoying.

And yes, He was great. Sheesh.

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