Tag: Football

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Darker sides of “fandom”

The other night, on Monday Night Football, the Buffalo Bills very nearly beat the hated New England Patriots. They were leading, and were in very good shape with a little over two minutes left: New England had just scored to pull to being down 24-19, when they kicked off. Bills cornerback and kickoff returner Leodis McKelvin fielded the kick in the end zone, and then he decided to attempt a run back. He got out about twenty-five yards or so before the New England players arrived around him and began tackling him. Rather than just fall down, McKelvin attempted to push for more yardage, and so doing, ended up fumbling. New England recovered, scored, and won 25-24. Ouch.

So naturally, McKelvin ended up being “the goat”. It’s not dead certain that the Bills would have held on for the win had he gone down, but their chances would have been superb; all they would really have needed to do is pick up a single first down and kill the clock. Much of the postgame discussion focused on McKelvin: whether he should have attempted to run the kick back at all, the obviousness that he should never have striven for more yardage once the tacklers converged upon him; Dick Jauron’s odd defense of McKelvin the next day on the basis that he’s a really good kick returner and you never know when he’s going to break one. (This on a kick where the Patriots might well have been kicking onside, forcing the Bills to deploy their “hands” team instead of their kickoff blockers.)

Most people are now of the “Sucks, but it’s over and Tampa’s in town on Sunday.” However, a couple of teenagers decided last night to vandalize McKelvin’s front lawn. So now the discussion is no longer even about the fumble but about this act of misdirected “fanhood”. The topic of discussion on the sports-talk show I like to listen to on the way home from work was, What does this say about us? About Buffalo Bills fans? About Buffalo? About football fans in general?

I’m not sure it has to say anything about any of those things, right now. Police in Hamburg, NY — the Buffalo suburb where McKelvin lives — apparently, as of this writing, have two teenagers in custody who have confessed to the vandalism. And as misguided-fan incidents go, this is pretty weak tea, easily corrected with some lawn care products and tools. Of course, that’s not the point: it’s still a very ugly incident that puts on display yet again the fact that too many sports fans in this country take their teams and their allegiances way too seriously. In point of fact, it’s not even this country: it’s all over the world. As bad as our fans can get at times, nobody’s ever heard of people getting trampled at a baseball riot. But that’s probably small consolation to taxpayers and business owners each year in the cities whose teams win the World Series, or the NBA championship, or the Super Bowl.

I’ve never been one to engage in “Things were better back in the day” rhetoric. I usually find that, upon deeper inspection, things “back in the day” tended to suck a lot as well, and that people pining for things back then usually turn out to have simply not been aware of how things sucked “back in the day”. But I do wonder if sports fandom is getting qualitatively worse with regard to things like this. On opening day of the 1987 season, Boston Red Sox fans gave Bill Buckner an ovation. I don’t remember how too many goats were treated, save one: after Super Bowl XXV, in 1991, a giant rally was held for the Buffalo Bills in downtown Buffalo. At that rally, Scott Norwood, who had missed what would have been the game-winning kick at the end of the game, received a massive ovation. Back then, a guy whose missed kick cost his team the Super Bowl championship got an outpouring of love and support. Eighteen years later, a cornerback whose fumble cost his team a regular season game got his lawn vandalized.

Of course, the situations are different, and the emotions in sports are so often defined by the situations. McKelvin’s fumble came in a regular season game against an opponent that is universally loathed in this town, for various reasons. (Mostly because they’re loathsome!) It also comes after a recent history that has seen huge amounts of futility, of mediocrity, of disaster at critical times, of injury, of just plain loss. But that doesn’t excuse anything, obviously; and neither does it lessen the point. Instead, it clarifies it: why are so many sports fans so angry these days? Win or lose?

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But what about Brett Fah-vruh?

So, Brett Favre has made up his mind now. Really. He’s gonna play. His mind’s made up. He’s now a Minnesota Viking.

Well…maybe I get surprised, but I can’t see how this works out well at all for Minnesota. Favre has had one good season lately (the year before last), but despite his “Iron Man” tendency to not miss starts, his physical effectiveness has gone down steadily, year by year, until last year he managed to lead the NFL in interceptions thrown. Passing accuracy and arm troubles generally aren’t the kinds of problems that start to reverse themselves as quarterbacks with enormous amounts of mileage reach the age of 39 and their sixteenth or seventeenth season in the league. I’m thinking that a lot of eyes popped in the Midwest today, and the eyes that did the most popping were the defensive backs at Bears, Lions and Packers’ training camps. They’ve all got to be salivating at the prospect of watching Favre for another year as he runs around and lobs grapefruit-like passes out of his refusal to accept that he just can’t make the throws he could make ten years ago when he was already four years past his Super Bowl title.

What does Favre bring to the Vikings? At this point, I have no idea. Yes, he brings fierce competitiveness. But that’s about it, I think. He’s not a quarterback who is anywhere near the top of his game. He brings a larger-than-life persona that could well undermine the efforts of a relatively new coach. And he delays, by a year and maybe two, the Vikings’ development of whoever they think their quarterback of the future is going to be. By bringing him in, it’s clear that they’ve pretty much given up, rightly or wrongly, on Tarvaris Jackson. But with Favre there now, he takes up a valuable year or two while the Vikes have a pretty good defense in place and a hell of a running back. If Favre plays both the years on his contract, by the time he leaves the Vikings will again be in transition. As a “win now” type of move, signing Favre doesn’t seem like the best idea in the world.

The Vikings were 10-6 last year, while Favre’s Jets were 9-7. Now, I think that the Vikes are better than the Jets, so the question becomes: does Favre make the Vikings better? I’m just not sure that he does. Maybe one more win, for 11-5. I don’t think that Favre makes the Vikes a team that can really contend with the conference’s best teams (the Giants and Eagles). So: with Favre, I think the Vikings have put themselves in a tough spot. By going for the old veteran, they’ve committed themselves to a very narrow window of opportunity for winning, and they’ve done it with a guy who just doesn’t seem like much of a winner anymore. I don’t expect that this will backfire to the tune of a 4-12 season and the franchise in shambles, but I do think that this will translate to 10-6 for a couple of years and then some rebuilding once the current defense gets too old to be effective.

In short, while I’m not sure that Vikings fans will come to hate the Favre signing (it’ll never come close to replacing the Herschel Walker trade in the Vikings’ annals of poorly-considered personnel moves), I do think that in five years Vikes fans will look back on the Favre era much as Bills fans now look back on the Flutie era: a couple of pleasant and maddening years that didn’t amount to much.

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Vix

Michael Vick returns to the NFL, as a member of the Philadelphia Eagles.

I’m glad he’s not with the Bills, but he’s still with a team I kind of like, so that makes it hard. I’d been hoping he would end up with some team I don’t really care about. Jacksonville, maybe. Or the Bucs.

I’m generally of mixed mind on Vick. He did an awful thing (running a dogfighting ring), and it was well and truly an awful thing. On a moral scale, I think that Vick’s transgression is quite a bit worse than, say, the steroid-poppers of Major League Baseball. In my book, cheating to hit home runs isn’t nearly as horrible as taking pleasure and finding entertainment in the violent and torturous deaths of animals. Not even close. I find what Vick did loathsome, and had the Bills signed him, I would probably have declared the end to my Bills fandom and switched my allegiances fully to the Steelers (who have always been my #2 team).

However, I can’t deny that while what Vick did is about as loathsome as it gets on my moral scale before moving into “crime against humans” territory, I also can’t deny that he paid the price dictated by society. He served time in jail, and his personal finances, once princely, are now a train wreck. His “sky’s the limit” football career is now reduced to “Work hard and hope the guy in front of you gets hurt someday and maybe you’ll get a shot”. Vick has fallen far and hard, and I can’t deny that he deserves the proverbial second chance.

I just don’t want that second chance to be here. Maybe Vick’s sincere in his contrition since his release from prison, and maybe he’s really turned himself into a new person. At his press conference today he was extremely contrite, with all the right answers and all the right statements. Someone on a sportstalk radio show asked, “Which is it? Is it that Vick was well-rehearsed and well-prepared in advance of this press conference, or is it that he spent eighteen months in prison and had a lot of time to think about his actions and what they meant?” I’m not sure it can’t be both, to be honest.

As I said, maybe Michael Vick is a model citizen from here on out, never getting so much as a speeding ticket and never stepping out of line and finding ways to become a role model again. If that happens, good for him. That, after all, is what’s supposed to happen. But it’ll be a long time before it’s evident that that’s the case, and in the interim, I don’t want him on Buffalo’s roster.

(On a side note, I think it’s been generally embarrassing to see the rumors flying around the sports news world the last week or so about Vick. There have been “Vick sightings” everywhere, including Buffalo and New England, that were eventually debunked for one reason or another, but each new rumor that would pop up on Twitter or someplace similar would be reported by the news, and checked out, and followed up on, because woe to the news station that misses the story of Vick’s arrival in their town. I’ve found this embarrassing, not just because the news outlets have been led by the nose this whole time, but also because of the likelihood that at least some of those “Vick sightings” were probably sincere. Someone probably saw a big, strong black guy on a plane somewhere, maybe wearing athletic gear, and thought, “Hey, this town’s an NFL town! Is that Michael Vick?” And then we’re off to the races. Jeez.)

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Report to camp for re-Nedification!

The Buffalo Bills have reported for training camp, thus allowing Football Obsession Levels in Western New York to return to their usual “fever pitch” levels. The year breaks down like this:

Training camp: Yay! We’ve got some good youngsters! Maybe this is our year! Hope springs eternal!

Regular Season: Yay! We’re playing again!…We’re showing some promise! Isn’t it cool the way we beat the crap out of that team that’s going 3-13 this year?…Well, we’re still showing growing pains. We’ll beat New England someday…oh geez, what the f*** is going on here? That other 3-13 team just beat the crap out of us!…Well, five games out, and if we win out, we might make the playoffs…OK, we’re 6-8 but we can still make the playoffs technically, if we win these next two…ach, who are we kidding? We’ll never beat New England. Shit.

Playoffs: Yeah, f*** these other teams.

Offseason: We signed who? Boo-yeah! Now let’s see who else we sign to fix some of the other holes on this roster!…Well OK, we didn’t sign anybody else at all, but there’s still the draft and guys get cut, so we’ll see…OK draft, but do we really need five defensive backs every year?…Oooooh, that guy’s still available, maybe we can sign him — oh forget it, he just signed with Kansas City.

Training Camp: Yay! They’re back on the field! This might be our year! These guys are a year older and more experienced, and those youngsters looked effing awesome in those non-contact practices back in March! Super Bowl, here we come!

And then it’s back to the regular season. Lather, rinse, repeat. Anyway, welcome to Buffalo, T.O.

(By the way, I’m getting a little tired of how everything T.O. says gets reported. From what I can see, most of what he says is pretty non-controversial, but for some reason, everything that comes out of his mouth, whether it’s one of the Bull Durham sports interview lines or not, gets trumpeted for some reason. Weird.)

I’ll probably do a football predictions post once the regular season is near, but I won’t be doing weekly synopses as to why the Bills stink. Those aren’t fun to write, but I do still love me some football.

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So long, JP

Former Buffalo Bills quarterback JP Losman has signed with the Las Vegas…ummm…the new football team in Las Vegas. You may be thinking, “Wow, the NFL expanded to Las Vegas?” And the answer would be, no, they didn’t. Someone’s starting a new football league that will have something like four teams, one of which is in Las Vegas. Thus ends the JP Losman era in Buffalo.

Longtime readers may recall that I was a big Losman backer; not so much that I was convinced of his talent as I felt it necessary to withhold judgment on him until he’d been around at least a while. Well, after the “while” had gone by, even I had to conclude that he was a bust of a player. Losman is tough and competitive, and he has a big-time arm, but he never showed any real awareness of what was going on around him on the field and he was never a good “touch” passer. Oh well; it was just another high-round draft pick the Bills spent in the post-Jim Kelly era in an attempt to find the next great quarterback.

But even admitting that Losman wasn’t a good QB, I actually found him very likable as a guy. When he was drafted, he made a real effort to adopt Buffalo as his hometown. He got an apartment downtown as opposed to buying some McMansion out by the stadium or living in a hotel room during the season, and he really tried to become part of the community. He got mocked a lot in these parts for talking like a Southern California surfer-type in interviews, but that never bothered me.

It does strike me as odd that he is jumping into an experimental football league, rather than just bide his time until some team has a need at QB (which always happens eventually). I don’t think Losman would have been unemployed forever; sooner or later an NFL team would have come calling. Maybe he got impatient, or maybe he thinks that if he lights this new league on fire his road back to the NFL will be shorter. I don’t know, really. It strikes me as an odd decision, though.

Anyway, this blogger wishes best of luck to JP Losman, now that he’s a former Buffalo Bill.

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McNair

While the act of consummate sporting evil that was Homerun Throwback had me loathing the Tennessee Titans for a while, I never disliked their quarterback, Steve McNair, at all. He was just too classy of a player, with toughness that you don’t see all that often anymore. I remember when he was being drafted, hoping somehow that the Bills might swing some kind of big trade to move up in the draft to get him (at the time it was clear that Jim Kelly was down to his last year or two), and frankly, the last twelve years of Bills history would certainly look different had they done something like that. (I don’t recall any actual trade talk that year; it was just wishful thinking on my part.)

McNair was found shot to death yesterday. They don’t know what happened yet. He had retired from the NFL a year ago, but even so — this was a fine player, one of the best of the last fifteen years. Damn.

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More answers!

Continuing to work through the queries that came in for Ask Me Anything! 2009, I figure I should handle this, from Roger:

What would fix the Buffalo Bills?

(Warning: boring football post ahead.)

OK. How to fix the Bills? Well, they have GOT to do something about their receiving corps! How many years of lackluster talent at receiver do we need to watch? How many years of Lee Evans and nobody else? WHAT does it TAKE to get an actual GOOD RECEIVER in Buffalo! Yeah, never mind that. Sorry. More on TO in a moment.

But in general, the “fix” here is simple, really, but like all simple answers, it’s apparently very hard to do, because only a handful of teams have actually managed to do it lately. (Those teams are Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, New England, and the Giants.) The answer is to put in place a good football operation. What this means is (a) instituting a policy of primarily building through the draft, and (b) identifying good talent to be taken in the draft. The Bills, to their credit, over the last couple of years have done (a). They’ve been rather less successful at (b). The Bills don’t do what the Redskins do — toss money at every conceivable free agent who comes along because they’re new and shiny and boy does Daniel Snyder like the shiny — but while they focus heavily on the draft, they’re not particularly good at identifying the talent they should be picking, and in addition to picking questionable talent, they also make picks that are contrary to what they probably should be picking, and to add insult to injury, they often make bizarre decisions about the very process of picking the wrong talent in the first place.

A good example came in Marv Levy’s first draft as GM, back in 2006. The Bills had the eighth pick overall, and somehow, the draft’s biggest name, quarterback Matt Leinart, was still on the board. The Bills didn’t want Leinart, thinking at the time that they still had a good prospect in JP Losman, so they picked safety Donte Whitner instead. However, everybody under the sun knew that Whitner had originally been unlikely to be picked anywhere before the middle of the first round, so if the Bills really wanted him, they could have very likely traded down in that round with some team that wanted a shot at Leinart, grabbed an extra pick in the process, and almost certainly still have been able to get Whitner. Instead of doing that, they took Whitner at number eight, and then, instead of reaping the benefit of an extra pick to grab a couple of quality guys in the second round, they traded up to get back into the first round and grab a defensive lineman, John McCargo, who wasn’t on anybody’s list of top lineman prospects and who as yet has not come close to living up to his potential. In fact, the Bills tried trading McCargo away last year, only to have the trade nullified when McCargo failed a physical with his almost-new team.

That kind of thing happens to the Bills all the time. They are never able to identify guys who will develop into top-flight NFL playmakers, so the team is basically in a position where they’re not without talent — if they were, they wouldn’t be 7-9 every year — but where they’re not able to really produce, either. The Bills are exclusively comprised of decent guys who work hard, but nobody who can really step it up and make some really impressive things happen on the field. Now, there are some younger guys who maybe are going to become those kinds of players and just aren’t there yet — Marshawn Lynch, Trent Edwards among them. But if you’re a defensive coordinator facing the Bills, you know that all you basically need to do is double-team Lee Evans and play the other receivers as you normally would, and you’ve pretty much handcuffed the Bills’ passing game. Likewise, if you’re an offensive coordinator facing the Bills, you know you’re not facing a “paper tiger” of a defense, but there’s still nobody on defense whom you must have taken into account on every snap of the ball. All the really good teams, the ones that got good and have stayed good for a long time, have figured out how to find guys like that. The Bills haven’t.

The Pittsburghs and New Englands of the world don’t go out and sign everybody they can to big contracts; they develop new guys and plug in occasional free agents when they need to. (Now, I’m not sure that New England is doing quite as good a job at developing new talent as Pittsburgh is, which is one reason I believe New England’s days as one the NFL’s elite teams are closer to ending than most.) The Bills try to do this, but they do it wrong: instead of drafting offensive linemen every year and developing them, the Bills rarely draft OL’s, instead signing free agents who then turn out to not be that good. (Derrick Dockery? Really?) One of the most damning facts about Bills’ personnel management over the last ten years is the fact that when former GM Tom Donahoe was fired, the Bills’ starting offensive line didn’t feature a single player who had been drafted by the Bills. (At that time, Jason Peters was merely a prospect, and he’d been a free agent signee and not even drafted.) I had hoped that would end under Levy, but so far, no dice: few OLs drafted, and the one who was, Duke Preston, played center last year and has now been possibly replaced by a new free agent signee.

I have my issues with the Bills’ coaching staff, but as long as the on-field talent is picked by guys who aren’t really solid football guys, it won’t matter.

Now. Terrell Owens.

I was shocked that the Bills signed him. Stunned. But not for the normal reasons. I’ve never understood the TO hate that’s out there. Sure, he’s a prima donna and can be a pain in the arse; at times he can be a downright distraction. But the stuff he does frankly always strikes me as “small potatoes” in a world where Pacman Jones can still have an NFL career and where you know somebody’s going to give Mike Vick a training camp invite. And it can’t be denied that where TO goes, better numbers in the win column follow. The 49ers were good with him; they’ve been crap since he left. (Not that he’s the only factor there, but the correspondence can’t be denied.) The Eagles lost the NFC title game three years in a row, and then they signed TO and reached the Super Bowl, which they might well have won if not for some sloppy play by Donovan McNabb and some weird coaching decisions by Andy Reid. Dallas got quite a lot better when TO arrived, and I wouldn’t blame him for all the drama that’s happened down there; Jerry Jones is quite good at creating drama all by himself. Remember the Cowboy dynasty teams of the 1990s? That was not a happy locker room, by any means, and it was only the fact that that was probably the most talented roster in the last fifteen years that made that team what it was, and it’s been dramatic in Dallas ever since. Yes, TO brought in some extra baggage, but so what?

In terms of TO’s ego, I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of Bills fans think — not without justification — that this team actually could use an infusion of good old football arrogance. He’s not exactly moving into a situation where there are already a lot of high-octane personalities ready to clash with him. The Bills are a laid-back bunch — too laid back, I suspect a lot of people might say. Why would TO sign here, instead of with someone closer to winning? Who knows — but maybe he saw the atmosphere in that infamous Monday night game in 2007, when the Bills dominated the Cowboys all night only to blow the game in the final seconds in one of the most heart-breaking defeats in team history, and maybe TO said to himself at one point, “Wow, these people love their team in a way I haven’t seen too much.” Maybe. I’m no mind-reader, obviously, but I very much doubt the Bills were the only team interested in TO.

And besides, TO will help on the field. Teams won’t be able to basically have their defensive gameplan against the Bills’ passing game consist of nothing but “Double team Lee Evans”, knowing that aside from Josh Reed, the other receivers on this team aren’t going to do anything. He’ll draw some attention and open things up for other players. Hopefully, his presence here, however long it lasts, helps last year’s second-round pick, James Hardy, to learn the NFL ropes faster than he’s been already. Hopefully he helps open up the running game a bit, since teams will actually have to respect the Bills as a passing threat more. I think he is very likely a good addition to the team, and if he does turn out to be a massive pain in the arse, he’s only sitting on a one-year deal, so it’s not like the Bills are wedded to him forever. If they like what he does here, they can re-sign him to another one-year deal next year. If not, they can say, “Thanks, we’ll take it from here.” This was, as far as I can see, the first genuinely shrewd personnel move the Bills have made since they brought in Drew Bledsoe in 2002. (Just because that move didn’t work out for various reasons doesn’t mean it was a bad move. That move didn’t work out basically because the Bills made that their only move.)

What interests me is the resurgence since TO’s signing of the new favorite word in Buffalo regarding the Bills: relevance. It’s what everybody is saying: signing TO makes the Bills “relevant”. I’ve never been terribly sure what “relevant” means; it seems to mean “winning”, but it’s more than that. It’s the idea that the Bills generally aren’t taken terribly seriously in the NFL these days. You play them, and you need to play well otherwise they might beat you, but they’re not going to the playoffs anyway. You know you won’t find yourself in a bidding war against the Bills for some player or coach because the Bills won’t spend big on coaches and they will spend on players but not huge money and they won’t go after the big names either, preferring to wait a few weeks into free agency and grab some guys who have been sitting out there teamless for a bit. That’s “not being relevant”, I suppose.

But it’s more than that. It’s not the Buffalo Bills franchise that’s seen as not relevant; I think a lot of people around here fear that the NFL sees the entire Buffalo Bills fan base, the market here, as not being relevant. And if we’re not relevant, then it will be that much easier for the NFL to let the team move when Ralph Wilson dies and the team is sold. This kind of move makes the Bills relevant again. This kind of move makes Buffalo a place that should be taken seriously, when it comes to talking about football.

Bills fans crave their team being a team that is actually talked about in football circles. Well, having TO on your team will certainly get you talked about, won’t it?

More answers to follow!

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Wow!

UPDATED below.

That was truly a great game. Remember what I said earlier? Blowouts are a thing of the past. They’ll be the rarity now.

Anyway, the Steelers have just joined the Cowboys as the only franchises to have won Super Bowls under three consecutive head coaches.

And Kurt Warner is, in my book, a Hall of Famer. I hate watching him lose in that way. In a just world, that guy would NOT be 1-2 in Super Bowls. He’s a free agent now, so I hope he signs with some contender and gets back next year. That guy deserves better than this. He carried the Cardinals on their back.

UPDATE: In the postgame, the reporter sent to get Kurt Warner’s reaction actually asked: “Do you want to try to get back to the Super Bowl?” What a stupid question. What’s he going to say? “No, I just want to be on the roster of an 8-8 team for a year or two”? Maybe she was asking if he is considering retirement, since he’s pretty old for a starting QB, but that was a seriously dumb way to phrase it.

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Blowin’ out the wind

The Buffalo News‘s Larry Felser thinks that a boring Super Bowl is likely, because the game has so often been a blowout. Problem is, over the last fourteen years, it hasn’t. The era of consistent blow-out Super Bowls ended, I think, with the 49ers’ 49-26 pasting of the San Diego Chargers in SB XXIX; in thirteen games since then, there have been only two Super Bowls that I would consider blowouts: SB XXXV (Ravens 34, Giants 7) and SB XXXVII (Buccaneers 48, Raiders 21).

Now, how do we define a blowout? I personally consider a game to be a blowout if the margin of victory is more than seventeen points — and sometimes, not even then. Basically a blowout occurs when the losing team is never really in the game, so a blowout doesn’t necessarily have to be a 55-10 laugher like the 49ers drubbing of the Broncos in SB XXIV. Some games feel like blowouts but kind of aren’t: Denver’s 34-19 win over Atlanta in SB XXXIII was a borderline blowout, and I remember thinking during SB XLI that the game was either the most lopsided close game in history, or the closest blowout in history. Final score that day was Colts 29, Bears 17, but after the first quarter was over — after Chicago ran back the opening kick for a TD and after Peyton Manning calmed down — the game never felt close again, and I remember the TV guys talking at halftime about what the Bears needed to do to “get back in the game”, when they were only down by two points.

Yes, the Super Bowl was usually a boring affair for a long time, but looking back over the history of the game, virtually all of the big blowouts came during the NFC’s long era of dominance from 1985 to 1997; that era really did see blowout after blowout, with final scores like 38-16, 46-10, 39-20, 42-10, 55-10, 52-17; but even then, some of the games considered now to be boring blowouts really weren’t, in my view: the Bills’ 30-13 loss to Dallas looks like a blowout, but it was a competitive game followed by a collapse, and Green Bay’s 35-21 win over New England wasn’t a blowout either, with the Patriots hanging in there a while before the better team pulled away late.

Anyway, I haven’t seen a truly boring Super Bowl since the afore-mentioned 49ers-Chargers game, and I see no reason to expect a laugher today, either.

(And I might not even watch the game, seeing as how I’m in the Pacific time zone right now which puts the game in the middle of the afternoon. That feels weird!)

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The wild, whacky NFL

Just a couple of NFL thoughts:

:: Wow, is home field advantage increasingly meaningless or what? Since 1990, when the NFL went to a twelve-team playoff format, AFC top seeds are 7-12 in converting top seed status into a Super Bowl appearance; NFC teams are a better, but not staggering, 11-8 at doing the same thing. All top seeds, therefore, are 18-20 in getting to the Super Bowl. Two of the last three Super Bowl champions were sixth seeds in the playoffs (Pittsburgh in 2005, the Giants in 2007), with the one in the middle (Indy in 2006) being a third seed. And next week’s conference championship games will each feature a number six seed, and both of those sixth seeds look pretty impressive right now.

:: The Cardinals are hosting an NFC Championship Game. This is a franchise whose greatest single moment in the NFL limelight was a fictional moment (Rod Tidwell’s touchdown catch to beat the Cowboys at the end of the movie Jerry Maguire). I’m actually going to root for them, because I love Kurt Warner and I’m supremely glad to see the way he’s made his comeback. I think that Warner, by sticking around and taking his lumps as a backup to young guys until he got his chance again, and by then making the most of that chance when it came, may have finally gone from “onetime flash in the pan” to potential Hall of Famer.

:: It must be enormously frustrating to be a Chargers fan these last couple of years and see what is probably the best single roster in franchise history basically wasted because Norv Turner’s the one with his hand on the tiller. Good coordinator, but he can’t head coach his way out of a paper bag. If he didn’t keep lucking into teams with good rosters, he’d be Dick Jauron.

:: Brett Favre will make up his mind in a couple of weeks as to whether he’s playing next year or not. I’m sure the Jets are really feeling great about the decision to trade for him last year! Now they’re out a draft pick, they still didn’t make the playoffs, their coaching staff will be in flux, they’ll still need to figure out their longterm quarterback solution, and now Favre is jerking them around the same way he did the Packers for the last few years. I was always a Favre fan, but he’s been making such an arse of himself for the last few seasons that I just want him to go away. Sure, he’s got a lot of passing records, but so what? If not for his injuries and long road back, Kurt Warner would probably be right up there in stats too, and he’s got as many Super Bowl appearances (two) and Super Bowl rings (one) as Favre. (He does have one more MVP award than Warner, three to two.)

:: I still hate that teams get two points for a safety. I think there should be no points but the team recording the safety should automatically take possession at the 50 yard line.

:: Odd synchronicity: this weekend saw action by all three quarterbacks who lost Super Bowls to Tom Brady (Kurt Warner, Jake Delhomme, Donovan McNabb) and the one who beat Tom Brady (Eli Manning).

:: Ben Roeythlissburrgher (pretty sure I spelled that wrong) is in his third AFC Championship game. That brings the record of the three first-round quarterbacks from the 2004 Draft to five conference championship game appearances (Eli Manning and Philip Rivers have one each) and two Super Bowl wins (Big Ben and Manning). That may well have been the best quarterbacks class ever, better even than the class of 1983. Those three first-rounders of ’04 are Teh Awesome.

:: Yes, there were only three quarterbacks taken in the first round in ’04. Why do you ask?

OK, that’s it. If the Bills hadn’t sucked, this might have been a fun NFL season to watch.

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