Tag: NFL 2010

I have a hard time putting my finger on it, but the last few years, something just seems a bit smaller about the Super Bowl. Sure, they still hype the crap out of it, but it just doesn’t seem like as big an event as it once was. I was rooting for the Steelers, as they’re my second favorite team, but I’ve always liked the Packers too, so it didn’t bother me that they won. But it just seemed like…a football game, with a trophy at the end. Random thoughts follow:

:: I wonder a bit about Pittsburgh’s offensive game planning and play calling. In the second half, with Green Bay’s secondary as banged up as it was, I wonder why they didn’t try coming out in a spread formation and beat the Pack through the air. By that time, Ben Roethlisberger had his mojo back. The Pack came out terribly flat in the second half, and the Steelers just didn’t put the screws to them like I thought they should have.

:: Watching a steady stream of Green Bay players heading for the locker room at one point might be the best argument against an 18-game season that can be made. Football is so physical and violent that in an 18-game season, the team that wins the Super Bowl won’t necessarily be the best team, but the team that makes the playoffs with the most key players healthy.

:: Troy Aikman on scoring: “A field goal is big, but a touchdown here would be huge.” Thanks for spelling that out, Troy.

:: The commercials were crap, across the board. All of ’em. I’m really starting to hate how Super Bowl Sunday is now basically a national holiday for the advertising industry. That many people actually look forward to watching advertising strikes me as indicative of something deeply wrong.

:: Yes, the halftime show was total, utter crap. But the halftime shows are always total, utter crap.

:: Christina Aguilera muffed “The Star-spangled Banner”. You’d think that a professional singer could get the lyrics right, but I guess not.

:: So the powers-that-be at Cowboys Stadium screwed up the ticket sales, and ended up selling tickets to people they didn’t have seats for. Oops. Heckuva job, Jerry!

:: I read a lot of articles last week by sportswriters whining over the Super Bowl not being held in a warm-weather city. I’m not sure how warm Dallas is on a normal first weekend of February, but really, suck it, sports journalists. I think that what was really behind each and every one of those articles that I read was a guy who really likes getting an expenses-paid trip to someplace warm every February, and this year, it was a trip to someplace not quite as warm as usual. Too bad. I hope they have a Super Bowl at Lambeau Field.

:: I’m really getting sick of “narrative-based” journalism. Last year, the whole thing was “Will Peyton Manning stake his claim to being the best ever!” This year, it was “Will Aaron Rodgers make Green Bay forget about Favre once and for all!” This stuff is stupid.

:: That trumpet-fanfare thing they do when the Vince Lombardi trophy is being unveiled is laughable. Forget it, NFL; your trophy is nice, but the trophy itself will never have the cachet of the Stanley Cup.

:: Speaking of which, a local sports radio personality posed the question to Buffalonians: Would you rather win the Super Bowl or the Stanley Cup? True, Buffalo is hockey-crazed, and the Cup would be a sweet, sweet thing. But the NHL is a fairly small thing in the sporting life of the US nowadays. The Super Bowl, on the other hand? If the Bills won that thing, then Buffalo would be able to finally, once and for all, be able to offer an extended middle finger to every single person in the country for whom Buffalo is a punchline. No, I don’t think that a Super Bowl win would have any real effect on Buffalo’s economy or anything like that. But being able to say, “Hey, we won the Super Bowl, so F*** you” would be pretty sweet.

:: Next up: the draft, hopefully. If there’s not a lockout first.

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Steelers and Packers in the Super Bowl. What a matchup! Seriously, out of all the teams that were in the playoffs, I think these two teams yield the most potential for a fantastic game — and that’s even by today’s standards, as the Super Bowl has for fifteen years now tended to produce great games a lot more often than the dull blowouts it used to feature. I don’t see this game as a blowout for either team.

I’ll be rooting for the Steelers, of course, as they are my second-favorite NFL team (I only root against the Steelers when they are either playing the Bills or are in a situation in which a Steelers win hurts the Bills in some way, such as playoff positioning), but it really won’t break my heart if the Packers win. There’s just something about the Packers that’s frankly awesome, and I’m not talking about this year’s team but the franchise itself. The idea that one of the NFL’s better franchises resides in a relatively tiny town in northern Wisconsin is one of sports history’s cooler quirks, even if the existence of the Packers will allow the NFL to feel a bit less guilty when they inevitably put the screws to their franchise in Buffalo.

I’m not as down on Ben Roethlisberger as a lot of people are; if I’m going to believe in second chances for the Michael Vicks and the Marshawn Lynches of the world — guys who were actually committed and were charged with crimes — then I’ve gotta be on board with extending a second chance to a guy who wasn’t charged with anything at all. (In fact, come to that, I’d love to know how Roethlisberger’s sexual escapades merited a longer suspension than Marshawn Lynch’s hit and run of a pedestrian.)

As for the other teams, the ones that lost: I’m seeing all kinds of criticism of Jay Cutler this morning for essentially quitting on his team. I don’t know about any of that, but it does happen sometimes. I’ve got to ask, what was his coach doing? I’m reminded of Thurman Thomas in Super Bowl XXVIII, who was emotionally shattered after he fumbled a handoff that Dallas ended up returning for a touchdown. Marv Levy has even said in recent years that he wishes he’d gone over to Thomas that day and gotten him up off the mat. Oh well. Was Cutler really hurt? Or did the Packers get that far into his head? Either way, his career going forward is going to be tough.

(But for the ultimate in a team getting into another quarterback’s head, check this out, from the NFC Championship Game after the 1989 season. Rams at 49ers. Jim Everett against a San Francisco pass rush that was so persistent that…well, look what happens.

Amazing — he flinches at nobody!)

As for the Jets, well, I don’t like them. They’re not the Patriots yet, but I find them obnoxious and irritating. I’m also wondering which Mark Sanchez is the real one, because he’s frankly starting to look as inconsistent as New York’s other franchise quarterback, the Giants’ Eli Manning. The Jets do an awful lot of things right on the field, but Sanchez does not inspire great amounts of confidence. He strikes me as a “Things might go great, or things might go horribly” kind of guy. I’m also not a fan of Rex Ryan. I think Buddy Ryan was one of the biggest douchebags in NFL history, and his son seems cut from the same cloth. (The “foot fetish” thing actually kinda counts as a point in his favor to me. Not that I’m into feet — I find the foot generally to be a fairly unattractive part of the human anatomy — but it does make Ryan seem like more of “just a dude” in my mind.) I’ll give Ryan credit where due, though: I thought his postgame interview with Steve Tasker was one of the classier ones I’ve seen. He was disappointed, but still confident in the direction he’s taking his team, and why not? Two AFC Championship Games in a row isn’t bad. This interview was certainly better than the “What? I lost?!” reaction that Bill Belichick always conveys.

So yeah, time to gear up for the Super Bowl. Or, as we’ve come to think of it in Buffalo, “Football’s biggest event between the end of the Bills’ season and the Draft.”

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A few thoughts about the divisional NFL playoffs:

:: Wow, watching St. Tom Brady the Overrated pout when he gets beat really never gets old, does it?

:: Sure, Brady’s a great quarterback. He’s earned his spot in Canton, and probably on the first ballot. But I just don’t think he functions well under pressure. When everything is going his way, he can beat the living hell out of you. But if you manage to just get things going not quite his way, he gets frustrated and usually loses. I’ve listened to a lot of people the last month or so resurrecting the “Brady is the greatest ever” talk, but I continue to believe that until he responds to a real high-pressure situation with a win, he doesn’t even merit mention alongside Joe Montana.

Put it this way: if I’m down four points in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl with two minutes to go and I’m on my own 5-yard line, I don’t want Tom Brady under center. Sorry. Give me Elway, or Montana.

:: That said, I think the Jets’ bubble probably gets burst this weekend. I wouldn’t be surprised if they look a bit flat after a hugely emotional win. Plus, for all the talk about how Mark Sanchez faced Peyton Manning and then Tom Brady and beat them both, the fact is, Sanchez didn’t face those guys. He opposed them, but he actually faced the Colts and Patriots defenses. Now he gets to face the Steelers defense.

I know, Sanchez beat them in the regular season. That win was rather flukey, if I remember correctly, and the Steelers were pretty banged up at the time. Not the case now…and the Steelers are an experienced, playoff-tested group of veterans.

:: Speaking of Sanchez, I’m not really impressed with him. The Jets’ defense is why they won that game, but Sanchez’s passing is all over the place. He missed wide-open receivers left and right, and the ones he hit, he didn’t exactly hit on the numbers. Again, that’s not going to work out well against a healthy and fired-up Steeler defense.

:: My prediction skills suck, but I think Green Bay wins as well. Steelers-Packers in the Super Bowl!

:: Oh, and finally: Lord knows that my love of overalls is quixotic enough, but even I can’t endorse this.

Go Steelers!

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The Bills won! The Bills won! The Bills won! So, no pie in the face of my cartoon Bills fan this week.

But now, I’m sure that some Bills fans are disturbed by a victory now, since the focus for many here has changed from winning this year to securing the best possible draft pick for next year. The Bills have been streaking toward the first overall pick, with which they would hopefully be able to pick the best quarterback in the draft (hopefully either Andrew Luck or Ryan Mallett; hopefully not Jake Locker, whose stock has been dropping). So, now that most teams have played nine games, let’s look at the Bills versus the other teams who are in position to end up picking first.

The Bills, of course, are now 1-8 on the year. If they pick first and Luck or Mallett are there, the Bills will almost certainly take one of those two. The question mark right now is whether or not Luck will actually decide to enter the draft or remain in college. He has indicated in the past that he plans to return to Stanford next year, and Buffalo News columnist Jerry Sullivan is constantly pointing out that Luck may see that he’d be drafted by Buffalo and decide not to enter the draft, especially since his coach, Jim Harbaugh, rejected the Bills’ head coaching job last year. The motivating factor in favor of Luck’s entering the draft is money: when the NFL gets its new collective bargaining agreement, there will almost certainly be some sort of salary cap structure for rookies, so there is a big chance that the 2011 Draft will be the last one where rookies can get enormous contracts to launch their careers. And who knows? Maybe Luck will look at the Bills and see a team with more potential than many thought before the year started. They’re not a total wasteland of talent, after all. We’ll see.

Also sitting on a single win are the Carolina Panthers, who are also really bad. I don’t know much about the Panthers, but I do know that they drafted one of the top QB prospects last year in Jimmy Clausen, so I tend to think that unless Clausen looks really awful, the Panthers are unlikely to be looking for a QB next year. So, if the Bills end up picking behind them, maybe they still get a shot at Luck.

Next up, at 2-7, we have the Cowboys, Lions, and Bengals. I’m not sure I see any of these teams looking to go QB high in the draft — maybe the Bengals, if their almost-certain new coaching staff decides that Carson Palmer needs a change of scenery. I don’t see the Cowboys dumping Tony Romo, and the Lions still have last year’s top pick, Matthew Stafford, as their young prospect. Stafford seems to have some injury problems, though, that could put the Lions in the QB market. But I’m not so sure.

Then there are the 3-win clubs. The Bills are almost certainly not going to win three games, so I think there is very little chance that any of these clubs will end up edging the Bills in terms of draft position. But, you never know! So, our 3-win teams are the Browns, Broncos, Vikings, and the Cardinals. The Browns have a QB prospect drafted just this year in Colt McCoy, and the Broncos traded up to get Tim Tebow, so both teams may be looking to draft something other than a QB. Not so those other two teams, though; the Vikings absolutely need to address their future QB situation, with Brett Favre looking worse and worse, and the same goes for the Cardinals, unless Derek Anderson somehow manages to turn it on over the rest of this season (unlikely).

So, it seems to me that even if the Bills don’t end up picking first overall, they might still have their pick of quarterbacks if they end up picking behind Carolina, Dallas, Detroit, Cleveland, Denver, and maybe Cincinnati. They’re screwed, however, if they’re beaten for draft position by the Vikings or Cardinals.

Another scenario that could screw the Bills anyway is if any of those bad teams end up (a) drafting ahead of the Bills, and (b) firing their current coaching staff and hiring Jim Harbaugh, who might well decide to draft his college standout, Andrew Luck. But we’ll worry about that when it happens….

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This was a fun game to watch. The Bears ran it well, but the Bills stayed right there, even taking a 19-14 lead in the 2nd half. But as the fourth quarter ran on, you just felt it coming. You knew it was there, waiting….

And sure enough, with the Bills trying to set up a tying field goal to send the game to overtime (after a freakishly good bounce on a Chicago punt to leave the Bills at the 1-yard line), QB Ryan Fitzpatrick rallied the troops…and then promptly unrallied them by throwing an interception, allowing the Bears to run out the clock.

Splat.

BTW, I know it’s hard to judge sitting at home watching on the teevee, but it sure sounded like the crowd at this Bills “home” game — played in Toronto — consisted of mostly Chicago fans. Yuck!

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Wow, these Buffalo Bills are certainly looking how I expected them to look this year. Lots of losses, but at least the team is playing more interestingly, they’re playing harder than they ever did under Dick Jauron, and the games are more fun to watch. But they keep ending up in losses. Oh well. I don’t have much to say about today’s game, except to say that I saw a lot of heart on the field. Oh well. They came really, really close…they took the Chiefs all the way down to the last few seconds of overtime…and still ended up on the receiving end of the loss.

I was almost wondering how I’d do a post without using this graphic, but here it is.

Sigh.

(But isn’t watching the Dallas Cowboy demise a lot of fun? As someone said on Twitter: “Welcome to bizarro world in Arlington. Dejected Cowboys fans & excited Rangers fans meet in the parking lot near the ballpark.”.)

(Oh, and on an unrelated note, there shouldn’t be a possibility of injury when receiving a pie in the face. Yeesh.)

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The Buffalo Bills came off their bye week today, and headed to Baltimore to face the Ravens. The Ravens are widely considered one of the league’s best teams, with a fearsome defense, and an offense that combines a punishing running attack with a significantly-improved passing game. The Ravens are also coming off a very tough loss last week in New England, an overtime defeat that left them angry and needing a win to keep pace with the Steelers in their division. The Bills, on the other hand, headed into today boasting one of the NFL’s only two winless records, and a defense that would have a sieve saying, “Who are you calling ‘porous’?” So the scene was set for a big loss and another pie in the face of Bills fans everywhere.

But…as Chris Berman likes to say, “That’s why they play the games.”

The Bills hadn’t had a quarterback — any quarterback — throw for more than 300 yards in a game in something like four years; so Ryan Fitzpatrick today threw for almost 400. The Bills hadn’t taken a big lead at all this year, so today they jumped out to a 24-10 lead in the second quarter. The Bills’ offensive line had looked horrific on a depressingly common basis, so today they only gave up a single sack, provided decent pass protection, and made for a productive, if not explosive, running game. The Bills hadn’t put up a strong rally from a late-game deficit, and yet today they bounced back from being down 34-24 to tie the game with seconds left to force overtime.

Unfortunately, the Bills’ defense had not protected a lead in any game this year, and they still haven’t. That 24-10 lead quickly disappeared to become a 34-24 deficit, with the annoying announcers — seriously, these guys were terrible — pronouncing in the third quarter that with a mere ten-point lead, the Ravens had the game “well in hand”. The Bills tied it, sending it to overtime. But, as usual this year when the Bills score a nice number of points, the defense can’t stop anybody else from scoring, either. In the NFL, scoring 34 points should mean a win. But so far this year, the Bills have lost games in which they scored 34, 30, and 26 points.

Looking at that, however, I see continued reason for potential optimism for the team’s future. Everybody around here — especially Buffalo News columnist Jerry Sullivan — thinks that it will take three or four years to get the team respectable again, assuming the current brain trust is even up to the job. But here’s the thing: right now, the offense is pretty good, and will probably be even better if the Bills can add a stud quarterback with their more-certain-every-week high 1st-round draft pick. That means that what really needs fixing is the defense, not the entire team. If the Bills can start to address that, and do so convincingly, then I think that maybe they’re only one or two years away from being good, not three or four.

Yeah, I know. “If.” But all of football is “if”, isn’t it?

Oh, and overtime? The Bills turned the ball over in Ravens territory, on a stripping of the ball from Shaun Nelson. Now, I expect when I listen to some day-after radio tomorrow on this game, some Bills fans will insist that Nelson’s forward progress had been stopped on the play and therefore it should have been whistled dead before Ray Lewis was able to strip the ball, but I’m not sure that’s what happened. It looked to me like the Ravens defenders (a) surrounded Nelson, (b) held him up so he couldn’t get down to the ground, and (c) kept pushing him forward to keep forward progress alive until someone could get the ball out of there. That’s how it looked to me, anyway — a smart play by a smart defense where everyone thinks as a team. I don’t really blame Nelson for that.

I do blame Bills center Geoff Hangartner, though, who got really stupid at that moment. Instead of keeping his cool and hoping the defense could make a stop and prevent a game-winning field goal (granted, a tall order for the NFL’s crappiest defense), Hangartner got frustrated and threw his helmet to the ground. Bills fans all know (thanks to Andre Reed in Super Bowl XXVI) that this is a 15-yard “Unsportsmanlike Conduct” penalty, which put the Ravens in field-goal range before they even ran a play. A couple of snaps later, in came their kicker, boom went the kick, and splat went the pie.

I don’t think today’s game was very discouraging, really; it shows that there’s a lot more to the Bills that we can be optimistic about for seasons to come. Yeah, it’s still a loss, but there are worse fates than being pied.

Next week, the Bills face the Chiefs, who last year were awful but are quickly improving. Bring ’em on!

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Jacksonville Jaguars 36, Buffalo Bills 26. So, for Bills fans, yet again:

The game was blacked out on local teevee, since (a) as the Bills get crappier and crappier, fans are more and more apathetic about them, and (b) the Jags aren’t much of a draw anywhere, so you can’t even count on fans of the other team to help fill the place up. (The Bills’ game against the Steelers, later this year, will probably sell out, since Pittsburgh’s one of the NFL’s elite teams and since Pitt is only a 3.5 hour drive away, and fans will undoubtedly be able to get tickets for that game, cheap.) So I didn’t see any of the game, which is fine by me.

Looking at the stats, then, it seems pretty straightforward. The Bills’ games in 2010 are probably all going to split into two varieties: games in which the offense plays well but the defense can’t hold the other team off at all, and games in which the offense stinks just as badly as the defense. Today’s game was the former type of game, apparently; they ran the ball well (albeit not enough), and the passing game appears to have clicked, with Ryan Fitzpatrick completing 20 of 30 for 220 yards, 3 touchdowns, and no interceptions. He also spread the ball around, with seven different Bills making catches, and four guys catching multiple passes. Not bad.

The defense, however? A continuing train wreck. Only two sacks, one by a cornerback; over 200 rushing yards yielded yet again; et cetera. Thus, once again, despite a good day for the Bills on offense, it’s pie-in-the-face time yet again.

Luckily, next week we can absolutely guarantee that Bills fans will not be pie-faced. Because next week, the Bills don’t play. Oy….

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