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No Sportswriter Left Behind

My former Herald colleague Michael Felger is a superior football reporter. Alas, he has not fulfilled one of my dearest hopes. Instead of ashcanning the "Patriots Report Card" when Kevin Mannix retired, Felger made the nosious feature his own.

Newspapers love report cards in sports. They take up space on slow news days (and the day after a game is usually slow except for medical reports). They lend themselves to snappy design. Most of all, report cards are easy for any fan, hell, anyone who can read, to grasp.

Writers like report cards, too, especially a busy workaholic multi-media chap like Michael. They're easy to do, and even easier to steer towards generating increased and indignant reader feedback, which all papers adore more than anything except money.

There's only one thing wrong with report cards, which have spread their inane tentacles into other sports besides football in the past few years. They're such an oversimplification of reality as to be an active distortion of same. Instead of information, the format provides the reader with a hot, fresh pile of hippopotamus dung

The Herald's Patriots' report card is typical of the genre. The home team's performance is broken into sections, then graded. Quarterback, running back, offensive line, defensive line, etc. As a general rule, grades are too high when the team wins and too low when it loses, but since that's the way football teams tend to grade themselves, that's a relatively minor quibble. The real problem is that breaking the team's effort into neat sections gives a false idea of how football is actually played.

If there's one thing yours truly learned from five years of listening to Bill Belichick (aside from an infinite number of ways to brush off unwelcome questions), it's what I call the unified string theory of football. Simply put, every player's performance affects the performance of every other player. It's all tied in together, and pulling it apart for the sake of a glib explanation is futile.

Case in point. Tom Brady has not played up to his high standards in the first two games of this season. Is that because Brady has yet to synchronize with a new set of wide receivers, a popular local theory? Or is it due to the homelier fact that's Brady's been clobbered and knocked loose from the football in two consecutive games, the experience most likely to negatively affect a passer's performance? Should the wideouts get a bad grade, or the blockers, or Brady himself?

Nobody knows the answer. Not you, not me, not Belichick, not Brady. That's why teams spend all that time practicing and watching video. And when the Pats make their conclusion on this issue, their answer certainly will be "all of the above."

When Belichick goes into cliche, he's often making the most sincere effort possible to express his deep-set ideas about the sport he loves. Last Sunday, he went back to one of his favorite coma-inducing coachspeak phrases, speaking of both the good and bad things he saw his team do "in all areas of the game." The Pats' coach ALWAYS mentions every area of his team's performance because he's convinced that only by making all of them better will any specific area be able to improve. He's right, too.

Until a way is found to express Belichick's idea in a letter grade, the report card should be banished in the interests of better journalism. It won't be, of course. You tell America's sports editors to dispose of such a handy if bogus tool. Their lives are tough enough as is.

There are only two grades in a football game, pass or fail. The Pats passed last Sunday. That they did so without honors is irrelevant.

posted by Michael Gee @ 10:41 AM