Too Bad Tony Randall's Not Alive to Introduce Him at Canton
Peyton Manning found a flaw in the Bronco's 35-21 win over the Chargers last night. He was caught by national cussing out the Mile High Stadium scoreboard operator for inciting the crowd to cheer when Manning wanted to them to be quiet, forcing the quarterback to use a meaningless fourth quarter time out.
That's the heat of battle. In about the most Peyton Manningesque moment of his entire career, the quarterback went on to call out the operator in his post-game press conference. I'm sure that in his next public remarks, Manning will put on his Papa John's persona and insist he was just kidding, but we all know differently, don't we? Manning wasn't joking. Your true fusspot can never laugh at disorder, no matter how petty it might be. Manning is the fusspot incarnate on a football field. It's why he drives fans mad when he's calling signals. It's why he's one of the all-time greats.
Peyton Manning is Felix Unger with an arm.
Five, Two and Even
Bill Belichick allows Tom Brady a privilege he denies to every other New England Patriot including himself. The quarterback has the leeway to discuss a Pats' season in more macro terms than the next game on the schedule.
After last Thursday night's game against the Jets, a victory far closer than anyone in the NFL world including most Jets expected, Brady chose to exercise his right to take the long view.
"We lost our first game, and we're 5-2," Brady allowed. "That's not so bad."
Tough to top that for succinct and faultless analysis. Warts and all, the Patriots haven't been nearly as bad overall as they were in their two shoddy defeats. They are one of the six NFL teams with 5-2 records. Complaints are few among followers of the other five, the Colts, Chargers, Ravens, Lions and Packers. All are assumed to be what they are, strong favorites to make the playoffs, except maybe the Lions, whose history has left deep scars on its fan base.
I daresay that if one had tapped a random Pats fan on the shoulder in August and told them their team would be 5-2 after seven games, that fan would almost certainly have said, "I can live with that" or even "sounds about right." Continued success does jade fans, but a .714 winning percentage is not considered the mark of a team in crisis unless it plays in the SEC West instead of the NFL.
My summary of the 2014 Pats to date as viewed from the International Space Station goes as follows. The team remains vulnerable to problems in blocking and stopping the run. Those are serious vulnerabilities. They are far outweighed, however, by the team's success in maintaining three vital strengths, the ability to win at home, the ability to clobber the Buffalo Bills (the key element of its AFC East dominance) and the ability of Brady himself.
As long as the Pats can keep folding those ingredients into their omelet, they will serve up another division title and playoff berth, just as everyone in the world assumed would happen before the season began. In fact, in super macro NFL terms, the local home team is a prime example of what has so far been the defining trait of the 2014 pro football season -- an almost total lack of surprises.
Try as I might, I can only think of one, the Cowboys. Nobody, especially me, thought they'd be any good this season, and after their horrible Opening Day loss to the 49ers. most expected them to be terrible. Funny how a team gets better when it puts the functional equivalent of Jim Brown in at running back.
After that, the NFL has been "Ode to Banal Forecasting," a sonata played in chalk. What most people thought would happen, has. The teams forecast to be good have been, the ones expected to be dreadful have been so and then some. The Bengals were a mirage. Peyton Manning has continued to break records. Some might say the Seahawks' 3-3 record is a shock, but they're wrong. It's never a true surprise when the Super Bowl champ struggles the following season. It happens more often than not.
Season's not half over. Surprise may yet rule the NFL. Today's favorites may become December's disappointments. The Cardinals could keep on winning. Anything is possible, or so the theory goes.
Some things are more possible than others, however. I wouldn't advise Pats fans to be complacent, not with four of the other 5-2 teams plus the Broncos left on the schedule. But I wouldn't advise them to worry overmuch, either. During the regular season anyway, they root for a franchise that ought to be called Conventional Wisdom's Team.
Belated Advertisement for Myself
This will no longer be the only forum where my sports thoughts will appear. I will be found, on a weekly but no set day basis, on the Boston.com Website as well. I've already posted twice there, but since I am an idiot at self-promotion, it's now too late to link to them. I promise from here on in I will do so. Every click counts.
Oh, Grow Up
Carl Crawford made the last out for the Dodgers in their playoff loss to the Cardinals last night, and some alleged Red Sox fans went on Twitter to taunt the former Boston player as well as Red Sox-then-Dodger Adrian Gonzalez. This is a perfect example of loser fan behavior. It is the epitome of that ancient and honorable baseball epithet, bush.
Three World Series titles in this century, one of 'em just last season, and some Boston baseball fans still can't let go of spite as a reflex emotion. This is why, fellow residents, baseball fans elsewhere loathe Sox fans almost as much as they do Yankees and Cardinals fans. Successful people who taunt others for their failures are seldom popular.
It's unseemly, no, make that ridiculous, to mock another team's elimination from the playoffs when one's own team was eliminated from the postseason by Labor Day. And assuming Crawford and Gonzalez where the reason LA lost belies the notion that Bostonians are the world's most knowledgeable fans.
The Dodgers lost because Clayton Kershaw, the best pitcher in the sport in the regular season, twice went into the seventh inning with leads and could hold neither one and because manager Don Mattingly may be a superb leader of men, but doesn't seem to have a knack for bullpen juggling. Gonzalez led the majors in RBI this year. Without him, the Dodgers wouldn't have qualified to lose to the Cards.
Twitter plays hosts to millions of born losers speaking before they think (those that are capable of thought) on every topic under the sun each day. In 40 years as an alien sports fan in this city, I have learned that the overwhelming majority of Sox fans are blessedly normal, happy in victory, sad in defeat, but above all, primarily concerned with their own damn team.
The normal majority suffers for the sins of its loudest, dopiest brethren. Bushers have a way of dragging down a franchise -- on or off the field.
Serenity Now?
On Wednesday, Bill Belichick will again give his midweek press conference.
I for one hope he answers each and every question by saying "we're
moving on to Buffalo." He's earned the horselaugh and I like laughing. More importantly, it'd be good
for his mental health.. If Belichick spent any amount of time pondering the last two Pats' games, he might just go nuts.
What is a football coach noted for excruciating attention to detail and a heaping helping of professional paranoia to make of a team capable of playing a game in which it did nothing right followed by a game in which it did nothing wrong in the space of one week? He can be happier, but he can't be any less puzzled.
I am leery of attempting to read Belichick's mind, but I'll go this far. He's not assuming blowing the out the Bengals means that he's solved all the Patriots' problems and restored the 13-3 natural order of things. Leave that to the bipolar fans and media.
Belichick likely was cheered to see that like all quarterbacks Tom Brady plays better when upright, but that's something he already knew. It is quite possible the coach is admitting to himself that Darelle Revis's theories on how to play pass defense have merit. But as for having the faintest idea how the Pats will perform next Sunday against Buffalo or the game after that and on down the line, Belichick can't hazard a guess and wouldn't if he could. He's not much on guessing
I'll guess where Belichick won't. The Pats' split of their last two games by the combined score of 57-58 shows that the local team is part of a shift in the NFL cosmos in the 2014 season where the concept of parity has taken a bizarre turn. For years, it's been used to sell the league as providing more close games than any other sport. So far this year, parity seems to mean that on any given Sunday, Monday, Thursday, every team is capable of blowing out an opponent or being blown out by them.
The dismal Thursday nighters are the most visible aspect of this phenomenon. The Eagles, who have routed opponents and been routed within individual games on a regular basis, are its most extreme example. The last two unbeaten teams in the league, Cincinnati and the Cardinals, went down yesterday by a combined 84-37 score. Nobody's immune. It's my firm belief that the Broncos and Seahawks have ass-kickings in their near futures (if not tonight for Seattle or next week for Denver).
Since 2001, the New England franchise has sneered at parity as a loser's idea. It has made consistency its hallmark, gliding along to double-digit victory seasons as a matter of habit, indeed, as a matter of birthright. Since winning IS a habit, this attitude led to more victories leading to more attitude and so on in a virtuous circle of smug.
The circle is broken. A big rebound win addresses a team's problems by indicating they have
solutions. It doesn't make them go away. Tbe boat race in Kansas City
was the Pats' worst loss in over a decade. No coach forgets such an
experience, no matter how hard he tries. Seeing a game where the
offensive line did block may have been gratifying for the coach, but it couldn't have been completely reassuring it will block equally well from here on out.
To a certain extent, this is normal. NFL coaches live in a cloud of uncertainty. Bill Parcells once told me that even for a championship team, a coach never really understood his team's possibilities until around Thanskgiving, and when this theory was put before Belichick, he didn't disagree.
As was said here last week, by then the Chiefs' loss could be a forgotten anomaly in a brilliant season
Or it could be the worst example of issues that have plagued an inconsistent team since its very first game. Since the coach's primary and nearly impossible goal is to create consistent performance, Belichick's mind is likely to remain uneasy for some time to come
On the other hand, problems with solutions are better than those without. Doubt is easier on the soul than panic.
Silver Threads Among the Golden Couple
The rain wasn't stopping, and I was bored, so I did some random remote clicking this afternoon. First, naturally, I tried the 197 or so sports channels I overpay for.
On two of the cheap talking head shows all the channels have to fill time, commentators were arguing about whether four mediocre to awful games in a row mean Tom Brady is in irrevocable decline as a quarterback at age 37. That got way older than 37 very quickly, so I abandoned sports for the world of entertainment.
On TMZ's show they were interviewing some well-known except to me woman from the fashion world, a blogger or journalist or some such. As Nielsen was my witness, the topic was whether at age 34, Gisele Bundchen was "on the back nine" of her modeling career.
About Brady, opinions differed. About his wife, they didn't. Nobody thought she wasn't still the preeminent superstar of her weird profession.
There you have it, America. There's definitive evidence that the audience for tabloid shows about celebrities is considered harder to fool than audiences for sports talk programs.
