All the February Optimism That's Fit to Print
Over the decades, the Red Sox have generally performed in inverse ratio to expectations. The 2004 ALCS is one example. The 2019 regular season is one in the opposite direction.
If this pattern holds true, the Sox should win a minimum of 207 of their 162 games in the 2020 season. Expectations are past pessimism into actual dread. There's nothing like following a very poor season with an offseason consisting of nothing but unpleasant surprises to get a manic-depressive fan base into ledge-walking mode.
Don't jump yet, gang. It's entirely possible and perhaps even probable that the Sox will improve on their 84-78 record in their previous campaign. Just like "everything went our way" years like 2018 tend to revert to the mean next time around, so do "everything broke against us" years like 2019. Such is the generosity of the expanded playoff system that even a modest gain to the 88-91 range of wins could get Boston (or any other club) into the postseason, if only for a day.
IMPORTANT CLARIFICATION, PLEASE NOTE: This does not mean the Sox have done anything but lost ground from trading Mookie Betts, David Price and $48 million for three guys who won't be on the Opening Day roster except on the injured list. Teams never get better when they lose stars, and trading a superstar always involves taking a hit on the performance balance sheet. A team in any sport that does so is lucky to get back fifty cents on its metaphorical dollar. The most generous assessment of the Betts trade is that Boston might get back a quarter, but not this year.
This still leaves the Red Sox with a starting lineup containing three rather than four hitters who had .900-plus OPS's in 2019. Three of those is or ought to be enough to produce the runs necessary to win well more than half of a team's games, assuming all other aspects of their club are at least adequate.
There's the rub. The odd truth is, the presence or absence of Betts is almost irrelevant to any 2020 Sox forecast. It's the presence or absence and/or performance of other players who'll matter.
The equation is one short paragraph. If Chris Sale and Nathan Eovaldi enjoy good health and pitch at the upper range of their performance levels (even just midrange for Sale), then the Sox have enough to be a winner without Betts. If they can't, then even having Betts in the lineup every day wouldn't get Boston to the postseason.
The Red Sox: Big lineup, starting pitching questions. There's an original forecast for you. Could only have been cut and pasted from preseason previews of about 80 of the last 100 seasons at Fenway. Some of those 80 seasons were very good years, if not championship ones.
So calm your dread, Sox faithful. Besides, I'm sure the team is leveling with you when it says Eduardo Rodriguez's injury is nothing to worry about.
Super Bowl 54 As a Series of Sports Maxims
When Patrick Mahomes threw his second interception of the game early in the fourth quarter, one of his worst plays of what was then a very bad night, he gave the 49ers the ball to protect their 20-10 lead. I turned to Alice and said, "well, this one's pretty much over."
Turns out I was right, just not the way I thought. The lesson of this Super Bowl is that football, like all other sports, can not be fully explained by examining it as probabilities, ratios and other cold numbers. DVOA, the WAR of newish football stats, was better for the losing 49ers than for the winning Chiefs because San Francisco averaged more yards per play. Fat lot of good that did 'em.
No, football runs hot, as a violent sport must. The Kansas City Chiefs are champions this morning because they don't just run hot, they explode. Twenty-one points in five minutes with six minutes to play in the fourth quarter of the NFL's championship game is not an event susceptible to mathematical scrutiny. We must use our words, or in my case, other people's words, words used to explain other sports, too.
Maxim Number One: "All comebacks start with defense" -- Bill Russell.
Mahomes is on a float with cartoon characters today, and rightly so, but he has no chance to be the hero if the Chiefs' defense, bullied about for three quarters, hadn't responded to that allegedly fatal pick by flipping its switch. From that moment on, the 49er offense was held to two punts, a loss of the ball on downs and an interception in 17 plays. San Francisco quarterback Jimmy Garoppolo completed 17 of his first 20 passes. In the fourth quarter, he went 3 for 11. The 49ers were un able to rip off 10+ yard runs as they had in the opening 45 minutes of the game, either. This isn't calculus-level stuff. A team is only able to score three TDs in five minutes if it gets its hands on the ball three times.
No one has ever compared the 2019 Chiefs' defense to the '85 Bears, or even the 2019 Patriots. What was the root cause of its sudden identity switch to a brilliantly evil twin? For the answer, we consult a noted football authority.
Maxim Number Two: "Football games are determined by who can rush the passer in the fourth quarter" -- Bill Walsh.
For three quarters and two minutes, the 49er pass rushers, particularly Nick Bosa, had their way with the Chiefs' offensive line. Almost every time Mahomes dropped back, at least one San Francisco rusher beat their blocker clean. This had its usual effect on Mahomes' game. He made the quick, inaccurate throws of a man expecting immediately bodily harm. Meanwhile, his opposite number Garoppolo's uniform remained as clean as it was for the national anthem, and prospered accordingly.
When the Chiefs absolutely positively could not surrender another point, their rushers found a second desperate wind. Garoppolo became the quarterback under stress, surrounded if not sacked, unable to see much past the line of scrimmage. We have seen what that did to him down the stretch. Don't say Garoppolo choked. He was choked off.
News flash: Pass rushing is very hard work. Three hours of repeated anaerobic exercise is tough on 300-pound human bodies, chiseled or not. The 49er rushers lost a tiny bit of vim as a result of their stellar early work, and the Chiefs offensive line was able to battle to a draw. That's all that was needed to bring us to our last statement on Super Bowl 54.
Maxim Number Three: "A loaded six-gun beats any hand in the deck" -- poker saying of the Old West.
Mahomes is the Chiefs' loaded Colt .45. Hell, make it an AR-15. He is the reason Kansas City can defy probabilities and analytics to score points in ungodly bunches not seen since the Showtime Lakers on a roll. He is why Andy Reid has designed an offense made for explosions and built on speed. Mahomes is why the Chiefs got better when the time-space-scoreboard continuum and almost all of Super Bowl history said they'd get worse.
Quarterbacks get too much credit when they win and too much blame when they lose is a maxim, too, but I didn't include it in my list because as this Super Bowl showed, it's not always true. There are times, many times, when quarterbacks cannot be given too much credit, and this was one of them.
This was the third straight playoff game in which the Chiefs allowed an opponent AT LEAST a 10 point lead and came to win anyway. It was the fifth time Mahomes had led such a comeback in the 2019 season. That defies any kind of math and all kinds of history.
Consider the following. The all time leader in playoff comebacks from 10 points or more down is one Tom Brady. He's 6-6 in that situation, in a career of 20 years. Mahomes got halfway to Brady's mark in one year, his third in the NFL. Peyton Manning, also considered more than fair, was 2-8. So is Ben Roethlisberger. Kurt Warner, Hall of Famer, was 2-44 in the playoffs and regular season when his team was down by that margin. In the whole league it happens maybe 10 times in 256 games. Mahomes went 3 for 3.
Yeah, it's a team game. Yeah, the Chiefs have frightening speed afoot. Reid and offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy create game plans built for explosions (Kansas City's fourth down conversion in the first quarter was a play Bieniemy copied from Michigan's win in the 1948 Rose Bowl. How cool is that?). Without Mahomes all of that is nice and gets the Chiefs a divisional round loss.
Some of the best pro football reporters and analysts in the country, men and women whose work has deepened my understanding of the sport, took to various quadrants of the Internet to quibble with Mahomes' MVP award last night. After all, he had a poor game until he won it. Surely running back Damian Williams (excellent for 60 minutes) or defensive end Chris Jones (see passage of Maxim Two) were more deserving.
Stuff and nonsense. It's the quarterbacks who can shrug off stinking up the joint for most of the game and come through when needed who I want. It's the guys who can be the bonafide Hero when only heroics will do. Tom Brady was pretty freaking terrible in the first half of Super Bowl 51 against the Falcons. Who remembers? Who cares?
The Chiefs have a Hero. That's worth more than 10 points in any game. Enjoy meeting Elsa, Mickey, Minnie and the gang today Patrick. Take lots of selfies. Tell them you'll be seeing them again.
Because you will.
Oh, I Suppose I Must
One of the inescapable duties of every sports opinionator is to pick the winner of the Super Bowl. Nowadays, we're also expected to pick against the spread and the over/under. It's a bother. For one thing, none of your audience remembers the right picks in that trio, just the one or ones that went wrong.
Last year I went with the Patriots giving points to the Rams. Like everyone else on Earth, I predicted a high-scoring game making the over as well. The only fact anyone will remember about Super Bowl 53 a decade from now is that at 13-3, New England won the lowest scoring Super Bowl ever. Hard to say two out of three ain't bad when the third is a bad guess of historic dimensions.
Which brings us to tomorrow's Super Bowl 54. Once again there is "expert" consensus, this time across the board, from the numbers crunchers at Football Outsiders to the men and women who crush a very different set of numbers in Las Vegas. The Chiefs and 49ers are an even match. The Kansas City minus 1.5 spread says so. The nearly 50-50 split of "expert" (some of these people really are football experts, mind you, but no one is an expert in forecasting one game, not me, you nor Bill Belichick) opinion says so. Hell, even the two uniforms say so. The shades of red used by the Chiefs and 49ers are separated by one 127-128, on the scientific color scale.
There is a consensus choice on one element of tomorrow's game. Both teams are expected to score a bunch of points. The over/under is 54.5. That means Vegas expects a score around 28-27 or 27-24 given the game it and the public expects to be close.
I'm not touching the over/under this year except to say this. If there's another 13-3 Super Bowl, the NFL owners will pass a rule eliminating the safety position.
For my prediction, I was tempted to just flip a coin, but there's no change in my desk drawer. In the interest of brevity, let's summarize the conventional wisdom on each team's strengths and weaknesses.
The 49ers offense runs the ball effectively and at times, as in the NFC title game, with frightening prowess, whereas the Chiefs defense, while improved from last season's sorry lot, has been mediocre to poor at stopping opposing runners.
A strong point, that. A team need not run to win, indeed most don't, but a team that cannot stop the run will surely lose. The Patriots had the NFL's leading defense this season, and its inability to limit Derrick Henry is the main reason Tom Brady had so much free time on his hands last month.
The Chiefs real running defense is Patrick Mahomes. A two touchdown lead has always been the ultimate run stopper. The ability of Kansas City's offense to score points in bunches in very little time negates what makes running the football work, the control of both time and space. In football physics, scoreboard trumps both those dimensions.
Not to give short shrift to the KC defense, but the case for a Chiefs win rests totally on its offense. One of the league's top three quarterbacks and its fastest offense. Never out of any game. Immune to the awful sense of impending doom that impacts so many Super Bowl losers who were trailing by 10 midway through the third quarter. Can outscore anyone.
This argument would impress me more had I not seen its history in Super Bowls ranging from XXV (Giants 20-Bills 19) to XLVIII (Seahawks 43-Broncos 8) to, well LIII (13-3, remember). For the record, teams which reached the Super Bowl relying wholly on defense have a spotty history as well. Ask the Purple People Eater Vikings of the early '70s. Having more than one plausible path to victory is a decided advantage in any sport.
I yield to no one in my admiration for Mahomes. Maybe it's my childhood spent rooting for Wilt Chamberlain going up against the Celtics, but I am skeptical of teams dependent on one player's heroics. That's in basketball. In football, with more twice as many players in action on every play, that skepticism increases a thousandfold.
The 49ers offense is not one-dimensional at all. Jimmy Garoppolo has been more than competent in 2019. His receivers may not be as fast as the Chiefs' lot, but they're almost as good. Maybe just as good. San Francisco is capable of winning an amusement park fire shootout (see the Saints game) as are the Chiefs and its defense is much more capable of preventing one.
So that's two, maybe 2 1/2 plausible paths to victory for the 49ers to one for the Chiefs. Nice as it would be to see Andy Reid win a Super Bowl, if only to shut up Boston sports talk radio on one topic, I cannot in good conscience predict it. Kansas City is gonna need a lot more funny bounces, turnovers, enemy penalties, special teams screwups, etc., than the Niners do. The Chiefs need more luck to win. I never bet on luck.
49ers 34-Chiefs 24. For amusement purposes only, meaning any reader is free to laugh at me on Monday.
