NFL

Three Questions for Three Football Games This Week

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The Pittsburgh Steelers eked out a win in a hard-fought game against the Titans in the NFL’s Kickoff Game, but lost Troy Polamalu for several weeks; in a battle of defenses against the Bears this week, how far back could that set the Steelers?

Florida showed it could knock around an FBS team the same way they could knock around an FCS team. Now, what about a BCS team? They take on Tennessee in the Picking A Fight With Urban Meyer Bowl.

It took until the fourth quarter for Utah to pull away from San Jose State – is that cause for concern, especially with BYU wowing the nation? With Oregon coming off a win, will a trip to Autzen Stadium treat the Utes as kindly as it did Boise State last year?

All three of those teams hold one of my football lineal titles, and will be defending them this week. The requisite categories on my web site have now been updated.

The closest I’m going to come to an NFL season preview

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I mentioned my college football lineal titles last week and again in today’s Part I on the college football playoff debate. Well, I’ve also exhaustively researched an NFL lineal title. The NFL lineal title only splits when the current title holder doesn’t make the playoffs, and with the NFL’s balanced schedule, splits are rare. The Steelers are the only holder of an NFL Lineal Title, and I’ll keep track of it from here.

Also, the college football titles are completely updated with the new challenges for Florida and Utah.

Probably the last word on Roethlisberger-gate, as in, I’m chiming in so late I doubt anyone else will chime in after me. Or even listen.

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If ESPN wanted to cover up the Roethlisberger scandal, their initial decision not to report on it may have inadvertently helped that goal more than they intended, by moving the focus of the story off the suit itself and onto ESPN… (I swear I won’t spend every one of my posts talking about stories everyone has already left behind!)

Ultimately, the outrage directed at ESPN seems to have two sources. First, ESPN wouldn’t report on it, at all, not even on its web site, when other organizations – including the same company in the ABC News division – did. In his interview with ombudsman Don Ohlmeyer, Vince Loria declares that “[i]t was never our intent to be out front on this story.” Newsflash, Vince: ESPN is expected to be out front on every story. At the very least, ESPN is expected to acknowledge the existence of every story, since so many people turn to it for their sports news. As more people turn to the Internet for their sports news, that may start to change, but ESPN is still the definer of the news cycle, and for the moment the Internet only increases ESPN’s responsibilities, by not restricting it to filling only an hour and thus not giving it any excuse for ignoring a story. (Ohlmeyer seemingly acknowledges as much towards the end, though he also seems to recommend that ESPN itself should make the story about its refusal to report, and no one goes to ESPN for that sort of meta-discussion… this was an issue with Ohlmeyer’s predecessors as well…)

Second is the question of whether ESPN’s decision was fair, balanced, or consistent, given the fact that ESPN has not shied away from reporting on unconfirmed civil suits in the past… then other times it has. ESPN’s inconsistent stance on this issue has seemed wildly inconsistent and left people in the dark as to what criteria ESPN is using to determine whether to report and when. (And how; some have accused ESPN of slanting the story when they did report it.) With people left to come to their own conclusions, some have determined it has less to do with ESPN’s claimed criteria and more with irrelevant aspects of the athletes themselves, such as popularity, race, and relationship to the network. Ohlmeyer arguably did a disservice by asking Loria only about Marvin Harrison. ESPN has a lot more than that to answer for. Ohlmeyer also did a disservice by asking only about ESPN’s perceived protection of the NFL, and not Roethlisberger or the Steelers (especially given some writers’ dredging up ESPN’s Spygate coverage for evidence that the Patriots are/were not one of ESPN’s “protected” teams and the Steelers are).

(In fact, Doria himself notes that “prior history” goes into coverage decisions – a commendable position on its face, but Mike Tyson getting in trouble with the ladies is kind of old news, and a pillar of the community doing so is big news.)

I think most of us would prefer that the media not get so wrapped up in accusations against athletes that damage reputations and then not restore those reputations if the accusations turned out to be false – a natural result of the fact that once the case is settled, there’s no reason to report on it anymore, so the “no accusation” doesn’t get as much coverage as the “accusation”. But that’s not the way the media (or this country) works, and ESPN shouldn’t pretend it is.

On another note, I’m debating whether to include Ohlmeyer’s line – “I think the Internet is the most transformative technological advancement since the printing press” – in my book on the impact of the Internet… then again, Ohlmeyer’s hardly the first to say it.

Did I just fall into the Twilight Zone?

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One minute I’m thinking Jay Glazer’s report/opinion piece predicting a Favre comeback merely reflected disgruntled Vikings who didn’t like their quarterback situation and maybe didn’t quite understand the circumstances and reasons why Favre wasn’t already there, didn’t quite understand that Favre wasn’t any ordinary free agent. I wondered if ESPN’s obsessing over the story was related to its willingness to give Glazer credit for it instead of saying “ESPN’s Michael Smith reports…” and whether ESPN was setting up Glazer to get maximum egg on his face when the report proved spurious.

The next, Favre not only signs a contract with the Vikings, he shows up at training camp and is going to start the next preseason game like he was always there?

I mean, within 24 hours, we went from Favre being retired and in Hattiesburg, to being at training camp and the No. 1 QB on the depth chart without even throwing a practice pass.

Did history somehow retroactively change on everybody?

No more calling out the mainstream media for Favremania, mmmkay?

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The Jets released Brett Favre from their “reserve/retired” list yesterday, an auspicious move considering so far as I can tell players on the R/R list don’t count against roster or salary caps, but ordinarily a fairly routine move, at least for any player not named Brett Favre.

So naturally you’d expect plenty of “does this mean he’s thinking of coming back?” speculation from ESPN and the like, and you’d expect the blogosphere to do plenty of “there they go again, obsessing over Brett Favre” and thumbing their nose because they’re so above that…

…hold on, it appears the number 1 topic on SportsCenter’s “Blog Buzz” segment this morning was Favre’s release. Seems not even the blogosphere is immune to Favremania when a plane traveling between Minneapolis and Hattiesburg and back again sends them going “OMG OMG OMG IT ABSOLUTELY MUST HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH BRETT FAVRE BECAUSE HE IS THE ONLY PERSON IN ALL OF HATTIESBURG THAT EVER HAS TO TRAVEL OMG!!!!!11!!1!!!eleven!”

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr… another retype. I thought I made myself immune to this bullshit.

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If the Super Bowl were covered the same way the NFL Draft is:

  • It would last two days.
  • It would be covered by TWO networks.
  • It would be preceded by a five-hour pregame show. Same (or less) than now, right? Well, there would be pregame shows on both networks.
  • One of the two networks would have analysis throughout the entire game on a sister channel.
  • There would be cameras inside each team’s locker room which each broadcast could switch to whenever they needed to, AND cameras inside the houses of players who could be called in at any moment to fly to the game and pitch in for either team.
  • There would be in-game interviews with coaches and team executives, and an interview with one player after every play either early or late in the game.
  • Each network’s broadcast team would include an expert who has analyzed every single play each team could possibly use during the game and has drawn up a “mock game” scripting every move of the entire game (or at least the first quarter).

On another note, Al Davis is now officially certifiably insane.

Something I’ve been meaning to say since the news broke.

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There’s been a lot that’s been said about John Madden’s retirement, and I could repeat everything that’s been said about how beloved he was (not so much in my household, but that may be because he made all the obvious things he said obvious) or his alleged man-crush on Brett Favre or his impact on football and the broadcasting profession or his retirement’s impact on NBC, the NFL and its network, and the careers of Cris Collinsworth, Al Michaels, and Frank Caliendo.

But let me just say this about replacement Collinsworth.

NBC was caught off guard by Madden’s retirement, but they were not caught unprepared.

That said, I have to agree with what Curt Smith had to say about Harry Kalas: “[Collinsworth] will succeed [Madden]. None will replace him.”

A simple game of connect-the-dots.

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How was it possible that despite a far less compelling matchup than last year, including the until-recently laughable Arizona Cardinals, the Super Bowl still drew a bigger audience than last year?

Amidst people crowing “when it’s the Super Bowl the teams are irrelevant”, I was wondering why more attention wasn’t paid to the surprisingly large female audience – which seemed to explain the large audience but gave me more questions than answers. Where did all these women come from all of a sudden?

I may have a partial answer, at least. (Courtesy Fang’s Bites.)

Another thing about the Super Bowl that NO ONE has noticed…

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Everywhere I’ve gone, starting with the announcing team itself, people have lamented that if James Harrison’s long touchdown run to end the first half was called down at the 1, time would have run out and the play would have been for nothing.

Um… has anyone actually seen the play, and watched the clock, and the exact moment when the clock ran out?

THERE WOULD STILL BE ONE OR TWO SECONDS ON THE CLOCK! Watch that clock in the video below!

Quick thoughts on the Super Bowl

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  • If I were putting together NBC’s opening sequence, I would have made a few more changes to the opening song. For example, instead of “waiting all day”, how about “waiting all year”? And how can you pass up the fact that “forty-three” rhymes with “NBC” and so could have been inserted into the song with few other changes? You won’t get anything like this until Super Bowl 70!
  • I hate to disagree with Roger Goodell, but this game did not top last year’s game. This game does have the advantage over Super Bowl XLII, and XXXVIII, that the first half was not boring as hell. But while this game did produce some landmark, all-time Super Bowl plays, those individual marks can’t really compare with a great game – this game was just like any other Super Bowl from a pre-game angle standpoint, unlike XLII, and the Cinderella team didn’t win, which hurts its standing – in fact I was rooting for Pittsburgh to pull out the win just because it would have been too bizarre otherwise. There are in fact some similarities with XXXVIII, another game people wondered about being the best Super Bowl ever. One of these days I need to go over the game film, or at least the NFL Films distillations, or even compact game stories, of every Super Bowl and rank the greatest ever. FSN’s “The Sports List” did a ranking probably around the time of XL, maybe even before XXXVIII. Obviously, that list needs a serious update.
  • Is it too early to start talking about Ben Roethlisberger’s Hall of Fame credentials? Remember, in the lead-up to the Super Bowl people were talking about Kurt Warner’s Hall of Fame credentials now that he had reached three Super Bowls with two different teams. Now Roethlisberger has been to one fewer Super Bowl and won two, becoming just the tenth QB in NFL history to do so, and not completely throwing up in the second. Not to mention his leadership in the regular season. If there’s a knock against him it’s that he’s leading a team composed of a bunch of parts that might win Super Bowls without him, but then again that was the knock against Tom Brady for a while as well. If he so far as makes one more Super Bowl, is he a shoo-in for the Hall? And is it possible that his final drive in this game, which had Steve Young positively salivating on ESPN’s NFL Primetime, is the one that puts him in the Hall?
  • Speaking of ESPN, and lists, about your “Top 10” Super Bowl plays: Your own analysts, who clamored for Manning-to-Tyree to beat out Roethlisberger-to-Holmes for , are correct. What you should have done was rank the Harrison INT return significantly further back, in the middle or even near the back, since it was one of those sideshow gimmicky plays that come out of the blue every once in a while in the Super Bowl. By ranking it , you forced the Holmes play to to avoid consecutive plays from the same game. Probably the main reason you rated the Holmes play was because it actually scored the game-winning TD, but it arguably makes Manning-to-Tyree greater that it attained such greatness without actually scoring. (Incidentially, initially I rendered “Holmes” as “Burress”. What does that tell you?)
  • Am I the only one who noticed that the clock briefly stopped at two minutes left in the game when Roethlisberger barely got a play off, then started again as the clock operator realized there was a play going on, and the discrepancy was never corrected? How might that have influenced Arizona’s final drive? The game-ending fumble would have only occured with two seconds or so left on the clock! You think Arizona would be working a bit quicker? And am I the only one who thinks that on the play to the 5 on Pittsburgh’s final drive, the main reason the Steelers called a timeout was that the receiver (I think it was Holmes) was a little lazy getting back to the line of scrimmage, as though he didn’t quite realize the situation? The Steelers might have needed that timeout to set up a field goal with a few seconds left on the clock if the Cardinals had been able to get a stop. I think there was one other “Am I the only one who noticed that” in there, but damned if I can remember it now.

I have plenty to say about the ads in a later post, where I hope to hand out awards for the ads, and some comments on NBC’s modified banner for the game, which is also an opportunity to talk about ESPN’s new tennis banner it broke out at the Aussie Open. There were a LOT of great ads in the second half of this game. Lineal titles updated for the offseason.