Fumbling The Point
In last week’s TMQ column, Gregg Easterbrook quoted Tiki Barber that the secret of Adrian Peterson’s success was that he ignores tacklers and focuses on the goal. Sounds great!
What neither Barber nor Easterbrook mentioned is that this likely a characteristic of a rookie running back. There was one play in which Peterson lunged for extra yards and fumbled the ball. Ignoring tacklers and focusing on the goal line will have that result occasionally. Those are big, fast guys, and they can put a hurtin’ on ya, as Peterson will continue to learn.
Barber himself had a reputation as a fumbler early in his career, which is partly why he was not the Giants’ sole feature back until late in his career, and Ron Dayne and Brandon Jacobs got a lot of important carries.
Of course, when you run for 296 yards, nobody gives a damn about one fumble. But he’s not going to run for 290 yards every week. A guy who runs for 200 yards and fumbles once is an exciting player. A guy who run for 90 yards and loses a fumble may be a liability.
I predict that Peterson will go through a similar fumbling crisis, and emerge from it a more careful, (and, alas, less exciting) runner.
Can You Top This?
Bill Simmons must be on some quixotic mission to be as obnoxious as possible while maintaining his reader base. That is the only plausible explanation for last Friday’s column on the Pats-Colts game.
Simmons managed to combine the most annoying characteristics of fans of good teams (gloating) and fans of bad teams(why do these awful things only happen to us?) in one column. Maybe he’ll top it in the Super Bowl by writing about how awful it is that he’s covering the Super Bowl in Phoenix when most of his readers are in places like New Hampshire in February. I’m not sure whether the US or the Boston sports fan base has squandered more good will in the past five years.
A few nuggets:
From the time the movie was released in 1981, I have measured every real-life contest with shady officiating against that Nazis-Allies game. (Important note: Even though it’s a fictional movie, I’ve seen “Victory” so many times during the past 25 years that I now feel like the game actually happened.) So the irony of enduring the Pats-Colts game so close to my umpteenth “Victory” viewing was just too bizarre. In fact, here’s how bizarre it was — while watching “Victory,” I thought to myself, “I hope this isn’t how the Pats game is called tomorrow.”
As it turned out, I wasn’t far off.
So the Patriots faced a situation similar to that of a team of inmates in a Nazi prison camp. And for a second I was afraid Simmons might go overboard.
Also, it’s good that Simmons here acknowledges that he is delusional, in believing that a soccer game in a Nazi prison camp featuring Pele and Slyvester Stallone actually happened. So, at least we have a
And besides, everyone was more interested in making excuses for the Colts (which reminds me, you can play the “Indy really missed Marvin Harrison card” so long as you also mention all the key guys New England was missing in the AFC Championship Game last January)
I don’t think that’s necessary because the AFC Championship Game was a playoff game. The point of mentioning that the Colts missed Harrison is that the Colts may be better than they displayed on Sunday, so the Pats victory doesn’t make the result of a playoff rematch a foregone conclusion. In the playoffs, you are the team that you are. And the Pats were missing “key guys” (whom Simmons fails to name).
I knew the Pats were in trouble less than three minutes into the game, when Aaron Moorehead’s entire left foot landed out of bounds on a first-down catch. Standing 10 feet away from him on either side, two officials improbably decided Moorehead landed inbounds, forcing the Patriots to waste a challenge to overturn a miserable call.
Ah, the first leg of the grand conspiracy — deliberately miss a reviewable call, causing the Patriots to burn their challenges — brilliant! Because as we all know, the Patriots’ success is built on the use of challenges. Without them, they’ll be powerless!
Like the 15-yard “unsportsmanlike conduct” call on Matt Light after Gary Brackett’s interception, of which CBS couldn’t even find a replay (14:04 remaining, fourth quarter).
Which is more likely?
- An offensive lineman got frustrated after an interception and did something stupid. The cameras, having no plausible reason to focus on an offensive lineman after an interception didn’t pick it up.
- The officials made it up on the spot to stick it to the Patriots.
Wait, there’s more! There was the no-call when Rosie Colvin got held while trying to sack Peyton Manning on a crucial third-and-15 that the Colts ended up converting on their last touchdown drive (12:52 remaining, fourth quarter).
So now we’re counting no-calls on holding? Better have a long set of film for that.
Or a pivotal first-and-goal interference call on Randy Moss when he made the mistake of running forward for five yards and turning around, which nearly murdered the Pats because they were trailing by 10 points and suddenly looking at first-and-goal from the 12 with less than nine minutes to play.
Um, I saw that play. It was offensive interference. Just because the officials usually let Moss get away with that doesn’t mean it’s not interference.
(Note: I’d give you the exact times on those last two plays, but both of them were mysteriously deleted from the NFL Network’s official replay of the game. Hmmmmmm.)
Wait — in the previous paragraph Simmons described how during that same replay, officiating head Mike Paeria had a lousy explanation for a bad interference call. But now we’re supposed to expect that they’re sweeping stuff under the rug? Right.
And how could the Patriots or their fans possibly find evidence for this if it’s not in “the NFL network’s official replay?” I guess if it’s not in the “official replay,” it didn’t happen… I guess they’re hoping nobody on the Patriots (who were fined for videotaping) gets a hold of the original broadcast, or a raw game film, or this brilliant cover-up could be foiled.
We haven’t seen homefield advantage work that well since Hitler invaded Russia.
Wait! I thought the NFL and the Colts were the Nazis. What does Godwin’s law say about this move?
In fact, it passed six of the seven checkmarks on the Fishy Officiating Test. Here are those checkmarks, which I just made up 90 seconds ago:
- The fans of the team about to get screwed need to worry even before the game, “I hope we win this one handily because there’s no way in hell we’re getting a call.”
- You need a series of inexplicable calls spread throughout the game.
- The officiating needs to be so reprehensibly bad that the fans of the team-getting-screwed are calling/e-mailing/complaining/texting each other with comments like, “Oh my God, this is fixed!” midway through the game even before the next few horrendously one-sided calls happen.
- There needs to be one call (in Sunday’s case, the Samuel call) that makes you flash back to the shady offsides call in “Victory” when the British announcer screams, “The goal has been disallowed! The goal has been disallowed!”
- The announcers need to openly question what’s happening, as it’s happening, at least three or four times.
- You need a lingering feeling afterward that something fishy occurred, mainly because there was a clear motive for the biased officiating in the first place.
- The targeted team needs to lose so its fans will spend the rest of eternity complaining about how they were screwed in the game.
Hmm, almost all of these have more to do with the fan’s response rather than the actual merits of the calls. And if you go into a game with the suspicion you’re going to be screwed, you’re going to spend the game looking for evidence to support that, especially if your team isn’t doing well.
I’ll have more to say about this whole, “it’s OK for the Patriots to be bad sports because they’ve been screwed over” argument elsewhere, but suffice it to say that this attitude has not proven beneficial in other contexts.
One thing I will say — I can see the players and coaches adapting this “eff you” attitude, if it helps them to perform at a higher level. But do the press and fans have to buy into it to? Does this help us appreciate the game more?
The thing is, I usually enjoy Simmons, but the Colts-Patriots rivalry is his kryptonite, and turns him into the most annoying homer fan in the world.
