The playoffs have not been good to us. Our Saints are out. Our Packers are out. San Francisco is still standing. On the other hand, San Diego is gone, which means an end to the stupid “San Diego is destined to win the Super Bowl because they played Philadelphia in the opening game” meme. And our Patriots are still standing.
But enough about us. After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
What’s the breakthrough idea of the West Coast defense? Back to basics.
564 words down.
Chicken-(salad) kicking: Indianapolis. (Easterbrook apparently thinks Pagano ordering a kick on 4th and 1, with 10:16 remaining and down 43-22, is “the worst play in all of football history”. Hyperbole much?)
Sweet: New England. Sour: Carolina. Mixed: San Diego – Denver. “…the Denver man beneath the ball didn’t have the presence of mind to signal fair-catch.” As TMO’s commenters point out, Easterbrook is confusing NCAA rules with NFL rules: since the ball bounced off the ground and into the air, under NFL rules it could not have been a fair catch.
How about that Florida State?
In the run-up or the postgame, did you see any media coverage about the Seminoles’ 58 percent football graduation rate? The team’s 2007 cheating scandal that led to probation? The program’s recent history of classifying many players as learning-disabled, waiving most classroom requirements? Any mention that though Florida State had $48 million in football revenue in the last school year, it still charges every undergraduate $245 annually to subsidize NCAA sports?
Should point-after kicks be eliminated? 1,256 of 1,261 were successful this season. We were inclined to agree with Bill Belichick and TMQ at first blush, though our variant would be 7 points for a touchdown with no conversion attempt, 8 for one with a successful conversion attempt, and 6 if the attempt fails. But: are injuries more likely on a point-after attempt or on a conversion attempt? And honestly, we’re not wild about TMQ’s “eliminate kickoffs and add conversions” idea, though we’re having trouble putting our finger on exactly what bothers us about that.
How did Denver win? “San Diego switched from unorthodox to a conventional West Coast defense”, which failed to throw Peyton off.
Mike Munchak is “the opposite of a weasel coach — perhaps, a bald eagle coach” for not firing his assistants. And then being fired anyway. Along with his assistants.
Wade Phillips, recently shown the door by the Texans — his defense only finished seventh overall in 2013, get rid of the bum!
And the Texans went 2-14. And have a new head coach. Who wants to bring in his own people. Wade may not have been the problem, but would keeping him have been the solution?
Go whine about it on your Live Journal, Gregg.
Would we trade more TMQ for the continued failure of the Bills? You bet your bippy we would.
“I’m from Joisey. Are you from Joisey? I’m from Joisey.”
We’ve seen people gripe about the relative attention being given to Chris Christie and Benghazi. TMQ makes a point that we want to jump off of:
We’d suggest that part of the reason for the disparity in coverage may have something to do with this. Very few people (probably ex-military and State Department employees) can put themselves into the shoes of the people who were left hanging in Benghazi. Everybody‘s been stuck in traffic. Everybody understands being stuck in traffic. Traffic jams are more easily comprehended by most people than foreign embassies, we suspect. And we also suspect that’s at least part of the reason the Christie affair is getting traction.
So Louisville hired a man as head coach who was their head coach for a year, left to coach the Falcons, left the Falcons after a year to go coach at Arkansas, and is most famous for paying his mistress from school funds and wrecking his motorcycle with her on board. We look forward to seeing how that works out for them.
How did San Francisco win? Clock-killing drives.
Geoff Foster of the Wall Street Journal reports Belichick has smiled in public exactly seven times this season.
If we thought that a WSJ reporter was counting the times we smiled in public, we’d smile a lot less in public too.
Did you know TMQ has a new book out? Did you know he wants to have another one out in 2016? “Selfish Reasons to Become a Better Person” sounds like something Tyler Cowen would write, not Gregg Easterbrook.
Is “Michael Irvin, philosopher” the replacement for Stubhub watch?
How did New England win? By scoring more points than the other team. No, wait: clock control. Yeah, that’s the answer.
Why do lieutenant governors even exist? The position is an anachronism that should be abolished.
Oh, bullshit, Gregg.
And in those states where “much of the time the legislature is not in session”, the governor runs things. What happens when the governor dies in office? Who has the authority to call the legislature together? Who maintains the affairs of state if the governor’s office is vacant?
Easterbrook’s rant here seems to be based on the fact that some lieutenant governors have been charged with crimes. You know something? Some governors have, too. Also many, many mayors and a little over two percent of United States vice presidents. Does TMQ advocate getting rid of those offices as well?
That chortling medication we’ve been giving to the football gods isn’t working. Technically that isn’t a computer being loaded, but an external hard drive for an IBM mainframe. Johnny Student Athlete can’t read, and that’s the fault of the universities.
Somewhat nice tribute to the late astronomer Halton Arp.
We’ll remember this next time TMQ says global warming is beyond questioning.
Does TMQ seriously think that the “cosmology and astronomy communities” aren’t trying to answer these questions? And his question about physical laws and natural constants does have an answer, albeit not one we’re really comfortable with: the laws and constants are the way they are because, if they were not, we would not be here to observe them.
Jay Gruden is the latest coach who will have his career destroyed by the Washington Redskins. How did Seattle win? Cautious offense, good defense, and it just wasn’t the Saints day.
Bishop Sullivan Catholic, a high school in Virginia Beach, fired their football coach.
The dismissed coach, Cal Turner, told the Virginia Pilot, “I got fired because I run the score up on opposing teams. They told me not to and I defied them and did it anyway.”
Easterbrook’s spin on this is: good for the school, firing a coach for running up the score. Our spin: he wasn’t fired for running up the score, he was fired for disobeying orders.
Should Marshawn Lynch have scored? “Ideally he would have dropped to the turf at the Saints’ 1. The Bluish Men Group would have knelt three times, then kicked a field goal for an 11-point lead with around 30 seconds showing.” On the other hand, the way things worked out, the score was 23-8 and the Saints took possession with 2:40 left on the clock, no timeouts, and needing to score 16 points to win. They managed to score seven. What we’re saying here is, we’re not sure Marshawn Lynch was wrong to score. If you can’t trust your defense to not give up 16 points in 2:40 to a team with zero timeouts, why is this team in the playoffs?
“Adventures in Officiating“: defenseless players, “Newton hit the defender as much as the defender hit him, but the rule was correctly enforced as written”, why was Munnerlyn’s head-butt a foul but Boldin’s wasn’t, and you can’t body slam a receiver.
We are suddenly more interested in seeing “American Hustle”.
Speaking of “adventures in officiating”, “The philosophy in the postseason, the direction is no different from the regular season when we talk with our officials. We want them to call the game the same way.”
The video was accompanied by a disclaimer stating, “For informational purposes only.” What other purpose could it have?
Hey, how about that Andrew Bynum trade?
We disagree with TMQ calling Bill O’Brien a weasel. O’Brien coached for two years at one of the most reviled college football programs in the history of the sport, and (if his side of the story is to be believed) put up with a lot of crap from Penn State alumni.
Then the moment money was waved, O’Brien broke his promises and left.
Frankly, it seems pretty clear to us that Penn State saw O’Brien as a placeholder, and figured once things blew over and everyone forgot about the scandal, they’d put in someone with closer ties to the Paterno era. We can’t blame O’Brien for wanting out of that mess early. Now, if he leaves the Texans early, then we might start thinking about weasels…
And that’s a wrap for this week, folks. Tune in next week, when we expect to hear a lot more about Peyton Manning, no matter what happens over the weekend.