No clever introduction this week. Just this week’s TMQ (which you won’t be able to read in its entirety unless you subscribe to “All Predictions Wrong”, which is the actual title of Gregg Easterbrook’s Substack) after the jump…
Now the Niners once again seem the class of the NFC.
“the class of the NFC” got into a fight with a Philadelphia security guard. Also: “the class of the NFC” as opposed to, say Dallas? Or Detroit? Easterbrook writes favorably about both teams later in this item. To be fair, we are perhaps biased: if we did not hate the worthless Chargers and the Bills as much as we do, we would advocate disbanding the 49ers franchise, burning their playing and practice fields and offices, sowing the grounds of all three with salt, and plowing the rubble into the earth.
Bad officiating: Green Bay-Kansas City. But was the officiating actually bad, or is this just a case of everyone loves Taylor Swift Kansas City? (And wasn’t “Everyone Loves Kansas City” actually the short-lived spin-off of “Everybody Loves Raymond”?)
Why are officials exempt from accountability?
We’re not sure that they are. We’re pretty sure we’ve read some stuff in ESPN about the league’s process for rating refs and how that process works. But you know what would be swell? A real story covering the process, written by a real journalist (as opposed to a publication that fired everybody and uses LLMs to write stories). Heck, we’d even settle for giving Easterbrook that kind of inside access. He’s proven that he can do this kind of coverage before.
Jacksonville lost to the Bengals. But the thing that gets us is: Jacksonville is currently 8-4. It wasn’t that long ago when the Jaguars were a leading contender for the Owen-16 award.
Love for Jordan Love. We suspect it is more like: Packers fans expected a rookie quarterback to struggle, and are happy that he’s starting to pull things together. Also, the “double reverse” isn’t, and there’s no such thing as a “triple reverse”.
Chiefs note: when they attempt a Hail Mary it should be called a Hail Taylor.
No, Gregg.
Cupcakes. The football gods do a lot of chortling in this week’s column, by the way.
Detroit is doing well. Well, yeah, that’s kind of obvious (9-3) but we’re actually kind of deluding ourselves into thinking…maybe, just maybe, this could be Detroit’s year for the Superb Owl? But then there’s Dallas.
By the way, Carolina is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs, per the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network. Nothing to do with TMQ, we just wanted to mention that fact.
Also, Detroit “won” the Jared Goff-Matt Stafford trade. But we’re more inclined to think the Rams struggles come from playing in LA, a town that seems kind of indifferent to the NFL. We also think the Swift thing is going to backfire on Kansas City soon. Again, nothing to do with TMQ, we just wanted to get that in.
College signing day draws nigh, which gives TMQ a chance to beat the drum again for his theory that football success does not necessarily translate to life success, and the odds of making it in college and pro sports are slim. You can read 581 words covering this point (if you’re a subscriber) or you can say “Thank you, Captain Obvious” and move on.
“…we’re going to miss [the Pac-12]”. As we said last week, “Who’s this ‘we’, paleface?”
Also: “A series called Series Finale.” This is sort of an example of Easterbook trying to be funny and failing, but there’s a small core of an idea here: a series that starts at the very end and is told chronologically in reverse. Like “The Betrayal“, but a full-blown TV series.
We confess: we think the toy trains in the National Christmas Tree display are cool. We’re kind of a sucker for toy trains around the Christmas tree. Not that we were deprived at Christmas in general, but that was one thing we never got: a toy train on tracks winding around under our Christmas tree. Also, Easterbrook is an agnostic, but loves going to church on Christmas Eve. Or at least, he loves the bells.
Easterbrook’s holiday schedule. No reason to go into that now, really. We can talk about it as it comes up.
Stats.
Sweet: Texas-Oklahoma State. We didn’t watch the game (every time we watch a game, our team loses) but this does sound like a sweet play by D’Vondre Sweat and Byron Murphy.
Sour: Washington-Miami.
Mixed: Titans-Colts.
Sure you’re the league’s only 10-win team, but what have you done for us lately?
Well, you’re losing at home to a bunch of effete West Coast liberals, for starters…
I wear my sunglasses at night. (Trivia: Corey Hart turned down the role of Marty McFly in “Back To the Future”.)
More chortling. Even more chortling. Also: the rules are too complex and need to be simplified, and football announcers should know and understand these complex rules.
Those clubs should remember TMQ’s axiom – Don’t Panic Now There Will Be Plenty of Time for That Later.
You could pretty much boil that down to “Don’t Panic!” As a matter of fact, a better writer did.
Flacco. Stroud. Ratings. How long before the inevitable TMQ rant about how football’s popularity isn’t guaranteed to go on forever?
Bad blitzing: Philadelphia.
What with the transfer portal and NIL payments, college sports is now the Wild West, according to Easterbrook. We’re looking forward to the Shootout at the OK Coral of college sports. (But props to Easterbrook for referencing Bluto’s “Seven years of college down the drain!”)
If we had known the Great Danes were playing the Spiders, we would have tried to find the game for Lawrence, who is a big fan of both dogs and spiders.
Chicken-(salad) kicking: Oregon. Except in their previous game against Washington, Oregon was 0-3 on fourth down, a fact which TMQ glosses over.
Weasel: Bobby Petrino. We can’t fault TMQ on this. As a matter of fact, our reaction when we saw Arkansas was re-hiring him as offensive coordinator was “What the frack? What the FRACKING FRACK?!”
(Lawrence: “Will his contract have a “No Sidepiece” clause, a “No Motorcycle Riding” clause, or both?”)
KIPP Sunnyside of Houston 89, Founders Classical Academy of Mesquite 22.
Viewer mail: George Walk has an excellent point about what would happen if “a fully armed U.S. nuclear aircraft carrier suddenly arrived at an English port around 1700”. Not that we’re accusing him of plagiarism or anything like that, but his point is very similar to a John W. Campbell essay we read a long time ago in a “Best of ‘Analog'” collection, and if we could find that essay online we’d link it here. Also: TMQ’s brother is a federal appellate judge, just in case you didn’t know that.
Bad officiating: KC-Green Bay. (“…if it’s now simply illegal to make contact with the quarterback, let’s make it official and put flags on them.”) TMQ’s “Parking Lot Theory of Officiating” may be right. Or it may not be. You make the call. San Francisco-Philadelphia.
Ya gotta catch those balls, Tyler Lockett. “Single Worst Sequence of the Season – So Far”: Seattle.
And that’s a wrap for this week, folks. Tune in next week, when we will hopefully have found “The God Killer” and can put an end to the Football Gods reign of terror chortling.
So much good stuff to write about today, but I will try to keep more succinct than normal. As far as Detroit being a Super Bowl team, I am not naive. I do think they are a playoff team, and may win a game or even two. But they simply don’t have enough of a defense to make a serious run at the Super Bowl. There is a lot of talk about replacing Aaron Glenn as the defensive coordinator, and that might be something that could help them. Lord knows that they have the talent to be much better on defense than they have shown as of late.
As to the officiating lately, I have watched some of the most blatant miscues on Youtube not only of the Green Bay/Kansas City game but a few others, and the refs were pretty bad. I blame that partly on them, but a lot of blame rests on the NFL itself. In trying to make the game safer, what they have done is make it harder for the very elite players to actually do their jobs.
One rule that is very sound is that a player can’t initiate a tackle with their head, to attempt to reign in concussions from head to head contact. So of course many players begin to tackle lower. The problem is that the NFL is now considering a rule to stop a tackler from hitting the runner at the waist and then sliding down to the ankles in order to bring the runner down by impeding their legs. They say it causes too many leg and knee injuries.
I understand wanting to protect multi million dollar players from season ending injuries, which translates to money lost at the box office. But the fact remains that people love football because it is a violent game. Something that mankind has always liked to watch. Just look back at the gladiators in the arena.
One thing that has always been a problem to me is that because a player who is of such caliber that they have a shot at the professional level usually is obviously talented from a very young age. They are the best by far at age 10, through high school and college all the way to the NFL if they make it that far. And from that young age of 10 or so, they are praised and given perks like the most ball carries per game or articles in the news paper about them all the time, not mentioning their team, but their own individual achievements. The farther they go, the more egregious they get, with “gifts” like their dad getting a job working for the University that they attend. Or a part time job for the University turning the lights on and off before and after class, with a paycheck for it.
I know that it doesn’t happen as much now, but I also know that in the past it did happen. I have first hand knowledge of this. By the time this player gets to the professional level, they have become used to the world revolving around themselves, with little or no consequences for bad behavior. The give them a multi million dollar contract and wonder why they often get into trouble, either with females or gambling, drugs, gun charges, etc.
I have a brother who was an All American his senior year in high school football. The things that occurred with his recruiting were right out of a bad movie. Fortunately there are some who learn character from their youth, and maintain that throughout their entire lives. That reflects on good parenting.
I myself do not follow college football. I attended small colleges football games in the past, and those were fun. But I only saw one large university game, Michigan vs. Colorado. It made it so I never wanted to go to another game like that again. This was in my 9th grade of high school. The one thing that does stick out in my mind is that at the U of M game in Ann Arbor it was the first time I smelled marijuana. Now I can’t drive down a certain road here in my city of Muskegon, MI without the overwhelming smell of a skunk. There are 6-8 provisioning centers in a short stretch of road.
As usual, I went on too long. I thought about deleting the whole thing, but what the heck. You can do so if you want. Have a great week, and safe travels where ever the road takes you.