Last week, we quoted TMQ:
Final score: Detroit 31, Tampa Bay 23. What’s the pace now, Gregg?
(To be honest, we don’t have a lot of faith in Detroit beating San Francisco. But, as FotB pigpen51 notes, “On any given Sunday…“. Stranger things have happened. And we’d love to see Detroit in the Superb Owl.)
After the jump, this week’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback (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)…
Running backs dominate the postseason.
Sports Illustrated may be going umder. This has been well covered elsewhere. But we did want to observe (having given TMQ some flack recently for not having cheerleader photos) that he did include the first SI swimsuit issue cover. In a rather small format, but at least it is something.
(Babette March’s Wikipedia entry. Here’s a larger version.)
“Zero” is a minimum. (And we feel obligated to mention the legendary Spinal Tap album that shipped gold and returned platinum.)
From there, we get a 319 word meditation on the idea that sports (and sports journalism) is a fundamentally positive thing, in that it (mostly) celebrates achievement. Props to TMQ for quoting Byron “Whizzer” White. He never actually says this, but we wonder if that may have been part of SI‘s problem. Did SI‘s shift towards covering the negative side of sports, rather than positive achievements, drive away readers?
(Another thought that nobody seems to have brought up: SI in recent years has been passed around like…something that gets passed around a lot. And none of the people it has been passed to seems to have had a clear idea of what they wanted to do with it. Heck, the current owners licensed someone else to actually run it, because they flat-out said they had no interest in running a magazine.)
(We found a SI football phone on the ‘Bay for $30. Interestingly, we also found a football helmet phone for the Houston Roughnecks (the XFL team) for $55.)
…defenders are much more likely to drop passes than receivers.
TMQ gives obvious reasons for this, but one we think he missed: the defender’s job is to break up plays, not get interceptions. Interceptions are nice, especially when they score points. But the main goal is to stop points.
Let’s bang on the drum some more about the “evils” of sports betting. 495 words down. (Also, no “Baptist upbringing pro-nudity anti-gambling compromise” again.)
Stats.
Sweet: Baltimore. Sour: Buffalo (the fake punt). Mixed: Green Bay-San Francisco.
Kansas City is just better than Buffalo. Patrick Mahomes is just better than Josh Allen. “…[Stefon Diggs] seems determined to convince the football universe he is the most overpaid non-quarterback in the NFL…”
Double-aged Scotch.
More on the Washington Post claiming there aren’t enough black coaches…and ignoring the black coaches.
Texas-Ravens: “The Ravens outrushed the Texans 229-38, and that’s all the information you need to know who won.”
Buffalo is squandering draft choices, and that’s why they’re mediocre. Again, we see Buffalo in the same way we see the Chargers: mediocre teams who put the minimal viable product on the field in hopes they can keep collecting ticket money from suckers who have nobody else to root for, and don’t want to stay home.
Good Less Bad.
We thought the idea of booking a Ravens mascot for our party would have been pretty cool, if we lived in B’More. But we clicked through to the link. It appears (based on the picture) that Edgar, Allan, and Poe are not actual ravens, but people dressed up in costumes. Also, while we think it would be neat to watch “The Raven” with a Ravens mascot, we don’t think it is $250/hour neat.
(But “The Raven” is really a pretty good film. Horror, but not really gory or bleak horror: it almost just barely counts as “horror” at all. And there’s quite a bit of humor in it. If you have kids, this would be fun to watch with them around Halloween.)
The football gods were less busy this past weekend. Where do they go for their vacation after the season is over?
TMQ has a sort of obit for Norby Walters, whose passing we also noted. TMQ’s obit also mentions his brother, and degenerates into Trump bashing.
San Francisco-Green Bay: you have to sell those short-yardage plays.
Will TMQ ever experience sports happiness?
–1 Corinthians 13:11
That’s probably a little unfair. We’re still disappointed the Houston Oilers never won a Super Bowl. But it also seems to us that TMQ invests a lot of emotional effort into what is, at the core, rooting for laundry.
“A Trump Reelection Would Tear the Country Apart.” Only 151 words down.
Tampa-Detroit: Fortune favors the bold. Or at least those who go for it on 4th down.
We try to keep the quotes from TMQ to a certain minimum, basically just what we consider to be “fair use”. But we have to include this item in its entirety because…really…we can’t summarize it and do it justice.
Five false starts, Houston? Good news for Spelman College. And for California Bay Area taxpayers.
Viewer mail about TMQ’s freeze peach column (which ran a week ago Friday): read!
“Single Worst Play of the Divisionals”: Jordan Love should have just thrown the ball away.
And that’s a wrap for this week, folks. Next week…who knows? But we plan to be here.