Believe it or not, I’ve never been an NFL team owner, GM or head coach. I swear. You can look it up.
Yet, I’m convinced that I can do what none of the above have: Prevent my team from losing even one game for selfish, self-absorbed in-game behavior.
Steelers coach Mike Tomlin is widely heralded as among the best in the business. Yet, during his 14 years at the wheel, the Steelers have succeeded or tried to succeed in losing games to rotten post-play conduct.
Including a Super Bowl.
In the 2009 Super Bowl, the Cardinals led the Steelers, 23-20, when Ben Roethlisberger, with under a minute left, completed a pass to wide receiver Santonio Holmes, a career me-first guy as later would be seen here after joining the Jets.
Holmes was tackled at the Cards’ 6, clock running. Instead of hustling to the new line of scrimmage, Holmes, with no awareness beyond himself, rose and ran further downfield in a look-at-me/ain’t-I-special routine.
Roethlisberger was in desperate, hurry-up mode and waving his team to the line of scrimmage, presumably to spike the ball to stop the clock. Meanwhile Holmes doing his wild-about-me dance on the wrong side of the line of scrimmage. This could have been the reason Pittsburgh was forced to call its last timeout.
With 35 seconds left, the winning TD was caught … by Holmes, who was voted the game’s MVP despite his effort to become the biggest fool in NFL history.
Now, call me a curmudgeon (or a crab), but if I were Tomlin, on the first day of practice to start the 2010 season, I’d have gathered my team, shown them how the Super Bowl was nearly lost, then addressed my troops:
“See this? It’s never to happen again on my watch. We shall never surrender 15 penalty yards, let alone risk the loss of any game, to such garbage. And I don’t want any of you guys to risk lasting infamy.”
Apparently, that never happened. Tomlin’s Steelers continued to be a team that allowed games to be determined by rotten, me-first behavior.
And still do.
Thursday night, Dec. 9, the Steelers, with no timeouts left, trailed the Vikings, 36-28, 37 seconds left. On 4th-and-1 from Minnesota’s 44, Roethlisberger hit WR Chase Claypool at the 34, first down, clock running.
Instead of hustling to the new line of scrimmage so Roethlisberger could spike it to kill the clock, Claypool languished on the ground from where he made that tired first-down gesture, the one TV rewards as the essence of good football action.
Roethlisberger was unable to stop the clock until 24 seconds remained. Fox’s Joe Buck and Troy Aikman either missed it or ignored it.
This time the Steelers ran out of time. The game ended, second-down, on Minnesota’s 12-yard line. Had Claypool, a college man — Notre Dame — been aware of anything other than himself, the Steelers very likely would have had one more play.
The outcomes of NFL games are weekly determined by inexcusably childish, unprofessional conduct. Still, while the stakes have never been greater, there is no team owner, GM or head coach who seems the least bit inclined to treat this madness with anything better than neglect. That’s insane.
Worst teams get most fan-friendly NFL kickoff times
Under Roger “Good Investments” Goodell, the addiction to TV money is so powerful that the best times to play a fall/winter sport — Sundays at 1 p.m. in natural sunshine — have been designated for the worst teams to play.
Last week’s early games included the 5-7 Saints at the 3-9 Jets, the 4-8 Seahawks at the 2-10 Texans (a noon start in Houston), and the 5-7 Falcons at the 5-7 Panthers.
The 4:25 window included an East Coast game, the 7-5 Bills at the 9-3 Buccaneers, with a night game hosted by 9-3 Green Bay, outdoors.
By midseason, sunshine games, those most welcomed by ticket-buyers and PSL-owners/suckers, are top heavy with miserable teams.
In ESPN transplant Adam Amin, Fox has another play-by-player who would have us believe that stats make games when games make stats. Another who would ignore what he has seen all game to read off a stat sheet.
Sunday, the Jets down by 10 to the Saints and in fourth quarter-desperate mode, went for it on fourth-and-6 from midfield. Amin then saw fit to illuminate us with, “The Jets are one-for-one on fourth down today.”
What did that previous fourth down play have to do with this one? Absolutely nothing. And Zach Wilson next threw incomplete.
But Amin is certainly not alone in such misleading and irrelevant game-in-a-vacuum statistical folly.
Dr. George M. Beard wrote that such matter is “the home not so much for the abjectly ignorant as of the fractionally educated; not of the raw, but of the underdone, the paradise of non-experts.”
Beard wrote that in 1879 in “The Psychology of Spiritualism.”
Though it’s unlikely that even Fox would return Urban Meyer to its college football panel — even by TV’s standards, seven guys speaking half-a-sentence each and forcing belly laughs might be too much — perhaps he can return to teaching his course at Ohio State, that class titled “Leadership and Character.”
By the way, reader E.C. was thrilled to see Ohio State’s basketball team on TV, wearing “their traditional black uniforms.”
Have to pay up to see Rangers
So Tuesday’s Rangers-Avalanche game could only been seen by those who coughed up a monthly fee to receive an extra-pay ESPN tier, the first of three Rangers games this season to be so hidden from view.
The NHL has adopted the old drug-addicted prostitute business model: “Do anything you want to me, mister, as long as you pay me.” Gary Bettman would call this “Growing the game”?
So when the Knicks took a total of 91 3s, making 33 of them, in consecutive home losses to the Bucks then Warriors last week, exactly what was their strategy? Wherein was the beauty, let alone the value, of the games?
And when Steph Curry broke the 3-point record by making 5 of 14 vs. the Knicks while the Warriors totaled 15-of-40, the game, starring 82 3-point heaves, made less sense than it did history.
Attention all mute buttons! For a third consecutive Sunday, Fox has assigned Mark Schlereth to smother a Jets or Giants game in whistle-to-snap pigskin palaver. Sunday he has been chosen to wreck the Cowboys-Giants telecast.
Wednesday’s women’s college basketball: LSU 100, Alcorn State 36. LSU coach Kim Mulkey, who stomped opponents by 50 or more for kicks when she coached Baylor — in 2016, she had her kids beat Winthrop, 140-32 — played run-and-gun the entire game.
NBC’s Cris Collinsworth, I guarantee, never noted a QB’s “arm talent” when he broke in as an NFL analyst. He kept it concise, simple, useful. But that was a long time ago, so now, rather than say a QB has a “good arm,” he chooses “arm talent,” first cousin to “eye discipline” and “lane integrity.”
CBS’ Andrew Catalon last week during Saints-Jets read a promo for “Football’s iconic show, ‘Inside the NFL.’ ” Everything and everyone are now so iconic the word will soon come to mean “nothing special.”
I’ve awakened to become woke! No longer will “lady bug” appear in this column. From now on, it’s “non-binary bug.”
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NFL continues to reward rotten, me-first behavior - New York Post
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