Ray's Rapid Ramblings

Last Week: 2-2

Year To Date: 118-116-10

As part of the ever expanding ranks of laid off media types, I’m really not supposed to find any solace in a writer finding himself unemployed, since we can all agree that the printed word is what separates us from the lesser forms of life, such as raccoons, sea plankton, and Brad Childress.

Still, I can’t help but take some satisfaction in knowing my plight could spare future generations from having to endure the prose of bloated, self-important local sports columnists who constantly tout some cultish, untelevised event as the Pinnacle of Modern Sport (‘Sport,’ of course, being a game where the best players are named Tripp and Logan). Memo to metropolitan newspaper publishers: maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess if you didn’t give free reign and ridiculous money to loudmouth columnists who pride themselves on never having read “Moneyball,” write the same damn column every year about dead drunk fathers (their own, or those of the Detroit Pistons backcourt), and are out-of-touch enough to think something like the Beanpot tournament, Little League World Series, or mountain stage of Tour de France is the highest form of competition, just because these events faintly remind them of some sort of prelapsarian sports world inhabited by stocky, sepia-tinted white guys who worked a real job in the offseason, played for ‘ballclubs,’ instead of teams, and cultivated a home life out of a lesser Pat Conroy novel.

We have this world-view to thank for 93% of HBO Sports documentaries, the 72,000 Joe DiMaggio biographies written in the last decade, and the totality of Luke Harangody’s career. It’s a reactionary, hopelessly outdated way of understanding sports, especially since everybody knows that the TRUE greatest sporting events in a calendar year are as follows:

5.   First Two Days of March Madness—Largely self-explanatory, would rate even higher if you didn’t always have to put up with a preponderance of asshats who fill out more than one bracket (the sports equivalent of cheating at solitaire), and that one friend/coworker who fancies himself an expert on mid-major hoops constantly telling you to watch out for the WAC this year.

4.   Preakness Weekend—Applicable only to those who grew up within fifty miles of the DC metropolitan area.

3.   Big East Men’s Basketball Tournament—God I love it when the ACC bloodhounds argue they have the better conference tournament. Because nothing says ‘Big Game’ like bustling downtown Greensboro, the annual press conference where Roy Williams and Krzyzewski condemn this tournament’s mere existence, and the fact nobody at half of these schools cares about basketball. Clearly, far superior to the Garden, where coaches value a conference title more than a Final Four birth, tradition-rich doormats like St. Johns, Providence, and Seton Hall are always a threat to bring some ghosts to the game, and so many memorable games ESPN Classic needed a new wing to hold the tapes. Also, the players don’t burst out in tears after a hand check, which is refreshing.

2.   The First Two Weeks of the NBA Playoffs—Whatever, I feel the same way about pro basketball that others do about baseball. I just like having it on as background noise when I’m working on something else late at night. The squeaking of sneakers, the staccato call of defensive assignments, the bottomless contempt for spindly Europeans with complicated facial hair—It all just puts the mind at ease.

And number one…

The Divisional Round of the NFL Playoffs.

This is it rockers; if you have any outstanding chits for some quality ‘Drinking Alone and Swearing At The TV’ time, now is the weekend to call them in. Don’t wait until February 1^st, or even the weekend of the conference championship games. Why? Well, for starters, the Super Bowl is one of the prime party events of the year, a sharp contrast to game seven of the World Series, where it is tradition for socially awkward men to watch the game alone in their childhood bedroom while composing a sonnet for Bill James.

Super Bowl parties are a different beast altogether, a chance for every American to go to a strange house with too many cats and/or children and reconnect with somebody else’s college friends. This is important: you are not allowed to spend time with your friends on Super Bowl Sunday—You must be surrounded by strangers. Ideally, your one companion will abandon you for hours on end while they do something worthwhile, like attempt to fix a keg that isn’t broken, or hook up with an ex out behind the carport. The other attendees will be friendly, but somehow alien. The males—garbed in either retina-busting alternate jerseys, or button-down shirts with the same studied wrinkles and non-committal vertical stripes favored by college sophomores who don’t want to bust out any of the clean clothes for a Wednesday night game of beer pong—will feel compelled to talk to you about a fantasy football league in which you did not participate. The females will almost all be wearing child sized jerseys of the most media-friendly member of the team closest to where she attended college. They will ignore the keg, preferring to nurse one of those little bottles of Miller Lite that look like a referee.

A small but vocal group of women (the best looking of whom faintly reminds you of Ellen Barkin) will soon bemoan the lack of vodka, and begin assembling a crack squad to make a liquor store run. They will return with four bottles of tequila, two .375s of Night Train, three packages of “Happy Bar Mitzvah” disposable napkins, two boxes of Franzia wine (“To be safe,” explains Barkin girl), a case of Dr. Zip generic cola, thirty six ping pong balls, and a pack of American Spirit cigarettes, purchased by the only confirmed smoker in the group for the sole purpose of giving the male smoker back at the house an easy opportunity to engage in some hardcore, kamikaze smoke-break flirting over the lameness of hippie cigs.

The intricate social waltz will be interrupted midway through the third quarter by the inevitable Couple Fight, usually involving the most dedicated fantasy player and his girlfriend in the Rex Grossman jersey who apparently likes her liquids in shot form. Invariably, they’ll disagree about the merits of one of the game’s much touted commercials (Note: according to studies, men and women who feel strongly about Super Bowl commercials—which is to say, actually claiming that a particular spot could be underrated or overrated, or send friends any ad that involves marsupials and/or something hitting a guy in the nuts—are 72% more likely to engage in a public Couple Fight within the next calendar year).

If she went to a big enough school, there’s a good chance Grossman Girl will know somebody participating game. She will recall he was really funny and cool, which Fantasy Guy, being an idiot, will take as a tacit admission that she engaged in sexual relations with this player. Grossman Girl will clear things up by explaining, no, it was his backup she had a thing with, but it was purely sexual. At which point a shaken Fantasy Guy, in need of a dramatic gesture to symbolize his inner turmoil will: a) descend into a pan-sexual underground subculture and become ensnared in a murderous plot by Sydney Pollack and Todd Field; or b) punch out a car window after five attempts. If he chooses option B, Fantasy Guy will feel compelled, for no apparent reason, to renter the party and announce, as blood drips into the five layer dip, that while he hurt his hand, he most certainly does not want his live-in girlfriend accompanying him to the hospital, on account of her once being intimate with an above average reserve tight end and long snapper more than half-a-decade before they first met that day in Grant Park at the intern softball game.

Various attendees will refer to this outburst as, “typical. Just so damn typical. This is what he’s like every day,” a statement that is not completely accurate; another group will congratulate their friend for finally “telling it like it is,” a phrase usually reserved for puffy conservative talk-radio hosts, but tonight is reserved for a man in an orange Ronnie Brown jersey who punched out a window in a rage over his girlfriend’s conduct before either knew the other existed.

And you will wonder, as the alleged greatest day of the NFL season unravels in a heap of cheap wine, boring fantasy anecdotes, and couples that insist on having their personal problems detract from a perfectly good six-foot sub, if this is really what the last six months of your life have been building towards.

The answer? An emphatic no way. This week is the brass ring. Structurally, these last two weeks are perfect. The Greek mathematician Euclid used to write a lot about the concept of the ‘perfect number,’ which is apparently what people did before HuffPo and the steam engine. A perfect number is one where all the divisors, when added together, equal the original whole. Individualized, separate quantities, bonded together, bring you back to the original entity or concept.

Now, if Euclid were alive and working in television (presumably at NBC, where he’d be scheming to oust Ben Silverman), he’d almost certainly want to talk about the ‘perfect schedule’ (and not just because that’s the name of the eight-week course Euclid is teaching at the USC School of Cinema-Television this semester). In giving us eight games featuring twelve teams over the course of fourteen days, the NFL and networks have succeeded in making sure what we see is indicative of the totality of NFL existence. This is somewhat accidental. Twisting plot-arcs (the Plax-less Giants), amazing individual achievements (Ed Reed, Steve Smith), perseverance through adversity  (McNabb, for leading the Eagles, Kurt Warner, for beating out that young turk Matt Leinart, and stubble, for somehow managing to cover the entirety of Andy Reid’s huge face), and the scrappy underdogs (Tennessee, Baltimore, Norv, Kerry Collins’ liver) are what the league likes to sell to the masses and sponsors, but the sneaky reason these first two weekends so embody what we all enjoy about the NFL is that it gives equal time to NFL counter-culture, and those weird, joyous, and predictably inexplicable facets of the game that determine champions, serve as backdrops for a vast array of drinking games, and generally keep folks like us in business.

By the last two rounds, the fringe icons have all been picked off, are smoothed-down to the point where you find yourself saying “Boy, Philip Rivers sure looks fun to play with!” or “Ben Roethlisberger is one of the five best QBs in the league who in no way sounds like the hillbilly Gheorghe Muresan and runs like an awkward 14-year-old girl who hit puberty early”

I’ve even compiled a checklist of the bizzaro NFL minutia the football gods have already seen fit to bestow upon us. Enjoy it now, because next week it all becomes deathly serious.

-        Atrocious, mind-meltingly bad coaching that goes unnoticed (Childress)

-        A press conference in which a future hall-of-fame QB, when asked if he thought his future hall-of-fame coach would return for another season, replied “Whatever” (Peyton Manning)

-        That same Hall of Fame once again proving himself to be an iffy game coach, to the point where he let seven seconds run off the clock because he was too shy to speak up and ask for a timeout. (Dungy)

-        The most maligned QB in the NFL somehow managing to be worse than expected (Tarvaris Jackson)

-        A 40-year-old journeyman QB with two broken bones in his back stating he should have been the starter over said maligned QB (Gus Frerotte)

-        Nobody disagreeing with him (The world)

-        Coordinators trying to make a name for themselves at the expense of the team (Clancy Pendergast)

-        The punter as rock star (Scifres)

-        Players staying focused, despite recent legal situation (V. Jackson, Fitzgerald, (Should They Have Kept?) Michael Turner)

-        Alarming faces (NORV!!!, Tom Coughlin in a below-freezing game, Peyton Manning’s peanut head and receding hairline, previously unproblematic, now alarming since he stole Fabrizzio Moretti’s haircut)

-        Players who nobody has cared about 2004 suddenly deciding to throw their weight around and demand more playing time (E. James, McGahee)

-        An offensive lineman who’s married to the coach’s daughter (Chris Snee and Tom Coughlin…WERE YOU AWARE OF THIS??? It certainly never gets mentioned during games)

-        Sideline shots of once prized prospects who are no longer trusted enough to be given their own headset/clipboard (Leinart/Vince Young)

-        Mickey Rourke’s character from “Johnny Handsome” awakening to start at wide receiver for the Arizona Cardinals (Anquan Boldin)

-        Reminders that the yellow line is unofficial and not actually on the field (Still with this one! On the subject, you know what was great? When all the yellow line business was getting started in the late-90s, Pat Summerall had an idea for, and I believe patented some technology relating to, a neon green line that would be projected out onto the field for the players to see. And he would subtly sort of plug it on the air on any close first down…”Well, maybe if there was something on the field that let him know where he needed to get to…” Anyway, when Fox brought him back for the Cotton Bowl last week, he got right back on the green line horse. It really took me back to my youth)

-        Media darlings who never say die (All it took was one winning streak and somehow—SOMEHOW!—mustering up the brainpower to outmaneuver Brad Childress, and suddenly Andy Reid’s getting fitted for another Teflon Mumu)

Now, while the idea of Ed Reed running back an INT is powerful enough to define just how we process beauty in human form, and Kerry Collins is quietly on the verge of becoming some sort of Faulkner/Fitzgerald hybrid for which the literary world has no equivalent, and Matt Leinart is proving why you shouldn’t trust men in Ed Hardy shirts, there are actual flesh and blood games this weekend that, by law, need to be broken down in more detail.

Ravens (+3) over TITANS

I love the Titans. I love how they play, I love how they’re coached, I love the Kerry Collins story and think it’s been woefully underreported, I think Jim Schwartz would be make a valuable addition to Obama’s cabinet, and Jeff Fisher is too good to be forced to coach a team with such goofy uniforms.

But here’s the thing: the one lesson we’ve seen reinforced time and time again over the past four months has been that injuries along the offensive and defensive lines are an absolute killer. You can buy a few weeks with a rookie 5^th round running back or journeyman QB, but when injuries hit the line, the wheels come off. The Jaguars never recovered from trading DT Marcus Stroud to Buffalo; their fate was effectively sealed when Richard Collier and the entire interior of the o-line got hurt during preseason. Washington went downhill as soon as The Seal-Off Right Tackle Formerly Known As Jon Jansen was pressed into action. The Jets fell off the cliff when Kris Jenkins and Alan Faneca wore down. The Packers went into a tailspin when Cullen Jenkins went on IR. The list goes on.

Vanden Bosch and Haynesworth are gimpy, but will play; center Kevin Mawae is already out, sidelined with a bad elbow, and possibly a recurrence of childhood polio. I think we all get suckered into writing these things off during the week—“Oh, it’s not really that bad, they’ll be fine” And it seems like every time, we find out the next week, yeah, these linemen were banged up more than they were letting on.

There are teams this wouldn’t matter against, but Baltimore (and this is really breaking news I’m about to lay on you) is big and physical. More to the point, you need to spot them seven points going into every game for the non-traditional ways they put up points on you. It’s not just Ed Reed and Cam Cameron’s brilliantly timed trick plays. They can basically pick up anything inside a 4^th and 3 at will, and at least once or twice a game seem to have a naked bootleg, perfectly executed draw on 3^rd and long, or wide sweeps that just paralyzes the defense. They make drives go longer than they should, and put themselves in position for points other teams could never hope to get. If we agree this is worth an extra TD a game, then this line becomes +10. And that’s pretty easy to go along with.

(A brief tangent: I watched a lot of television over the past few weeks, but by far the most confusing program I saw was a bowl preview on ESPN hosted by Jesse Palmer, in which the former Gators QB attempted to rank all the games based on his confidence in his prediction for who would win this game. Now, the only thing I care about less than who Jesse Palmer thinks is going to win all the bowl games is how confident Jesse Palmer feels in who Jesse Palmer thinks is going to win all the bowl games. That may be the dumbest idea ever for a TV show in history. Really, who’s going to watch that? Naturally, of course, I scheduled my whole night around this program, and even lied to my and friends and said I had the flu, just to make sure they wouldn’t bother me. The only problem was that I turned on my TV five minutes late and Palmer was already underway in his little Don Draper skinny tie, assigning numerical values to the games via a giant touch monitor that was like the butterfaced sister to John King’s slammin’ Magic Wall. It was like “Three Days of the Condor,” I had no idea what was going on, Palmer randomly shouted out these numbers that had no context and then they’d throw it over to the panelists who would debate whether the Emerald Bowl was a 14 or a 17 on the Palmer Scale (or even—GASP—an 11). The whole thing could have been simulcast in Farsi and I would have understood more about how Jesse Palmer felt about these games. Palmer’s a wannabe TV personality and alum of “The Bachelor,” so he should know the pitfalls of providing numbers without context. Hopefully when Joe Flacco gets off “The Swan” he won’t make the same mistakes.)

PANTHERS (-10) over Cardinals

I grew up during the height of parents pumping their kids full of psychoactive drugs to curb disruptive behavior like singing along with the radio in the car. Nowadays, parents are a bit more skeptical of such curative techniques, Parents these days are a little bit more skeptical about running a quasi-methadone clinic for a bunch of fourth graders, but I think the plight of Cardinals d-coordinator Clancy Pendergast argues in favor of a harsh regime of mind-altering pills. What the hell was that game plan, Clancy? It was like he chose “Balanced D” in a Madden game. Hey great, a 5-2…dial it up, it’s not like there was any reason it became obsolete fifty years ago…Ooh, a 1-5-5. And a 280 lb guys is the 1! Try and run on us now, ya bastards!

Was it Pendergast’s choice to have everyone on the defense clock in at either 6’3, 280lbs, or 6’2 230lbs. Is this all part of Clancy’s plan to control the NFL with a defense that melds the slowness of a big, unathletic secondary with the weakness of an undersized line? (Plus Karlos Dansby, who is supposed to be good but never seems to do a damn thing except ignore his position coach)

Is John Fox a good coach? I think so, he seems like a guy I’d like to play for, and he obviously has a good feel for his team. I think the Steve Smith suspension was a defining moment, not so much because it brought that sawed off little psychopath and the rest of his teammates closer together, but because it showed that, even though this was Fox’s make-or-break year, he wanted to make sure it was on record that you don’t go after Little Big Blue and get away clean. But again, good coach? I just don’t know, I never hear anything. Coaches from the offensive side of the ball are so much easier to judge. In my notes I have Fox ranked 5^th out of the remaining 8 coaches (Behind Coughlin, Fisher, Tomlin, Harbaugh). He could conceivably be as high as three, since Tomlin and Harbaugh’s greatest strengths are that they’re both smart enough not to meddle with Dick Le Beau and Cam Cameron. Fox, however, is the undisputed leader among active coaches in the “Looking Like Lorne Michaels” category, something that history tells us comes in handy the further you advance in the playoffs

GIANTS (-4.5) over Philly

The Carolina win seems like it was ages ago, but let’s not forget how well New York played in that game. Hell, their JV squad almost beat Minnesota in the Twin Cities two weeks ago, a game they would have won were it not for David Carr, once allegedly a decent QB who now provokes Steve Jobs level “[gasp] I can’t believe how bad he looks” scrutiny every time he waddles onto the field like Marty Feldman in “Young Frankenstein” Philadelphia only kinda-sorta squeaked by the Vikings last week. Everybody remembers the block as being key the last time these two played, but like I wrote at the time (and had reinforced this week watching the replay of the Meadowlands on NFL Net), New York wins were it not for a couple of inexplicable drops by Domenik Hixon in the open field. Technically, they didn’t take points of the board, but were representative of a day Philly got all the breaks. DeSean Jackson looked scary last week, like a seven-year-old pounding lattes, to the point where the Vikings planned to gut the league worse special teams unit, only to be overruled by Brad Childress who claims starting every drive inside the ten is all part of the development process the team envisions for Tarvaris.

Chargers (+6.5) over PITTSBURGH

Love the Chargers in the upset here. Mike Lombardi has been predicting all season that the Steelers O-line will be their undoing and the burden won’t be any lighter knowing that your QB is concussing himself just by putting on his helmet. Tomlin/Norv seems like this huge advantage for Pittsburgh, until you realize that, as good as he may be with personnel and game planning, Mike Tomlin’s primary responsibility during games is to put up a unified front. I love Mike Tomlin—if you said to me, “Ray, you’ve been kidnapped by a Danish billionaire who is going to hunt you for sport on his own private island. If you could only have one NFL coach to help you survive by your wits and turn the tables on Anastaas Van den Cort, who would it be?” I’d take Tomlin—but man, I could give an awesome high five, too, if I had Dick Le Beau dialing up zone blitzes.

Obviously, Norv can’t match Tomlin the motivation department—he’s the only coach in the NFL who looks like he’s disagreeing with what his players are doing on the field. Amazing. Additionally, Turner’s clock management skills are on trial at the Hague. Still, you can’t argue with the man’s ability to call plays on offense, and he’s got the added bonus of Rivers having to play better this week almost by default (You know how these big hitters hustle long drive competitions? Has anyone thought of taking that concept and applying it to somebody like Phillip Rivers when their playing days are done? Marmalard could tour the southlands and try to beat all sorts of folks in a 40-yard dash—small children, goats, the recently deceased, you name it.

Anyway, even more glaring than the Norv/Tomlin dichotomy is the difference in the specialists. Mike Scifres is coming off arguably the greatest game ever turned in by a punter (Yes, I realize the statistics don’t bear out this assertion, but come on, he beat Peyton Manning. That’s a fact. I can’t believe Matt Turk’s run with the Redskins in the 2000 playoffs—with Norv, again!—was more statistically significant, considering that to this day if you mention Matt Turk’s name in the company of a certain impressionable and borderline psychotic subset of Skins fans you’ll get one of about a hundred variations on the idea that Turk and his brother threw the game. This is groundless and untrue, but also a noble sort of reminder of the freedoms Redskins fans enjoyed in the pre-Snyder era. Nowadays you get sent to Gitmo for suggesting somebody missed a block, or speaking out against the notion that Vinny Cerrato is a fully-functional adult who should be allowed to use pens and the majority of other pointy instruments with only minimal supervision)

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