Ray's Rapid Ramblings

Last Week: 1-3

Playoffs: 3-5

Year To Date: 119-119-10

One of my favorite episodes of Season Two of “Mad Men” is “Six Months Leave,” where Don Draper and Roger Sterling spend one last night on the town with an alcoholic copywriter they’re about to fire. While at an after hours gambling hall, the usually implacable ad man slugs Jimmy Barrett, a comedian who flirted with Draper’s wife in an earlier episode. Recalling the incident later in the evening, Draper sheepishly acknowledges his mistake to Sterling. “That,” says a still-boozy Don, “was a real Archibald Whitman maneuver.”

For “Mad Men” devotees, this was a telling glimpse into Draper’s past life, the culmination of a season-and-a-half worth of furtive glances, cornpone relatives, and flashbacks involving old-time hobos. I don’t know how many casual NFL fans watch “Mad Men”—not many, I’m guessing, since Fox is apparently having a ton of trouble marketing that new Tim Roth show (which, admittedly would be drawing a lot more interest if it were called “The Human Lie Detector”). That’s a real shame, because even last September, “Mad Men” was laying the groundwork for the new conventional wisdom of NFL post-season play. Beware the Archibald Whitman maneuvers. I took the aggressive step of using the bold font for this last statement to highlight its importance. If I could, I’d add some pirate flags, Drudge sirens, and cigar-smoking monkeys. That’s how committed I am to this new football philosophy comprised of a few simple pillars: long-simmering problems will invariably manifest themselves at some point over five months of football. The center, once again, is incapable of holding. The best fall down, the rest rise up, and when it rains, it pours.

The refrain all week—mainly from those who watch hours of game film and assume even a brain-damaged sheep dog wouldn’t ask Chris Gamble to cover Larrry Fitzgerald one-on-one—has been something along the lines of, “These games make no sense, it’s no different than college basketball!” albeit with more swearing and bitching about the wind in the Meadowlands. I don’t see that at all. The playoffs begin with twelve teams, each with a well-documented set of problems. This isn’t pre-internet baseball where you had no idea what anybody on the Seattle Mariners looked like; fantasy leagues have made it impossible for WRs to rack up 1400-yard seasons in obscurity. It’s safe to say I know more about how Bill Parcells builds a football team than I do about the basic likes-and-dislikes of 88% of the women I’ve dated. And yet, for all our knowledge of schemes, personnel, and abstract statistical categories, we’re not getting any smarter. It’s amazing how much we choose to edit out come playoff time. The Cardinals and Eagles suffered public meltdowns during the regular season, something the Giants, Panthers, and Titans largely managed to avoid until last weekend. But these problems didn’t just come out of nowhere. New York, Carolina, and Tennessee all fell victim to upsets, but the truth is, they just picked the worst possible times to dial up their Archibald Whitman maneuvers. Like an old set of dog tags, a shattered piece of breakfast china, or a kicking mule, the bits and pieces that added up to three divisional round upsets were hidden in plain sight all along. A rundown:

Philadelphia/New York

The Archibald Whitman Maneuver: Eli Manning losing the ability to throw a spiral; Giants receivers dropping too many catchable balls; settling for field goals instead of TDs.

The Warning Signs:

Mike Lombardi, 12/17/08:

“I have defended Eli for the past few years…But there are times in the game when the ball does not come off of Eli’s hands very smoothly and he struggles to make good throws…The Giants cannot make a big play in the running or passing game, and they are getting penalized too often…They are 29th in starting field position on offense, and the fact they cannot make a big play forces them to have to drive the ball down the field.  This is also where they struggle; they are 29th in quick-strike drives (that is, a drive of fewer than 5 plays resulting in a touchdown). Scoring in the NFL is all about finding ways to create big plays…The Giants are not able to create big plays, which is surprising because they have such a powerful run game you might think their play-action pass game would be sensational.  When you rank 26th in penalties and cannot make big plays, it affects the production of your offense and hinders your scoring.”

Me, 12/5/08

“I don’t understand all these people who are saying, “The Giants won’t miss Plaxico Burress.” Yes, the Giants will not miss a 6’6, All-Pro wide receiver one bit as they head down the stretch. They’ll just lob the ball up to Sinorice Moss when they get in the red zone. Give them the damn trophy now.”

Arizona/Carolina

The Archibald Whitman Maneuver: Jake Delhomme losing control of all bodily functions simultaneously; Carolina fans bailing on their team at the first sign of trouble.

The Warning Signs:

Bill Simmons, 11/21/08

“The good news: Jake Delhomme definitely has more zip on his passes, thanks to Tommy John surgery. The bad news: He's still Jake Delhomme.”

Will Leitch, 11/18/08

“I sat in the press box for the Panthers-Lions game Sunday… Nobody bothered me, and, frankly, I don't think anyone in the whole stadium made a sound. It was like watching a football game in an aquarium. I kept tapping the glass to see if I could get the players to notice me.”

Sports Illustrated’s “Fan Value Experience,” 11/7/07

“…(Perhaps) that's why Bank of America Stadium is "one of the quietest in the league." "There are people who will ask you to sit down on third-and-goal with the game on the line and the Panthers D on the field." "Panthers fans have a reputation for being a 'wine-and-cheese' crowd," where a "lady can walk into the lower level with a fur coat on," and fans are "often more worried about getting the wave started than a late fourth-quarter drive." "Many fans have a poor knowledge of football" and "have not learned how to cheer enough to create a hostile environment for the other team."

Baltimore/Tennessee

The Archibald Whitman Maneuvers: Going to pieces without Chris Johnson; putting LenDale White in a position where he might be asked to carry the offense.

The Warning Signs:

Matt Bowen, 1/8/09

“I don’t see LenDale White running anywhere…except to the post-game buffet.”

Mike Lombardi, 10/3/08 (Previewing the first Ravens/Titans game)

“This game will mean more Chris Johnson and less LenDale White.  Johnson is the kind of athlete that is needed to deal with the Ravens. White is too slow to help in this game.”

The lesson is not “Beware the good team,” but rather, “Beware the team without a defined low point.” It’s the same logic by which the Patriots win Super Bowl XLII if they lose to Baltimore in Week 13. It’s just impossible to go through an entire season thrashing everybody on the schedule. Injuries pile up, plays don’t click, you get saddled with a bad match up…little things that are beyond the control of any one player or coach, all designed to prompt the Archibald Whitman maneuvers that lose games. During the regular season, this can yield ungodly months, like Philadelphia’s November, or Arizona’s December. As in all other aspects of football, reinvention is the key, but that’s an easier pill to swallow during the last seconds of a September loss in Buffalo than, say, when you find yourself down three scores at the two minute warning on Wild Card weekend.

It’s been a running theme over the past week to claim that the Giants, Titans, and Panthers are better than three-fourths of the teams in the conference championship games. Really? Why? How could anybody suggest that Carolina would beat Arizona nine times out of ten? Would John Fox suddenly stop playing zone on Larry Fitzgerald? Would he direct the security detail at Bank of America Stadium to arrest Jake Delhomme upon his arrival for the walkthrough?

The same thing holds true for the Giants: would having Plaxico in the lineup teach Eli how to execute a QB sneak, or give John Carney ten extra yards on his field goal attempts? Even the Titans—the best of the bunch last weekend—should realize that having Chris Johnson for both halves wouldn’t negate the injuries that rendered Haynesworth and Vanden Bosch ineffective, and wouldn’t make up for the half-dozen snaps reserve center Leroy Harris misfired to Kerry Collins in the shotgun. For the seventeen weeks of the regular season, New York, Carolina, and Tennessee were consistently the best teams on any given Sunday, and this ruthlessness is what spelled their doom.

They never got lost, which means they never got found.

ARIZONA (+3.5) over Philadelphia

Hunter Thompson shot his face off four years ago this February, which is a shame, because I can’t help but think the good doctor would enjoy this Cardinals team. He’d get a kick out of pairing hardasses like Whisenhunt and Russ Grimm with the firepower of Fitzgerald, Boldin, and Warner. He’d revel in Clancy Pendergast’s pure gonzo defensive schemes, and would almost certainly refer to Adrian Wilson as “the rottenest strong safety in the football business.” The downfall of Edgerrin James would confound him, and Edge’s looming free agency would trigger a tangent about the personnel decision of Al Davis, and why AD’s predilection for over-the-hill stars makes him Worse Than Nixon.

With the exception of DeSean Jackson, Thompson would hate everything about this Eagles team, for the same reasons Philly worries the rest of us: a coach prone to nonsensical game plans, awful challenges, and red zone ineptitude; a QB with a difficult-to-evaluate skill-set who never fills up the stat sheet and creates the impression (rightly or wrongly) of missing more plays than he makes; a secretly washed-up kicker; two playoff wins finagled via awful QB play and inexplicable short-yardage breakdowns on the part of the opposition.

High-flying Cardinals offense aside, the subplot in this game most likely to provoke the ire of pigskin-loving iconoclasts is nine-win Arizona hosting another playoff game. This quirk in the scheduling is on the books to promote the league’s Jeffersonian ideal of the playoffs as representative democracy; good intentions aside, it does not account for the fact the Cardinals won a division where two of the four teams forfeited all their games after forgetting to mail their entry checks to the league office.

Give Eagles fans credit for not going all Philadelphia-y on this issue; Phil Gramm had to leave the McCain campaign last summer after he said America was turning into a “nation of whiners,” on account of this sentiment being so far off-base that the former Texas senator could no longer be taken seriously as an advocate for the campaign. As somebody who covered the McCain camp as part of the press pool, I thought Gramm’s comments were about the most well-reasoned and thoughtful ideas to emerge from the campaign’s inner-circle. Now, though, I understand it—if Eagles fans are reacting calmly and rationally to a league office screwjob, then clearly our national discourse is in far better shape than Senator Gramm and I initially believed.

The logic behind this stoic approach to game week, as outlined in the book “Zen and the Art of Not Burning Down Andy Reid’s House,” is that they never expected to be here in the first place, and that, as January road games go, Phoenix is a gift.

I couldn’t disagree more—there’s no place on earth as dangerous for this Eagles team as Glendale at high noon on Sunday. The trip to Arizona, and the team that awaits them in the desert, play into the Eagles biggest weakness during the Reid/McNabb-era: the inability to cope when things start getting Weird.

Weird is not a word commonly associated with NFL success, but it’s the primary reason Philadelphia keeps coming up short. The Eagles don’t do Weird. This is not an opinion so much as a statement of fact. It’s the by-product of being coached by a fundamentally unimaginative man like Andy Reid.  Were games played in a vacuum, the Eagles would be near-perennial champs. Within the standard operating procedure of the league, the Eagles can go on a run and knock off straw men like Dallas, Minnesota, and New York—balanced, calibrated teams that want to win because that’s what makes the most sense. Things get tough for Philly when they face teams driven by vague, non-traditional goals. In Week 11, they played to a 13-13 tie with the Bengals, a team that only showed glimmers of life down the stretch when they realized playing for Marvin Lewis and Mike Zimmer would be a whole lot better than whatever Mike Brown would dig up if he had to go coach shopping. In Week 16, Philly lost 10-3 to a Washington team that used the game as a kind of Dadaist protest against coach Jim Zorn.

Arizona is just as Weird, and they also happen to be playing very good football. This isn’t Philadelphia’s sweet spot—not here, thousands of miles from home and without their usual contingent of traveling fans, playing in a climate-controlled stadium that looks like an advanced form of female contraception. Not here, with playoff starved yokels descending on ticket booths like the Sand Raiders of Tatooine, working in tandem with Clancy Pendergast’s exotic formations to throw off the timing of Philly’s dink-and-dunk offense. Not here, in the middle of nowhere, where a stiff desert breeze threatens yet another Jenga game that Andy Reid calls a football team.

20 Songs To Rock Your Conference Championship Weekend—The music picks are always the last thing added to the column, only last week I got so carried away with Brad Childress jokes that I forgot to copy-and-paste the playlist into the master document. Thus, this week will be a twofer. Enjoy.

            1. ‘Hard Sun (Main)’ by Eddie Vedder

            2. ‘Calling And Not Calling My Ex’ by Okkervil River

            3. ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’ by The Long Blondes

            4. ‘Black River Killer’ by Blitzen Trapper

            5. ‘Lover’s Day’ by TV On the Radio

            6. ‘Coughing Colors’ by Tilly and the Wall

            7. ‘For Emma’ by Bon Iver

            8. ‘You Are My Face’ by Wilco

            9. ‘Lights Out’ by Santogold

            10. ‘You Know My Name (Look Up My Number)’ by The Beatles

            11. ‘Godspeed’ by Jenny Lewis

            12. ‘Love Song for a Schuba’s Bartender’ by Margot and The Nuclear So & Sos

            13. ‘Never See Me Again’ by Vivian Girls

            14. ‘Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door’ by Burnside Explosion

            15. ‘Grey Ice Water’ by Sun Kil Moon

            16. ‘Huck’s Tune’ by Bob Dylan

            17. ‘Apple Orchard’ by Beach House

            18. ‘Good Life’ by Francis Dunnery

            19. ‘A Case of You’ by Nancy Wilson

            20. ‘You Are My Joy’ by Reindeer Section

Baltimore (+6) over PITTSBURGH

I’m never one to accuse the media of failing to spend enough time discussing obvious, clichéd talking points (Kurt Warner…pretty good in the playoffs, in case you weren’t aware), but I don’t think enough is being made of how hard it is to beat the same team three times in a season. Didn’t anybody out there play high school basketball? Doesn’t this very issue affect seeding for the NCAA tournament every year? The consensus seems to be that this logic doesn’t apply to the fragmented, compartmentalized world of pro football, which would be true if Pittsburgh was playing, say, the Lions. Instead, they get a Ravens team that has been working things out all year like the raptors in “Jurassic Park,” (“They’re lethal at eight months…And I do mean lethal.”) yet still hasn’t played a particularly good game through two rounds of the playoffs.

This last point is what makes Baltimore so intriguing—the other three teams are playing their best football of the season. Baltimore, god bless ‘em, isn’t even close—were it not for Chad Pennington reenacting the final scene from “Flowers For Algernon” in the Wild Card round, and a well-documented non-call last weekend from The Ref Who Looks Like Powers Boothe, they’d be done.

And yet, perhaps no remaining group of players is as primed to pull an Archibald Whitman maneuver as the Pittsburgh O-line, a much-maligned group that admittedly turned in their best performance last Sunday. This is a problem, as evidenced by the divisional round carnage—even during the most stellar performances, all NFL teams are in the process of moving deathwards. This is especially true along the lines, with the regular season all but reduced to a glorified last-man-standing competition for whichever team keeps their original o-line intact for the longest stretch. Pittsburgh’s problem isn’t injuries up front, but rather, questionable personnel.

Here’s the nagging question. Yes, the O-line dominated against San Diego, but how does that help with Haloti Ngata, Ray Lewis, and (maybe) Terrell Suggs coming to town? To quote the old “Sesame Street” song, “One of these things is not like the other…” (PS—I don’t understand how all these Steelers apologists, who are apparently part of some super-secret cabal that controls all cable sports shows, can read anything into how they pushed around the Chargers defense. The Chargers defense gets pushed around every week. It’s like a hobby of theirs)

The Ravens super secret ace-in-the-hole? Steven Hauschka, the team’s long-kick specialist (he also handles the kickoffs, apparently). Nobody has ever hit a 50-yard field goal in Heinz Field, much for the same reason nobody has ever hit a 50-yard field goal in the Okefenokee Swamp. But, as they tell you at long-kicking academy, situations like these are why you waste a roster spot on a kickoff specialist. Mike Tomlin is a tornado of high-fives and Cover-2 suppression, but the façade cracks, as well it should, when he contemplates Steelers special-teamers-not-named Santonio Holmes. Punter Mitch Berger is stumbling around like a film noir hero whose new wife is slowly poisoning him to death. He may actually be the first player to be cut midway through the Super Bowl—Tomlin will have him folded up and carried out in Soozie Tyrell’s violin case. On those rare punts when the ball doesn’t land five yards deep in the end zone, the Pittsburgh gunners either overrun the coverage, or lop off an extra five yards by refusing to let the ball roll. Kicker Jeff Reed is serviceable so long as he keeps his pants on and doesn’t text after midnight, but not to the point where you feel like you can stall out beyond the 30 and have any chance at all of coming away with points.

If the slow turf negates the speed of both defenses, and Flacco’s fondness for ill-advised, on-the-move, across-body throws is negated by Roethlisberger’s fondness for ill-advised, on-the-move, across-body throws, this one becomes a toss up, totally dependant on line play, the running game, and special teams. In which case, to paraphrase The Boss, two kickers are better than one.

And with that great segue, I’m proud to announce, after doggedly holding out for nearly five months, the column and I are poised to enter the exciting and lucrative world of NFP contest-dom…BEHOLD!!!

The NFP/E Street Super Bowl Pick ‘Em

In retrospect, it was just good luck that, in the very year Mike Lombardi and I started working together on an NFL blog, Bruce Springsteen allowed the league to schedule a football game around the four-song mini-set he’s playing in Tampa on February 1^st. Mike and I are Springsteen freaks, for reasons I won’t go into here, since I don’t want to come across like one of those people who gets all wild-eyed telling you how deeply they connect the music of John Mayer. As usual, Tom Hanks summed it up best when he introduced Bruce at the 2006 Grammy Awards: “Music is one of the ways we pass on stories of America, and the world in which we all live. Nobody today does that better than this next man. He has been singing to us—and for us—for more than thirty years. Ladies and gentlemen, Bruce Springsteen.”

When word first leaked about The Boss playing at halftime, Mike and I, like fans all over the world, burned up the phone-lines and shot off dozens (literally dozens) of emails, planning our dream set lists for an event we would have no hand in organizing.

Things have changed since September: the reeling, divided landscape of “Magic” has been cast aside—both by choice and by circumstances—in favor of seeking out that redemption beneath all our dirty hoods. It’s not a political thing—Bruce just happens to be America’s clearest voice when it comes to themes of rebirth, loneliness, and racing to repair the damage, save maybe for F. Scott Fitzgerald, who, it’s worth noting, has been dead more-or-less-continuously for the past seventy years.

In the next month, the rest of the world will be presented with two televised ambassadors of America: Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen. That’s a heckuva burden for a pop star, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. In his 2003 Nation essay "USA Oui! Bush Non!” Eric Alterman wrote, “You can tell a lot about a continent by the way it reacts to Bruce Springsteen…You can’t be anti-American if you love Bruce Springsteen.” Obama gets at least four years to sell himself; Springsteen gets less than twenty minutes, barely enough time for four songs. These songs will have to provide background music to millions of lunkheads attempting to fix pony kegs that are not broken; they have to help Sony move copies of Bruce’s new album; they have to celebrate new beginnings while tacitly acknowledging heartbreak and years of disappointment; they have to save the world.

So, four songs…the most important set of Bruce’s career, whether he realizes it or not. So we’re issuing a challenge to all of you who worship at the twin altars of Springsteen and the National Football League, sign up for the NFP/E Street Challenge. The rules are simple: from now until 12 PM on February 1^st, post your predictions for Bruce’s Super Sunday set-list in the comments section of any new post written by Mike Lombardi or myself. You can also click on the NFP/E Street banner that should be up on the home page momentarily. Grand prize will include a few freebies we yank out of the storage closet, plus an as-yet-undetermined piece of Springsteen memorabilia, which could run the gamut from a genuine Sal’s Grocery t-shirt, to a discarded pack of Soozie Tyrell’s Marlboros. In the event of a tie, a two-minute lightning round of E Street trivia, written and administered by Mike Lombardi and I, will crown our new king.

For those of you wondering how…do…we…GET…this…thing started, I’ll take the opportunity to publicly cast my ballot. Again, it’s not your favorite songs, or what you wish he would play. The four you think he’s going to play. (So leave the “Lucky Town” signs at home) Also, all bets are void if he busts out a medley:

“The Rising” (A no-brainer. Also, if Arizona somehow wins it all, the union of Phoenix and “The Rising” will be the lede for hordes of lazy sportswriters)

“Born To Run” (Another no-brainer, plus it’s short)

“My Lucky Day” (Here’s where things get tricky—you have to think he plays something off the new album. “Working On A Dream” is the obvious pick, but I’m not sure how well it would play in a big venue (that damn whistling!). So we’ll go with the second single from the album)

“Long Walk Home” (My real dark horse pick, it just seems to perfectly embody what this performance should shoot for. Wistful, hopeful, proud. America feels a collective chill up its spine when Bruce belts“My father said, ‘Son, we’re lucky in this town/It’s a beautiful place to be born/It just wraps its arms around you/Nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone’/’You know that flag flying over the courthouse/Means certain things are set in stone/Who we are, what we’ll do, and what we won’t’”)

Good luck, goodbye, and enjoy the games.

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