Football Archives

I guess I am not the only one to notice that Ben Sheets is a dead ringer for Brett Favre:

At one point during lunch, a fan approached Sheets and said "Hey Brett, how are you enjoying retirement?"

"I'm not Brett," Sheets said, pointing at [Geoff] Jenkins, who was mistaken for Brett Favre early in his career. "He is."

The confused fan walked away as the players laughed.

"I loved it," Jenkins said. "And he was dead-set that it was Sheeter. Now that I'm gone, I guess I'll pass that on to Sheets. I passed the torch."

I suppose, given the state of Holy Cross football, I can understand why Justice Thomas prefers to root for Nebraska.

This is truly a moment to savor, as it's the first time in 17 years that one of my three teams (Mets, Giants, Franchise Formerly Known as the Knicks) has won it all. Before the game I had expected that the Giants would hang with the Pats for at least the first half, but I never thought they would actually pull this off. And I'll admit that over the past two seasons I never believed that Eli would turn into the kind of QB who could run that incredible do-or-die drive to retake the lead down 4 in the closing two minutes. And maybe I haven't paid close enough attention to the NFL but it still amazes me that the Giants were able to do this without Tiki Barber and Jeremy Shockey, the two mainstays of their offense these last few years. And on top of that, a quiet day by Tiki's replacement, Brandon Jacobs.

The co-MVP of the game could easily have been David Tyree, who caught Eli's first TD pass and had a number of impressive catches including a crucial 24-yard circus catch off the top of his helmet in the final drive that looked like a throwback to the stickum age. But the play that will most likely be re-shown in the days to come was Eli evading the grasp of defenders who nearly tore the jersey off his back to complete a 45-yard strike over the middle to Kevin Boss early in the 4th quarter when the game was still stalled at 7-3 Pats.

If there was one downside to this game it was the officiating, which seemed intrusive and yet missed shenanigans caught on camera by both sides on a couple of occasions.

Nobody will weep for Goliath - least of all the now-giddy 72 Dolphins - the Pats have plenty of rings to count. But from this day forward the credcendo will build whenever a team gets to 10-0 or so that they better lose now and not wait until the Super Bowl. Which is probably unfair to the Patriots, who just looked last night like a team that got beat by another team, not a team that played too tight and choked.

UPDATE: A few additional thoughts:

1. I didn't give the Giants D nearly enough credit above for stopping the Pats' vaunted offense. This defensive unit may not have the big names of Giant defenses of yore, but they showed up when it counted.

2. I guess it's no surprise that I can't reach firetomcoughlin.com this morning.

SECOND UPDATE: Yeah, I somehow got the plays mixed up in my head and forgot that the Eli torn-jersey play was actually the same play as Tyree's helmet-catch. Duh.

Also, humbling moment of the day: watching scrawny little Wes Welker, realizing that he's even smaller without his pads...and being informed that Welker is my height and outweighs me by 40 pounds.

Sunday night's Giants-Packers NFC title game made me nostalgic for the days when I used to follow the NFL every week, rather than casually with my full attention not focused until the playoffs. It was a rare kind of classic game - typically a monster game involves two offenses clicking on all cylinders (like the Giants-Pats season finale - the all-time classic of this was the famous Chargers-Dolphins playoff in 1981), or two great defenses slugging it out, or a great offense against a great defense. But this was one of those rare games - much like the 1991 Giants-Bills Super Bowl - that was crisply played by both teams on both sides of the ball, and doubly impressive for such great football being played in such terrible cold. I don't think I have ever seen so many passes completed by one team with just tiptoes in fair territory on the sidelines (many of them diving grabs) as the much- and (until very recently) justly-maligned Eli Manning hit to Plaxico Burress and Amani Toomer in this game. Those weren't blown coverages, as few of them were totally wide-open; they were just a QB in perfect sync with his receivers and the receivers making amazing snatches. Burress and Toomer have to be the best Giants receiving corps ever (and rookie Stephen Smith wasn't too shabby over the middle, either). The only marring factor was Lawrence Tynes' disastrous kicking before the OT game-winner; it reminded me all too much of the infamous Seahawks game two years ago when Jay Feeley missed three game-winning field goals, one to end regulation and two in overtime.

One thing you have to say is that Tom Coughlin's decision to play full-bore for the 'meaningless' win the last day of the season against New England was the right decision. Going the distance against the undefeated Pats juggernaut clearly gave this team a confidence boost, and now they face the Patriots feeling quite reasonably like they can take them. I'm doubtful that they will, not least because it's nearly impossible to beat a demonstrably better team in the playoffs with an unreliable kicker. But there's time yet for hope.

And it's only four letters. H/T Ben.

The WSJ's sports blog has a roundup of some great feature stories of the past year.

Seriously, did you ever expect to see a team that was (1) the defending Super Bowl champs, (2) undefeated 7 weeks into the season, (3) playing at home, (4) against a team they beat in the playoffs the previous year, (5) who just lost their leading rusher for the season...and be a 5-6 point underdog?

I'm not saying the oddsmakers are crazy, given how the Patriots have played this season, but it remains an astonishing set of circumstances. As for the "Game of the Century" hype...um, don't we expect these same two teams to likely meet again in the playoffs?

The Super Bowl in London?

It's not complete heresy - this is football, not baseball, after all - but it does seem a bit much to take the nation's premier championship sporting event on the road.

You know, once you've been an ex-backup punter at the college level, it's all downhill.

No, especially after reading KSK's take I couldn't resist that title.

The news that Jets coach Eric Mangini caught Bill Belichick in the act of stealing the Jets' defensive signals via video camera in violation of NFL rules presents a number of interesting issues. For obvious reasons, the NFL isn't going to go back and start forfeiting games or kick Belichick out of the league, but the penalty does have to be real and stiff to discourage this sort of thing from happening; the NFL has talked about docking the team draft picks, and a first round pick would be a sufficiently stiff penalty that it should be included. And yes, the penalty should fall on the team as a whole, since this was an operation involving multiple people from the head coach on down for the benefit of the club.

Sign-stealing has a long pedigree, of course, and in baseball we have the now-notorious example (only unearthed 50 years later) of the 1951 Giants' elaborate surveillance operation. But while baseball has mostly treated it as a venial sin and one that carries no penalty if you aren't caught red-handed (as the Patriots here were) it strikes me as being a more serious issue in football, given the elaborate nature of the play-calling process in today's game.

At the same time, I'm not so quick to jump on the bandwagon of people trying to strip the legitimacy of the Patriots' titles; as is often the case with these things, you start doing that and it raises the issue of who else got away with what that was never known or suspected.

Probably the biggest lesson of the whole affair is that you should never use dirty tricks against people who used to work for you and know your M.O. "The Mangenius" knew Belichick's tricks from having worked for the Pats; if Belichick expected Mangini to keep quiet out of an unspoken code of loyalty, he shouldn't have tried the same thing against Mangini's team.

Oh, and: don't mess with a guy who knows Tony Soprano.

ESPN's Howard Bryant pens an uncommonly silly but revealing column arguing that the NFL Players Union should have put up a major fight to defend Michael Vick precisely because his conduct was, in Bryant's word, "indefensible."

Leaving aside for the moment the question of how serious Vick's conduct was and whether it ought to be a federal crime, Bryant's attitude is precisely what is wrong with many unions:

In the coming years, that will prove to be a colossal mistake. Vick deserves to go to prison, but the union's job is to defend every player's right to work.

The Major League Baseball Players Association, built and sustained by Marvin Miller, Donald Fehr and three generations of resolute players, long ago answered the question of defending the indefensible. The multiple drug abuse cases of Steve Howe, the spitting incident of Roberto Alomar and most recently the way the players association has handled much of the steroids era have served as examples of a union not finding itself on the right or popular side of an issue and at risk of damaging its public image. The rationale was this: How you fight today sets the parameters for the battles of tomorrow.

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The responsibility of a union is to defend its membership -- every time, all the time, if for no other reasons than to send a dissenting vote to management that its membership always will be protected by a strong union and to alert the commissioner that his powers always will be checked by an advocate for the players. The union's message should be that a commissioner cannot simply do whatever he wants.

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So the union has an understanding that it won't be blindsided by a runaway commissioner, adopting a position closer to equity shareholder than skeptical watchdog. It has labor peace and can take comfort in not worrying about losing public goodwill during contract years or losing face should its membership crack during pressurized labor negotiations. The union seems comforted that it is treated as an inside player instead of a hostile entity. But what good is maintaining the peace if it is not accompanied by power?

There are many fair arguments to be had for the pros and cons of unionizing for the purpose of better wages, benefits and working conditions. But those are general benefits, obtained by the whole union to benefit the whole union.

By contrast, when a union goes to bat for an accused or proven miscreant, or for that matter for its most incompetent or insubordinate employees or to otherwise block management's efforts to reward the better performers and weed out those who don't do the job, it is using the strength of the many to benefit the few - and indeed, to benefit those few who least deserve it. That's antithetical to the entire idea of unions as a collective effort to benefit everyone, and perversely rewards wrongdoers. And of course, it harms the business from which the union's members derive their livelihoods.

A union may think, as Don Fehr does, that you never give in to management on something management wants unless you get something in return. But that is a misunderstanding born of hubris. In fact, a union, like any other contestant in an ongoing power struggle, has only limited resources: only so much money, only so much time and attention from its leaders, lawyers and members, only so many battles it can fight without triggering an irrational response from management or draining the resources ofthe business as a whole (and thus shrinking the pie), only so many concessions it can extract. A union that prioritizes fighting for the protection of members who are criminals is expending resources that could be used to benefit members who actually stay out of trouble and do their jobs. A union that extracts concessions of that nature is failing to extract others that may be more evenly enjoyed.

Unions, especially private sector unions, have been in trouble for a while in this country, losing footholds in organizing and seeing the industries they dominate weaken. There are many reasons for this, but if there's a single characteristic of unions that is most unattractive and most gratuitously damaging to the businesses that employ them, it is the determination to go to the mat for members of the union who misbehave or don't perform at their jobs.

My kids hate Michael Vick. Not, mind you, because of anything he did on or off the field, but simply because on vacation, every time they turned on ESPN to get baseball news, they instead got The Passion of the Vick, repeated endlessly. (Two summers ago it was the same with Terrell Owens).

Vick's deal is no cakewalk - a likely 12-18-month sentence plus possible state charges carrying stiffer fines. In fact, I don't know if I would have let him plead to the federal charges given the state exposure. Although I can't say I see what point there is to the state getting involved once he has plead to a federal felony; is Virginia really that short on crimes to prosecute?

Apparently, Vick is cooperating with an ongoing investigation of other dogfighting rings, so analysts like Roger Cossack were wrong in assuming that he had nothing more to offer once his co-defendants pleaded out. But even if he was the last man standing, Vick had two key chips to play. First, if the investigation really had ended with him, there's the benefit to the prosecutors of being able to close a case and close it successfully - move on to other things, wrap up without a defeat or a messy, labor-intensive trial.

And second, Vick's plea legitimizes his prosecution - not a minor thing when a man has lined up the NAACP and similar groups to charge racism and witch-hunting in the bringing of the investigation. Having the man stand up and accept responsibility goes a long way in that regard.

One-liner of the day, on the passing of Bill Walsh.

But someone still cares to teach them to be men.

Was behind on my KSK but this is hilarious.

Sooner or later I will have to read "All American: Why I Believe in Football, God, and the War in Iraq," by Ropb McGovern, a lawyer, former NFL player, and graduate of Holy Cross and of my high school's arch-rivals Bergen Catholic who left the Manhattan DA's office after September 11 to become a JAG lawyer in Afghanistan and Iraq (I linked to an interview with him here).

New England Patriots owner Bob Kraft's wife on how Vladimir Putin ended up with Kraft's Super Bowl ring:

As Kraft tells it, she and her husband were in St. Petersburg with Sandy Weill, then the chairman of Citigroup Inc., their "good friend" the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, an oil executive, and a physician. That group, all except for Kraft, met at Konstantinovsky Palace with the Russian president, and when she next saw her husband in their hotel room, he confessed he had a problem. "They were getting up for formal pictures, and Sandy said to Robert, 'Why don't you show the president your ring?'" she says. "So Robert never wears the ring, [but] sometimes, in certain instances, he'll have it in his pocket, he'll take it out. Putin put it on his finger, and his first comment was 'I could kill someone with this,' which was a little bit of an unusual comment, and then they took pictures, and Putin put it back in his pocket and walked out."

Then the fuss began. The story leaked to the media, and Robert Kraft issued a statement: "I decided to give him the ring as a symbol of the respect and admiration that I have for the Russian people and the leadership of President Putin."

Myra Kraft even has an explanation for the official story. "Sandy called and said, 'You've got to do something to put this at rest,' so Robert said 'fine' and came up with some statement about the warm fuzzy feelings he had being in Russia. Of course, his forebears were probably raped and pillaged by these people, but Robert had to make it sound good," she says. "That's what it is. And so he got another one."

The article also has some Holy Cross-related anecdotes, for those of you who are interested.

Just in case you may have considered not reading Michael Lewis' The Blind Side, I'm here to tell you to reconsider. The Blind Side is one of the best sports books I've ever read.

Like Lewis' previous books Liar's Poker (about Salomon Brothers in the 1980s) and Moneyball (about the Oakland A's in the past decade), The Blind Side is fundamentally a book about markets and how they interact with the people whose unique skills or insights are suddenly made valuable by those markets. In this case, it's the market for NFL left tackles who protect the end of the line of scrimmage on a right-handed quarterback's blind side from increasingly quick and dangerous pass rushers. Lewis starts his tale with a (literally) shattering anecdote, recounting in stop-motion detail Lawrence Taylor's legendary hit on Joe Theismann and noting that the Redskins' star left tackle, Joe Jacoby, was on the sidelines that night. Lewis then details the rapid rise of left tackle salaries and the ripple effect that has had on the position all the way down to high school.

Wrapped inside a book about markets, however, is a second story - a unique coming of age story that takes over the narrative. Lewis follows Michael Oher, a 16-year-old African-American kid from the worst possible part of Memphis who arrives, Tarzan-like, at an overwhelmingly white Christian school with nothing but the ideal physical size and gifts to be an NFL left tackle. And I do mean nothing: no family, no home, no education, no money, no background in organized sports, no medical history - but also, perhaps surprisingly given his background, no boiling anger, no criminal record, no bad habits. The kid was just a complete cipher. It's an amazing testament to the generosity of his neighbors that a kid who never knew where his next meal was coming from somehow made his way to 350 pounds of mostly muscle by age 16.

I've been told by more careful watchers of the NFL that Lewis has a few factual details wrong - names misspelled, dates wrong. As a narrative, the only false note in the book is a chapter entitled "Death of a Lineman," which ends with the early death from cancer of 49ers guard John Ayers; while Ayers' story fits neatly into Lewis' narrative, his death really has nothing to do with nothing, and feels tacked on for surplus emotion (perhaps it would have felt less so if not for the chapter title).

This book may be less significant than Moneyball, in that it's far less likely to stir new debate in the NFL, but it's a great yarn full of laugh-out-loud "wow" moments (I may be biased because I went into Moneyball knowing more of the story). On the other hand, Lewis does also manage to bring in more of the world outside football through his examination of a Memphis neighborhood that is staggering even by the standards of urban poverty.

Lewis was a childhood friend of Sean Touhy, the Memphis businessman who takes Oher under his wing, and so this is the second outstanding book that Lewis essentially fell into, the first being Liar's Poker, which came out of Lewis' own tenure working at Salomon Brothers. That said, he's a tremendous writer and it's a tale worth the telling.

KSK has the definitive last word on Peyton Manning.

Peyton Manning seemed to spend much of last night with a look on his face that said, "hey, nobody told me the Super Bowl was going to be this wet!" Then again, that's better than Rex Grossman's look of "hey, those cars are coming at me really fast."

On the whole, from what I was able to see, it was a pretty solid game, not one of the greatest or most well-played Super Bowls but the outcome stayed in doubt into the fourth quarter, which is good. And it was worth it to see Manning finally win it just to hear the grinding of gears by sportswriters suddenly switching directions after years of branding him with the scarlet "L".

I have to think that one beneficiary of Manning's victory is Eli. Now, Eli has plenty of problems, but one less is having the burden of thinking that even if he got as good as his brother that still would never be enough to silence the critics, the boo birds, etc. This season, Eli can go back to worrying about living up to his family, not living down to it.

I'm not ready to burn bridges over this, but I agree 100% with Ben that it's an outrage for the NFL to vote Michael Irvin into Canton over Art Monk.

UPDATE: I should add that when I saw the full list of people on the ballot, what's really outrageous is that they left out Derrick Thomas.

*The Schottenheimer Playoff Coaching Index!

*From the same source: Rick Mirer, the worst NFL QB ever. Note that the list also includes Danny Kanell, Scott Brunner, Kerry Collins, Dave Brown, and Kent Graham.

*Via Instapundit, the Top Ten Iraq War Myths.

*In one January strike, the Iraqis brought down the highest ranking casualties of the war. (Confirmed here). One hopes this was just a coincidence and not a sign of inflitration or other compromising of our operational intelligence.

*John Kerry finally gets good press - in Iran's state-run media. I had more on his latest foot-in-mouth episode at RedState yesterday, including links to other sources. The most charitable reading of all this is that Kerry really is an idiot.

*Jimmy Carter backs off the implication that suicide bombing is a legitimate tactic that need not be stopped until the Israelis make certain concessions.

*Israeli PM Ehud Olmert on Iran. (A government that now includes a Muslim cabinet member - don't hold your breath for a Christian or Jew in the regimes of Israel's enemies).

*Did Barack Obama choose to run in 2008 rather than wait longer because a run now would be easier on his children, ages 5 and 8?

*Obi-Wan's cloak for sale!

Well, the NFL season ended in a hurry in New York (not that this was any great surprise on either count), and with the Knicks done for the decade that leaves us non-hockey fans to await baseball season.

Not to take anything away from the Eagles' victory (although watching the game you had to question if either team really deserved to win), but this one felt, most of all, like the Giants just ran out of time as opposed to getting beat. At the end, though, they just didn't have the old Big Blue defensive stoppers.

It's a shame, of course, that the Giants weren't better positioned to capitalize on the seasons Tiki had the last two years; with his retirement it seems vanishingly unlikely they will be a playoff team next year. We'll see soon enough if Coughlin comes back (or if the Giants decide to get a coach who can keep his players from getting whistled every other down). Either way, next year has to be Manning's last in New York unless he steps up in a major way - if his name was Eli Jones he might well have to battle to keep his starting job after this one.

Good Slate column appreciating the importance of centers. I'm just starting the Michael Lewis book mentioned here.