Now or Never for the Titans

As published at www.ongameday.ca

It never sat right with me watching Tennessee locking themselves into the basement of the AFC South for the first six games of the season.  Not after the crazy tear they went on in 2008.  These guys should have been building on the season prior and giving the Colts a run for their money, instead they were running out of steam half way through games and playing collectively like they spent the summer watching Detroit Lions motivational videos.

 

Jeff Fisher, for all his football savvy and mustachioed wisdom, was stuck firmly on “Team Collins” no matter how many losses, incomplete passes (89 but who’s counting) and general embarrassing Sundays his team had to wander through.  To his credit, Fisher must have been properly shaken after Young’s suicide debacle a year prior and is forever inclined to go with the fella with a proven track record of not-crazy, but this is the NFL and crazy shit is going to happen.  At some point you have to put it down as dark chapter in an otherwise amazing biography and run that one-in-a-million risk of a “Last Boyscout” incident.

 

After the Peyton Manning Jersey Mia Culpa Fisher finally caved to a murderous Bud Adams (who was reportedly angry enough to start bleeding from the eyes) and gave Young the nod after a long and ugly bi-week.  He more or less admitted he didn’t want to, but an 0-6 coach more or less forfeits his right to ignore the man with the big wallet.  The rest is a four game history.

So all of the sudden the Titans have a storyline, and the football gods just loooooooove a storyline.  Four wins in a row and two of them against division rivals.  Teams that are a joke don’t go 4-0 in the middle of a season.  It’s an uphill tooth and nail battle to the 6^th spot in the AFC, but every season has a Cinderella story, and my gut tells me the Titans are gonna crash the party or at least put on a good show at the door.

This Sunday night is where we find out of the Titans are serious about their comeback.  Arizona is a solid team that puts up big numbers and the Warner Fitzgerald one-two puts on as good a show as there is in the league.  Of course all that aside, this game means a hell of a lot more to the home squad, and Superbowl appearance aside, they still aren’t that good.  Being kings of NFC West this year is like beating up on children.  Look for the Titans to fire off a cannonball named Chris Johnson and ruin Thanksgiving for the Cardinal’s linebackers.

The Over/Under is 47.5 and I’m thinking that’s pretty conservative, this is going to be a highlight-rich slobber knocker and if I’m lucky enough the Cardinals D is going to spend a lot of time on the field.

The Hall of Fame makes me want to be a better man

The Hockey Hall of Fame swelled both in membership and prestige this week with some of the more worthier inductees to have ever laced up skates, that is, Steve Yzerman and some other dudes. Judging from the coverage and the noticeably amped up production value, the shrine on Front Street and the ceremony surrounding it’s big night has upped it’s game to the credit of the game and everybody in it.

Even though the scrum might have followed Gretzky’s entrance like he was drunk Mylie Cyrus falling out of a dress, the coverage was sharp overall and to the point the way you would never expect to see on TSN (this might bode well for the Olympic coverage, cautious optimism is the order of the day). They should be commended for keeping the strobe light graphics and passive-aggressive banter to a minimum. The ceremony was more of the same. The highlight reel for #19 was demonstrative of his abilities (especially so against the Blackhawks) without being sappy or otherwise ridiculous. James Duthie did the introduction with the classy sort of prodding that played for chuckles while never letting anyone forget that he was Duthie and the inductee was an immeasurably better human being.

Steve Yzerman stole the show and for good reason, as qualified as Hull and Robitaille may be Yzerman is exactly the sort of player the NHL has been built on.

Yzerman’s career was a study in competence becoming excellence, while he wasn’t without a spectacular highlight reel, his steady consistence, a mastery of fundamentals and work ethic that stands second to none were what set him apart and made him what he was. He represented the very best character of the NHL; his dignity and hardwork were what elevated him above every other run-of-the-mill 1755 career point hockey player. He may have produced like a superstar but he never acted like one. The NHL is full of Yzerman’s sort of player. Small town kids overjoyed to be playing hockey for a living and finding it all a little hard to believe. For every Shawn Avery there are ten genuinely good men slugging it out every game knowing full well their moms are probably watching and behaving accordingly. One couldn’t suggest he played like a saint, he took up enough lumber in the penalty box to build a fort, but on camera he was every bit the composed role model he will be remembered as.

If they awarded Lady Byngs for induction speeches they wouldn’t ever have to give it away again. He hit all the notes with the humility and straightforwardness he had employed every time he stepped on the ice. He’s no Tony Robbins on the microphone and looked more than a little embarrassed over all the brouhaha. The kind of modesty you can’t fake did him all the more credit. He thanked the wife and kids, talked up his fellow inductees, coaches and everybody else there was to thank, it was a speech by the numbers from a fella whose actions always speak for him. It is no surprise he got recruited as masthead for Team Canada and if the Red Wings front office is ever dumb enough to let him go he’ll fit into a GM chair somewhere in the League very nicely.

One of the NHL’s biggest assets is the years and years of history behind it. You have Maurice Richard riots, Paul Henderson defeating communism, Gordie Howe hat tricks, Theo Fleury after-parties and a trophy older than Hugh Hefner hoisted by all the biggest names in the game. The Hall itself, its archives and its reach into the wider cultural landscape should be used over and over again to promote the game worldwide. Inducting Stevie Y to the big club may be a no-brainer, but selling him as exactly the sort of guy that belongs there makes the Hall, the league and the sport better.

Is Belichick ready for Shady Pines? No.

Now everybody and their mom knows America and it’s National Football League love hyperbole as much as apple pie, cheep ammunition and jail bait, but all this fallout is two degrees South of ridiculous.  Does going for it on a fourth and two mean your coach is a lunatic in charge a nuclear submarine? Does it mean he’s blinded by hubris?  Does it mean he’s secretly in cahoots with the Governor of Indiana? NO, what it means is your coach has balls.  He has a quarterback that has done the impossible over and over again, he has an offense he feels better about than his defense, and he has balls.  He didn’t make the easy decision, and taking a risk ended up biting him in the ass big time, the risk didn’t pan out.  Oh well, there’s next Sunday to worry about, back to the drawing board.  If football fans in Massachusetts start pining for a coach who calls the game according to Hoyle, then they should have to give their last three championships back because you don’t get the sort of dynasty they’ve enjoyed this decade when your team is run by a bunch of pansies.  

I feel their pain, losing to the Colts is a hard thing for Pats fans to do, but losing a big game midseason does not constitute grounds for a mutiny.  First place in the AFC east is a lock unless Miami recruits God for the second half of the season, and everybody knows God is backing New Orleans this year.  Life as you know it is not over and baring some sort of 2012 disaster canceling the season these two teams have a rematch on the dance card in two months.  Stand by your man for Pete’s sake.   There, I’m finished.

The future tastes easy for the victors, and after the confidence boost that was Sunday Night they would have to set the spread at triple digits to keep the Colts from beating it against the on-again off-again Ravens.  If there’s any defense in the entire league that can solve Manning for 4 quarters of football, Baltimore ain’t it.

The Patriots meanwhile can lick their wounds and think about taking out all their embarrassment on their next opponent.  I expect Mr. Sanchez and his Jets are going to get to know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a sixty minute, bitter, no nonsense shitkicking.  

A Long Hard Road Out of Suck

As first Published at www.hockeyinsight.com

With the Tuesday’s overtime loss against the Lightning, the Leafs have declared their residence in an upper level of purgatory, where four consecutive overtime losses represent the slow climb from running joke to bona fide hockey club. As bizarre a trend as it is, it does mean Toronto has been an over five hundred team in the last five games, and while that’s not quite worthy of a round of high fives, it’s something and something is unequivocally better than nothing.

It means that in four games, if the Leafs can snap out of letting in the first goal, they win. It means if they can sharpen up their late night four on four, they win. It means if something on the bench clicks and they can do one better shift of offense or defense, they win. That may be a lot of “ifs” but the biggest one yet is Kessel. He played well and managed to get himself open enough for a bunch of shots, none of which looked too convincing but judging from last year’s highlight reel if he gets any part of his groove back they’ll be turning into bullets and real productivity.

As of this writing the season is creeping up on a quarter finished and the Buds are sharing last place with the Hurricanes, which though hardly enviable is only seven points out of a place in the postseason. While there’s nobody out there writing off the latter, just about everybody assumes the former are set to make their customary early exit come April 10th.

The case has been made that the new team is being built from the ground up, and will without doubt be a while finding their feet. As they’ve immediately established, should it actually occur, the nature of the Maple Leaf turnaround is going to be slow. The best anybody can hope for at this point is that it’s steady. Of course an eighty game season is an awfully long time, and word has it those in the employ of MLSE, along with the Flames, have jumped the line for those special H1N1 meds all the rest of the suckers are going to have to wait for. If any of the other teams in the league are dumb enough to behave like gentlemen and actually wait their turn behind infants, asthmatics and pregnant ladies, a nice fat bout of swine flu could throw more than a few games their way (Please excuse a digression the writer thinks he should be permitted as he just had his children vaccinated).

So what happens next? Friday has Toronto up against the aforementioned Carolina team full of long-established talent and a Cup in recent memory that has so far Staal-ed (ahhhhh) out of the gate. Friday means the same thing for both teams. A team in last place that means to rise above has to win games like these, to put itself on the proper trajectory by stepping on the heads of the real losers. Whatever the outcome, expect a game with playoff intensity, more than a little rough housing and enough dirty to make late-nineties Christina Aguilera go three shades pink. In short, a proper hockey game.

If the Leafs come out on top it would make 6 games with a point, a notch up in the standings and the biggest momentum push of the season, which is a fancy way of saying nothing much. A loss means just about the same, but those two points have to come from somewhere and it doesn’t look like it’ll be any easier with the Wings, the Hawks and the freshly inoculated Flames all on the immediate horizon.

So the recipe for success is…The Monster stays good or better, Kessel makes friends with the back of the net, the young guys skate fast, the tough guys get tough and the Southern partisan crowd keeps daydreaming about NASCAR. Sounds simple right? Right? Right.

As a postscript, all this stuff about baby steps aside, would it have really killed them to beat the Habs in the Waldo jerseys? Would it have been that hard? No one deserves two points dressed like that.

Tom Cable Ruined My Sunday

The kids were fed, the dog was walked and I had settled my brain for it's customarily fulfilling eight hours of Sunday football.  I started as I always start with Berman and the gang over at ESPN Sunday NFL Countdown, and cousin, it made me squirm.  Not on account of the jokes, those crumby jokes warm that “warm peanut butter cookie and playoff sex” part of my heart like a glass of Crown Royal.  No, what made me cringe was the piece of investigative journalism concerning Tom Cable’s bringing the pain to his assistant coach’s jaw two weeks prior. 

After the police decided the case didn’t warrant the laying of charges, ESPN’s Colleen Dominguez did a little digging and put together a regular “This is your Life” featuring a train of ex-wives and girlfriends Coach Cable had kicked the shit out of.  They made a pretty good case for old Tom being the biggest asshole in all of football today and even suggested that though all the incidents were investigated,  his position on the team was what really kept him out of trouble.        

This shocked me on two counts;

Firstly, that ESPN has the capacity for investigative journalism.  CNN doesn’t have the budget for investigative  journalism.  Have we have reached the point where sports writing is the only arm of the profession with license to challenge men in authority?  ESPN is actually armed to tackle issues as serious as domestic abuse and they can do it without fear of being called fascists on the left and terrorist sympathizers on the right.  Furthermore, they can do it on a Sunday morning, surely the most effective place to distress the comfortable.

  Second,  ESPN aired a piece that shone a bright light on the NFL’s dirty laundry.  They bit the hand that feeds them, lays golden egg after golden egg, and puts their kids through college handily.  Without all due respect, and there is a great deal offered up, this is fishy as all hell. 

The National Football League loves women.  Every year more and more are tuning in on Sundays, and beyond that, they are the mothers, sisters and wives of the God fearing athletes that butter their bread.  If you hadn’t noticed, this year they’re sporting pink like it was going out of style, and it sure doesn’t become a league that talks up curing breast cancer on one hand to be coddling serial woman beaters on the other.  Furthermore, the league genuinely strives to frame a narrative that shows them taking the higher ground on issues of ethics.  Point in case, the Michael Vick Eagles press conference, where Tony Dungee and Jeffery Lurie evoked American redemption and Christian forgiveness to explain their decision.  In the case of Tom Cable however,  the only option besides hoping it blows over, is to throw him to the dogs.

 

Officially the NFL had no comment on the matter, but it really is giving ESPN a lot of credit to to think they have gone independently and clearly shamed the league,  ostensibly prodding them into action. 

A hypothesis then:  The league has a scumbag coach they know is as guilty as the day is long, but they have a police department clearing him of all charges.  That’s the last thing they want to contradict,  but at the same time they need to protect their image and get rid of an obviously destructive  influence.  So the NFL sanctions the ESPN piece that introduces the new evidence of Tommy Boy’s previously silent victims, waits for the outcry from the usual suspects, and placates by canning Cable, saving face and appearing proactive.  These guys should be running the Whitehouse, if they aren’t already.