Phil Mushnick

Phil Mushnick

NFL

NFL letting stats — not circumstance — rule

Please submit. Fine; we’ll submit. But where do we report to surrender?

Just when we thought they had run out of statistics to confuse and diffuse every right-there-in-front-of-us reality, welcome to the Summer of the 70 Percent Solution.

It began early in Giants training camp, from where word came from quarterbacks coach Danny Langsdorf that he would like Eli Manning this season to complete 70 percent of his passes.

Sounded good, and that’s all it takes. So everyone picked it up and ran with it. Everyone likes to reduce football into simpler, more comfortable statistical terms, like free-throw percentages and earned run averages.

That football is played by 22 men interacting, often violently, at the same time, doesn’t make a difference. We don’t want context, we want batting averages!

Friday, before Ch. 2’s Giants-Jets preseason game, sideline man and Ch. 2 News sports anchor Otis Livingston asked Rex Ryan what he would like from Geno Smith, this season. Ryan said he’d like Smith to have “a 70 percent completion rate.”

Et tu, Rexius?

But how’s this: Rather than have Manning and Smith committed to completing 70 percent of their passes, why not have them focus on completing their next one? And maybe the pass after that?

Ya want 70 percent? Then play dump-off with backs and tight ends, all game, every game; 2-yard pitch-and-catch. You might not win but you’ll complete 80 percent of your passes!

If it’s a game of percentages instead of circumstances — circumstances as per the simultaneous, opposite interests of the 11 men you’re competing against — why not commit to dropping 30 percent fewer passes, scoring 25 percent more points, allowing 35 percent fewer points, missing 15 percent fewer field goals, punting 40 percent fewer times, throwing 20 percent fewer interceptions?

The quality and performance of your players and their players don’t count — not even the weather or where the game’s being played — just the stats?

My goal this week is to hit 30 percent fewer red lights than I hit last week. Yup, it’s all up to me, so here I go!

Anyway, unless you were in the mood for farce, Friday’s telecast was tough to watch, but only given that you couldn’t watch what you couldn’t see.

More than a few times, the player with the ball disappeared from view, out of frame, as if he had left the screen and was headed for the framed family photos in the wall unit.

When Ian Eagle told us that Jets punter Ryan Quigley then Giants punter Steve Weatherford were back to take the snap, we had to take his words for it. Neither punter was on screen.

When Smith scrambled, he scrambled off the screen, at last sight right toward that big green vase that I was never crazy about, anyway.

Then again, maybe showing 70 percent of what was happening on the field was the goal. To that end, not bad.


LL games should be fun, not televised

If I were a rich man: I’d buy the TV rights to all the Little League World Series games, then prevent all of them, except the championship game, from being televised.

For the final, I’d have it shown on tape after its heavily edited to ensure that no child — no 12- or 13-year-old who plays baseball — suffers any greater humiliation, sorrow and blame than any child who plays baseball or does anything else ever should.

The too-much, too-soon confederation of ESPN and the Little League to present weeks of summer programming — pressure-stressed kids seen breaking down, crying, on national TV from the field and dugouts — may have been inevitable, but it should not be indulged as inevitable.

Call me Pollyanna, but baseball played by kids isn’t supposed to imperil a kid’s self-worth; it’s supposed to be fun.


Last season, Sam Houston State and Eastern Washington University opened their football seasons on Aug. 31. This year, they opened even earlier — Saturday night, Aug. 23 — playing each other on ESPN for ESPN money and ESPN “exposure.”

They’re exposed, alright. Classes at Sam Houston don’t begin until Wednesday, and the academic quarter at Eastern Washington doesn’t begin until Sept 24, after its fourth game, part of “Welcome Week” for new students. What TV money can do, gets done.


So John “John from Kentucky” Calipari nailed Mike Francesa doing one of those low things he has done so often and for so long: Knocking big shots before and after he conducts his we-have-being-big-shots-in-common chats.

Still, if Sitting Bull felt shame half as much as he feels self-entitlement, he’d have cut that transparent stuff out, years ago.


Teaching the world to love baseball

During  World War II, the region of Manipur, which includes the city of Imphal in northeastern India, was the malarial target or temporary home to Allied forces in the bayonets-fixed, maggots-sucking CBI (China, Burma, India) campaign. There, baseball, as played and taught by U.S. airmen, was introduced to the locals.

Seventy years later, although Manipur is ravaged by drugs, disease, poverty and violent factional politics, men, women and kids there play baseball with passion.

“The Only Real Game” is an 82-minute film written and directed by Manhattan’s Mirra Bank that documents Manipur’s sustained love for baseball. It appears Monday at 8:00 p.m., no charge, at South Street Seaport’s Front/Row Cinema. It’s special.

The NFL Players Association’s Department of Sincerity last week issued another near-boilerplate “apology” from a suspended player, this one quoting Chiefs offensive lineman Donald Stephenson, caught for performance-enhancing drugs. Remarkable, how these from-the-heart apologies, start to end, read the same.

Reader John Cafarella suggests that with NFL players, even in preseason games, performing post-play acts of conspicuous self-approval, “There really is no end to the exhibition season.”

Hunter Mahan, Sunday on CBS, provided the latest televised PGA Tour feel-good that TV’s and the PGA’s shared sales strategies would have had us ignore or abandon because it didn’t include Tiger Woods, occasionally Phil Mickelson, and now, Rory McIlroy.

Those forced to pay many thousands for Giants and Jets PSLs, plus season tickets, including must-buy exhibition games attached to regular-season prices, should note the Giants are selling tickets to Thursday’s preseason game against the Patriots for $58 a pop, which is still steep to attend a rehearsal, but a fraction of what the PSL “privileged” pay.

Sorry, Joe Torre, but to some of us, No. 6 on the Yankees will always be Clete Boyer. We can’t help it.