TO BORROW from a song of the season, did you see what I saw?
This was a weird NFL viewing season in New York. We spent most of it watching teams play bad football – the winning teams. And it wasn’t a matter of parity, but of quality. The NFL’s upper middle class – good teams, just below the best – this year seemed nonexistent.
Before the start of last night’s 38-35 loss to the Patriots, the Giants proved that you can play one quarter or less of semi-efficient offense, game after game, and still win 10 games. The Giants may be the worst 10-win team in NFL history, although the Seahawks might be, too. In the games shown here, I watched the Seahawks play 12 quarters of mostly dreadful football, including a 28-17 home loss to the Saints on a Sunday night, yet won two of the three.
Same goes for the Jags. They opened with a 13-10 loss at home to the Titans, then followed that with a 13-7 win against the horrid Falcons. We saw them get crushed at home, 29-7, by the Colts on a Monday night, then two weeks later were smacked again, 41-24, at New Orleans. The Jags, though, are 11-4.
Hey, the Saints are 7-8, yet beat an 11-4 team and a 10-5 team, both by more than 10 points.
The Jets are 3-12, yet how many of their opponents looked good for more than a few minutes? Two? Three?
Other than the Pats, Colts, Cowboys, Packers and, for a while, the Steelers, every team we saw appeared indistinguishably as bad as their opponents. A few sustained minutes of decent football per game became plenty good enough.
The Ravens may be 4-11, but they didn’t look any worse than the 8-7 Redskins or 9-6 Browns. The Titans, at 9-6, didn’t look any better than the 6-9 Broncos, and the 8-7 Vikes often looked worse than the 6-9 Bengals.
While the gap between the upper crust and the middle class never appeared wider, the distance between the middle class and the dregs now seems very narrow.
We watched the Vikes and ‘Skins a bunch this season. They’re both 8-7. But if either today played the 3-12 Rams on a neutral field, the winner clinching a playoff spot, wouldn’t you rate the game close to pick ’em?
What does it mean? I think it means that we saw a lot of bad, yet meaningful, pro football.
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From preseason’s start to regular season’s finish, ESPN’s “Monday Night Football” taught the wisdom of choosing to say nothing vs. the foolishness of choosing to say anything. That lesson, however, was learned only by viewers.
Monday, during Broncos-Chargers, Tony Kornheiser began to riff how LaDainian Tomlinson remains an unappreciated, underrated and undervalued player:
“What LaDainian Tomlinson is known for is wearing a visor and criticizing Bill Belichick last year. But he’s not appreciated the way all the people whose records he is passing. He is an unknown person. Why is that?”
Then Mike Tirico put his approval to Kornheiser’s claim, suggesting Tomlinson might be underappreciated because he has “no postseason success and because he plays out here in San Diego.”
Could these two have been talking about the same LaDainian Tomlinson who appears in all those commercials? The fellow profiled on “60 Minutes”? The fellow who won last year’s NFL MVP award? The six-time Pro Bowl selection? If Tomlinson’s underappreciated by two people, Kornheiser and Tirico might be them.
Why does Kornheiser think Tomlinson is known for having taken those post-playoff game shots at Belichick for the Pats’ poor conduct last season? Might it be because Tomlinson’s a full-blown star? No one else on the Chargers who made such remarks would have made as much news.
Here’s how unappreciated and unknown Tomlinson is: Through August, this year’s best-selling NFL jersey was LaDainian Tomlinson’s.
Don’t get me wrong. ESPN’s MNF telecasts are not the only sports telecasts on which nonsense is regularly spoken. But they may be the only ones on which nonsense is regularly spoken then seconded.
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Perhaps it’s his fault, but Walt Frazier‘s rhyming often shrouds his short-but-frank side. Wednesday during MSG Network’s Knicks-Magic, Gus Johnson asked how Frazier would explain Orlando being a .500 home team but 13-5 on the road.
Frazier could have chosen to go with one of those windy, analyst-at-work explanations, but instead chose a simple and sensible answer: “It’s an aberration,” he said.
Moments later, Frazier scolded the Knicks for allowing Hedo Turkoglu to keep “weaving and achieving.”
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This is the time of year when football analysts, trying to sound tough and make a splash, tell us that it’s a crime that so-and-so wasn’t selected for the Pro Bowl. But that’s easy tough talk. Unless they tell us who’d they remove – who was less deserving than the fellow who should have been selected – such talk is sounds-good nonsense.