No need to have been a noted player or coach. You, too, can be a top-notch TV analyst. Follow these easy instructions:
Play a recording of yesterday’s Packers-Jets, then do as the FOX guys did. Start with, “That bye week really helped the Jets, allowed them to heal and get some returning players more time with the playbook.” That’s what Moose Johnston suggested near the top of the telecast.
Next, after the Jets were shut out in the first half, paraphrase what Johnston said, go with, “That bye week seems to have cost the Jets their edge; they seem flat.”
Got that? Will anyone remember what you said to start the game? They’re not supposed to.
Also, do as FOX’s Tony Siragusa does every week: Say anything. Never say nothing; before you say nothing, say anything.
Yesterday, when the Jets appeared to have jumped of side and Aaron Rodgers threw a long, out-of-bounds pass to Greg Jennings, Siragusa said, “Smart play by Aaron Rodgers, with the offsides; that’s a free play.”
But, regardless of whether there was a flag, Jennings could only run the route he was to run coming out of the huddle. So the “smart play” was part of the play, either way. Who throws a no-risk, “smart, free play” out of bounds?
And when Jets linebacker David Harris pressured Rodgers on a blitz, Siragusa suggested that Rodgers was the kind of quarterback who is susceptible to the blitz, making him, what, unique among QBs?
“That’s what you have to do, right there to Rodgers. You have to let him know you’re here; get right up in his face.”
And when the Jets gave the Packers good field position after a failed fake punt — a call Johnston and Siragusa originally claimed to like when they thought it was a first down — you, too, claim this is evidence of Rex Ryan’s great confidence in his defense.
Even if Green Bay is close to scoring position, then kicks a field goal (for the only points of the half)? Sure, why not? Who’s gonna remember what you said?
But if the Jets’ ‘D’ is so good, wouldn’t it have made more sense to have punted the Packers out of field-goal position?
Hey, don’t make waves or sense. Stick with your first, senseless analysis, got it?
It’s easy. Try it at home. Anyone can do it.
A three-minute drill in ugliness
There are too many times when watching football is like watching security tapes from prison-yard riots. Game-surfing on Saturday, the following appeared in a time span of roughly three minutes:
1) On third-and-9, a roughing-the-passer against Tulsa’s Curnelius Arnick on NBC. No borderline call, it was a dirty hit against Notre Dame’s defenseless Tommy Rees well after he had thrown.
2) On YES, a roughing call against Yale; Columbia’s defenseless quarterback Sean Brackett was hit very high and very late.
3) Back to NBC, in time for an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty against Tulsa, Arnick again.
4) Over to MSG where Tennessee linebacker Herman Lathers was laid out motionless. Leading with his head and a shoulder, he tried to devastate a South Carolina receiver on a crossing pattern, rather than tackle him with his arms.
All in just three minutes.
One Game, Three “As Ifs”: Yes, Notre Dame was in position to beat Tulsa with a last-play field goal on Saturday when freshman QB Rees, an emergency sub, threw an interception.
On NBC, analyst Mike Mayock
seemed to think it was the kid’s fault, as if Rees, and not coach Brian Kelly
, was responsible for such a play.
Mayock joined Tulsa coach Todd Graham
in calling this Tulsa’s biggest-ever win, as if beating this 4-5 Notre Dame team — crushed the week before by Navy — was unfathomable.
But Tulsa, in the mid-1960s, led by the pass-catch magic of Jerry Rhome
to 5-foot-10 Howard Twilley
, beat schools such as Oklahoma State, Houston and, in the 1964 Bluebonnet Bowl, Ole Miss. In fact, Sonny Werblin
, as the AFL Jets owner, briefly pursued Rhome as aggressively as he did Joe Namath
.
‘Bye’ weeks are way off
Finally, the nonsense the NFL began and the media dutifully followed — calling off weeks “bye weeks” — has been adopted by NBC, which listed Notre Dame as having a “bye” this Saturday, as if Notre Dame automatically advances to the next round in a tournament.
It’s as if, for the last 100 years, “off” didn’t explain it.
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FOX’s World Series sensibilities are better, but we still get the feeling that for every camera shooting the game, three are shooting the crowd watching that game.
But FOX did have one telling crowd shot. In the bottom of the second of Game 3 in Texas on Saturday, it showed a miniature on-site ballfield and a bunch of kids playing Wiffle ball.
If my dad took me to a World Series game — and he did — and I spent it doing anything other than watching the game — and I didn’t, not that there was anything else to do or I’d have chosen to do anything else — that would have been our last game.
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Man of the Week: Tony Bennett
, 84. His unassisted “God Bless America” during Game 1 was special. The fellow has a future as a singer.
If excessive unnatural behavior is a good thing, the Knicks are in great shape. Surely, they lead the NBA in self-mutilation, in scribbling all over themselves in permanent ink. I could swear Wilson Chandler
‘s tattoos include one that reads, “Continued on back.”
Exactly what in the MLB collective bargaining agreement prevented Bud Selig, Sandy Alderson
or men of good conscience within management or labor from unilaterally and publicly claiming they smell a rat, that all these sudden sluggers in their overnight muscles are too suspect for seeing, reasonably intelligent people to blithely indulge? How much for their silence?
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What we were told before the season by (literal) insiders — when winter blows through the wind tunnel that is PSL Stadium, it’ll make windy Giants Stadium seem no worse than breezy — yesterday began to show just that.