What follows is an answer to the chorus of complaints from the legions of fans tired of being distracted by “sensible” analysis, backed by “facts” and “knowledge.” If you seek shelter from the twin storms that are “reality” and “logic,” then this is your port of call.
-Final scores are tricky things to read, because they only tell you a small part of the story. The winner and loser are obvious but the distance between losing and winning is often relative. There are those games in which the final score tells you pretty much all you need to know, a.k.a. a blowout. There are games in which the final score is completely misleading, games that were much closer or much more of a blowout than the final tally would indicate. And then there is cricket. Cricket doesn’t make any sense to anyone. I’m pretty sure it’s one of the world’s more elaborate practical jokes in which the participants make the rules up as they go along just to make themselves laugh. It seems like an awfully long way to go for a joke but you have to admire their dedication.
-The point (and there is one) is that while you might be tempted to draw some sweeping conclusions from the Redskins loss to the Giants, it doesn’t tell us a great deal. Does the offense need work? Absolutely. Could the defense have played better? Yes. But could a handful of plays have swung the other way and given us a different outcome? Also yes.
It’s important – in fact it is essential to your sanity as a fan – to accept that one game does not a season make. The fact is that the Redskins played a fairly close game against a very good team, on the road, in their first game of the year. The performance wasn’t ideal but it’s just far too small a sample size to draw any grand conclusions. Well, except that Hunter Smith will score at least 16 touchdowns this year and that you should cut whoever is starting at running back on your fantasy team and plug in Hunter “I’m a Lock for 6” Smith.
– I do have a plea for Coach Zorn. Please find your own place to live, I said you could use my couch for like a month but that was a year ago. Also, right now, your eggs are in the Jason Campbell basket, for better or worse. So cut the reins and let the kid throw the ball, and let him do it a lot. If he’s more comfortable just running plays out of the shotgun, do that. I haven’t come to a conclusion about him yet (and I’m baffled by people who have) because I have yet to see him cut loose. If he makes mistakes, I can live with that and you can throw your hands up and say you tried. But this carefully managed, hand-holding offense doesn’t tell me anything, it’s death by a thousand cuts.
-We, as a society, should take the time to thank whoever it is that put the Monday Night Football pre-game music video thingy. Not for the music which, at this point, is kinda lame. Is anyone watching ever not ready for some football? Do we need to be asked that on a weekly basis? Does anyone ever tune in and say, “Am I ready for some what?!?! Good lord no, I thought this was PBS, I’ve wandered into some kind of trap. Thank god that crazy man with the guitar had the good sense to ask me whether I am ready.” No, not the music or the musicians or anything of that nature. Instead, we should thank this person for the sheer amount of things which explode in that segment. There are a LOT of explosions packed in that relatively small segment which means someone had to put both time and effort into this.
“And there you have it, our Monday night pre-game … thing … what do you think? Jim, you seem to have a question.”
“Yeah … I was keeping tally here and it seems like we only have … 63 explosions in the entire 90 second segment. Just seems like we’re really missing some opportunities … like 27 of them. Maybe we can make the explosions explode, just to really drive home the point: at NBC, we blow stuff up that doesn’t even make sense to blow up.”
-Prior to the Bills-Patriots game, Ron Jaworski noted that the Bills had given Trent Edwards “the hat of responsibility.” That seems like a pretty crappy hat. It sounds like the kind of hat the preachy lion in the Narnia series would give to some kid just to teach him a lesson. Why not the hat of you will throw 7 touchdowns tonight or the hat of ninja skills or the hat of holy crap I can fly and I am a ninja? That would be a hat worth winning. But the hat of responsibility? You can just see poor Trent in some club with his Bills teammates, mopping up the floor after one of them gets sick. “Yeah, I mean, it sucks but then again … (sighs and gestures sadly toward hat).”
-Jay Cutler, Carson Palmer, Marc Bulger, Kurt Warner, Donovan McNabb, Phillip Rivers, Ben Roethelisberger and Eli Manning. What do those quarterbacks have in common? They have a deep and passionate love for Sting’s music, particularly the latter half of his career (and who doesn’t love ‘The Dream of the Blue Turtles’). Also, they all had QB ratings worse than Jason Campbell last week. It may not be pretty but it ain’t all bad folks. Keep the faith (for now).
Edit: This blog was archived in May of 2016 from our original articles database.It was originally posted by Stephen Zorio