(the glory days of NFL football - when teams were put together
for long enough they could take promotional pictures
in tuxedos with farm animals)
As a longtime Redskins fan who has watched some ugly football in the past 15 years, I have to say – and I understand memory retension is a huge issue in this cybertronical age, so I am probably biased towards what happened yesterday as opposed to three years ago – but that was one of the ugliest games I ever remember seeing, especially considering both teams involved finished the game with winning records. What kind of fucking league has the NFL become? As a young buck coming up, my favorite two sports were college basketball and pro football. I could not get down with pro basketball because it was a giant clusterfuck of interchangeable teams that played with zero emotion until the end of the season in general and the end of the game in specific. College basketball had an enthusiasm and excitement that wasn’t there in the pros. But pro football was the shit, smashmouth awesomeness with great rivalries and all types of bullshit.
Man, they sure screwed that golden goose, didn’t they? The NFL has become exactly what the NBA was, far more boring and completely interchangeable teams exchanging Ws and Ls for 4/5 of the year until like the 4 teams left that truly matter start to play for real at the very end of the season. It’s sad, and actually disgusting. Fuck this shit.
There is no fucking way this 2010 Redskins team would be anything better than 2-5 in the ‘80s. Complete inconsistency, ridiculous egos that celebrate every fucking correct thing they do. And that’s not a diss to my team, because even if a Santana Moss or DeAngelo Hall comes across as a primadona player at times, that’s my team so those are my boys, and fuck you if you don’t like them. But every team has guys like that nowadays, even 1-6 teams.
So this game was torture. We were gonna visit Ma Dukes Mack’s house, but the kids were straggling and we didn’t get on the road until almost kick-off, and of course they only transbeam football games on the satellite radios nowadays so I was torturing us all by juggling between three AM stations that had loud static whenever I had to pump the gas, causing me to aurally waterboard my family for about an hour. And then at my mom’s house, she’s got her TV on old people mode where the closed captioning is on all the time, and I couldn’t figure out how to cut that shit off with her four remote set-up, so I sat there like an old ass, waiting for my apple sauce to choke on.
And then the football game. Good lord. Though the Skins won, I have bumped back my positives/negatives to 4/3, to properly reflect their record, and because there is no way anybody could feel 5-2 good about this team as it looks right now. Hopefully we can stumble through Detroit into the bye week, and if we are somehow 5-3, man, I will thank both the football gods for smiling down upon us and the godless scientific tinkerers of NFL parity who have destroyed the sport’s soul to make this all possible.
FOURTH DEGREE POSITIVE: CB DeAngelo Hall. You kinda have to give DeAngelo Hall credit for having such a huge HUGE game, but let’s be honest here. He’s not gonna play against Jay Cutler every week. He should cut a tip out of his next contract to Cutler, because Hall just got hisself an extra half a mill off that one game most likely. But any halfway decent CB in the NFL should be able to snag a ton of interceptions when all you have to do is jump in the air about two yards behind the receiver you’re covering since that’s where the ball would be going. (Point in favor further of DeAngelo Hall – had that been Carlos Rogers in that position, he would’ve gotten ZERO interceptions, not scored a TD, and the Redskins would’ve lost the game.)
THIRD DEGREE POSITIVE: TE Chris Cooley. Cooley played after being concussed last week, and came back strong at the end of the week to power through this game, having a couple of big catch-and-plows. Cooley is a throwback tough ass dude, and in this new neurologically concerned NFL, I am very thankful for warriors like Captain Chaos – guys who make themselves minorly brian damaged, yet fight through the fog to still play, and still play smartly. Like, the very notion of being traumatically brain injured but still being concerned with how cognizantly you play, that’s fucking awesome, and makes me proud to be a football fan and proud to be American, because that – in a nutshell – is the American spirit – half retarded yet still doing our best to dominate motherfuckers.
SECOND DEGREE POSITIVE: LB Rocky McIntosh. #52 has been stepping up in key spots all year long, and had a couple of big moments in yesterday’s game. He has quietly become a key role player on this defense, and has learned to play smarter over the course of his time in D.C. Hanging out with London Fletcher doesn’t hurt any young player’s development, but McIntosh has been solid this year, and you don’t hardly see him flailing on bad coverages like you would in past years.
FIRST DEGREE POSITIVE: LB London Fletcher. Simply put, Fletcher is in the mix all the time. The little bad ass well-spoken dude from John Carroll College was the guy who came out the goal line scrum with the football when Cutler fumbled his one non-INT turnover, and Fletcher was in on a couple of big hits and tackles throughout, like always. You can never feel like you own a player as a fan when he has had notable stints on multiple other teams like Fletcher has, but I can tell you, of everybody on this football team right now who has gotten up there in years relative to pro football, I think I am going to be saddest about London Fletcher not coming back than anybody else. And he’s going to leave a bigger empty slot on the roster than Moss or Clinton Portis will. Hopefully #59 is rubbing off on Rocky McIntosh behind the scenes and in the film room too.
STAY MEDIUM DEGREE: RB Ryan Torain. I love Torain’s running, as the tackle resistant power runner who doesn’t plow through dudes but just can’t seem to be tackled at times. Shit man, I hope Portis comes back full-health because Torain and him will make a nice pair to switch and flip in the backfield. That being said, watching yesterday’s game, I was nervous as fuck about how Torain runs, never getting around to tucking the ball in when the defense closed in, and actually thunk that strongly in my brain, grimacing a few times. Apparently Charles Tillman of the Bears is keyed into my mental wavelength, because he started realizing if he punched at the ball while Torain was holding it, Torain would fumble it, a lot. Luckily, he only lost one of his fumbles, but still, motherfucker better be running some strip drills through a line of people this week in practice.
FIRST DEGREE NEGATIVE: Defensive Coordinator Jim Haslet. I’m not sure how impressed with this defense I am yet. They, as has been noted, give up tons of yards, and even though they had dominated the Bears, all it took was turning it off early in the 2nd quarter to let Jay Cutler look briefly Peyton Manning-esque, and the Bears were about to take the fuck over. Haslet seems like he comes into games with a good plan, but there is an obvious dip end of the second half without adjustments, and also in the 4th quarter. We will not be playing against someone as shitty as Jay Cutler every week, and really it could be argued this defense has bent but not broken more because of the ineptitude of the competition than the hulk-upability of their own selves.
SECOND DEGREE NEGATIVE: S Reed Doughty. Much like when I was dissing on Stephon Heyer and felt bad because he seems like a good dude who just is out of his league at times, I have to sadly and reluctantly push Reed Doughty under the bus. For years, he has been a role player on defense who’s never exactly stood out as an exceptional player, but didn’t fuck up too terribly bad to dump him. He made Adam Archuleta look like a bitch, and was a serviceable and unhateable replacement when Sean Taylor was dead all of a sudden. But there’s just too many times where Doughty is the guy in the picture when a TD is caught to end the game (as against Houston) or the guy who is meekly combining on a tackle near the goal line late in a half. What the fuck happened to Chris Horton? That guy is still playing special teams, and seemed like he might be a solid player at times during his rookie season. I just can’t believe Doughty is the best we can have out there, all the time. If he is, man, it’s just another sign of how this team’s overall roster has been so severely neglected in recent years. I mean it’s obvious on the O-line and D-line, and RB, but you could probably add secondary to that list, which is kinda pathetic considering they’ve dropped 3 top ten draft picks on those positions in the past eight years or so.
THIRD DEGREE NEGATIVE: QB Donovan McNabb. Really, yesterday’s game came down to who wanted to prove they were the worst and more overrated QB – Jay Cutler or Donovan McNabb. McNabb looks fucking lost out there at times. I simply do not understand how someone can look so perfectly good one moment, and then look like fucking Jay Cutler the next one. I don’t know, I’ve been iffy about the long-term commitment to McNabb up to this point, but after yesterday’s game, I really think it might be a big mistake to give him a big contract, regardless of how well this team does the rest of this year. I know the normal Redskins front office thinking is “well, we already traded a draft pick from next year for this guy, so if we don’t sign him then we wasted that draft pick ultimately.” Well, yeah that’s true, but if you sign him and he fucking sucks then you’ve wasted a ton of money, the time spent developing someone else, AND the draft pick on him. I guess if they could sign McNabb to a relatively economical (yeah right) two-year Veteran Leadership deal, and try and snag a quality rookie in the draft or pick up a scrap heap player that Shanahan thinks he can whip into shape, it would be acceptable. Of course, Rex Grossman is lurking over there on the sidelines and is poker buddies with Kyle Shanahan and is way younger and more affordable to be that transitionary QB, so really if McNabb can somehow trick this Redskins team into the playoffs and force the Skins to sign him to continue the commitment to winning, that seems to me the only way McNabb stays around. He hasn’t shown real greatness with any consistency deserving of a giant commitment at this point. I know talking head fuckers and local sportswriters will continuously try to convince you otherwise, because FINALLY we have a QB we can not be ashamed of, who the rest of the league recognizes. But I ain’t buying it, not enough to pretend #5 being in D.C. for the next three or four years is going to turn out anything but with more wacky and torturous ugliness.
Season-to-date totals:
LB Brian Orakpo (+13), LB Lorenzo Alexander (+12), LB London Fletcher (+11), S Laron Landry (+9), TE Chris Cooley (+8), WR Anthony Armstrong (+7), RB Ryan Torain (+7), PR Brandon Banks (+5), RB Clinton Portis (+4), LB Chris Wilson (+4), K Graham Gano (+3), GM Bruce Allen (+3), LB Rocky McIntosh (+2), S Kareem Moore (+2), DE Philip Daniels (+2), CB DeAngelo Hall (+1), P Hunter Smith (+1), head coach Mike Shanahan (+1), CB Phillip Buchanon (+1), T Trent Williams (even), WR Santana Moss (even), DC Jim Haslet (-1), fan Raven Mack (-1), WR Malcolm Kelly (-1), S Reed Doughty (-2), QB Donovan McNabb (-2), P Josh Bidwell (-2), CB Carlos Rogers (-4), owner Dan Snyder (-4), T Stephon Heyer (-7), and DT Albert Haynesworth (-7).
No comments:
Post a Comment