Showing posts with label NFC West. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NFC West. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
NFL 2012 Week 7: AFC & NFC West (2nd Quarter)
Here, let us go into this new week of the NFL football NFLuminati rankings and analyze from a chaotical perspective those teams what which inhabit the West divisions of our beloved American blue state and National red state Football Conferences. Sometimes I wish there was no inter-conference or inter-divisional play and you only played six straight weeks of your own divisional games to start the year. Then the worst half of each division would be eliminated for the year. That would leave 8 teams in each conference, who would play once against the other 6 teams in their conference but also another home-and-away with their divisional rival who was also still in it. That would be a total of 14 games. Then you eliminated the worst four from each conference, which would leave 8 teams total, who would play all four teams from the opposite conference. All games would count from beginning to end, but like that last third phase would be 3 points per win, and the second part of your conference would be 2 points, and your first 6 divisional games would only be 1 point. After the four games only against the other conference, the top four teams with the most points would be seeded and play a single elimination tournament called the American Bowl and National Bowl and then the Super Bowl. And at halftime during the Super Bowl, instead of some stupid concert, all the owners of teams who did not make it to the second round could fight each other for necklaces they wore featuring their star players, so a tough owner could make his team way fucking better in the 15 minutes of the halftime of the Super Bowl. And then the NFL would be perfect, finally.
So yeah, the West division teams. Let us dally through this nonsense…
#1: SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS (4-2, 2nd overall) – Look, knee-jerk football pundits, I know the 49ers lost at home to a Giants team, but that does not mean you say the 49ers are crap. They are still one of the most forceful teams in the league, and even more so when most teams are more up-and-down than some sort of tasteless reference to oral sex on the back seat of a Greyhound bus. But the 49ers still will manifest their destiny, as they are one of the few up-and-downers with identity. As humans, when caught up in the ebb and flow of emotions, when we also lack self-esteem or sense of self, we are more prone to terrible sudden declines that destroy our world. This is a lot of the NFL right now. However, the 49ers have strong sense of self, and Jim Harbaugh has a huge dick. They will be okay.
#2: SEATTLE SEAHAWKS (4-2, 7th overall) – The Seahawks, on the other hand, are a great example of the prone-to-sudden decline pattern. I have Russell Wilson as my back-up fantasy QB (and he’ll have to start this week). Sure, be blew away the Patriots, but mostly he has been inconsistent and questionable. I guess that’s to be expected from a rookie QB. But shit man, the Seahawks are 4-2, and people are getting caught up in “the possibilities” when really they are just benefitting from Beast Mode by osmosis. Beast Mode is a tricky demon though, and it will fail you. Trust me, I am half-beast myself, trying to contain that side of my soul by carving alexandrine quatrains into tree stumps as a hobby. But I know Beast Mode, and it gets so wrapped up in itself being Beastly at times that it completely forgets the rules of civilization, thus ignoring a key civilized man’s law, and then fucking over the successful application of Beast Mode, a the man’s law enforcers then reprimand Beast for Beastly. Essentially that is the psychic tap dance of the NFL, and the Beasts have been losing that dance for a long minute, which is why Marshawn Lynch is so fucking great. Too bad about the new Nike uniforms being so ugly though.
#3: ARIZONA CARDINALS (4-2, 8th overall) – By my patented NFLuminati scoring system, the Cardinals are actually the 8th best team in the NFL right now. What that should tell you is the NFL is a horrid festering product where any team can beat any other team any given day of the week, literally now that they play games on almost every day of the week.
#4: DENVER BRONCOS (3-3, 9th overall) – Peyton Manning and his cripple-neck had himself a miraculous comeback against the most worst head coach in the history of the NFL, who somehow still has a job even though he has done nothing but never succeed in prominent times where success seemed inevitable. And you motherfuckers still act like this shit ain’t fake. That Broncos/Chargers game was like Hulk Hogan grimacing at the Iron Sheik’s cobra clutch then jumping up and winning the belt. Complete and utter bullshit, and the perfect lead-in to “NEVER COUNT OUT OL’ PEYTON MANNING” memes galore the next day. Man, fuck the NFL sometimes. Sad thing is some team from the AFC West will have to make the playoffs, so that’ll probably be the Broncos and fucking Peyton fucking Manning. But hopefully somebody will paralyze him. And I know in today’s internet age, people say inflammatory things to be inflammatory, but I can guarantee you, I would not feel even a quibble of doubt if Peyton Manning were paralyzed. Only problem is he is rich so he’d get some sort of Hemi-powered Stephen Hawking wheelchair and end up coaching the Colts or some asshole team like the Browns to multiple Super Bowl titles.
#5: ST. LOUIS RAMS (3-3, 14th overall) – I think of all the NFL teams, the Rams are the ones I’d like to ride around in a donk with, getting blunted as fuck, scoping out jogging ass bitches wearing those black legging/tights things that chicks be just wearing like regular pants nowadays. I’m not complaining at all, just noticing, often and regularly.
#6: SAN DIEGO CHARGERS (3-3, 24th overall) – Hahaha, oh man, somehow even when everybody on earth knows the Chargers are fucked and are gonna screw up and be exactly what we all know Norv Turner and Philip Rivers are gonna be, they find a way to convince us that maybe it won’t go that way somehow. And then it goes EXACTLY that way. It is like laughing at that same joke you’ve busted your gut at nine times already – you can’t really lose your shit any more, but you still take great joy in the joke continuing, and you also feel the inner-glow of glee from the length of joy the running joke has given you. I might actually be sad when Norv Turner is finally fired, just because that’s probably it for Norv Turner – Head Coach. Such a thing has brought so many lulz to so many otherwise sad souls for such a long period of time, it seems a shame that it has to end.
#7: OAKLAND RAIDERS (1-4, 25th overall) – I would like to say that even though they are not a good team, I fully support the Oakland Raiders. Raiders fans are my people, and them almost beating the Falcons (who are #1 on this NFLuminati list right now) was a great moment, but also further proof inside my paranoid mind of the actual truth of the NFLuminati effect, as the Raiders are a storied team in black, and the Falcons are a new school imposter, whose history in black is not even a full part of their history as a team. So essentially the Raiders game was close enough but still a loss to give the Falcons the false rub of Raiders black fear, to make our collective minds think, “You know, maybe these Falcons are real. I mean, John Abraham was almost like Jack Tatum there for a couple plays.” But he wasn’t, and they’re not. The NFL is manipulating your consciousness. The Falcons suck, and Jack Tatum’s ghost would paralyze Tom Brady and smile for eternity were he a ghost, which he is not as he is fucking 71 virgins in Valhalla as we speak. I know this because I talked to his personal assistant through a thrift store Ouija board last weekend. Also of note is that apparently when Orientals go to Heaven, they become personal assistants for the rest of us. But that is their idea of Heaven, so it’s cool. The only slaves in Heaven are apparently those who like to be slaves. I asked the personal assistant through Ouija board if perhaps this was the result of psychological conditioning, that would make people desire slavery against their own personal benefit because they had been demeaned into such a position, or manipulated to think such a way. The personal assistant bolted on me though, and then the next person medium on the other end of the Ouija board didn’t want to answer my questions about such sociopolitical issues, as they just wanted to know if Beyonce still had a fat ass or not. It was uncomfortable answering Us Weekly type shit to the beyond, so I took my hands off the little dialer doohickey and broke the connection to the other world.
#8: KANSAS CITY CHIEFS (1-5, 31st overall) – Be patient, because the Chiefs have all the makings of eventually being the worst team in football this year. Thus far, everything has broken just right to make such a thing happen, and the soap opera can only get better. The great thing is there is no Andrew Luck to reward them for their poor effort this year.
Friday, October 5, 2012
NFL 2012 Week 5: NFC North & West (1st Quarter)
I failed to update the NFLuminati Index last weekend when it was the turn of the NFC South and East, and have flailed this week with the NFC North and West, as two of the stupid Westeros teams have already played in some sort of abomination against “professional” football played on an amateur night upon amateur elitist networks not available to the common man who culls his television signals from the sky with divining rods. Fuck you NFL.
I doubt anyone noticed the absence of my posting the lists, as this blog is sometimes mistaken for a Detroit Lions blog, which partially is due to the wonderful work of Neil, who does the Lord’s work there is no denying. I sometimes dream we will be this generation’s HST/Zeta, but also I know that is stupid because we will be this generations me and Neil. Oddly enough I had a memory the other day that when I was in high school I did this weird comic thing called Birdman & Neil, which was a bearded hippie viking dude called Birdman and a stickman named Neil – and they did battle with evil police lieutenants and the first President Bush, all in the name of being high and free. I sort of realized that comic was prophecy apparently, and while that makes me happy, I also wish I had prophesied vast wealth as well, although wealth is a trick of the devil. You may have noticed the weird World Series of Poker post this week. Some shady fake robot emailed me asking if they could make a guest post for $200. I of course said yes. After harassing, they finally paid me, and then my wife was like, “Our electric bill is at cut off two days ago,” and I used the money to literally pay my electricity bill. We live in a culture where the oils of dead animals from ancient ages turn lights on inside my house magically. Isn’t that crazy? Anyways, I did not split the money with Neil like I had planned. So I worked a larger hustle with the robot scam casino demonoid thing, and did a second post at Armchair Linebacker’s brother site called Baseball Feelings, to hopefully get more money, and then be square with Neil, in my soul. I know he would not give a fuck, or he would at least claim to not give a fuck, but I felt wrong in my soul. And of course, after multiple harassings, I have not received my second payment from the robot PR department for some sketchy online poker casino.
The point here is my soul is one thing and money is another. My soul has trouble navigating money, as money is still an abstraction to me. I am too deeply powered by ancient molecules that do not recognize your modern “civilized” abstractions. It can’t be helped. But this line of introspective thinking by my white quartz rock viking altar in the fields behind my compound made me realize that’s what’s missing with the NFL in me now, and why I can move away from it. There is no soul left. Even in the past decades, the soul was low, and the money abstraction was a powerful prism for the entire industry to be seen. But there was still soul. It really seems Roger Goodell has killed it, choked the last little bit of life out of it. I guess it is time to start putting my energies to outlaw goat football even more strongly. I don’t know.
But nonetheless, I figured I would come here this morning and share the NFLuminati rankings, which were done before last night’s game, for this upcoming weekend of NFL foozballs. Not that you’d care, because I hardly mention the Lions and not until the end. If you are an asshole Lions clinger-on, let me be clear – your team is fucked. You may cling to the false hopes of your euphoric dreams of the past two years, but you are clutching lovingly at a dying whore, choking on a turkey bone lodged deeply in her throat. But we will get to that later. Let us start at the top…
#1: SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS (3-1, 2nd overall) – The 49ers are the defense on my lone fantasty team, and last weekend they scored me 40 points, ultimately winning my game for me. This is why fantasies are stupid, because they make you fall in love with things you should hate. The 49ers are a vile franchise, and this feel-goody aspect to them makes me uncomfortable. So I wish ill upon them all.
#2: ARIZONA CARDINALS (4-0, 3rd overall) – As you can see from my NFLuminati index score, they were still ranked only 3rd, and below the 49ers still. So them losing last night was not as shocking to me as it was to all the assholes being like, “CAN YOU BELIEVE THE CARDINALS ARE THE BEST TEAM IN FOOTBALL? THIS IS AMAZING!” No, it’s not. It’s the new NFL where dumb unexplainable and ultimately unmaintainable bullshit happens regularly. Talk to me in week 15, but even then what you think won’t matter. See Green Bay Packers 2011.
#3: CHICAGO BEARS (3-1, 7th overall) – Did you know Jay Cutler gets his powers from smoking cigarettes? Not normal cigs but organic tobacco grown by Sioux Indian shaman in secret fields buried underneath of Mount Rushmore, where the sunlight enters through the nostrils of white overlords of America. Jay Cutler looks smug, but he is tapped into some really dark native American black magic. This is going to make the Bears fairly amazing at times this year, but not completely, as Brian Urlacher is a cocksucker state trooper wannabe from New Mexico who is uncomfortable with magic shit, and really hates Indians to boot. This year’s Bears team is basically Urlacher and Cutler wrestling psychically for the soul of Julius Peppers, to see who controls the team’s destiny. The problem is mostly all Julius Peppers cares about is getting high and having sex with fat asses. A man certainly can’t be faulted for that, but it gets in the way of psychic destinies every time.
#4: MINNESOTA VIKINGS (3-1, 12th overall) – I still think the rise of the Vikings is a manipulated psychosocial trick to make the name “Christian Ponder” more prominent in time for the Presidential election. Problem is, Mitch Romney is not really a Christian, but a Mormon. Look, I don’t want to get all political, because I honestly could give a fuck if both those dudes’ planes fell out the sky today, but I would rather have a Black Muslim President than a White Mormon President. Sadly, there are no black Muslims running for President, only a mulatto demon puppet and a capital investment cyborg. Who do you hope controls the lifeless predator drones that kill the innocents of faraway lands? Choose wisely, because one day a faraway land will fly ninja assassin robots over America, and these days will not be forgotten.
#5: GREEN BAY PACKERS (2-2, 14th overall) – Once I found out Aaron Rodgers was a Boyz II Men fan, he actually passed Tom Brady on my list of least liked QBs, only behind Peyton Manning at this point. But honestly, if Peyton was wearing the orange alternate jersey of the Broncos in a game against the Packers, I’d probably like him even better than Rodgers. I can’t emphasize how terrible that is for Rodgers. I hate Peyton Manning.
#6: ST. LOUIS RAMS (2-2, 17th overall) – The Rams have already won this week so this record is not entirely true, except I just put it on the internet so now it is true.
#7: SEATTLE SEAHAWKS (2-2, 19th overall) – They have the worst uniforms ever now. In fact, those new Nike collars on the jerseys are horrible, horrible things. Have you noticed? Also fuck Nike for giving Oregon 17,000 uniform combinations, making that seem cool, and then every other college is like, “Hey, we should do the same!” but then they have to pay for it. Colleges who win 7 games a year if they are lucky spend more money on embroidering names on the backs of 12 different types of jerseys each fall than I make in a year. You may say, “Well Raven Mack, perhaps you should have chosen your career path more wisely.” But I say to you, I did choose wisely, and the path has not yet unfolded, and don’t come crying to me in the comments section when my menageries of wild corvids are pecking the thoughts from your brains once the wifi power grids have failed you.
#8: DETROIT LIONS (1-3, 26th overall) – I was hoping to build up to mocking you Lions fans in a mean-spirited way here at the end, but I can’t do it. I feel bad for you. You bought it. The NFL demon lords gave you brief hope, just to keep you strung along, after shaming you with the embarrassment of 0-16. And here you are, thinking “We can turn it around! Great things have been built!” And yet the truth is there. Matthew Stafford is no better than 14 other mid-level QBs in the NFL, who can be awesome one week, and then horrible the next, and mostly mediocre the following three. And without a single viable option around him, for as great as he is, Calvin Johnson is impotent, not even as great as Barry Sanders, as he can’t touch the ball as often as Sanders did. Megatron could be Randy Moss famous as a great WR, but instead he will be Larry Fitzgerald anonymous, and then fifteen years from now he’ll get into the Hall of Fame on his third try, and we’ll remember him well. Or maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he is Art Monked and lives into his 50s before getting to wear that gaudy yellow jacket. Who the fuck knows? I know this though – your Lions are doomed, by the league, and you were played for fools. And I feel sorry for you, because I know that game, and have been played for a fool for many years myself. I know how stupid you feel, even if you’re still not ready to admit it.
I doubt anyone noticed the absence of my posting the lists, as this blog is sometimes mistaken for a Detroit Lions blog, which partially is due to the wonderful work of Neil, who does the Lord’s work there is no denying. I sometimes dream we will be this generation’s HST/Zeta, but also I know that is stupid because we will be this generations me and Neil. Oddly enough I had a memory the other day that when I was in high school I did this weird comic thing called Birdman & Neil, which was a bearded hippie viking dude called Birdman and a stickman named Neil – and they did battle with evil police lieutenants and the first President Bush, all in the name of being high and free. I sort of realized that comic was prophecy apparently, and while that makes me happy, I also wish I had prophesied vast wealth as well, although wealth is a trick of the devil. You may have noticed the weird World Series of Poker post this week. Some shady fake robot emailed me asking if they could make a guest post for $200. I of course said yes. After harassing, they finally paid me, and then my wife was like, “Our electric bill is at cut off two days ago,” and I used the money to literally pay my electricity bill. We live in a culture where the oils of dead animals from ancient ages turn lights on inside my house magically. Isn’t that crazy? Anyways, I did not split the money with Neil like I had planned. So I worked a larger hustle with the robot scam casino demonoid thing, and did a second post at Armchair Linebacker’s brother site called Baseball Feelings, to hopefully get more money, and then be square with Neil, in my soul. I know he would not give a fuck, or he would at least claim to not give a fuck, but I felt wrong in my soul. And of course, after multiple harassings, I have not received my second payment from the robot PR department for some sketchy online poker casino.
The point here is my soul is one thing and money is another. My soul has trouble navigating money, as money is still an abstraction to me. I am too deeply powered by ancient molecules that do not recognize your modern “civilized” abstractions. It can’t be helped. But this line of introspective thinking by my white quartz rock viking altar in the fields behind my compound made me realize that’s what’s missing with the NFL in me now, and why I can move away from it. There is no soul left. Even in the past decades, the soul was low, and the money abstraction was a powerful prism for the entire industry to be seen. But there was still soul. It really seems Roger Goodell has killed it, choked the last little bit of life out of it. I guess it is time to start putting my energies to outlaw goat football even more strongly. I don’t know.
But nonetheless, I figured I would come here this morning and share the NFLuminati rankings, which were done before last night’s game, for this upcoming weekend of NFL foozballs. Not that you’d care, because I hardly mention the Lions and not until the end. If you are an asshole Lions clinger-on, let me be clear – your team is fucked. You may cling to the false hopes of your euphoric dreams of the past two years, but you are clutching lovingly at a dying whore, choking on a turkey bone lodged deeply in her throat. But we will get to that later. Let us start at the top…
#1: SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS (3-1, 2nd overall) – The 49ers are the defense on my lone fantasty team, and last weekend they scored me 40 points, ultimately winning my game for me. This is why fantasies are stupid, because they make you fall in love with things you should hate. The 49ers are a vile franchise, and this feel-goody aspect to them makes me uncomfortable. So I wish ill upon them all.
#2: ARIZONA CARDINALS (4-0, 3rd overall) – As you can see from my NFLuminati index score, they were still ranked only 3rd, and below the 49ers still. So them losing last night was not as shocking to me as it was to all the assholes being like, “CAN YOU BELIEVE THE CARDINALS ARE THE BEST TEAM IN FOOTBALL? THIS IS AMAZING!” No, it’s not. It’s the new NFL where dumb unexplainable and ultimately unmaintainable bullshit happens regularly. Talk to me in week 15, but even then what you think won’t matter. See Green Bay Packers 2011.
#3: CHICAGO BEARS (3-1, 7th overall) – Did you know Jay Cutler gets his powers from smoking cigarettes? Not normal cigs but organic tobacco grown by Sioux Indian shaman in secret fields buried underneath of Mount Rushmore, where the sunlight enters through the nostrils of white overlords of America. Jay Cutler looks smug, but he is tapped into some really dark native American black magic. This is going to make the Bears fairly amazing at times this year, but not completely, as Brian Urlacher is a cocksucker state trooper wannabe from New Mexico who is uncomfortable with magic shit, and really hates Indians to boot. This year’s Bears team is basically Urlacher and Cutler wrestling psychically for the soul of Julius Peppers, to see who controls the team’s destiny. The problem is mostly all Julius Peppers cares about is getting high and having sex with fat asses. A man certainly can’t be faulted for that, but it gets in the way of psychic destinies every time.
#4: MINNESOTA VIKINGS (3-1, 12th overall) – I still think the rise of the Vikings is a manipulated psychosocial trick to make the name “Christian Ponder” more prominent in time for the Presidential election. Problem is, Mitch Romney is not really a Christian, but a Mormon. Look, I don’t want to get all political, because I honestly could give a fuck if both those dudes’ planes fell out the sky today, but I would rather have a Black Muslim President than a White Mormon President. Sadly, there are no black Muslims running for President, only a mulatto demon puppet and a capital investment cyborg. Who do you hope controls the lifeless predator drones that kill the innocents of faraway lands? Choose wisely, because one day a faraway land will fly ninja assassin robots over America, and these days will not be forgotten.
#5: GREEN BAY PACKERS (2-2, 14th overall) – Once I found out Aaron Rodgers was a Boyz II Men fan, he actually passed Tom Brady on my list of least liked QBs, only behind Peyton Manning at this point. But honestly, if Peyton was wearing the orange alternate jersey of the Broncos in a game against the Packers, I’d probably like him even better than Rodgers. I can’t emphasize how terrible that is for Rodgers. I hate Peyton Manning.
#6: ST. LOUIS RAMS (2-2, 17th overall) – The Rams have already won this week so this record is not entirely true, except I just put it on the internet so now it is true.
#7: SEATTLE SEAHAWKS (2-2, 19th overall) – They have the worst uniforms ever now. In fact, those new Nike collars on the jerseys are horrible, horrible things. Have you noticed? Also fuck Nike for giving Oregon 17,000 uniform combinations, making that seem cool, and then every other college is like, “Hey, we should do the same!” but then they have to pay for it. Colleges who win 7 games a year if they are lucky spend more money on embroidering names on the backs of 12 different types of jerseys each fall than I make in a year. You may say, “Well Raven Mack, perhaps you should have chosen your career path more wisely.” But I say to you, I did choose wisely, and the path has not yet unfolded, and don’t come crying to me in the comments section when my menageries of wild corvids are pecking the thoughts from your brains once the wifi power grids have failed you.
#8: DETROIT LIONS (1-3, 26th overall) – I was hoping to build up to mocking you Lions fans in a mean-spirited way here at the end, but I can’t do it. I feel bad for you. You bought it. The NFL demon lords gave you brief hope, just to keep you strung along, after shaming you with the embarrassment of 0-16. And here you are, thinking “We can turn it around! Great things have been built!” And yet the truth is there. Matthew Stafford is no better than 14 other mid-level QBs in the NFL, who can be awesome one week, and then horrible the next, and mostly mediocre the following three. And without a single viable option around him, for as great as he is, Calvin Johnson is impotent, not even as great as Barry Sanders, as he can’t touch the ball as often as Sanders did. Megatron could be Randy Moss famous as a great WR, but instead he will be Larry Fitzgerald anonymous, and then fifteen years from now he’ll get into the Hall of Fame on his third try, and we’ll remember him well. Or maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he is Art Monked and lives into his 50s before getting to wear that gaudy yellow jacket. Who the fuck knows? I know this though – your Lions are doomed, by the league, and you were played for fools. And I feel sorry for you, because I know that game, and have been played for a fool for many years myself. I know how stupid you feel, even if you’re still not ready to admit it.
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Week 4 Semi-Live Recap
ACLB 2012 WEEK 4 GAME NOTES
No Sopoaga for us -- interesting to see how this team handles an issue it did not face last year, injuries to that defense. However, no Revis for them.
49ers had their traditional Autumn Retreat in the colony of the empire: Youngstown, Ohio, homeland of the DeBartolos and Yorks. Worked like a charm last year between weeks 3 and 4, lets see how it plays out this time.
FIRST QUARTER
49ers get the ball first this time, in noted contrast to last week when Minnesota got it first and scored and the 49ers played from behind literally all game. Kyle Williams returns the ball from deep in the endzone to the 20, much ado about ultimately nothing. First pass is deep down the sideline to Crabtree incomplete with a flag, they call Revis' understudy for PI. Two Gore runs, and Crabtree misses the quick slant for the first down when the DB bats it away. Lee's punt dies inside the 5 expertly, but C.J. Spillman bobbles the ball and knocks it into the end zone. Spillman was out of bounds and the first to touch it, to boot, so the Jets start at the 25 yard line. WR screen to Santonio Holmes for 11, I expect them to have noticed what Harvin did last week and emulate it. Tebow in to run for 2. Greene for 3. 3rd and 5, Jets hold to negate a first down reception. 3rd and 15, Sanchez is curiously allowed to go over the line of scrimmage before completing a first down pass anyway. Greene runs twice for 8 yards, then Aldon Smith rides to save the day with a sack of Sanchez on 3rd down and force a punt. Ted Ginn is back! He fair catches the punt at the 8, campaigning for Fair Catch Interference as one defender was very close, but no call is forthcoming.
Second effort by Gore gets 5 yards. Gore up the middle for 6, first down. KAEPERNICK is in, keeps it himself on the option left, gets 17, and is slow getting up but it's to re-tie his shoe. Hah. Gore over left tackle for 13
just before the play clock hits zero, late flag for holding negates it. Fuck. 1st and 20, empty backfield, no matter. Manningham downfield for 25 on the left sideline. Kaepernick back in! DEEP for Moss, wobbling, and Moss has to play defender to knock away an interception. Gore for 4 after all that. 3rd and 6 from the Jet 46, pass too far for Manningham. Ah well. Lee punts, and this time Spillman stays in bounds and gets in front of the ball, easily stopping it at the 3.
Greene for 1 up the middle, Greene over right tackle for 5, 3rd and 4. Sanchez fires incomplete as Justin Smith comes on a well timed blitz after backing off the line. Ginn's return is minimal, Anthony Dixon blows a guy up on a block at a not-ideal angle, hence it's a block in the back.
Short over the middle to Gore for 5. Empty backfield shotgun, Alex loops around and ends up scrambling right for the first down. Gore for 4 to exactly midfield. Fake end around to Ginn is an actual end around to Manningham and he goes right for 28. Toss sweep left to Kendal Hunter gets 11 to the 11 to close out the quarter.
SECOND QUARTER
Alex bootlegs and has to throw it away. Alex runs the option!? Pitch to Kyle Williams and they get 9. Delany Walker takes a false start. Kaepernick is in on 3rd and 6, QB Draw to the left and he is in! Touchdown 49ers, and Colin K. is getting way more plays than I've ever seen. I approve of the Irony of doing this against the Tebow-having Jets. 7-0 49ers. Akers puts the kick through the back of the end zone.
Pass in the flat incomplete, thanks to WILLIS. Tebow in now as a halfback to block and throws a pretty good one on Aldon, slant pass gains 9. Greene converts on 3rd and inches. Tebow in to block again on a 6 yard pass, running play gets 3, 3rd and 1 and Tebow is back in looking at his wrist band, so he's QBing on this one. Tebow takes a step forward and throws, very clever fake draw, the pass is caught and then fumbled by the TE, Dashon Goldson blasts him in the legs and he does not get up. Carlos Rogers recovers and runs around for no real gain while the TE noticably writhes on the ground. Too busy watching the guy not get up to notice if this will stand as a fumble or not.
Call confirmed. Bruce Miller catches in the flat for 9. Manningham catches a pass for the first down. Time Out #1.
Gore left for 1. Alex pump fakes and then eats an unfortunate coverage sack. Smith eats another sack on 3rd down pushes them back to the 39. But 55 yards is well within Akers' range. However, this one knuckles just wide.
Greene runs twice for 9 total yards, Jets get confused and call time out #1.
Ahmad Brooks runs into Sanchez and bumps him down as Ray McDonald gets a well-timed rush on the snap count. Ginn makes a fair catch at the 10, without incident this time. Gore gets 5 the hard way cutting up the middle. Gore gets 7 more straight ahead. Kaepernick time, but he just hands to Gore and it loses 1. Jets call time out #2. Alex short pass to Crabree for 3 is the least bad of the options on the next play. DEEP to Crabtree but it's a step beyond him. Anthony Davis is called for a Personal Foul after the play, so it's now 4th and 20. The broadcast shows no replay of the foul. Lee's punt is uncharacteristically short and takes a Jet bounce to put the Jets on the short side of the field. Short pass complete and the receiver backtracks from the first down and only gets 4. Goldson with a well timed hit to knock the ball loose and it MAY be picked off by Whitner. A flag comes in. A bad flag, but they pick it up, and the ball is ruled incomplete, as Whitner did not control the ball. #88 drops the ball and a very late flag comes in, and another dubious late personal foul comes in on Aldon Smith. Smith punished for being smart as the guy tries to push him, but Aldon shifts his weight and the other guy falls down, making it sorta look like a hip toss. Very Weak Hometown Call. Obviously the real refs are trying to clamp down on anything that looks like rough stuff after the scabs let guys get out of control. Two Minute Warning.
Short run of 3 is restrained by BOWMAN. Pass is tipped at the line by Justin Smith. Brooks hits Sanchez from behind after BOWMAN gets a hand on him to slow him down, knocking the ball loose and Justin Smith immediately recovers. Nice! Pass downfield over the middle to Vernon Davis who gets 23 and the sideline. Crabtree gets 6 on a slant, with a flag on the Jets, 5 yards for illegal hands to the face, so Harbaugh takes that and the automatic first instead. 1:00 exactly left, Alex with a Favre-esque improved shovel pass to Gore for 8, next pass is short to Davis, but he gets both the first down and the sideline. Pass to Crabtree gets 11 over the middle, and they take time out #2. :23 left, 49ers just outside the red zone by inches. Smith tries the option but trips over Joe Staley. 49ers bleed the clock and call time out #3, setting up a 36 yard field goal. The FOX clowns keep trying to call it "interesting" smugly, but the 49ers are well served by taking points and racking up field goals whenever they get them instead of being too aggressive. Akers puts it right down the middle and we will go to halftime with the score 10-0 49ers.
THIRD QUARTER
Akers to kick off, deep but it is returned to the 21. Greene for 2, pass to the TE and he makes a nice move to shake off Whitner's tackle and gets the first down. Chaz Shillens catches the next pass for another first down near midfield. Screen pass tipped by Ray McDonald and INTERCEPTED BY MISTER PATRICK WILLIS! Ha ha! While the FOXcasters talk about "if". "If it hadn't been tipped Greene might still be running." So What? I had my fill of these clowns last week. Kendal Hunter in and he runs left for 12. Gore drives ahead for 4 up the middle. Gore sweeps left and gets 4 more. Pass is tipped, juggled, and ultimately dropped by Delany Walker and he would've been short of the sticks anyway. Here comes Akers from 40, way above the uprights and wide? Uh oh. Damn.
Greene bounces off a tackle in the backfield and gets 3. BOWMAN nearly gets another interception on a deep over the middle pass, Whitner providing contact to at least ensure the receiver can't make a play. Next pass is overthrown on the sideline and the Jets fans are starting to BOOO. Ginn makes a running up catch and has a moderate return.
Wheel route to Delany Walker but he comes down out of bounds. Walker on the slant next play gets 6. Kendall Hunter takes an inside handoff out of the shotgun and he gets 7 to convert. Gore FUMBLES, argh, but he falls right back on it. Gore holds on to the next one but he loses yardage anyway. DEEP pass to Manningham but he can only get one hand on it and it falls to the ground. That play is there and has been several times, but they keep missing it. Just as well, we would've have gotten to see Andy Lee's masterful punt as it hits the ground curls away from the goal line as if operated by remote control and Tarell Brown downs it at the 2 as we go to break.
A short run and an incomplete pass under pressure from Aldon Smith, and the Tebow chants build. Pass is incomplete amid more BOOOing. Ginn, as per usual, inadvisedly tries to backtrack as he reverses to the other side of the field, and he gains nothing on the return, but fortunately he was already on their side of the field. 48 yards to go.
WR screen to Manningham and he slips tackles to the tune of 12. Delany Walker wide open and he comes down with the ball at the 11. Bruce Miller gets an actual carry and he gets 5 as visions of Tom Rathman dance in my head. Gore up the middle stopped just short of the first down. JUMBO PACKAGE~! And they seem to have gotten in Gore's way, and once again that formation fails. 4th and 1, this time Gore goes all the way for a touchdown as they try the same play again and block it a lot better this time. Akers converts and it's 17-0 49ers with 2:49 left.
McKnight finds a seam on Akers' kickoff and takes it out to the 36 from the back of the end zone. Jets try to run again and Greene gets 3 as the fans express consternation. Then again with how Sanchez is throwing it today, maybe it's not a bad idea to run. Santonio Holmes on a WR screen picks up a first down. Play action pass DEEP and Goldson's man gets behind him, but he times his leap well and swats it away with his hand, showing he can do more than blast people. TE screen gains 6 after Cumberland makes a nice move to actually make WILLIS miss a tackle. Gotta learn the guy's name after a play like that. McDonald sacks Sanchez and yet a flag comes down, Illegal Hands to face on Carlos Rogers, replay shows it to be pretty weak. 1st down nevertheless and here comes Tebow. Aldon Smith shits all over Tebow's fake handoff keeper and throws him for a loss of 2 with a nice waist tackle as the quarter ends.
FOURTH QUARTER
Santonio Holmes catches it and goes down untouched and flips the ball forward, that is a FUMBLE, Carlos Rogers scoops it up eventually and he goes all the way for a TOUCHDOWN. Play is stopped as Holmes is unable to get up. 49ers training staff was on the field calling for the Jets training staff to come over, his legs appeared to go out from under him. Can you challenge that a player was injured and trying to give himself up? We'll find out.
Ruling on the field is Confirmed. Akers converts to make it 24-0 49ers with 14:46 left in the 4th and this one looks over. Have to remind myself that I was nervous about this one this morning.
Akers bombs the kickoff and it is not returned. Jets may not have beaten the play clock and soon wish they hadn't as a poor short pass flutters incomplete. Sanchez just avoids a sack and completes it for 8. Cumberland makes a Pyrric reception of a short pass and loses yards as Whitner ties up his legs. Ginn makes a fair catch of the punt as we go to break.
Kendall Hunter on the sweep left, Randy Moss blocking downfield (!) to clear a path worth 13. Gore right for 2 as I recall Moss hasn't had a catch today, don't think one's even been thrown to him and it does not quite seem necessary now. Gore up the middle with a dash and a leap for 11 and a 1st. Gore over right guard for 2, and it's time to make the clock bleed. Shotgun end around to Ted Ginn who gets just short of the first down, however, he goes out of bounds, which is ill-advised at this phase of the game. Oh, wait, the clock still restarts this early. Never mind. Gore picks up the first up the middle. Toss sweep to Hunter left for 8, Kendall's Pet Play. Graphic reveals the 49ers have had 7 different players with at least 1 rush today, which is amusingly contrasting with all the times they like to put up stats about "QB X has thrown to Y many different receivers today." Time Out #1 to prevent a delay of game.
For some reason they come out throwing, Crabtree takes a bit of a push from Cromartie but the ball is overthrown and incomplete. Slant pass to Crabtree, who is put in a headlock by Cromartie, and it's incomplete again. Not a fan of those last two play calls. Oh well. Akers from 40 and he puts it down the middle this time. 27-0 49ers.
Kickoff clears the back line. FOXcasters join the Call For Tebow no doubt amid pressure from the network to keep people tuned in for the commercials in this blowout. Aldon Smith ankle-sacks Sanchez but Tarell Brown is called for defensive holding. WILLIS blitzes, BOWMAN knocks the receiver down to ensure an incompletion. Sanchez misfires again. Justin Smith's rush forces another underthrown ball and an imminent punt. BLOCKED BY LARRY GRANT! The ball dies at the Jet 4 where it is recovered. Cumberland missed his block. Whistling cheers as the 49er fan contingent is now a large portion of the remaining crowd. Hunter left for a yard and a half. Hunter left for no real gain. Roll out pass to TUFUAFU but he can't haul it in for the TD, Jets called for defensive holding, the next best thing. Hunter goes in for the score, easily, on his next carry, and the extra point makes it 34-0 49ers and a "Let's Go Niners!" chant? Road fans taking over a New York (Jersey) stadium. NICE. Akers just misses the rouge. Here comes Sanchize again. Jets running out the clock now too, conceding defeat with an inside hand off to Greene. Sanchez misfires, again. I should've come up with a greater variety of ways to write that statement, I've had to use it so often. Cumberland with the Pyrric reception short of the sticks, Jets get the punt off. Tebow was in as the upback on the punt and he actaully made the tackle. GARBAGE TIME is here, as Anthony Dixon takes the handoff from Kaepernick and goes up the middle for 7. JV squad is in. Dixon carries again and gets a first down, with Tufuafu in as the fullback full time, tedious reporting every play as part of the JV squad, protecting Bruce Miller for another day. Dixon carries for 3. Dixon a little slow to get up on his next three yard carry, but the clock bleeds down to the Two Minute Warning.
Kaepernick on bootleg and he has wide open field forever, easy chance to score but he slides down at the 5 yard line. Now it is victory formation time. 2 kneels by Kaepernick finishes off a Very Satisfying, absolutely dominating performance. Final Score 34-0 49ers
No Sopoaga for us -- interesting to see how this team handles an issue it did not face last year, injuries to that defense. However, no Revis for them.
49ers had their traditional Autumn Retreat in the colony of the empire: Youngstown, Ohio, homeland of the DeBartolos and Yorks. Worked like a charm last year between weeks 3 and 4, lets see how it plays out this time.
FIRST QUARTER
49ers get the ball first this time, in noted contrast to last week when Minnesota got it first and scored and the 49ers played from behind literally all game. Kyle Williams returns the ball from deep in the endzone to the 20, much ado about ultimately nothing. First pass is deep down the sideline to Crabtree incomplete with a flag, they call Revis' understudy for PI. Two Gore runs, and Crabtree misses the quick slant for the first down when the DB bats it away. Lee's punt dies inside the 5 expertly, but C.J. Spillman bobbles the ball and knocks it into the end zone. Spillman was out of bounds and the first to touch it, to boot, so the Jets start at the 25 yard line. WR screen to Santonio Holmes for 11, I expect them to have noticed what Harvin did last week and emulate it. Tebow in to run for 2. Greene for 3. 3rd and 5, Jets hold to negate a first down reception. 3rd and 15, Sanchez is curiously allowed to go over the line of scrimmage before completing a first down pass anyway. Greene runs twice for 8 yards, then Aldon Smith rides to save the day with a sack of Sanchez on 3rd down and force a punt. Ted Ginn is back! He fair catches the punt at the 8, campaigning for Fair Catch Interference as one defender was very close, but no call is forthcoming.
Second effort by Gore gets 5 yards. Gore up the middle for 6, first down. KAEPERNICK is in, keeps it himself on the option left, gets 17, and is slow getting up but it's to re-tie his shoe. Hah. Gore over left tackle for 13
just before the play clock hits zero, late flag for holding negates it. Fuck. 1st and 20, empty backfield, no matter. Manningham downfield for 25 on the left sideline. Kaepernick back in! DEEP for Moss, wobbling, and Moss has to play defender to knock away an interception. Gore for 4 after all that. 3rd and 6 from the Jet 46, pass too far for Manningham. Ah well. Lee punts, and this time Spillman stays in bounds and gets in front of the ball, easily stopping it at the 3.
Greene for 1 up the middle, Greene over right tackle for 5, 3rd and 4. Sanchez fires incomplete as Justin Smith comes on a well timed blitz after backing off the line. Ginn's return is minimal, Anthony Dixon blows a guy up on a block at a not-ideal angle, hence it's a block in the back.
Short over the middle to Gore for 5. Empty backfield shotgun, Alex loops around and ends up scrambling right for the first down. Gore for 4 to exactly midfield. Fake end around to Ginn is an actual end around to Manningham and he goes right for 28. Toss sweep left to Kendal Hunter gets 11 to the 11 to close out the quarter.
SECOND QUARTER
Alex bootlegs and has to throw it away. Alex runs the option!? Pitch to Kyle Williams and they get 9. Delany Walker takes a false start. Kaepernick is in on 3rd and 6, QB Draw to the left and he is in! Touchdown 49ers, and Colin K. is getting way more plays than I've ever seen. I approve of the Irony of doing this against the Tebow-having Jets. 7-0 49ers. Akers puts the kick through the back of the end zone.
Pass in the flat incomplete, thanks to WILLIS. Tebow in now as a halfback to block and throws a pretty good one on Aldon, slant pass gains 9. Greene converts on 3rd and inches. Tebow in to block again on a 6 yard pass, running play gets 3, 3rd and 1 and Tebow is back in looking at his wrist band, so he's QBing on this one. Tebow takes a step forward and throws, very clever fake draw, the pass is caught and then fumbled by the TE, Dashon Goldson blasts him in the legs and he does not get up. Carlos Rogers recovers and runs around for no real gain while the TE noticably writhes on the ground. Too busy watching the guy not get up to notice if this will stand as a fumble or not.
Call confirmed. Bruce Miller catches in the flat for 9. Manningham catches a pass for the first down. Time Out #1.
Gore left for 1. Alex pump fakes and then eats an unfortunate coverage sack. Smith eats another sack on 3rd down pushes them back to the 39. But 55 yards is well within Akers' range. However, this one knuckles just wide.
Greene runs twice for 9 total yards, Jets get confused and call time out #1.
Ahmad Brooks runs into Sanchez and bumps him down as Ray McDonald gets a well-timed rush on the snap count. Ginn makes a fair catch at the 10, without incident this time. Gore gets 5 the hard way cutting up the middle. Gore gets 7 more straight ahead. Kaepernick time, but he just hands to Gore and it loses 1. Jets call time out #2. Alex short pass to Crabree for 3 is the least bad of the options on the next play. DEEP to Crabtree but it's a step beyond him. Anthony Davis is called for a Personal Foul after the play, so it's now 4th and 20. The broadcast shows no replay of the foul. Lee's punt is uncharacteristically short and takes a Jet bounce to put the Jets on the short side of the field. Short pass complete and the receiver backtracks from the first down and only gets 4. Goldson with a well timed hit to knock the ball loose and it MAY be picked off by Whitner. A flag comes in. A bad flag, but they pick it up, and the ball is ruled incomplete, as Whitner did not control the ball. #88 drops the ball and a very late flag comes in, and another dubious late personal foul comes in on Aldon Smith. Smith punished for being smart as the guy tries to push him, but Aldon shifts his weight and the other guy falls down, making it sorta look like a hip toss. Very Weak Hometown Call. Obviously the real refs are trying to clamp down on anything that looks like rough stuff after the scabs let guys get out of control. Two Minute Warning.
Short run of 3 is restrained by BOWMAN. Pass is tipped at the line by Justin Smith. Brooks hits Sanchez from behind after BOWMAN gets a hand on him to slow him down, knocking the ball loose and Justin Smith immediately recovers. Nice! Pass downfield over the middle to Vernon Davis who gets 23 and the sideline. Crabtree gets 6 on a slant, with a flag on the Jets, 5 yards for illegal hands to the face, so Harbaugh takes that and the automatic first instead. 1:00 exactly left, Alex with a Favre-esque improved shovel pass to Gore for 8, next pass is short to Davis, but he gets both the first down and the sideline. Pass to Crabtree gets 11 over the middle, and they take time out #2. :23 left, 49ers just outside the red zone by inches. Smith tries the option but trips over Joe Staley. 49ers bleed the clock and call time out #3, setting up a 36 yard field goal. The FOX clowns keep trying to call it "interesting" smugly, but the 49ers are well served by taking points and racking up field goals whenever they get them instead of being too aggressive. Akers puts it right down the middle and we will go to halftime with the score 10-0 49ers.
THIRD QUARTER
Akers to kick off, deep but it is returned to the 21. Greene for 2, pass to the TE and he makes a nice move to shake off Whitner's tackle and gets the first down. Chaz Shillens catches the next pass for another first down near midfield. Screen pass tipped by Ray McDonald and INTERCEPTED BY MISTER PATRICK WILLIS! Ha ha! While the FOXcasters talk about "if". "If it hadn't been tipped Greene might still be running." So What? I had my fill of these clowns last week. Kendal Hunter in and he runs left for 12. Gore drives ahead for 4 up the middle. Gore sweeps left and gets 4 more. Pass is tipped, juggled, and ultimately dropped by Delany Walker and he would've been short of the sticks anyway. Here comes Akers from 40, way above the uprights and wide? Uh oh. Damn.
Greene bounces off a tackle in the backfield and gets 3. BOWMAN nearly gets another interception on a deep over the middle pass, Whitner providing contact to at least ensure the receiver can't make a play. Next pass is overthrown on the sideline and the Jets fans are starting to BOOO. Ginn makes a running up catch and has a moderate return.
Wheel route to Delany Walker but he comes down out of bounds. Walker on the slant next play gets 6. Kendall Hunter takes an inside handoff out of the shotgun and he gets 7 to convert. Gore FUMBLES, argh, but he falls right back on it. Gore holds on to the next one but he loses yardage anyway. DEEP pass to Manningham but he can only get one hand on it and it falls to the ground. That play is there and has been several times, but they keep missing it. Just as well, we would've have gotten to see Andy Lee's masterful punt as it hits the ground curls away from the goal line as if operated by remote control and Tarell Brown downs it at the 2 as we go to break.
A short run and an incomplete pass under pressure from Aldon Smith, and the Tebow chants build. Pass is incomplete amid more BOOOing. Ginn, as per usual, inadvisedly tries to backtrack as he reverses to the other side of the field, and he gains nothing on the return, but fortunately he was already on their side of the field. 48 yards to go.
WR screen to Manningham and he slips tackles to the tune of 12. Delany Walker wide open and he comes down with the ball at the 11. Bruce Miller gets an actual carry and he gets 5 as visions of Tom Rathman dance in my head. Gore up the middle stopped just short of the first down. JUMBO PACKAGE~! And they seem to have gotten in Gore's way, and once again that formation fails. 4th and 1, this time Gore goes all the way for a touchdown as they try the same play again and block it a lot better this time. Akers converts and it's 17-0 49ers with 2:49 left.
McKnight finds a seam on Akers' kickoff and takes it out to the 36 from the back of the end zone. Jets try to run again and Greene gets 3 as the fans express consternation. Then again with how Sanchez is throwing it today, maybe it's not a bad idea to run. Santonio Holmes on a WR screen picks up a first down. Play action pass DEEP and Goldson's man gets behind him, but he times his leap well and swats it away with his hand, showing he can do more than blast people. TE screen gains 6 after Cumberland makes a nice move to actually make WILLIS miss a tackle. Gotta learn the guy's name after a play like that. McDonald sacks Sanchez and yet a flag comes down, Illegal Hands to face on Carlos Rogers, replay shows it to be pretty weak. 1st down nevertheless and here comes Tebow. Aldon Smith shits all over Tebow's fake handoff keeper and throws him for a loss of 2 with a nice waist tackle as the quarter ends.
FOURTH QUARTER
Santonio Holmes catches it and goes down untouched and flips the ball forward, that is a FUMBLE, Carlos Rogers scoops it up eventually and he goes all the way for a TOUCHDOWN. Play is stopped as Holmes is unable to get up. 49ers training staff was on the field calling for the Jets training staff to come over, his legs appeared to go out from under him. Can you challenge that a player was injured and trying to give himself up? We'll find out.
Ruling on the field is Confirmed. Akers converts to make it 24-0 49ers with 14:46 left in the 4th and this one looks over. Have to remind myself that I was nervous about this one this morning.
Akers bombs the kickoff and it is not returned. Jets may not have beaten the play clock and soon wish they hadn't as a poor short pass flutters incomplete. Sanchez just avoids a sack and completes it for 8. Cumberland makes a Pyrric reception of a short pass and loses yards as Whitner ties up his legs. Ginn makes a fair catch of the punt as we go to break.
Kendall Hunter on the sweep left, Randy Moss blocking downfield (!) to clear a path worth 13. Gore right for 2 as I recall Moss hasn't had a catch today, don't think one's even been thrown to him and it does not quite seem necessary now. Gore up the middle with a dash and a leap for 11 and a 1st. Gore over right guard for 2, and it's time to make the clock bleed. Shotgun end around to Ted Ginn who gets just short of the first down, however, he goes out of bounds, which is ill-advised at this phase of the game. Oh, wait, the clock still restarts this early. Never mind. Gore picks up the first up the middle. Toss sweep to Hunter left for 8, Kendall's Pet Play. Graphic reveals the 49ers have had 7 different players with at least 1 rush today, which is amusingly contrasting with all the times they like to put up stats about "QB X has thrown to Y many different receivers today." Time Out #1 to prevent a delay of game.
For some reason they come out throwing, Crabtree takes a bit of a push from Cromartie but the ball is overthrown and incomplete. Slant pass to Crabtree, who is put in a headlock by Cromartie, and it's incomplete again. Not a fan of those last two play calls. Oh well. Akers from 40 and he puts it down the middle this time. 27-0 49ers.
Kickoff clears the back line. FOXcasters join the Call For Tebow no doubt amid pressure from the network to keep people tuned in for the commercials in this blowout. Aldon Smith ankle-sacks Sanchez but Tarell Brown is called for defensive holding. WILLIS blitzes, BOWMAN knocks the receiver down to ensure an incompletion. Sanchez misfires again. Justin Smith's rush forces another underthrown ball and an imminent punt. BLOCKED BY LARRY GRANT! The ball dies at the Jet 4 where it is recovered. Cumberland missed his block. Whistling cheers as the 49er fan contingent is now a large portion of the remaining crowd. Hunter left for a yard and a half. Hunter left for no real gain. Roll out pass to TUFUAFU but he can't haul it in for the TD, Jets called for defensive holding, the next best thing. Hunter goes in for the score, easily, on his next carry, and the extra point makes it 34-0 49ers and a "Let's Go Niners!" chant? Road fans taking over a New York (Jersey) stadium. NICE. Akers just misses the rouge. Here comes Sanchize again. Jets running out the clock now too, conceding defeat with an inside hand off to Greene. Sanchez misfires, again. I should've come up with a greater variety of ways to write that statement, I've had to use it so often. Cumberland with the Pyrric reception short of the sticks, Jets get the punt off. Tebow was in as the upback on the punt and he actaully made the tackle. GARBAGE TIME is here, as Anthony Dixon takes the handoff from Kaepernick and goes up the middle for 7. JV squad is in. Dixon carries again and gets a first down, with Tufuafu in as the fullback full time, tedious reporting every play as part of the JV squad, protecting Bruce Miller for another day. Dixon carries for 3. Dixon a little slow to get up on his next three yard carry, but the clock bleeds down to the Two Minute Warning.
Kaepernick on bootleg and he has wide open field forever, easy chance to score but he slides down at the 5 yard line. Now it is victory formation time. 2 kneels by Kaepernick finishes off a Very Satisfying, absolutely dominating performance. Final Score 34-0 49ers
Sunday, September 23, 2012
49ers Week 3 Semi-Live (and semi-dead) Game Log
Well, fuck. The previous article's title was as prophetic as I feared it might be.
ACLB 2012 WEEK 3 GAME NOTES
FIRST QUARTER
Moment of silence for Steve Sabol.
Akers to kickoff, Harvin returns to the 18, Culliver tackles and comes up shoving. Illegal block in the back on the kicking team? How is that even physically possible. WILLIS already in a ref's face, Jim Harbaugh is already coming out on the field. They eventually pick the flag up due to how obviously stupid this is. Peterson right for 4, swing to Harvin gets a first down. Peterson thrown for nothing by Ahmad Brooks. TE wide open at midfield. Peterson up the middle for 3, WR Screen to Harvin gets nothing but Culliver gets 15 for grabbing the earhole of the helmet. Ugh. Far better opening drive than I'm used to seeing. Peterson up the middle for 3, PA screen to TE sets up 3rd and 1, Peterson picks it up, and they play that stupid horn sound effect again. Finally some pass rush forces an incompletion. Ponder misfires on the quick slant. Turns out Bill Musgrave, former 49er 3rd or 4th string QB way back in the good old days, is their OC. The TE, Rudolph, sticks the ball out for just enough to get first and goal. Fuck. Peterson up the middle almost scores. 2nd and goal from the 2, he's stopped for no gain. Peterson tries again on 3rd down but WILLIS AND BOWMAN are there, you can not get running TDs on this team. Crowd cheers as they go for it on 4th and goal, Play action and Kyle Rudolph is wide open in the back of the end zone. Fuck. Goldson's blitz is not quick enough. 16 plays, 82 yards, 7:20 left in the 1st, 7-0 Vikings. I check my calendar to see if its Opposite Day.
Hunter returns the kick from the goal line to the 20.
Bootleg PA to Crabtree for 6. Similar play caught by Delany Walker for a loss of a yard. Vernon Davis catch and run converts. Toss left to Gore for a few. PA pass too high and off the fingers of a leaping, wide open Randy Moss. Smith rolling right again and again, takes a sack. Already sick of that stupid horn. Lee's punt is fair caught at the 20.
This pass to Rudolph is incomplete and WILLIS gives him a light shove that bowls him over like he was shot. Harvin catches a wheel route on the sideline for 24, ugh. Peterson loses 1 up the middle as he meets PATRICK WILLIS. Peterson on a draw starts out looking dangerous but Aldon Smith spins him around and holds him to 3. 3rd and 8, Aldon Smith comes clean and hits Ponder as he throws and forces a punt. The Iconic Chris Kluwe punts and Kyle Williams gets a pretty good return to about the 35.
Manningham short pass for 6. Pass too high for Moss under pressure, Crabtree catches a pass in the flat for just enough to convert as the broadcasters mention what I was just about to check: only one running play so far for SF. Huh. Toss to Gore, right on cue, left for 5. WR Screen to Manningham converts. Smith stumbles as he starts to scramble and "runs" for no gain. Gore cuts and gets 11 and a first as the quarter ends, Alex Boone pretty flagrantly shoved him forward at one point, luckily for the 49ers they haven't called that penalty since the 80s. And they barely called it then.
SECOND QUARTER
Hunter catch for a minimal gain, Moss in the flat with "great" field awareness steps out 1 yard short of the sticks. Oh wait they give it to him, I retract my sarcasm, one of these days I will get better at watching the ball instead of the feet on those plays. Gore up the middle for 2, end zone pass for Moss too high AGAIN, 3rd down pass to Kyle Williams is too short even after the stretch, and after some hesitation here comes the field goal unit. Akers from 29 is as certain as the sunrise. 7-3. This is the first time the 49ers have trailed all year.
Akers crushes the kickoff to the back of the endzone, and we FOX.
Ahmad Brooks chases down a scrambling Ponder, knocking him forward for a run of 1 rather than a sack. Aldon Smith just misses a sack, and Christian Ponder tucks and runs and gets the first. Peterson still contained for 1. Peterson picks up the first on a 12 yard catch and run. Ponder finally faces some pressure and he STILL completes one for just enough for a first down. Peterson up the middle and this time he gets 7. Peterson picks up the rest on the next carry. Peterson falls down trying to run right instead of up the middle as per usual. Toby Gerhardt from Stanford in, Harvin stumbles on a WR screen, BOWMAN falls on him, 3rd and 11. Again, the pass is easily complete, what has happened to the secondary today? Ponder takes off and... What. The. Fuck. there is nothing but wide open field in front of him, and he dives for a rushing touchdown. 14-3, and it's starting to look like I gravely underestimated Christian Ponder. And that I'm not the only one. Well, let's find out how the 49ers are at playing from behind.
Kendall Hunter tries to make something happen by returning it from deep. He doesn't really. Down at the 24.
Gore up the middle for 3. Smith's pass batted down at the line. Crabtree saves face for the offense by picking up the first on a pass over the middle. Misdirection toss to Hunter looks like Tecmo Bowl with how thoroughly it is blown up. Smith has to tuck and run, outpacing Jared Allen but only getting it to 3rd and 5. Vernon Davis bumps into Crabtree on his route but still converts, and the clock runs down to the two minute warning before they can run another play.
Gore up the middle for 7, Crabtree picks up the first and they burn time out #1.
Too high for a wide open Moss, but he makes a leaping catch on it this time and he gets shoved out for 7 yards. Alex runs into Jared Allen, who grips his ankle, but Alex stays standing and throws it away. Allen got away with a leg trip after the ball was thrown. Pass to Walker is too short, and the Vikings call time out. Which reminds me: only one penalty called so far in this game. Hmm. 43 yarder by Akers is BLOCKED. I fucking hate that stupid fucking horn. Back to making Ponder look like an All-Pro. Short pass in the flat, out of bounds for 8. Pass off the hands of Gerhardt. Second try at the same play, Gerhardt holds it this time, Minnesota takes another time out. Rush misses a sack and Ponder throws it away. Long pass on the right sideline falls incomplete, first kinda deep pass attempt of the game for either team. Ponder flushed and somehow Gerhardt is wide open for the first, though BOWMAN at least keeps him in bounds to force timeout #3 with :15 left. Ponder deep, overthrown and through Culliver's hands. 49ers call a time out. Harvin wide open and he gets out of bounds at the 35 with :04 left. 52 yard attempt by Blair Walsh and it knuckles just in to put the a la mode on this Dingleberry Pie of a first half. 17-3 Vikings. At least they get the ball to start.
THIRD QUARTER
Kyle Williams takes it at the very back of the end zone and finds a seam around the 20! Gets past the kicker and almost all the way, has to slow down to cut back deep in VIking territory, this drive will start at the 14! Hunter runs left for 3, Gore gets 4 more up the gut. Smith rolls right and there is nothing there. After all that, just a field goal. Well that was discouraging. No, wait, they're going for it! Then again, maybe not, 49ers wait and take a delay of game. Now the field goal unit comes out. 29 yarder is right down the middle. 17-6, and while normally I'm used to the 49ers racking up field goals and gradually getting there, this one feels rather deflating.
Kickoff returned to the 27. Lets see what they've come up with to stop Christian Ponder. Peterson for 4. Peterson again, stood up by BOWMAN after another 4. Pass rush doesn't quite get there but Ponder throws it away, finally a three and out. Lets see what Kyle can do again on this punt return. Williams calls for a fair catch despite nobody being near him, and he seems upset with himself after. I would be if he didn't have those famous fumbled punts last year, just holding the ball on a punt is still a win for him.
Nice montage of old NFL Films shots of famous old 49ers and Vikings with the music to come back from break. From their own 14 this time, rollout pass to Crabtree gets 9. Gore picks up the rest and plus over left tackle. Pass out of the Eligible Lineman formation, Moss catches for 12 and takes a hit that almost buckled his knee. Gore just misses being sprung for a big gain, possibly even TD, as the second tackler holds on just enogh to slow him down, and it's just 12 and a first. Manningham wide open for 17 and another first down. Hey, it's the play selection they should've started the game with instead of that "try to surprise them with being pass heavy" nonsense. Kyle Williams catches in the right flight and sticks the ball out as he steps out, 9 more yards. JUMBO PACKAGE with Kilgore and Tupuafu does just enough to work as Gore gets 1.1 on 2nd and 1. Corner route to Vernon Davis and he hauls it in! Out at the 1 yard line. Here we go. Jumbo Package again, Daniel Kilgore started to lean forward as he came in motion and might have gotten away with the false start, Play Action pass to a wide open Vernon Davis for a touchdown, Akers converts easily and its 17-13 as we go to break with 6:17 left. Much better looking in the second half so far. Alex Smith 6/6 for 68 in a 9 play 86 yard drive.
Deep kick, Harvin returns and gets WHACKED at the 14 by Larry Grant. Another drive starting exactly at the 14. How odd.
Ponder rolls out and dives forward for 4 as Goldson hits him on the way down. Lateral swing pass to Harvin and he splits two tacklers to get just enough for the first. That's a play the 49ers haven't had an answer for yet. Coverage gives time for pressure and the pass to Peterson falls incomplete. Peterson runs forward and a late fumble moves the ball forward even more, the Vikings probably recovered, and flag comes out in the scrum afterward. They don't specify the player, just genearlly calling a personal foul on "San Francisco." Pretty weak. Another flag as Peterson runs, as though the scabs realize they are behind quota. Holding on Minnesota, and the broadcasters are killing them for not announcing numbers on the penalties. Ponder has forever to throw and Harvin is finally open. 2nd and 7 after all that. The Harvin screen works AGAIN, first down. Fuck. Peterson ankle tackled by WILLIS. Peterson catches and runs through enough of Whitner's tackle to get another first down. Ponder throws deep and incomplete, and the refs decide to help the Vikings out with a horrible Roughing Call on Goldson for a minor hit. Vikings deep in the red zone now. Bollocks. Ponder throws underneath for a minimal game and the 49ers get ANOTHER bullshit defensive holding call on Carlos Rogers for chucking Harvin well within the five yards, Harvin was behind the line even. This is crap. Broadcasters point out this is the same shitty crew that worked Denver @ Atlanta Monday night. Peterson stuffed for nothing. Holding them for 3 after all this would be huge. Time runs out in the 3rd quarter.
FOURTH QUARTER
Peterson cannot get in, 3rd and Goal from the 2. Rudolph flagrantly pushes off, of course its not called. Utter homer horse shit from the referees. 24-13.
Williams with another good return that I mostly missed because I'm still worked up over that last series of one-sidedness by the scabs.
First Down, and Gore fumbles. Called down by contact, Vikings challenge, and it's an obvious win for them. Fuck this. Well, now they can blame this instead of the officiating. I guess.
They picked a fine time to actually start getting stuff right. Minnesota ball, Peterson makes a great effort to bounce around for 8. Deep to Harvin, Goldson puts the hit on him to break it up. Surprisingly not called this time, despite the legitimacy of the hit. Pressure and the pass falls incomplete as the crowd howls for defensive holding on BOWMAN in vain. Worth a try with these shits. The punt eventually gets into the end zone for a touchback.
13:09 left, that's still time I guess. Gore left for 2. Smith tuck and run for the first down. Short route to Crabtree for 4. Release Route to Gore gets the first. Hunter goes right just before the play clock expires and is thrown for a loss. Hunter gets it back next play, but it's 3rd and 10 now. Smith under pressure, Vikes get away with holding Kyle Wililams and they're forced to punt, downed at the 2. 9 minutes left, they are in dire need of a turnover.
Peterson out to the 5. Sopoaga does not get up. Uh oh.
Harbaugh out to help Sopoaga walk off the field personally. Peterson finally breaks one and gets out past the 20. Ugh. PA bootleg to Harvin is low and incomplete. Peterson for 2, 3rd and 8, BLITZ, pass is intercepted and DROPPED by Donte Whitner. Damn, so close. Refs miss another one as the Vikings gunner stays out of bounds forever, 49ers flagged for a face mask and 15. Lets see what kind of explosiveness they have. Short pass to Manningham for 5 is not an inspiring start. Davis drops one that was too short anyway. 3rd down pass falls incomplete. WEAK 3 and Out. Well, they're not going to win now, obviously. Peterson for a few, then Gerhardt adds insult to injury and picks up the first. Vikings bleed the clock some more and Harvin gets a clutch 3rd down catch when I thought the Vikes were done throwing. Timeouts start now. Gerhardt for nothing, time out #2. Only a fumble and then some can save them now. Game is delayed because I think the referees cannot count to three because the 49ers appear to be out of time outs despite only calling two.
This is taking FOR EVER. He may be challenging for a fumble. Which he can't do if he's used all three timeouts, the broadcasters point out. But he should still have one. Fumble? 49ers ruled to have recovered, after this long ass delay. The broadcasters can't count either, without their fancy FOX graphics, and get pissy. I'm way behind right now with how confusing all this is. I'm not doing justice to how odd this past sequence has been. Smith runs, pass to Davis, pass to Crabs knocked away, theyr'e not getting out of bounds. An interception ends the competitive phase of this game, Alex's first in 249 attempts. Overthrown on Crabtree. Crowd BOOS as they 49ers call one final time out at 2:14. Gerhardt runs, time out NO. Another Challenge by Harbaugh, Gerhardt clearly fumbles on the replay, recovery is in question, crowd cleverly BOOOS the the final time out. Harbaugh actively trolling the refs and Kenny Albert/Daryl Johnston, who still are pissy over the concept that their FOX counter graphic was wrong and he DOES have this time out left. Lets have another long ass delay to stretch this game out. This paragraph has taken over 20 minutes of real time. Gerhardt recoverd, and that's it on challenges. It's all over but the unprofessional pissiness of Kenny Albert and Daryl Johnston as they continue to harp on this, two minute warning.
Gerhardt fumbles AGAIN, so obviously that no challenge is necessary, Carlos Rogers recovers and runs for a little bit of yards. Pass to Manningham for 22. Alex sacked and fumbled, he hasn't looked like this in a long time. And I think this game is finally over. Fittingly, Jarhead Allen makes the play. Vikings kneel down and, even I'm ready for this sequence to end. 49ers suffer their first loss, and they just did not look very good in doing so. 24-13 Vikings, and the 49ers never led and were only briefly in it. 49ers will stay over in Youngstown, Ohio as they did early last year on their road trip, and begin to prepare for the Jets. Lets just say no more and move on from this debacle.
Okay, one last thought. Much as I would love to kill the refs for that one shitty drive, the 49ers clearly were not ready for Christan Ponder to bring it as much as he turned out to be able to bring it. And they did not have an answer for Percy Harvin as a RB catching laterals and catching swing passes, as that play worked over and over again for first downs. They can be out-played, after all.
ACLB 2012 WEEK 3 GAME NOTES
FIRST QUARTER
Moment of silence for Steve Sabol.
Akers to kickoff, Harvin returns to the 18, Culliver tackles and comes up shoving. Illegal block in the back on the kicking team? How is that even physically possible. WILLIS already in a ref's face, Jim Harbaugh is already coming out on the field. They eventually pick the flag up due to how obviously stupid this is. Peterson right for 4, swing to Harvin gets a first down. Peterson thrown for nothing by Ahmad Brooks. TE wide open at midfield. Peterson up the middle for 3, WR Screen to Harvin gets nothing but Culliver gets 15 for grabbing the earhole of the helmet. Ugh. Far better opening drive than I'm used to seeing. Peterson up the middle for 3, PA screen to TE sets up 3rd and 1, Peterson picks it up, and they play that stupid horn sound effect again. Finally some pass rush forces an incompletion. Ponder misfires on the quick slant. Turns out Bill Musgrave, former 49er 3rd or 4th string QB way back in the good old days, is their OC. The TE, Rudolph, sticks the ball out for just enough to get first and goal. Fuck. Peterson up the middle almost scores. 2nd and goal from the 2, he's stopped for no gain. Peterson tries again on 3rd down but WILLIS AND BOWMAN are there, you can not get running TDs on this team. Crowd cheers as they go for it on 4th and goal, Play action and Kyle Rudolph is wide open in the back of the end zone. Fuck. Goldson's blitz is not quick enough. 16 plays, 82 yards, 7:20 left in the 1st, 7-0 Vikings. I check my calendar to see if its Opposite Day.
Hunter returns the kick from the goal line to the 20.
Bootleg PA to Crabtree for 6. Similar play caught by Delany Walker for a loss of a yard. Vernon Davis catch and run converts. Toss left to Gore for a few. PA pass too high and off the fingers of a leaping, wide open Randy Moss. Smith rolling right again and again, takes a sack. Already sick of that stupid horn. Lee's punt is fair caught at the 20.
This pass to Rudolph is incomplete and WILLIS gives him a light shove that bowls him over like he was shot. Harvin catches a wheel route on the sideline for 24, ugh. Peterson loses 1 up the middle as he meets PATRICK WILLIS. Peterson on a draw starts out looking dangerous but Aldon Smith spins him around and holds him to 3. 3rd and 8, Aldon Smith comes clean and hits Ponder as he throws and forces a punt. The Iconic Chris Kluwe punts and Kyle Williams gets a pretty good return to about the 35.
Manningham short pass for 6. Pass too high for Moss under pressure, Crabtree catches a pass in the flat for just enough to convert as the broadcasters mention what I was just about to check: only one running play so far for SF. Huh. Toss to Gore, right on cue, left for 5. WR Screen to Manningham converts. Smith stumbles as he starts to scramble and "runs" for no gain. Gore cuts and gets 11 and a first as the quarter ends, Alex Boone pretty flagrantly shoved him forward at one point, luckily for the 49ers they haven't called that penalty since the 80s. And they barely called it then.
SECOND QUARTER
Hunter catch for a minimal gain, Moss in the flat with "great" field awareness steps out 1 yard short of the sticks. Oh wait they give it to him, I retract my sarcasm, one of these days I will get better at watching the ball instead of the feet on those plays. Gore up the middle for 2, end zone pass for Moss too high AGAIN, 3rd down pass to Kyle Williams is too short even after the stretch, and after some hesitation here comes the field goal unit. Akers from 29 is as certain as the sunrise. 7-3. This is the first time the 49ers have trailed all year.
Akers crushes the kickoff to the back of the endzone, and we FOX.
Ahmad Brooks chases down a scrambling Ponder, knocking him forward for a run of 1 rather than a sack. Aldon Smith just misses a sack, and Christian Ponder tucks and runs and gets the first. Peterson still contained for 1. Peterson picks up the first on a 12 yard catch and run. Ponder finally faces some pressure and he STILL completes one for just enough for a first down. Peterson up the middle and this time he gets 7. Peterson picks up the rest on the next carry. Peterson falls down trying to run right instead of up the middle as per usual. Toby Gerhardt from Stanford in, Harvin stumbles on a WR screen, BOWMAN falls on him, 3rd and 11. Again, the pass is easily complete, what has happened to the secondary today? Ponder takes off and... What. The. Fuck. there is nothing but wide open field in front of him, and he dives for a rushing touchdown. 14-3, and it's starting to look like I gravely underestimated Christian Ponder. And that I'm not the only one. Well, let's find out how the 49ers are at playing from behind.
Kendall Hunter tries to make something happen by returning it from deep. He doesn't really. Down at the 24.
Gore up the middle for 3. Smith's pass batted down at the line. Crabtree saves face for the offense by picking up the first on a pass over the middle. Misdirection toss to Hunter looks like Tecmo Bowl with how thoroughly it is blown up. Smith has to tuck and run, outpacing Jared Allen but only getting it to 3rd and 5. Vernon Davis bumps into Crabtree on his route but still converts, and the clock runs down to the two minute warning before they can run another play.
Gore up the middle for 7, Crabtree picks up the first and they burn time out #1.
Too high for a wide open Moss, but he makes a leaping catch on it this time and he gets shoved out for 7 yards. Alex runs into Jared Allen, who grips his ankle, but Alex stays standing and throws it away. Allen got away with a leg trip after the ball was thrown. Pass to Walker is too short, and the Vikings call time out. Which reminds me: only one penalty called so far in this game. Hmm. 43 yarder by Akers is BLOCKED. I fucking hate that stupid fucking horn. Back to making Ponder look like an All-Pro. Short pass in the flat, out of bounds for 8. Pass off the hands of Gerhardt. Second try at the same play, Gerhardt holds it this time, Minnesota takes another time out. Rush misses a sack and Ponder throws it away. Long pass on the right sideline falls incomplete, first kinda deep pass attempt of the game for either team. Ponder flushed and somehow Gerhardt is wide open for the first, though BOWMAN at least keeps him in bounds to force timeout #3 with :15 left. Ponder deep, overthrown and through Culliver's hands. 49ers call a time out. Harvin wide open and he gets out of bounds at the 35 with :04 left. 52 yard attempt by Blair Walsh and it knuckles just in to put the a la mode on this Dingleberry Pie of a first half. 17-3 Vikings. At least they get the ball to start.
THIRD QUARTER
Kyle Williams takes it at the very back of the end zone and finds a seam around the 20! Gets past the kicker and almost all the way, has to slow down to cut back deep in VIking territory, this drive will start at the 14! Hunter runs left for 3, Gore gets 4 more up the gut. Smith rolls right and there is nothing there. After all that, just a field goal. Well that was discouraging. No, wait, they're going for it! Then again, maybe not, 49ers wait and take a delay of game. Now the field goal unit comes out. 29 yarder is right down the middle. 17-6, and while normally I'm used to the 49ers racking up field goals and gradually getting there, this one feels rather deflating.
Kickoff returned to the 27. Lets see what they've come up with to stop Christian Ponder. Peterson for 4. Peterson again, stood up by BOWMAN after another 4. Pass rush doesn't quite get there but Ponder throws it away, finally a three and out. Lets see what Kyle can do again on this punt return. Williams calls for a fair catch despite nobody being near him, and he seems upset with himself after. I would be if he didn't have those famous fumbled punts last year, just holding the ball on a punt is still a win for him.
Nice montage of old NFL Films shots of famous old 49ers and Vikings with the music to come back from break. From their own 14 this time, rollout pass to Crabtree gets 9. Gore picks up the rest and plus over left tackle. Pass out of the Eligible Lineman formation, Moss catches for 12 and takes a hit that almost buckled his knee. Gore just misses being sprung for a big gain, possibly even TD, as the second tackler holds on just enogh to slow him down, and it's just 12 and a first. Manningham wide open for 17 and another first down. Hey, it's the play selection they should've started the game with instead of that "try to surprise them with being pass heavy" nonsense. Kyle Williams catches in the right flight and sticks the ball out as he steps out, 9 more yards. JUMBO PACKAGE with Kilgore and Tupuafu does just enough to work as Gore gets 1.1 on 2nd and 1. Corner route to Vernon Davis and he hauls it in! Out at the 1 yard line. Here we go. Jumbo Package again, Daniel Kilgore started to lean forward as he came in motion and might have gotten away with the false start, Play Action pass to a wide open Vernon Davis for a touchdown, Akers converts easily and its 17-13 as we go to break with 6:17 left. Much better looking in the second half so far. Alex Smith 6/6 for 68 in a 9 play 86 yard drive.
Deep kick, Harvin returns and gets WHACKED at the 14 by Larry Grant. Another drive starting exactly at the 14. How odd.
Ponder rolls out and dives forward for 4 as Goldson hits him on the way down. Lateral swing pass to Harvin and he splits two tacklers to get just enough for the first. That's a play the 49ers haven't had an answer for yet. Coverage gives time for pressure and the pass to Peterson falls incomplete. Peterson runs forward and a late fumble moves the ball forward even more, the Vikings probably recovered, and flag comes out in the scrum afterward. They don't specify the player, just genearlly calling a personal foul on "San Francisco." Pretty weak. Another flag as Peterson runs, as though the scabs realize they are behind quota. Holding on Minnesota, and the broadcasters are killing them for not announcing numbers on the penalties. Ponder has forever to throw and Harvin is finally open. 2nd and 7 after all that. The Harvin screen works AGAIN, first down. Fuck. Peterson ankle tackled by WILLIS. Peterson catches and runs through enough of Whitner's tackle to get another first down. Ponder throws deep and incomplete, and the refs decide to help the Vikings out with a horrible Roughing Call on Goldson for a minor hit. Vikings deep in the red zone now. Bollocks. Ponder throws underneath for a minimal game and the 49ers get ANOTHER bullshit defensive holding call on Carlos Rogers for chucking Harvin well within the five yards, Harvin was behind the line even. This is crap. Broadcasters point out this is the same shitty crew that worked Denver @ Atlanta Monday night. Peterson stuffed for nothing. Holding them for 3 after all this would be huge. Time runs out in the 3rd quarter.
FOURTH QUARTER
Peterson cannot get in, 3rd and Goal from the 2. Rudolph flagrantly pushes off, of course its not called. Utter homer horse shit from the referees. 24-13.
Williams with another good return that I mostly missed because I'm still worked up over that last series of one-sidedness by the scabs.
First Down, and Gore fumbles. Called down by contact, Vikings challenge, and it's an obvious win for them. Fuck this. Well, now they can blame this instead of the officiating. I guess.
They picked a fine time to actually start getting stuff right. Minnesota ball, Peterson makes a great effort to bounce around for 8. Deep to Harvin, Goldson puts the hit on him to break it up. Surprisingly not called this time, despite the legitimacy of the hit. Pressure and the pass falls incomplete as the crowd howls for defensive holding on BOWMAN in vain. Worth a try with these shits. The punt eventually gets into the end zone for a touchback.
13:09 left, that's still time I guess. Gore left for 2. Smith tuck and run for the first down. Short route to Crabtree for 4. Release Route to Gore gets the first. Hunter goes right just before the play clock expires and is thrown for a loss. Hunter gets it back next play, but it's 3rd and 10 now. Smith under pressure, Vikes get away with holding Kyle Wililams and they're forced to punt, downed at the 2. 9 minutes left, they are in dire need of a turnover.
Peterson out to the 5. Sopoaga does not get up. Uh oh.
Harbaugh out to help Sopoaga walk off the field personally. Peterson finally breaks one and gets out past the 20. Ugh. PA bootleg to Harvin is low and incomplete. Peterson for 2, 3rd and 8, BLITZ, pass is intercepted and DROPPED by Donte Whitner. Damn, so close. Refs miss another one as the Vikings gunner stays out of bounds forever, 49ers flagged for a face mask and 15. Lets see what kind of explosiveness they have. Short pass to Manningham for 5 is not an inspiring start. Davis drops one that was too short anyway. 3rd down pass falls incomplete. WEAK 3 and Out. Well, they're not going to win now, obviously. Peterson for a few, then Gerhardt adds insult to injury and picks up the first. Vikings bleed the clock some more and Harvin gets a clutch 3rd down catch when I thought the Vikes were done throwing. Timeouts start now. Gerhardt for nothing, time out #2. Only a fumble and then some can save them now. Game is delayed because I think the referees cannot count to three because the 49ers appear to be out of time outs despite only calling two.
This is taking FOR EVER. He may be challenging for a fumble. Which he can't do if he's used all three timeouts, the broadcasters point out. But he should still have one. Fumble? 49ers ruled to have recovered, after this long ass delay. The broadcasters can't count either, without their fancy FOX graphics, and get pissy. I'm way behind right now with how confusing all this is. I'm not doing justice to how odd this past sequence has been. Smith runs, pass to Davis, pass to Crabs knocked away, theyr'e not getting out of bounds. An interception ends the competitive phase of this game, Alex's first in 249 attempts. Overthrown on Crabtree. Crowd BOOS as they 49ers call one final time out at 2:14. Gerhardt runs, time out NO. Another Challenge by Harbaugh, Gerhardt clearly fumbles on the replay, recovery is in question, crowd cleverly BOOOS the the final time out. Harbaugh actively trolling the refs and Kenny Albert/Daryl Johnston, who still are pissy over the concept that their FOX counter graphic was wrong and he DOES have this time out left. Lets have another long ass delay to stretch this game out. This paragraph has taken over 20 minutes of real time. Gerhardt recoverd, and that's it on challenges. It's all over but the unprofessional pissiness of Kenny Albert and Daryl Johnston as they continue to harp on this, two minute warning.
Gerhardt fumbles AGAIN, so obviously that no challenge is necessary, Carlos Rogers recovers and runs for a little bit of yards. Pass to Manningham for 22. Alex sacked and fumbled, he hasn't looked like this in a long time. And I think this game is finally over. Fittingly, Jarhead Allen makes the play. Vikings kneel down and, even I'm ready for this sequence to end. 49ers suffer their first loss, and they just did not look very good in doing so. 24-13 Vikings, and the 49ers never led and were only briefly in it. 49ers will stay over in Youngstown, Ohio as they did early last year on their road trip, and begin to prepare for the Jets. Lets just say no more and move on from this debacle.
Okay, one last thought. Much as I would love to kill the refs for that one shitty drive, the 49ers clearly were not ready for Christan Ponder to bring it as much as he turned out to be able to bring it. And they did not have an answer for Percy Harvin as a RB catching laterals and catching swing passes, as that play worked over and over again for first downs. They can be out-played, after all.
Looking Past The Vikings
The league told Alex he'll be fined $15,000 (twice as big a fine as if he had punched another player)
if he wears this hat within the 90-minute period after a game again. Which is funny, because he did it all
last season and the league apparently didn't notice. It's also funny because New Era Cap Company
is the official hat company for both the MLB AND THE NFL, so he's still wearing the appropriate
sponsor's product. It's also funny because Alex Smith grew up a Padres fan, which even
I didn't know until I google image searched for this, so really he's just wearing this to suck up
to the fan base that used to shit on him, when really, finally winning games was all it took. Still, it's a
nice touch, and even makes Alex seem kinda cool now, at least locally. Who ever thought that'd happen?
Head Coach Jim Harbaugh's oft-stated goal for the 49ers since taking the job has been "be better today than we were yesterday, be better tomorrow than we are today" which, as much as it has turned cliche for the ideal of constantly improving, is nice if you can actually achieve it. If a team were to actually get better every day, even incrementally, it would at some undefined future point be the best team in the league and thus, presumably, a Super Bowl Champion.
It isn't as silly or stupid as it sounds when the 49ers truly do seem to be improving before your eyes. Not necessarily getting better per se, but every week I find myself daring to expect more and more, as they repeatedly prove their upper limit is higher than I had hoped. It started last year when they started winning road games outside the division (a category in which they were a hilariously bad 4-36 from 2003-2010) again. It continued as they encountered game after game which I had written off as "well that will be a loss" when I went over the schedule, and ended up winning it. "Oh, well, even their defense can't shut down the Saints or Packers enough for them to win against the elite teams." And then they DID.
This year, we started out with "oh well they never win in Green Bay," and not only did they win, but they were dominant for most of the way through. Now the talking heads on the network pregame shows and NFL network are in a scramble to put the 49ers at the top of their power rankings, and jostling each other for position to say they picked the 49ers to win the Super Bowl first. It's both flattering and worrisome to have those guys getting in queue to fellate your team this early in the season, but it's been a while since the 49ers have been in this position, and it's a fun challenge to remember what it was like when they were that team all the time, and the fan base sat back feeling smug and entitled. Fan swagger is already creeping back; people are wearing the hats and the jerseys again, even in the East Bay, over on the Raider side of the Partition. Bay Area sports fans have long been classic frontrunners, owning all the team gear but waiting for an excuse to start wearing it (i.e. winning streaks) in public where other people can actually see you in it.
San Francisco Baseball Giants' Manager Bruce Bochy, a "dull" guy now permanently
declared cool (and legally authorized to kill hookers within the city limits) by virtue
of winning the first world series for the team since they moved out here. When word of the
fine made the rounds, the baseball team decided to start trolling Roger Goodell and wearing
49er hats during pre game interviews and warm ups. The other wacky reliever (no, not the one you've
heard of and are sick of seeing, he's hurt) even vowed they'd pay Alex's fine if he keeps wearing
the hat. Nothing says "looking past this week's opponent" quite like going on a tangent
about the local baseball team, too. But the NFL's bullshit about what you can't wear and when is always
worth making fun of, and San Francisco always oves getting an opportunity to protest shit.
worth making fun of, and San Francisco always oves getting an opportunity to protest shit.
But there is no obvious improvement this week. Pleasant Surprise is impossible. Only horrifying disappointment in the wake of falling into a Trap Game. Opening in Green Bay, home opening against the new rival Detroit, and off to New York to play the Tebows (though he doesn't even start for them) next week, the The Minnesota Vikings, presumptive last place team in a pretty good division, loom in prime ankle-biting position. In the Andrew Luck sweepstakes last season, offense built around an every-down running back in Adrian Peterson that the 49er have a tradition of smothering, even back when he was new to the league and the 49er run defense was the saving grace of a bad team rather than the building block of a really good one. Christian Ponder is not the QB the Vikings need, rather he is the QB the Vikings deserve.
Meanwhile, the city of San Francisco fools around with the local quarterback being fined for wearing the "wrong" hat.
Which is also funny because Randy Moss wore a Giants hat in a post game interview two years ago,
during their world series run, with no tie to San Francisco and no reason to wear it other than I guess
he thought it looked cool, and nobody in the NFL office noticed or cared then, either.
The hypercompetitiveness of Jim Harbaugh that has becoming the personality of the team, and their last year of track record, suggests they are as close to trap-game-proof as a team can reasonably be. Last year, they beat the teams they were supposed to beat. Badly, in some cases. But for the first time in many many years, everyone in the country is talking about how badly the 49ers are supposed to beat someone, 10:00 am West Coast Body Clock Time notwithstanding.
After several looks at how they handle a game they "can't" win, after today we will have an inkling of how they handle a game they "can't" lose.
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Everything Seems Possible
Seriously, you can't bounce a kick off the crossbar and in.
That shit doesn't happen. Oh wait, I guess they can and it does.
The 49ers will enjoy the national spotlight in a few hours, having been anointed as worthy of Prime Time Marquee Matchup status by virtue of that most accurate predictor of the future, the past. That's some pretty ill-tempered sarcasm to start an article with, particularly when I'm actually so optimistic about where the 49ers sit these days. Last week continued the pattern established last year, where each week and each game forces me to expand my range of reasonable expectations and take a long, arcing piss on prognostication and playing The Schedule Game back before the season starts ("That's a win, that one might be a win, no way they'll win that game though, this one's a loss too"). After eight years of the 49ers losing virtually every road game against a non-divisional opponent, they're now beating the Packers in Green Bay. Nothing seems beyond the pale in the wake of this result. When the schedule came out, I looked at those three ominous road games that seemed pre-destined to mark the 49ers for "regression" to 10-6 even if they didn't actually regress as a team, because the opposition was that much tougher: @ Green Bay, @ New Orleans, and @ New England towards the end of the year right in the middle of Snow Time. But midway through the afternoon of Week 2 and suddenly those Patriots and Saints look decidedly more mortal even with the massive qualifier of "its still early" and the 49ers won their first game in Green Bay in 22 years. With one "can't" irrevocably transformed into a "can and did" that infectious optimism we were introduced to at the party that was 2011 has held on to our phone number and called us to ask "D'you wanna hang out?" in 2012.
No, I'm not in a snippy mood over the 49ers. Nor am I in one over the looming opponent, although Detroit is very much a dangerous opponent and they already have that feel of a burgeoning Rivalry Game -- I expect to see at least one playoff game between these teams in the next 2-3 years -- and the Lions very much illustrate the idea that can does not mean will. The 49ers beat Detroit in Detroit last year and the 49ers looked last year like they can win a home game no matter who the opponent (and they kinda did). They should win this game: that's not outlandish to say at all. And yet, losing would also not be a great surprise. Paradoxical? Yeah. But big games between really good teams create that.
I am snippy because, as you have no doubt noticed if you cast a wide net over internet and television to get your NFL information, discussion of this Lions @ 49ers Sunday Night main event game has been high in volume but low in content. How low in content? I can sum everything every other football website will write about this game for you in one efficient paragraph, potentially saving you the fan tons of web-surfing and data-absorbing time and freeing you up to go about your Sunday.
Stand in front of a mirror (any size). Hold your hand flat. Start karate chopping yourself in the chest and yell "HERP DERP HANDSHAKE" as loudly and obnoxiously as you can, like you were trying to make fun of retarded people. Repeat until you despise the face in the mirror staring back at you.
There. Now you're caught up on what the rest of the web is saying about this game. If you play a "handshake" drinking game during tonight's contest, harvest a spare liver and acquire a working knowledge of invasive surgery beforehand. You'll need both.
Both these teams are way too good to be overshadowed by this fake-ass bullshit non-controversy. The handshake is a fake tradition fabricated a few years ago, ostensibly to mimic the camraderie of college football, but in reality it exists to create "content" such as this, to better facilitate the de-evolution of journalists into gossiping high school students, running around the country saying the equivalent of "Oooh did you hear what so and so said about you? You're not gonna take that, right?" instead of actually reporting news. It's not real. It's a custom that's designed to be violated, and we we got more proof of that a couple hours ago when the Giants vs Buccaneers game ended and those coaches came together and yelled at each other. Cynically, I find myself hoping against hope that will manage to work its way into the rotation and cut down on the number of times they re-run the clip of the stupid handshake from last year, just to have anything to spare me that. Artificial Traditions like this are the New Americanism and the NFL As Corporatized Entertainment Program (and not sport) envisioned by Roger Goodell and his TV Network Executive Bedfellows in a nutshell. Do you think John Madden and Chuck Noll shook hands after a game? THE FUCK NO.
Anyway, the Lions pose the same problems for the 49ers this year as they did last year. The 49ers offensive line never seems to be as strong as it should be, and for all the jumbo packages and 7-Tight End Sets and Defensive Ends Reporting Eligible To Play Fullback and the 49ers identity as ostensibly a power running team wherein Frank Gore punches your defense to death while Alex Smith Avoids The Big Fuck Up, the 49ers tend to get stopped in power running situations a lot. And Alex steps up into sacks a lot, demonstrating his skill at Avoiding The Big Fuck Up by usually no longer fumbling when this happens. One notable exception would be the first play of the game in Detroit last year, wherin Kyle Vanden Bosch flattened him as he punched the ball out, which led to 3 immediate points. Detroit's Pass Rush is really good. That is a farcical understatement, as they actually have two complete starting defensive lines' worth of defensive linemen, and they rotate them in and out to keep them coming in continuously fresh and rested waves. While the 49ers generally do not beat themselves by turning the ball over, their offense tends to move down the field gradually and the hoped for improvement at WR has yet to be conclusively proved or disproved. So a sack can easily kill a drive, and sure enough, their losses last year came against teams (Dallas, Baltimore, a blitz-happy Arizona) that rushed Alex well and sacked him a lot. On the other side of the ball, the Lions are set up to throw and throw often, just like New Orleans and Green Bay do. The scar Detroit still bears from the Matt Millen: GM era, the scar that has now become the talking point for the happy war story, is Detroit's wealth of pass catching talent. Calvin Johnson is the best known, but I still remember the less heralded pass catcher, Pettigrew, running the same short over the middle TE 6-yard route over and over again in last year's game. While the 49ers kept Calvin Johnson off the scoreboard last year, and they have proven their ability to hamstring the video game offenses so currently en vogue in the modern league (including last week), it is also true that the secondary still resemble Lilleputians next to the larger receivers in the game -- Calvin Johnson, for instance -- and while it pains me to see the negative side of the way Dashon Goldson and Donte Whitner play the game: Safeties that go for the loud hit more so than the ball, and look like they might like hurting people when they play, one must admit there are risks to playing that way. We've all seen many a highlight reel play where a DB gambles on going for the big hit or the strip instead of the conservative arm tackle, and the WR ends up running 70 yards plus for the score.
So the 49ers must needs be wary of Detroit, because the former's weaknesses match up with the latter's strengths. To ward against this, the 49ers must do as they did last year, all season in general and against Detroit in particular. The 49ers' find their strength and success in the unglamorous facet of the game. The facet where field position is important, and The Punter matters. Where the defense bends for yards but does not break for points because the opposition must go 90 yards to score: not one time -- which is doable -- but repeatedly, which odds dictate is not. The more plays they must execute to score, the more components that must repeatedly go right, the more likely one will not, and the drive will fail, provided you the defense continue to contest everything.
The face of a man who is absolutely willing to contest absolutely EVERYTHING.
This is after unsuccessfully challenging whether or not a 5 yard pass on 2nd and
10 on the first drive of the game was caught. I guess he needs to be that way so they will be that way.
In other words, do what they've been doing since last September. There is no mystery in how the 49ers can, will, must, try to defeat any and all opponents. And you know what? More often than not it works.
Monday, January 23, 2012
The Ghosts Have Company Now
Sneak Preview of The Elder Scrolls VI: K'andl'stikk (look, I need the laugh right now)
To be a San Francisco 49er fan is to live in the past. Even this season, the first time in ten that living in the now has been worthwhile, and even kinda fun. But the past is sacrosanct. What the 49ers used to be is the cherished memory of this fan base, and the envy of all others [well, maybe not Pittsburgh and Dallas; they're pretty even]. So every fleeting success of the modern edition of the 49ers is invariably measured against 49er history, because they seem to exist concurrently. Even as Vernon Davis made his game winning catch against New Orleans last week, in the same north end zone of the same old relic that is Candlestick Park, running virtually the same route as Terrell Owens ran to beat Green Bay 13 years ago, a 49er fan could immediately see the phantom of Owens, running alongside him, grabbing the ball and taking the hit at the goal line at the same moment as Davis did, and Joe Starkey's radio call which consisted of him screaming OWENS! OWENS! OWENS! over and over again drowned out the FOX broadcasters of today (a blessing in its own right). And, as was proven yesterday, even the heartbreaking losses seem to be but echoes of what has come before.
Last Friday, January 20th, was 21 years to the exact day that the 49ers' bid for a Super Bowl Three-Peat fell agonizingly short. The Scene? Candlestick Park. The Game? NFC Championship. The Opponent? The New York Giants. The defeat? Roger Craig made a costly and uncharacteristic fumble late in a close game, which the Giants parlayed into a field goal that won the game. As a little kid, innocent of real problems in the world and knowing no worse cruelty than seeing a favorite sports team that happens to be the best team in its sport that you've come to expect to see win and depend on winning, losing, I cried. That loss felt apocalyptic, even in the moment. It got worse when the Giants went on to win the Super Bowl that year. It got worse again in the months to come, when Roger Craig and Ronnie Lott were not retained, making that loss their last game in a 49er uniform. It was also effectively Joe Montana's last game as a 49er, too; the injury he sustained at the hands of Leonard Marshall (may he rot in Hell next to Hitler, Tim MacVeigh, and the guy who invented telemarketing) caused St. Joe to miss all of 1991, forcing the team to commit to go forward with the younger Steve Young as QB. Montana would get one swan song at home in the 2nd half of the season finale, mopping up against a beaten Detroit Lions team in 1992. He would throw his final TD pass as a 49er to the otherwise unmemorable Amp Lee. He would sit unsummoned on the bench as they lost another NFC championship game, this time to Dallas, my pleading for him to enter the game and save the day, future be damned, may as well have been silent. He would be traded in April of 1993. I've forgotten who they got in return and I don't even care, anyway.
So really, yesterday could've been a lot worse. This year's 49er team was a pleasant surprise, an endearing overachiever that put a finger in the eye and a knee in the scrotum of nouveau football fans everywhere, who have no true soul-bond with any team but draw their knowledge of the sport from FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY and from fantasy football, who follow stats without understanding their deeper significance, and who wanted to watch Drew Brees play 60 minutes of pinball with Aaron Rodgers and put up a basketball score. The 49ers took that away from those people, and then lost narrowly to their co-conspirator New York the following week. This was not a shocking upset of a juggernaut, and it certainly wasn't the doomsday end of a dynasty. Still, I almost have to laugh at the absurdity of how yesterday's game played out. It was a conference championship game, at home, against the Giants, and it was lost on a fumble that led directly to a field goal. Kyle Williams is not as beloved as Roger Craig, and most likely never will be now, but now they will sit together on the ghost-bench that occupies the same space as the now empty real bench on Candlestick's home sideline. Roger possibly even has a consoling hand on his shoulder, reminding him to buck up, and at least he'll get a chance at redemption next season and that fumble won't be the last thing he did in the uniform (at least, it shouldn't be. Dire as his failures as backup Punt Returner may be, they truly can't afford to lose him as a wide receiver, as they are comically thin at the position and he's the one wideout who actually holds onto the ball consistently when its thrown at him).
Just not when its kicked to him, apparently.
21 years later, I'm a grown-ass man (mostly) and I'm not going to cry over a football game when there's real shit like taxes and death and debt and jobs that are underpaid and psychically unfulfilling. Not to mention the creeping corporatization of everything in America that threatens all our souls (in which the NFL is not only complicit but integral). Hell, I don't even hate this Giants team. There's no LT, or Leonard Marshall, or Bill Parcells, or any real villain worthy of contempt. There's just the Cruz kid who likes to salsa dance in the endzone and he's kinda fun to watch. And the good quarterback who plays well yet is forever overshadowed by someone who has QBed before him -- his older brother, in this case -- and really, we can sympathize with a guy like that. Once again, Then exists alongside Now and its hard not to see a sliver of Steve Young and what we 49er fans put him through even AFTER he finally won a Super Bowl. Besides, New York's opponent will once again be New England, Quarterbacked by a man born and raised in 49er Country who threatens a 4th Super Bowl ring, and to thus invariably draw comparisons to St. Joe, and with a 4th they'll start casting him as an equal. Some heretics will even start calling him better. The Giants only beat 49er present; the Patriots threaten to tie 49er Past and thus they must be destroyed. Kinda ironic to have to lean on the Giants as indirect defenders of that legacy -- again -- but there it is.
So, onto the goat, Kyle Williams. Predictably, 49er fans are pissed at the convenient scapegoat, and pinning the loss on him. He made the fatal fumble on a punt return, after all. He also caused momentum to shift the Giants way by muffing an earlier punt because he didn't think to get way the fuck away from a bouncing ball that he had already decided not to try and catch. He nearly coughed up the ball two other times, once was again as a punt returner as he made an ill-advised dive to catch one. Again, as WR, on a double reverse attempt that was pitched (poorly) by Kendal Hunter, although Williams deserves some props for wrestling that one away at the bottom of a scrum and preserving it. Williams also only had 1 catch for 4 yards that was wiped out when the 49ers opted to accept the Illegal Contact penalty called on the play and thus get one more yard. All in all, a shitty day for Kyle.
My Exact Thoughts Were: "Poor Kyle 'you stupid motherfucker!' Williams."
But its not his fault, really. Williams as Punt Returner has been a misadventure for a couple of months. He should not have been back there. Coach Jim Harbaugh, who otherwise has done a tremendous and un-reproachable job this season, can count this as his one failing. Williams had a muff against Pittsburgh that could've done to that game what it did to yesterday's, except the referee ruled he hadn't touched the ball (and there were 49ers in the area who fell on the ball just in case) even though again, Williams was wandering way too close to a ball he was letting bounce. He got injured and missed a game returning a kickoff against Seattle, and losing him as a WR hampered the already-challenged 49er passing game even further. Dude is star-crossed when it comes to returns, and he's the back-up to Ted Ginn anyway. Harbaugh and his Special Teams assistant should not have been married to keeping Williams back there, they ignored his struggles at their own peril, and that peril came at last. Kendal Hunter filled in when Williams got hurt. Delanie Walker was the return man under Singletary. Either of these guys could've gone into the game and while they wouldn't have gotten far with the ball, past performance suggests they'd have held on to it better than Kyle. Kyle's more valuable as a receiver, anyway. Hopefully next year they have him focus exclusively on doing that. Don't put him back their on punts anymore and for God's sake don't heed the idiots calling up sports talk demanding his release.
His internal monologue of "put me back to return punts, shiiit, I ain't doin nothing else
anyway and at least I can hold on to the damn ball."
11 out of the 12 best teams in the NFL have a shitty end to their season. Today the 49ers are merely one of them, sitting alongside Houston, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Green Bay, which is pretty good company all things considered. "How Far Have They Come?" and "How Far Do They Still Have To Go?" We have all off-season to answer.
Friday, January 13, 2012
A Referendum On Defense
MISTER PATRICK WILLIS was a Madden Cover Boy?
Behold the power of WILLIS, for this means he is Curse-Proof.
Sadly, this is not nearly the same as Brees-Proof.
Behold the power of WILLIS, for this means he is Curse-Proof.
Sadly, this is not nearly the same as Brees-Proof.
So earlier in the week I made a point of watching college football's championship game. Alabama ended up winning 21-0. It was an unusual 21, too; 5 field goals (out of 7) and a missed extra point very late in the game when the outcome was essentially decided and Alabama's running back finally scored an actual touchdown. The Tide strung a lot of good drives together, but they all ended up bogging down in or near the red zone; meanwhile their defense absolutely smothered LSU's offense and made all those field goals stand up [although, admittedly, LSU's QB had an atrocious game and their offensive play selection couldn't have been worse and less imaginative even if you consciously attempted to make it so].
Or in other words, it was the same game I've been watching throughout the second half of the 49ers' 2011 season. I inevitably started pulling for Alabama, with their familiar dominance of field position and time of position, their ineffective short yardage offense, their settling for repeated field goal tries and somehow making it stand up until the turnovers started happening and the other team finally broke and surrendered a game-cinching TD. Tony Richardson became Frank Gore in my mind's eye.
I couldn't hope but pick up on the similarity, both in the development of the game and the exasperation of play by play broadcaster Brent Musberger sarcastically whining about their not being enough touchdowns/scoring. Because, after all, this is the 21st Century and Professionalism amongst journalists and broadcasters is a relic of America's Ancient Past, languidly haunting the inside of something called a "phone booth" or perhaps the shattered remnants of a horse and buggy.
It's bad enough when we as Americans bitch about the world's game, football (i.e. soccer), being boring because there aren't enough goals scored. But now, after a couple decades of us playing Fantasy Football, being able to bet over/under in a Gambling Book, and playing the Madden NFL video game franchise, and the NFL attempting to coddle and placate this new market by re-writing its rule book year after year to make the game more conducive to high scoring shootouts that more closely resemble the video game world, here we are, now bitching about our own mutant strain of football being not "exciting" enough because the score totals aren't quite as ballooned as basketball yet.
But that's where we are. 2011, where "taking steps to promote player safety" is merely another fancy way of saying "neuter the defense". If you throw deep balls trying to draw pass interference as a means of moving the ball down the field, you will be rewarded. Holding is almost as decriminalized as marijuana. And casting an unpleasant gaze in the Quarterback's general direction is a 15 yard penalty also subject to later fines and suspensions. Hit a QB high? That's a flaggin'. Hit him low? Flaggin'. Hit him late? Flaggin'. Hit him on time, in the middle of his body, but momentum and gravity carry you through and as you both fall to the turf, you land directly on top of him, and he's thus a little slow to get up? That's a flaggin' too. What's a Pass Rusher to do? Why, be worried about penalties and fines so he'll hesitate a little bit, be a little less effective, and the glorious Offense Show will be unimpeded by those pesky defensive players trying to muck things up with this "competitive balance" bullshit. Since, after all, nothing neuters a pass-heavy offense quite like a dominant pass rush. Go watch Super Bowl 42 again if you need a visual aid of this principle.
[Somewhere Roger Goodell and David Stern are at some degenerate billionaire resort, giving each other handjobs, all the while Stern is reassuring Goodell in a breathy voice that the increased score totals are good, and he loves the way the rules/protection is different for star individual players than the rest of the grunts, and that "you're almost there, Rog!"]
All year long, the passing record book has been getting re-written. Dan Marino's ballyhooed single season passing yard record stood for 27 years. This year THREE QB's eclipsed it. And one of them didn't even make the Pro Bowl roster, think about THAT. Madden fans and Fantasy players are loving this year. The three top teams in terms of power rankings are Green Bay, New England, and New Orleans. All of them have high scoring pass heavy offenses (2 of the 3 Marino Record-Breakers), and all three have forgettable defenses. Green Bay's has often looked bad and the Patriots almost seem indifferent to the concept of playing defense; they have a 3rd string Wide Receiver playing CB, for instance. It hasn't mattered, because they all score TDs seemingly at will.
Thus, sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb at the top of the NFL power rankings, trailing just behind those teams, are the lower scoring, defense-led San Francisco 49ers. The Saints average 40+ points a home game. The 49ers only scored above 30 three times; once against a shitty team, once against another shitty team and they needed to resort to a fake field goal to do it, and once against a mediocre team and they needed two special teams return TDs to do it. The 49ers take the antiquated approach to football success; they use a run-heavy offense to control the ball and the clock, taking occasional shots downfield (that fail half the time). They kick a lot of field goals. Their kicker and their punter consistently bury the other team's offense in shitty starting field position and force them to go 90 yards to score over and over again, knowing that a team can do that once or twice, but not repeatedly. The odds are the other offense will make an eventual mistake when trying to cover all that territory. That mistake becomes a turnover and a short field for the 49ers, and thus they dominate the field position battle against opponents as well. The offense needs only be pretty good, not great, when it only has to go 30 yards (or less) to score.
So a long snapper, a punter, a place kicker, and a kick returner walk into a ring of honor...It's the style that all the rules changes are all but legislating out of the pro game. It is also anathema to folks whose football "expertise" comes from following stats for fantasy football or from playing the Madden franchise. There is no blocking or tackling in Fantasy Football. There are no offensive linemen. There is no field position, or time of possession. There are no gunners or long snappers. There is no punting and there are no punters. The 49ers thrive on these things (well, not the offensive line so much), and they make no sense to the fantasy player. A team that wins this way boggles their mind. [Come to think of it, the Broncos squeak their way into more wins than anyone expected them to get much the same alien way; Matt Praeter hits 50 yard FGs as easily as most of us piss into a toilet bowl and Von Miller wrecks QBs on defense. Of course this crowd has no other explanation for their results than ascribing magic Jesus powers to Tim Tebow!]
It is boring. It is frustrating even for fans of the team. It will cause much petulant whining from the Tony Kornheiser's of the world and the dittoheads that quote them on the internet, smugly complaining about how its a "ratings disaster" whenever the pre-ordained marketing friendly teams don't make it to the championship game. Most of the time they're just trying to cover for their own disappointment as fans and trying to pass it off as objectively bad for the game when their team fails, but it's still annoying as hell when people treat this like a valid complaint. Especially in football, since the Super Bowl is ridiculously popular and has proven time and again that this country will basically as a whole stop to watch it regardless of the teams involved. Fuck those people. Go watch pro wrestling if you want to make sure the championship is always contested between the top ratings draws without any of that pesky real world randomness and legit competition ruining the storyline for you.
But, in regards to the 49ers Defense & Field Position approach, the question "Does This Shit Still Work?" still waits to be answered. The 49ers' Defense hasn't faced an offense on par with New Orleans (there's almost no such thing). The Saints haven't faced a defense as good as what the 49ers have. The old football axiom was "Offense Wins Games, but Defense Wins Championships." It seems to be on trial, in a way, this weekend. Counsel for the prosecution: New Orleans, and Drew Brees, Esq. Presenting the case in defense of... well, defense... will be the 49ers. It is not the ideal test case, since the Saints will not be playing their ideal Dome element, instead in the wonderfully shitty mire that is Candlestick Park, with its below-sea-level playing field. [Note: the weather outside is nice. Bright and sunny and few clouds in the Bay Area. DAMN IT. Break out the fucking hoses and spray that turf down until its yellow and brown. Not one blade of green remaining.] The 49ers, for their part, are in Uncharted Territory: this is the franchise's first playoff game in NINE YEARS, which means its the first taste of postseason pressure for virtually the entire roster, particularly the key players like Vernon Davis, Frank Gore, MISTERS PATRICK WILLIS AND NAVORRO BOWMAN, Dashon Goldson and Carlos Rogers, and arguably most key of all, embattled Alex Smith. It would not be unheard of for the 49ers to be nervous and choke on the pressure of the big stage. They could vomit all over themselves and Alex could play like he did in the first 6 seasons of his career. But, assuming (hoping) they don't, and likewise assuming no flukes of luck in the other direction, like a last second monsoon or a freak injury to Drew Brees, we could have a litmus test on whether Defense Wins Championships still applies in the modern NFL. There is nothing to suggest the 49ers are capable of out-gunning the Saints in the way some thought Detroit might be able to. If the 49ers win this game, it will be because a great defense CAN cripple a great offense, still. 26-21 would probably be the score; field goals at least coming after long, tedious, time-devouring drives that keep Drew Brees on the side line. A couple turnovers turned into the touchdowns. Long fields increasing the chances of a sack, or a bad throw, that kills New Orleans drives. Not all of them, but enough of them. If, however, this team build is invalid, and Offense now Wins Championships, the 49ers can't win; this IS the end of the fun part of the season, where they run into a team they can't score enough to beat, and the glee of "look how far they've come" turns to the bile of "look how far they still have to go".
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