Superbowl

Lest anyone have any doubts or be at all unclear about exactly what the problem is in Philadelphia with Eagles coach Andy Reid, one has only to look at this past weekend's superbowl to have it all clearly laid out. Unlike Giants' coach Tom Coughlin -- make that two-time Superbowl winning Giants' coach Tom Coughlin -- Andy Reid could never be a part of what the Giants just did, not only once, but twice within the span of five years. Andy Reid sleeps well at night knowing that he has won what, five NFC Easts in 12 years as Eagles head man, but he is simply unable to lead his team on a post-season run like we have been treated to watching Tom Coughlin do twice in very recent memory. And I dare say that Reid has had more talent come through the halls of the Linc over the past half a decade than Coughlin has had in New Jerseyork.

You want to know what we Philadelphians want, if "all" of Andy Reid's success here in Philly just isn't enough? I wish I had Tom Coughlin as my coach. Period. Sure, we would have to deal with the late-season collapses, and the disciplinary issues, and the too-tough mentality, etc. But Andy Reid gets all the complaints anyways, thanks to his consistently embarrassing defense, his highly questionable assistant coaching decisions, his ineptitude on game-day and countless other very noticeable weaknesses, all of which seem to be magnified with the bigger the game is, again the total opposite of Tom Coughlin and the Giants.

But enough about the Eagles. Let's talk about them Cheatriots. Another good showing, huh? It really is amazing how mediocre this team looks in big games when they don't know every single play the opposition is going to run, one after the next after the next. It really is amazing. And despite what many New Englanders out there will be screaming from the rooftops all this week ever since about 10pm local time on Sunday night, make no mistake about it: the Cheatriots needed this win. They needed it. They still need it. This team absolutely, positively needs to win another superbowl, to show the world that they actually have it in them to win one when they play by the rules. Right now, the legacy of the Cheatriots is more than merely questionable. That legacy is in downright mutiny right now. These guys won three superbowls in four years, each one by merely a field goal, and it turns out after the fact that they knew every single play their opponents were running all game long. And they were only winning by field goals? Now, since getting caught cheating and being forced to play by the same rules as everyone else does in their big games, the Cheatriots have found their way to two more superbowls -- both of which they were favored in, as they were playing each year a Giants squad that had had by all rights not nearly as good of a regular season as the Cheatriots had. For crying out loud, this year's Giants team became the first team in NFL history to win a superbowl after going just 9-7 in the regular season. Said another way, this Giants squad was the worst team ever to win a superbowl in the NFL. And what did the Cheatriots do against them when it all mattered most, after Gisele had sent her email and gotten everyone close to her to pray for her man to win his fourth championship?

Absolutely nothing. Yes, Tom Brady led his Cheatriots on an awesome, long drive to end the first half with a touchdown, and another similar drive to start the second half with another score and build his team an 8-point lead early in the third quarter. But take those just two drives away, and the vaunted Cheatiots offense didn't do shiat in this game. I mean, look at the facts -- the Cheats scored just 17 points total in the entire game, after scoring just 20 points when the two teams matched up earlier this season in Week 9 (and only 14 points in the 2007-2008 superbowl). The Cheats just did not click well on offense in the Superbowl, and in general they simply cannot do and have not done much in general against the Giants, one of the few good teams the Cheatriots played all this year.

Unlike the Eli Manning of old, Eli stepped up big time in this superbowl as he looked every bit the part of grizzled, consistent veteran. If you watched the game then you know that Eli didn't get rattled once, not even a little bit, and it was in fact Tom Brady and not Eli who threw the one dumb, off-balance, back-foot pass of the night, leading to an interception on a crucial drive where the Cheats needed to score to get the game back in control. But make no mistake about it -- and I don't care about dropped passes, liberal intentional grounding calls, as none of that changes this conclusion -- but Eli Manning outplayed Tom Brady in this superbowl, plain and simple. In fact, he did so twice this year. And if you watch this game, then you know that the game simply wasn't nearly as close as the score would indicate. The Giants utterly dominated in the first half, somehow going into the locker room with a 1-point deficit despite having held the ball nearly twice as long as the Cheatriots did during the first half of play. And then in the second half, Brady started off with that beautiful long scoring drive to put his team up 17-9 in the game, but after that point, Brady didn't have one highlight in the rest of the game, and the New England defense simply could not stop Eli Manning and the Giants backs and receivers from more or less moving up and down the field at will.

So there it is in a nutshell. The Cheatriots cheated for years and even then were only barely able to squeak out wins in their biggest games some years ago. Nowadays with their ability to steal their opponents' every play taken away from them, the Cheats are still obviously a good team, full of players with much talent on the offense. But the loss of guys like Teddy Bruschi, Willie McGinest, Mike Vrabel, Ty Law, Rodney Harrison, Asante Samuel, Richard Seymour and others have left this team with what can barely even be called a defense, and while knowing every play ahead of time might have been enough to make them look passable on Sunday, having to face every play without foreknowledge showed the Cheatriots for what they really are:

A second-rate team, in a second-rate conference, with a hideous excuse for a defense, and an offense with a number of strong pieces but one that simply did not -- and does not any longer -- get it done in the biggest of spots. It's pretty obvious at this point that the teams the Cheatriots beat in the superbowl in the early 2000s deserve restitution. February 3, 2002: New England 20, St. Louis 17. That Rams team was obviously far better than the Cheatriots, when you consider that the Cheats were observed filming the Rams' signs during the pregame walkthrough, tapes which NFL Commissioner Roger Gooddell immediately destroyed rather than admit specifically what the Cheatriots had stolen from the Rams. As far as I'm concerned, that 3-point win for the Cheats is more like a two-touchdown loss to a clearly better team, and the Rams should be recognized as having won two superbowls in three years with The Greatest Show on Turf. February 1, 2004 New England 32, Carolina 29. Here is another 3-point victory against a team with a superior defense and a thought-to-be inferior offense, but who surely would beaten the Cheatriots in a fair fight. And then of course there was February 6, 2005 New England 24, Philadelphia 21. Still another mere field goal margin of victory against a team that was obviously better than them, with the Cheats once again using foreknowledge of every single play run to build up a lead that the Eagles just ran out of time trying to come back from. Take the cheating out of that game, and one can only assume that the superior Eagles squad from that year would have overcome their coach's inability to prepare for game day to put in a double-digit victory and Philadelphia's only superbowl.

At 59 years old, Bill Belicheat still has the opportunity to coach a great many more years, even going to another team or starting over with a whole new nucleus of players, if he sees fit. But I got news for you, Cheatriots fans -- the window on the career of Tom Brady is almost all the way shut after this past weekend's debacle. Although the AFC is as weak as it's been in years, and there may not be any team in the Cheats' conference that is as good as the Packers, the Saints or the Giants over the next several years, the odds of this Cheatriots squad finding their way back to the superbowl are seeming slim to none in my eyes. And, like mostly everyone else out there living west of Route 91 in Connecticut, the thought of that good riddance of unscrupulous, conniving cheaters from the upper ranks of the NFL is enough to make almost all of us smile.

I'll always hate the Giants with nearly every fiber of my being, but it is clear as day that the right team won on Sunday. Congratulations to the 2011-2012 New York Giants, the only true champions to play in the superbowl this year.

The Fix Was In

Man it is good seeing the Chiefs find a way to pull that game out of their asses on Monday night against the Chargers. I mean, I'm no kind of Chiefs fan, although I'll freely admit that I have no clue why there is so much animosity and lack of faith in relatively new head coach Todd Haley there, with whom I think the inescapable conclusion is that he has done a pretty damn good job with what I would not consider to be a plethora of talent or anything. But the reason I was so happy to see the Chiefs take that game down was not at all because I like the Chiefs.

It's because I like fucking fairness.

Did you watch that game? Let's see. First, the Chiefs guy intercepts Philip Rivers for the first of what, 15 times on the night, there in the first quarter? He makes a small return, gets tackled from behind, and after sitting squarely on the ground for a few seconds, taking some time to shave, say his daily prayers, and have a convo or two on his cell phone, the ball finally gets stripped out of his hands. Of course the refs ruled him down by contact on the field -- because it wasn't even close -- but then Norv Turner, raging idiot that he is, decides to challenge the ruling on the field even though there isn't any possible way in shit that any single human being could ever rule that a fumble. I mean, don't assholes like Norv have a guy sitting up in the booth somewhere, with access to the replay, a DVR, something? Just somebody who can tell him, "Don't waste your time, you boob, that play wasn't even fucking close to a fumble, you'll just look like a horse's ass if you waste a timeout challenging that very clear tackle." Is it possible that they don't?

So while the network takes a commercial break, both before and after the break they're showing the replay, and even the dickhead announcers -- who generally speaking interpret what they see incorrectly in terms of missed calls at least 66% of the time, much to the fans' enragement -- had already dismissed this as the worst challenge ever, that even if the call on the field had been a fumble, you would have to reverse it based on this very, very, plainly obvious replay. And then of course what happens, since this is the NFL, Roger Goodell's minions the refs walk out from under "the box" and announce that the call on the field is being reversed, it's a fumble and the ball goes back to the Chargers, instead of to the Chiefs who already had a 7-0 lead and would have been very close to making it 14-0 in gaining possession there deep in Chargers territory. It was without a doubt the single worst blown replay call I can ever recall -- and this is the NFL, where there are inexplicably obvious missed calls with a regularity greater than my daily bowel movements, and to think that anybody on the fucking earth had seen the clear and convincing evidence needed to overturn the call on the field, there are just no words, and just like that, boom the NFL darling Chargers were gifted pretty much a 10-point swing in the score early on.

But it didn't stop there. Later in the second quarter, Chief's quarterback Matt Cassel is hit as he goes to throw the ball, and this time the call on the field is that he threw an incomplete pass, that his arm was just starting to move forward when he got hit and lost the ball, so thus not a fumble and thus it is still Chiefs ball (the Chargers had picked up the incompletion on the field). The Chargers challenge again -- they shouldn't even have had another challenge to call there, but thanks to the early blowjob for the Chargers, they still had that challenge left in the first half -- and this time, lo and behold, this time the moron refs saw clear and convincing evidence needed to overturn and -- shocker of shockers -- give the ball back to the Chargers. Again. Personally, unlike the first fumble play which was the worst call I've ever seen in any professional sport in the history of mankind, this one was very close, and I could have seen it going either way. Give me an unbiased, even choice and I would probably have called it in an incompletion, but his arm was very close to either about to start moving forward or just started moving forward, and I can handle that call going either way. But what there clear evidence to overturn there? Not on your shitkicking life there was not. But hey, the decision got the easily-sellable Chargers offense the ball again, so Roger Goodell got to keep his boner for another few minutes there and that's all that matters.

Fast forward to the second half, as the game is really coming down to the wire, and the Chargers have to score two late touchdowns, including a 2-point conversion on one of them, just to tie the game up at the end, and first the refs award a touchdown to the Chargers after reviewing a play where the Charger player basically got the ball just barely over the end line before having it stripped out of his hands for a fumble that would have -- for the third or fourth time on the night now -- all but won the game for the Chiefs. On that one I tend to agree with the call that it was a Chargers touchdown, but lord knows I've seen that call go the opposite way at least 5000 times over the past five years in the NFL. And then came yet another stunning F-off to the Chiefs, when the Chargers player attempts to run in the 2-point conversion after catching a pass around the 2 yard line, where he was nailed by a fabulous defensive play by the Chiefs' gritty defense, and the fucking refs motherfucking again awarded the Chargers the score -- a crucial score to tie up the game with just a few minutes left to play -- based on a replay that maybe, possibly just showed the nose of the ball accidentally graze the plane of the end line as the receiver was unthinkably running sideways instead of just trying to punch it in there. I mean, this Chargers guy did everything in his power to give the refs a reason not to award him a touchdown, and I still cannot believe as I look at the replay that the Chargers got that call in their favor as well, but they did.

Suddenly it is 20-20, and after a short possession by the Chiefs, the Chargers march down the field, and they're just lining up on the Chiefs' 16-yard line when Rivers unimaginably muffs the snap, and the Chiefs clearly recover the fumble. I could just picture Goodell's tiny little limpy dick shriveling up like a prune when it happened too, because there was simply no fucking way they could find to award that ball back to the Chargers. And I'm sure they tried to, too, don't get me wrong. I bet you Goodell had every guy he knows rifling through the rulebook to try to find some reason why a fumbled snap by the road team in a tie game does not lead to a change in possession if in the final minute of a regular season game, you name it, the stupider and less substantiable the better. But they couldn't, and we went to overtime, where the Chiefs won it in "amazing comeback" fashion.

The only thing amazing about the Chiefs win last night is how badly they outplayed the Chargers from the first whistle to the last, and yet how close the game was because, if the referees are willing to be big enough assholes, it can be almost impossible to overcome a fix like the one that was clearly in last night.

Go ahead, I dare anyone reading this to tell me in the comments that I am mischaracterizing what happened with the calls last night. The first person to comment that I am mischaracterizing what happened has no penis. Sure I've included some factual inaccuracies in this post to give the tinydicks something to complain about in the comments, but I triple dog dare anyone out there to tell me the Chargers did not get the most ridiculous dicksucking treatment by the refs last night anywhere this side of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Fuck you, Roger Goodell. Karma's a bitch, ain't it, you piece of shit.

NCAA Football Wrap-Up

So about the national championship game last night...Wait, was there even a national championship game last night? And if so, Who cares?!

Yes, that's right, the fools in charge of the NCAA had the brilliant brainstorm to wait until one day after the wildcard round of the playoffs in the NFL to hold their title game this season. Did you know anyone who was really looking forward to seeing this game last night? Me neither. I'm much more interested in football, college basketball, hot stove baseball or basically almost anything else more than the national BCS championship game, and it seems that millions of others out there are just like me. Nowadays, it feels like every sport is just pushing its championship later and later and later, extending their season longer and longer and longer, all ultimately in the chase for the almighty dollar, and I have to admit it's nice to see these decisions backfire on the sports once in a while. Concluding the NBA Finals when everyone is away at the beach for the Independence Day holiday? Check. Playing the World Series in a November snowstorm in the Northeast? Awesome. And now delaying the NCAA national championship game so long this year that everybody even forgets that college football is still going on anymore? You betcha!

And I would be remiss if I did not mention here the other big story with the 2010-2011 college football season. Just a couple of months after embarrassingly having to vacate the Heisman Trophy award won some years ago by Reggie Bush after he violated every rule in the book back in his USC days, the league recently awarded its Heisman Trophy for this year to Auburn quarterback Cam Newton, who not only likely did accept money to attend Auburn over another NCAA school, but whose father publicly broadcasted before the fact that his son would be attending school at whichever institution paid him the most money. Sure, sure, nothing has been proven. Yet. But of course it will be. You think something like this, an explicit and public violation of every rule in the NCAA recruiting rulebook, won't have someone come out and talk about it once the furor from this season has died down? Don't be naive. The NCAA and the Heisman people might have been able to buy that silence for a couple of months here just long enough to award the trophy to the cheating dickhead and then watch him win the national title -- which is exactly what the Heisman people would love to see happen every single year if they could choose it -- but to think that the truth won't come out about just how guilty the Newtons are in all of this is the silliest thing I've ever heard.

The Heisman Trophy is officially dead. The voters, the committee, they had their chance this year to do the right thing. But instead, they decided to chase the money and the glory of crowning the kid who is obviously the best player in the country, the kid who was obviously on his way to winning Auburn its first national title in 53 years -- a feat which he completed on Monday night -- and the kid who pretty clearly has the skills and the raw materials go on to great things an an NFL quarterback. And even worse, the NCAA allowing Cam Newton to retain his eligibility a couple of months back on the excuse that it was allegedly his father who trumpeted this "play-for-pay" scheme before Newton opted to enroll at Auburn, and not the player himself? Congratulations, NCAA, you just created the widest, most obvious and totally foreseeable loophole in the history of collegiate sports, and it's one that you're now going to be struggling with for many, many years to come.

"I didn't do it! It was my mom who sent that solicitation for illegal benefits!"

"Hey, don't blame me. My agent's the one who demanded that money. I had no idea!"

"Well, I'm not the one who tried to throw that game. It was that booster who offered me the money."

Sheer brilliance. I give it less than a year, and Cam Newton's Heisman Trophy will be vacated just like Reggie Bush's was earlier in 2010.

End of the Road

So, the baseball season has come to an end for my beloved Philadelphia Phillies. What can I say really....The 2010 NLCS was a case study in the old adage that great pitching prevails over great hitting in the playoffs. Without really dominating in any of the games, the Giants quietly went out and took two of three in Philadelphia, and two of three in San Francisco to return to their first world series since Barry Bonds led them there back in 2002. The pitching was pretty much stellar, with only Jonathan Sanchez getting slammed up hard by the team, and Bruce Bochy's coaching is highly underrated in my view as he managed to find a way to take a team that does not run the bases well, does not steal bases at all, and really has very little offense to speak of, and eke out three out of four wins in one-run games against the team that led the entire major leagues this year in record in one-run games. In a lot of ways, the Giants did to the Phillies this year what the Phillies have done to the Dodgers in the past two NLCS's. Where in the recent past it was Jimmy Rollins leading the time to the amazing 9th-inning walkoff rally, this year in the key Game 4 it was the Giants finding a way to hammer out a run off of Phillies' starting pitcher Roy Oswalt in a rare bullpen appearance.

While the above made the NLCS painful for me to watch in a lot of ways, nonetheless I will confess that I am left with the feeling that the Phillies are still the class of the National League. The Giants' lineup is a joke for a World Series team, and it is quite obvious that they live and die by their pitching staff alone. I mean, if not for Cody Ross -- he of the three regular season home runs and 18 rbis all year -- going absolutely bananas out of nowhere in this series, the Giants would not have scored more than 8 or 9 runs in the 6 game series, and they would not have had a chance even with the Phillies' bats slumping as they did in the series. Ryan Howard struck out 12 times in the NLCS, and had a mind-boggling zero home runs and zero RBIs in the entire series after recording 17 rbis in the 2009 NLCS. Chase Utley, another of the most clutch bats in the postseason over the past four years, was pretty much worthless at the plate in this series. Several times in the series, Carlos Ruiz and Shane Victorino came to the plate with runners in scoring position or even with the bases loaded, and they failed to come through in the clutch as they have so many times in the recent past. Now to be sure, a lot of this is directly related to the incredible, historic strength of the Giants' starting rotation as I wrote about before this series began. But the Phillies deserve a whole lot of the credit for sucking up the joint in this series, be it at bat, or in the field where they made several uncharacteristic errors from guys like Rollins, Howard, Utley and Victorino -- all basically gold glove-worthy fielders in their own right -- including single-handedly committing three errors in the field in the third inning of the decisive Game 6 to let in both of the runs given up by Roy Oswalt on the day The official records say Oswalt's strong performance was one ER in six innings, but it was clearly zero if you know your ass from first base about scoring a baseball hit.

Anyways, try as I might -- and I freely recognize that this may just be the Philly boy in me shining through -- I just can't shake the feeling that while we might very well be looking at the best pitching staff in the last few generations, we're just not looking at the best team in the NL here in the upcoming World Series. Unlike the ALCS, where I would say it was painfully obvious that the Rangers are in fact the superior team over the overmatched Yankees. I mean, for all the talk of how Cliff Lee has the Yankees' number, and how much of an advantage that gives Texas in a four-game series, the guy pitched exactly one time in the ALCS. Yes, he won his start and utterly shut down the Yanks in Game 3, but the guy barely had a hand in any of the actual games. And those games for the most part were not close. The Rangers thrashed the Yankees in this series. As I heard a caller say on sports radio sometime today, this was a 6-game series that felt an awful lot like a sweep. The Rangers are superior, they were far superior at both hitting and pitching than the Yankees, they made the Yanks look old, and ultimately the Bronx Bombers never had a chance in this series, an outcome which in the end just didn't surprise me much at all.

One thing I will say about the 2010 World Series -- this is yet another victory for the little guy, for the small market team that is not the Yankees, Red Sox, Phillies or Mets. Despite all the talk heading into the LCS series, in the end it was not the top-5 payroll Phils or the sick-spending Yankees prevailing to face off in the sport's biggest stage. Instead, we're looking at Texas and San Francisco, not exactly small market teams, but not close to the big spenders on the top end of the spectrum in the major leagues. The Giants' opening day 2010 payroll stood at $97.8 million, good for 10th out of 30 teams in the majors, while the Rangers' team payroll was a paltry $55.2 mil, placing them in 27th out of 30 teams in terms of money spent on their players. So while the Yankees and the Phillies continue to show that money can generally buy some modicum of success over a 162-game regular season, once again baseball has two relatively new and rare participants in the Fall Classic, including the first-ever franchise appearance for a Rangers team that looks to be on a major roll heading into the final series of the season.

Before I go, I would be remiss if I did not mention that fuckass referee in the Packers - Vikings game on Sunday night in NBC, as that dickwad stood right there on national, prime time weekend television and just plain decided to give Brett Favre another come from behind victory by calling Percy Harvin in-bounds on the field with just 48 seconds left in what was at the time a 4-point Packer lead. I mean, this muthafucker is paid to be an NFL referee -- getting these calls right is his whole job -- and this jackfuck stood right there, not two feet away from where the catch occurred, in perfect position, looking right at the play right down on the ground, and called Harvin in bounds. This despite Harvin not being touched or pushed on his way up, and even though Harvin actually got not two, not one, but zero feet in-bounds. Go watch the play if you care to, but I mean this guy's first foot landed mostly in-bounds but on review his heel was clearly touching the out-of-bounds line at the back of the end zone. Then the second foot landed, with the entire foot well onto the white line, so much so that you could even see the white outline in front of the foot because literally the entire foot was that far out of bounds. And then the body landed, also hopelessly on the white well past the back of the end zone. And yet that fucksniffing referee still just up and decided to make the call on the field a touchdown, making it that much harder for replay to overturn the call and keep Favre from another stunning comeback victory at Lambeau Field. As I've written about several times here on the blog, this trend of sports officials interjecting themselves into the game and making sure that they actually affect the outcome instead of just shutting up, sitting back and calling the game correctly. The bottom line is, that referee in Green Bay cannot possibly miss that call from as close as he was and in the perfect position he was in, unless he is predisposed towards taking over the game. That's just the way it is. That referee is an asshole and he should be removed from the game immediately.

OK, /end rant.

Cowboys over the Giants tonight. Tom Coughlin always has a way of surprising you on the downside after a couple of big wins. Bank it.

W T F Criminal Justice System

How the hell did Ben Roethlisberger not get charged with sexual assault?