What I’ve Learned So Far

Because I have been quoted in Sports Illustrated, people — that’s why. Phil Taylor does the honors:

Time to Call a Reverse

Dig it. (My part is at the end.)

The furor over tape delay of events: Overblown.

The mix of pro-American and pro-other-people coverage: seems reasonable to me. (Relevant footnote: Aksel Svindal seems like an amazing person.)

Last night’s obsessive showing of pair after pair in the compulsory segment of the ice dancing competition: unforgivable.

And those are the thoughts I have to share for now.

Who’s with me?

~

Finally some placekickers had a good day in the NFL playoffs. Last night during the Vikings-Saints game, Fox answered my question from last week — “Is it just me, or has the kicking really been that bad?”

The answer: “No, it’s not just you.” During the regular season this year, NFL kickers hit more than 80 percent of all field-goal attempts; to that point in last night’s game (i.e. not including Hartley’s game-winning kick in overtime), kickers had barely broken 55 percent as a group during the playoffs.

Anyway, I picked right for both of the conference title games, and now we have the matchup called “Archie Manning’s Nightmare.” I expect 5,000+ stories on Manning in the next two weeks, and 50+ live shots of him when his son leads the Colts against Archie’s longtime team in Miami.

By the way, my buddy Kyle and I have matched each other round for round — pick for pick, in fact — up to this point in the playoffs.

And now, my Superbowl pick . . . Colts by 3, which would cement Peyton Manning’s historical reputation beyond any doubt.

That said, I’m hoping the Saints will pull it out. Even 4+ years after Katrina, New Orleans still needs all the love it can get.

What’s your pick?
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(Photo by Alysha Jordan, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.)

As you might expect, Joe Posnanski

• beat me to it;
• said it better than I would have; and
• said it longer and in much more detail that I would have.

Read it here. And make sure to pause, think, and think again before you ascribe all of the offensive explosion in baseball in the 1990s and 2000s to performance-enhancing drugs.

Mind you, I haven’t looked at stats to determine if field-goal accuracy really is down across the board this year, but the failures of good placekickers in the current NFL playoffs have been many and awful. The kickers for Cincinatti, Arizona, and, in last night’s excruciating loss, San Diego have all put up brutal showings at the worst possible times for their teams.

Also anecdotally, I feel like I’ve seen more bad kickoffs this year than at any time in my memory. My question to you, O NFL fan:

Is it just me, or has the kicking really been that bad?

On to other things, namely my past and future picks for the NFL playoffs.

• Last week I picked the Saints, Colts, Cowboys, and Chargers, so I went 2-for-4 in the games just completed. This is a fair sight better than my first-round showing of 0-for-4.
• Hoping to continue my upward trajectory, I now pick Saints over Vikings and Colts over Jets for the conference championships.
• I think the Colts are the favorites from here on out. That said, any ultimate winner besides the Colts would be more interesting, in my book, since the other remaining teams have either never won a Superbowl, or haven’t won one in ages and ages.

Who do you like from here on out?

~

(Image source.)

How do I know you care? Because, geez, I can feel your concern all the way over here, people. Maybe if you cared a little less, I could ignore this disturbance on the psychic plane and get some work done, you know?

A-a-anyhoo:

• Saints over Cardinals.
• Colts over Ravens.
• Cowboys over Vikings (upset!).
• Chargers over Jets.

Keep in mind that I went zero-for-four on playoff picks in the weekend just passed, so you should probably just adopt the Costanza Rule here and pick the opposite of what I do.

1. Carroll to the Seahawks: The Pete Principle? — I was prepared to write something snarky about Pete Carroll’s probable move from USC to the Seattle Seahawks, what with the contrast between his stellar record at SC and his mediocre previous run as a pro head coach. But, here’s the thing: I’m too ambivalent. My ambivalence gets bullet points of its own:

• Yeah, Carroll got fired by the Patriots . . . but Pats owner Robert Kraft admits it was the toughest decision of his ownership, and Carroll suffers unduly because he followed one coaching legend (Bill Parcells) and was followed by a man who became a legend in his tenure with the Patriots (Bill Belichick).
• Yeah, Carroll has been a great college coach, rebuilding USC to the pinnacle of glory . . . but there’s talk of NCAA sanctions against that program, which calls into question his tenure there.
• Yeah, Carroll seems like he could be a primadonna . . . but a recent Esquire profile helped me to understand him better for what he is: not just a jock’s jock, but really an Archjock among coaches. I don’t say that in a bad way. I just think it’s important to understand that he’s not primarily a coach-as-teacher (like John Wooden), a coach-as-strategist (Bill Walsh), a coach-as-tough-guy (Parcells), or a coach-as-leader-of-men (Bear Bryant). He’s always been a jock, and he’s still a jock.

One thing that does stink about his impending career move: the Seahaws apparently made a mockery of the Rooney Rule — which requires NFL teams to interview African-American candidates for head-coaching jobs — in rushing ahead with Carroll’s hiring.

On the one hand, I’m not surprised: there are plenty of non-glamorous jobs that require interviews with multiple qualified candidates, even when the folks doing the hiring know all along which person they want to hire. People game those requirements routinely, so it’s not surprising that the Seahawks would pull the same thing.

But maybe, as Johnette Howard suggests in her ESPN column, the Seahawks’ behavior here will move the League (specifically, Commissioner Roger Goodell) to enforce the Rooney Rule much more strictly going forward.

2. So far, I’m batting .000 on my NFL playoff predictions. I thought the Bengals would handle the Jets in Cincinatti; I thought the Cowboys might continue their streak of playoff futility; I assumed the Patriots would show up for their game against the Ravens; and I thought that the Packers would beat Arizona in the desert. But no.

3. Worth its own item: the last play of the Packers-Cardinals epic carnival of scoring came when Cardinals defender Michael Adams forced a fumble by Packer QB Aaron Rodgers. The Cardinals recovered the fumble and ran it the short distance to their end zone, finishing the game and reminding us all that we need a better system for deciding football games than a sudden-death overtime.

Here’s the thing, though: Adams had his hand firmly in Rodgers’ facemask for a few seconds. I don’t think he meant to do it, but it wasn’t just incidental contact.

I’m all for having refs swallow their whistles in the playoffs. Don’t decide contests like this with a flag for a hit that comes a millisecond late, or if the left tackle commits holding on his man by a margin of two inches. But, again, this didn’t look like a borderline call to me.

4. Hall of Fame bloviating. — I said what I meant to say about the current Hall of Fame ballot the other day, but the commentary and the meta-commentary just keeps on flowing.

Tom Gage of the Detroit News opines that Lou Whitaker deserved better than a one-and-done on the Hall of Fame ballot — in 2001. Gage is feeling guilty now because he didn’t vote for Whitaker; since Whitaker didn’t garner at least 5 percent of the 2001 vote, he dropped off the ballot after his first appearance.

He has a point about giving retired players more shots on the ballot. Among those he lists, Ted Simmons and Will Clark would certainly merit more than summary dismissal. But for all our sabermetrics, Simmons, Clark, and Whitaker probably all belong in that big pool of players with Paul O’Neill, Joe Carter, and Joe Torre: hell of a player, played a good long while, . . . but not a Hall of Famer.

On the other end of the vote-getting spectrum, Howard Bryant thinks we need some historical perspective on first-ballot election to the Hall. His basic points are that first-ballot election is historically rare, we shouldn’t expect it for many players, and the past decade has been anomalous in the high number of players elected on their first ballot.

Now as the proud bearer of a graduate education in history, I’m all for historical perspective in anything. But I think the “outrage” that Bryant describes is understandable. Thanks to a variety of advances including careers played entirely on television and a raft of advanced analytical statistics, we are more capable than ever of comparing one player to another.

Using these modern advances — or, hey, just a casual look at the back of his baseball card — it’s excessively, aggressively obvious that Roberto Alomar was a better player than many of those already enshrined in the Hall. How low could you rank him among all second basemen? Fifth, maybe? That’s a clear Hall of Famer. It was clear when he was playing. His numbers have held up. He should be in.

And that’s the point. Yeah, okay, it is interesting to know that Joe DiMaggio and Jimmie Foxx and a bunch of others didn’t get in on the first ballot. But those examples aren’t necessarily telling us that Alomar (or Barry Larkin, or whoever) should wait. They could just as easily be telling us, “Hey, those old Hall voters really screwed up on DiMaggio and Foxx, didn’t they?”

(An aside: I don’t usually read Bryant’s work — not out of any agenda to avoid it, but just because I haven’t made a habit of it — so I can’t comment on his writing as a whole. But the piece I’m citing here had a number of logical howlers in it. When I first read it, I considered a point-by-point enumeration of them, but then figured it wouldn’t be worth my time. Picturing me shrugging here.)

Sure, sometimes a deserving player, for example Bert Blyleven, needs many ballots for voters to come around. But when his case for inclusion or exclusion is obvious, let the outcome be just as obvious. And why beat around the bush about that?

~

Addendum, Monday morning — A Twitter friend pointed me to Peter King’s explanation via Twitter of the facemask non-call in the Cards-Packers game, viz.:

Facemask 1: Why there was no facemask called on the final play, when Adams had his hand on Rodgers’ mask and drove him to the ground:

Facemask 2: The referee, Scott Green, stands behind the pocket and has to watch first for the loose ball. Once the ball is out, Green’s …

Facemask 3: job is to watch ball for possession. He can’t watch the QB then. If he saw the facemask, it’d mean he wasn’t watching ball.

Facemask 4: It’s a quirky rule, but it’s the referee’s call — and the ref is charged with possession once the ball is loose.

Makes sense to me . . . but it still stinks that the game ended that way.
~

Or, more precisely, of its voters.

They elected Andre Dawson, who was a very good player, but who doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame — not quite.

They failed to elect the overqualified Bert Blyleven, again. A tour of the archives reminds me that I’ve been kvetching about this for years. At least he was very close to inclusion this year, and the tea-leaf-readers think he’ll make it in on next year’s ballot.

They failed to elect Tim Raines, one of the smartest players and greatest leadoff men ever to play.

And then they failed to elect the obviously and ridiculously overqualified Roberto Alomar because . . . because . . . I give up.

Anyway, read Joe Posnanski’s detailed explication of his own Hall of Fame voting choices. I agreed with him on everyone but Dale Murphy. And then, if you’re really interested (read: “if you’re my mom”), read Joe’s further blog posts on Blyleven (here, here, and here), Raines (one and two), and the Hall in general (one and two).

First, my own basic reaction when my wife and I stepped out of the theater: “Nice movie.”

I thought that the story of Invictus was worth telling to a wide audience. I thought that Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon did fine work in their roles, and that they had an excellent supporting cast.

But, as Bill Simmons points out in his insightful column on the movie, Invictus ultimately failed as a sports movie because it didn’t put enough meat on the bones to explain why the underdog South African team won the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Along the way, he makes a few more excellent points:

• Director Clint Eastwood made too many assumptions about Americans’ ability to intuit the rules and pacing of rugby — which is, after all, a complicated game.
• Matt Damon is about my size, i.e. 5′10″ and 175 - 185 pounds, and although he clearly bulked up for this role, he just didn’t have the physically imposing presence of Springboks captain Francois Pienaar. Check out this photo of Pienaar shaking hands with Mandela after winning the World Cup to see what I mean. According to his page on the South Africa Rugby site, Pienaar played at 6′3″ and 231 pounds. (My wife asks a relevant question here: is there any big-name actor who could have fit the bill physically?)
• The movie got stuck trying to choose between being a great sports movie and being Significant, and ultimately fell short on both counts.

Simmons’ column — which I encourage you to read — took care of the sports side of Invictus. This item from Racism Review, which I found thanks to a friend from Twitter, addresses the Significant side, and particularly the approach of the movie to the subject of racial reconciliation:

“Invictus” : From a Different Perspective

. . . Mandela as represented here is a man who remains ever hopeful to appeal to the better side of whites. In the film, Mandela is a de-radicalized figure who personifies the notion that non-white activists and leaders should rely exclusively on forgiveness, understanding, and nonviolence for any hope of racial progress. There are moments in the film where you see blatant white racism. To Eastwood’s credit, racism in South African is portrayed as institutionalized and systemic; yet after two hours South Africa’s problems are a thing of the past after the national team wins the Rugby World Cup. . . .

As I said to my Twitter friend, while the movie addressed South African racism — and especially racial distrust — head-on, the view it ultimately presented was too hunky-dory, like a Dick-and-Jane story:

See Mandela preach reconciliation.

See Mandela embody forgiveness.

See Mandela bond with Pienaar.

See Pienaar lead the Springboks to victory.

See South Africa achieve reconciliation.

Now, that’s not quite fair to Eastwood, who’s a favorite of mine, and who had a picture to make for a certain budget and on a certain timetable. (As Simmons reminds us, Eastwood is famous for delivering the goods on time and under budget.) The fact that the movie was unsubtle — or, as Simmons puts it, lazy — doesn’t imply that Eastwood fails to appreciate the subtleties that underlay his story.

I just wish that he had unfolded some of those subtleties better or, maybe better, had let them simmer in the background while he made a great sports movie rather than the movie he made, which never became more than a nice way to pass a couple of hours in the theater.

Have you seen Invictus? What do you think about it?