Cincinnatti Bengals, Kansas City Chiefs and More: NFL Week 16 Wishes

1. I Wish the Bengals Everything

I’ve never had much time for the Bengals. To my mind, they have in recent years become a team of woeful underachievers whose failings are not helped by an owner who has always seemed to favor personality over success or team harmony.

Nothing that has happened these past couple of months has changed that view, and there is a certain hard-edged opinion which states that, in any sport which employs so many people at the top level, one or two might not make it to the end of the season. However, for one side to lose two such prominent individuals during the course of the season is always going to be hard to take.

The one thing you can be sure of is that, during the coming weeks, the side playing the hardest out there will be the Bengals. I wish them every success in what they do.

 

2. I Wish I Could Predict Good Things For Kansas

Whatever Todd Haley is trying to do at Arrowhead, he needs to get some people with brains to work with. It is not as if Joshua Cribbs’ return skills are something new to the League. How the heck do you justify dumping the ball straight down his throat and allowing him to run at you on one occasion, let alone two? And what kind of defensive scheme can’t cope with a third string running back who has barely rushed the width of a sidewalk all season?

At the time of year when the Wizard of Oz seems to be on every channel, I’d say Dorothy picked a pretty good moment to get out of Kansas.

 

3. I Wish You All A Very Merry Christmas

Well, what else was I going to say?

And Santa, I know it is a bit late, but could I have one of these, please http://www.helmutthouse.com/ – and I don’t even own a dog.

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NFL Week 14: My Three Wishes

 

1. I Wish I Could Believe That the NFL Was Serious about the Whole Concussion Thing

 

For my money, it is all very well saying that you are tightening the rules on when a player can return to the field after a head injury, imposing independent doctors to assess the risk of further injury and so on. However, until you make players wear a helmet which fits properly, all of this is largely irrelevant.

 

Letting players take the field with a loose-fitting helmet is, purely and simply, negligent. Even in a high impact sport like football, there is no way that we should be seeing a helmet come flying off a player’s head on half a dozen occasions in every game.

 

Do racing bike riders have the same problem? No, because they wear the correct equipment.

 

You can’t claim to be serious about solving a problem if you don’t address the root cause of the problem. NFL players wear helmets for a reason. Any helmet that isn’t on properly is adding to the head injury, because it gives the head something to rebound against.

 

Time to put up or shut up, Commissioner Goodell.

 

 

2. I Wish the Head Coach Merry–Go–Round Would Stop for a While

 

Okay, so that is a slight exaggeration. Head coaches come and head coaches go. If that were not the way, we would never find the geniuses or weed out the losers.

 

But to start speculating now about whether Tony Dungy or Mike Holmgren might return to coaching next season is entirely facile. At the moment, only one franchise has a confirmed vacancy. In a pinch, this might be three by the end of the month—but only if you believe that Gary Kubiak and Lovie Smith are both merely counting the days before handing in their own playbooks.

 

Everywhere else in the NFL, the teams doing badly either have coaches who have still actually improved on 2008’s results, or have owners you would only work for if you were clinically insane. Then there’s Cleveland, where no one seems to know what is going on, including the coach and owner.

 

To start devoting hundreds of column inches to something which may never happen is simply white noise causing unnecessary distractions at a time when the season should just be starting to get interesting.

 

 

3. I Wish the Hall of Fame Electors Would Learn Some Math

 

Yes, it is that time of year again, when the more elderly football journalist starts grappling with the most interesting thing he will do all season—deciding who will and will not be granted the dubious honor of enshrinement in the Hall of Fame.

 

The problem becomes harder every year, because no one seems to have realized that the pool of candidates for election increases by at least a dozen every year, yet the number of potential enshrinees never goes beyond seven. Therefore, every year a large number of worthy ex-players never make it, despite being better than some of those elected before, because the weight of numbers is against them.

 

Which makes the whole thing even more nonsensical than it was in the first place.

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NFL Week 12: My Three Wishes

1. I wish the NFL would just drop the whole 17/18 game season idea

Yes, the NFL has one of the shortest seasons of any professional sport. But so what, it is also one of the biggest income generators, too. For every reason that Roger Goodell and company give for extending the season, there seems to be an equally good one against doing so. This, in itself, should be reason enough to keep things as they are.

Think ahead, though. How much of a benefit to fans is it to have those extra two games? Look at the players who are already missing from the League through injury. The loss of Kris Jenkins and Brian Urlacher has completely stuffed the Jets’ and Bears’ seasons and that is in a 17-week season. The point where these injuries usually occur, though, is at the end of the season. The longer you make the season, the more injuries you get. Does anyone really want to see a Superbowl short of stars, between two teams led by second- or third-string quarterbacks, throwing to a geriatric or pre-pubescent receiving corps against a secondary full of rookies? Thought not.

Mr Goodell, you’ve had some bright ideas since becoming commissioner. This isn’t one of them.

 

2. I wish the Thanksgiving games had a bit of variety to them

Tradition is all very well, but on an important day like today, shouldn’t fans be entitled to the very best fare that the NFL can provide?

What I mean is, Detroit may have made a stunning comeback on Sunday, but that was a real festival of ineptitude rather than a high-quality game. Exciting, but in the wrong way. The Lions are also one of the worst franchises in NFL history, yet they get a prime game every time the last Thursday of November comes around.

And this year they play Green Bay, the side who cancelled Christmas because their quarterback had already seen enough sacks for one year.

Later, we have Oakland, who has taken twice as long as the rest of humanity to realize that JaMarcus Russell wasn’t getting them anywhere, against a Dallas side that has scored a whole 14 points in their past 120 minutes of football. Yawn.

Where are the Colts? The Saints? The Patriots? The sides people will watch week in, week out? I’m all for everyone getting a fair crack of the TV whip, but there are 16 other weeks to do that in.

Even the Giants-Broncos game isn’t going to give you much to stay awake for—assuming the usual post-turkey snooze—if Denver plays the way it did on Sunday.

 

3. I wish someone would give Chris Simms a fair chance again

Being pulled from a game is traumatic enough. Being pulled in the second quarter more so. Being pulled for a guy on one leg, well, there’s barely a scale big enough to register that on. Especially when the reason is largely due to your O line’s inability to adapt to you being left-handed. It seems that the NFL really won’t give a sucker an even break.

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NFL Week Eleven: My Three Wishes

 

1. I wish that the NFL understood Ochocinco

 

I’ve never been sure what to make of the guy myself, to be honest. For large chunks of the time, he comes across as the biggest idiot alive – the name change, the begging to be traded and so on.

 

On the other hand, he’s one of the few players who has really worked out how to use modern technology to his advantage, and this in turn has helped to soften his image – no-one who reads his Twitter feed can be in any doubt about his devotion to his children, his loyalty to his friends or his dedication to his craft.

 

Then there is the fact that, oddly, we seem to have the same sense of humor. An acquaintance I had a rather public row with a few weeks ago has been complaining about the amount of spam she’s been receiving lately and I am so tempted to send her a tin of the real thing.

 

Especially now we now about Ochocinco’s proposed mustard stunt. And waving a dollar bill at an official carrying out a booth review? Hell, I’d love to have the chance to do that!

 

The fact remains, though, that by being so po-faced about everything he does, the NFL just plays into his hands. They’re giving a shameless self-publicist the oxygen of publicity. There’s always a risk that in ignoring him, he would do something really stupid.

 

But there’s also the chance that he’d become a real asset to the league, a character, but also a positive influence for all of the reasons I have mentioned above. I don’t understand why they can’t look beyond all the nonsense and realise that, actually, here is someone with the potential to be a real ambassador for the game.

 

2. I also wish that the NFL had a sense of proportion

 

I’m sorry, but I don’t care if someone does flick the Vs at opposing fans and I don’t care if they are so wealthy that they sweat money, fining someone $250,000 is obscene. That’s close to the NFL’s own minimum wage.

 

To say that you are going to take that sort of money for something like that, whilst at the same time allowing people to play when they have significant criminal convictions is vulgar, repulsive and frankly untenable. Until this week, I thought Roger Goodell was doing a good job. Now I am worried that he is losing it.

 

3. I wish that the Titans had started Vince Young earlier

 

At the start of the season, I thought they would be less troubled by the Haynesworth trade than they thought they would be. Then they started like 53 people who had never met each other before.

 

I appreciate that it would have taken some guts for Jeff Fisher to admit that he was wrong and make the switch to Young, but at the same time those sort of hard decisions are what he is paid for. The change in the side has been incredible, but imagine what their season would’ve been like if it had happened in Week three?

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NFL Week Ten: My Three Wishes

This being the week that the NFL begins to switch from Monday night games to Thursday night games, there’s something of a challenge in finding three things to wish for before the events of the weekend have fully played out or even come into the open. However, here goes:

1. I wish that the NFL would think ahead before scheduling matches

 

OK, on paper, the return of Mike Singletary to competition against the team he made his name with looks good. The problem is that, for there to be any mileage in this, there has to be some degree of animosity between the parties. In this case, that just isn’t there. This is not Favre returning to Wisconsin. This is not Belichick and Mangini. This is simply two very average teams somehow being allowed to occupy a prime time television spot in which to demonstrate their myriad deficiencies.

 

The Bears have one of the easiest schedules in recent NFL history and have still somehow contrived to be 4-4. They have a quarterback known for the strength of his arm, but no decent wideouts, whilst the defense looks older and slower every time you see it.

 

On the other hand, the ‘Niners have been utterly feeble for too long to remember, Singletary is no nearer than anyone else to solving the question of which of Shaun Hill and Alex Smith is the least worst, and their best offensive weapon didn’t play for half of the season due to a contract dispute.

 

The only good thing that can come out of this is that the game turns out a whole highlights reel of bloopers, thus saving the rest of us from having to watch the inevitable comedy of errors.

 

2. I wish that the Giants had seen this coming

 

Ask yourself this question: How can Eli Manning perform so much better than Philip Rivers, yet the Giants lose so badly to San Diego?

 

The short answer is that Eli isn’t a bad quarterback and hasn’t become one over night. Admittedly, he is still not Peyton, but neither are the 31 other starting QBs in the NFL. But he lacks both a functioning running game and an experienced receiving crew, which means that his stats get skewed by the numerous attempts he threw out wide, because nothing ever happens through the middle.

 

Surely, without Plaxico Burress, the Giants had to know this was going to happen? And that without Derrick Ward it was going to be exponentially harder to break through an already packed box? There’s a lack of forward planning here that you don’t normally associate with the Giants. Surely, this can’t be the very beginning of the end?

 

3. I wish I had some way to comfort Redskin fans

 

I got back this morning from four days in DC and the surrounding area. My conversations with the locals revealed four things to me:

 

(a) The locals remain fiercely devoted to their team, despite their team giving them a whole host of opportunities to walk away.

 

(b) No-one, but no-one, thinks that Jason Campbell should still be starting, and they really don’t care who it is so long as it is not someone who bores them to tears and loses games because they have no sense of adventure whatsoever.

 

(c) Everyone believes that Jim Zorn is a decent man handed an impossible task.  THey

believe that there is no shame in failing at a dysfunctional franchise like the Redskins.

 

(d) It’s better to be in Washington than Cleveland, at least for this week.

 

Despite all of this, it is very hard to see anything improving for the Redskins any time soon. It really doesn’t matter who coaches or quarterbacks this team, the plain truth is that the personnel are not good enough to take the franchise anywhere. I can see it being another five years at least before the good people of Washington have anything important to cheer about.

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NFL Week Nine: My Three Wishes

1. More of the Return of the Return Men, Please

 

We seem to have evolved into a two season cycle when it comes to returning kicks.

 

In 2007 we had Devin Hester and Josh Cribbs battling it out to be the leading kick returner in the NFL.

 

Then, in 2008, Hester decided that he wanted to be a wide receiver, whilst the rest of the league finally wised up to the fact that, if you kicked the ball straight to Cribbs, there was every chance that he was going to run it right back into your endzone.

 

This year started quietly on the return front. Then Vikings’ rookie Percy Harvin exploded onto the scene and suddenly we had a new return star on our hands.

 

Last weekend, a real sleeper joined him. The Dolphins’ Ted Ginn Jr. had lost his starting role and needed to prove himself all over again after being something of an underachiever since being drafted in 2007.

 

Becoming the first player to return two kicks for TD in the space of seven minutes certainly got him noticed again.

 

As fans, we love the return men. Nothing really gets a crowd going that the ball being run back for 80, 90, even 100 yards. It might not be good for special teams coaches—and, arguably, it should be easier with the banning of the wedge formation—but the NFL wouldn’t be the same without it.

 

2. Can the Raiders Just Resolve the Tom Cable Thing, Please

 

One way or the other. I honestly don’t care. Just get it over with. It’s worse than the long slow departure of Lane Kiffin. It’s not like it will make JaMarcus Russell a great quarterback, or make the Raiders a decent team, or put their owner on the right side of very annoying.

 

 

3. Can the Browns Stop Fooling About, Please

 

I have no idea what Randy Lerner is or isn’t trying to achieve, but at the moment it just looks like a man frantically rearranging the deckchairs aboard a certain unsinkable ship.

 

It doesn’t matter, Randy. No one could make that side winners—not Mangini, not Belichick, not Lambeau, not Lombardi, not Paul Brown, and certainly not you.

 

Let one coach have a decent run at building a team, clear out 80 percent of the current roster, and accept that it will be another five years before you get anywhere.

 

Then talk to the fans, tell them what you are doing and, if you can’t achieve it after that, get outta Dodge.

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NFL Week Eight: My Three Wishes

 

1. That the NFL ban Larry Johnson for a sensible amount of time

 

I don’t know where to begin with this one. It is hard to even comprehend someone acting as stupidly as Johnson did last weekend. The Internet has been around long enough for even the biggest simpleton to realise that nothing you say on there can be regarded as private. To use it to hurl homophobic abuse and to criticize your coach, no matter what your personal views, is just inviting trouble.

 

Realistically, Johnson’s days in Kansas are numbered. A long ban—and, to be consistent, Roger Goodell must surely ban him—would just allow him to play the martyr. That the man doesn’t like his coach and has utterly contemptible views shouldn’t prevent him plying his trade in the long run, but it ought to earn him at least a couple of weeks off to reflect upon what he has done.

 

2. That Matthew Stafford and Calvin Johnson are fit this week

 

You’re coming off the worst season in NFL history, you’ve got an exciting new coach and, perhaps most importantly, you’re playing a side who are, arguably, playing even worse this year than you did in 2008. Your best chance of another morale-boosting win all season, you might think. And then your rookie quarterback and No. 1 wideout go down injured.

 

I don’t want to see anyone beat up on the Rams, who at least (unlike the 2008 Lions) seem to have a long term plan for the franchise. I’m also not sure that it is good for the NFL to have another 0-16 team so soon.

 

But when you need a bit of a lift and your two best offensive players might not be able to play, it’s a bit too much. The game might well turn out to be a festival of ineptness, but it ought to be a game where both inept teams are at full strength

 

 

3. That the Cheeseheads remember the good times and not just the bad

 

I am sure that Brett Favre expects a barrage of abuse from Packers fans this Sunday. I’m also sure that those fans will never forgive him for the way that he left their team. I hope, though, that they also remember all of the good things that he did for the franchise, including being the leader of one of the best sides in NFL history.

 

He might have made a fool of himself with the manner of his leaving and his subsequent behaviour, but he’s also a guaranteed first time Hall of Famer who made his name playing for them. I hope that memories are not really as short as they seem to be in Green Bay

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NFL In London: Patriots at Buccaneers

Coming back to Wembley for the third time was a strange experience. For the first time, the weather conditions were almost perfect, not too hot, not too cold and not a rain cloud in the sky. The PA system worked perfectly, getting into the stadium was easy—if you ignore the somewhat overzealous frisking that some of the crowd were getting—and even the food was well above the usual standard served up in such places.

 

There were still the odd little niggles. The pre-match entertainment was, as usual, abysmal, they once again dragged in two singers who thought their jobs were to murder the national anthems rather than sing them, and the concept of honorary captains still seems to baffle everyone, including the captains themselves.

 

The real bonus, though, was the curious anomaly that means that the cheapest seats in the house have some of the best views. Being perched in the top tier might not be ideal at every stadium, but at Wembley it provides an opportunity to see practically every hand movement, every cut, every block, in a way that you just can’t from the (supposedly) better seats.

 

From such a viewpoint it was easy to see that, for example, Tom Brady’s two interceptions both came on plays where, had he elected to run rather than pass, he would’ve made significant yardage downfield. All of which leads me to wonder if he is quite as confident about that knee as he makes out.

 

It also meant that, for the Pats second touchdown, it was perfectly clear how the play was going to develop—clear enough that you have to wonder how the Buc’s defense didn’t pick up on it.

 

In fact, the one thing that really stood out during the game was not that the Patriots had vastly better players, because they didn’t. The Buccaneers, arguably, were stronger both wide out and in the backfield. The difference was in the play calling and the play design, which was much more inventive in all respects. Add this to the seeming unwillingness, let alone inability, of the Bucs to stop Welker doing pretty much whatever he wanted around the field and you have the basic reason why the Bucs lost.

 

Yes, Josh Johnson played like a man paralyzed by the fear of failure and, yes, neither he nor replacement Josh Freeman were given much to work with in the first place.  But against this, Brady threw almost as many interceptions and the Patriots offensive line seemed to be trying to set a record for the greatest number of penalties conceded by a winning team.

 

This may have been a one-sided game, but it was fascinating nonetheless. The only thing that the NFL now needs to do is to become a little more British, if only for this one game. In all three matches, boos have rung around the stadium at the end of the game. Taking a knee might be the gentlemanly thing to do back home, but to a British audience brought up on soccer and rugby it is anathema. They expect to see every game played to the death, every play to be an attempt to break into the opponent’s secondary and score. The British have embraced the NFL, might the NFL now take this step towards embracing the British?

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NFL Week 6: My Three Wishes

1. Can We Stop All the Criticism of the Henne Draft, Please?

If for no better reason than it is applying hindsight in the most stupid, blinkered way.

The ‘Fins were coming off what was, at the time, the worst season in NFL history. They needed to upgrade all positions, but there were a number of veterans available for each and every one of them.

By any measure, there were only three No. 1-pick candidates pick in that draft. Only one of them was a quarterback. And only one of them was a guaranteed starter at left tackle. There were a number of other later-rounders who would’ve been an upgrade for Miami behind center.

Moreover, without shoring up the feeble offensive line, picking a quarterback in the first round, be they Ryan, Henne, Flacco or whoever, would going to guarantee one thing; that come the end of the season, we’d be looking at the next David Carr.

Drafting Jake Long was the obvious and sensible option for the franchise at that time. (Even if you have to wonder about a player who feels the need to have his own name tattooed on his arm.) Anyone saying anything different at this time is only fooling themselves.

 

2. A Sense Of Perspective In Buffalo, Please.

So Bills fans have erected a billboard to protest against the poor form of the franchise, have they? Could there be any bigger act of misplaced ire than this?

How appropriate is it that, in the 50th year since the formation of the AFL, they start to turn on the one remaining original owner.

Bills fans need to remember that the reason they love Ralph Wilson so much is that he has remained loyal to them. That he could have made another fortune by moving the franchise elsewhere is well known.

If they love his loyalty so much, isn’t it hypocritical in the extreme for those fans to complain when Wilson shows the same loyalty to Dick Jauron?

 

3. Can The Packers Offensive Line Show Up Now, Please?

Your second-year starting quarterback has been sacked 20 times already. There’s no reason to give up one sack against the Lions, let alone a season-average of four per game.

If they don’t show, I fear that we really could be looking at the next David Carr

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NFL Week Five: My Three Wishes

1. Can We Have A Week Off From Petulant Wideouts, Please

With the week seeing the end of two utterly pointless, mind-numbingly dull mini-dramas, can we please just have seven days of respite from preening, touchline hogging, divas?

Michael Crabtree takes the prize for the most infuriating, tedious and ultimately futile holdouts in NFL history. I was really, really hoping that he would screw his entire career up by deciding to re-enter the Draft next year. After all, if he wasn’t getting the money he wanted this year, he sure wasn’t going to get it after a year out of the game. And it’s not as if the 49ers have been doing badly without him.

Brandon Marshall, on the other hand, at least did the honorable thing and worked his ticket for a trade. Even so, two months of a situation dragging on when you know what the outcome will be isn’t exactly interesting.

2. Another Chance For Mr. Irrelevant, Please

It pains me to write this, because I was working up a synopsis for a book on the history of Mr. Irrelevant, when David Vobora not only went and spolied it for me by landing a regular season roster spot, he even made his way up to a starting linebacker slot.

And then he got a four game suspension for taking banned substances.

I don’t condone drug taking in any form, but Vobora had done so much to move from the NFL’s least rated player to one of the elite 1296 that I, for one, want to see if he can do it again. And, frankly, the Rams aren’t exactly top heavy with defensive talent right now.

3. Can We Stop Talking About MVPs and Players Of The Year, Please

It’s Week Five, not Week 15. No-one has done anything yet. Saying that anyone, be they Brees, a Manning, Peterson or whoever is a front runner for any kind of award is ridiculous. Let’s get to the end of the season and then worry about who did well during it. All of this talk is just space filling by lazy journalists; the last thing the NFL needs is more meaningless speculation.

 

 

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