Recall watching Saturday morning cartoons to discover the chase scenes had repetitive landscapes with duplicate backgrounds — the same mountain, tree or house — seen on a reel?
That’s too much like watching sports in 2023. We know what’s coming and where we’re headed. But only dark comedy awaits.
This past week was a lot like watching Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner chase each other past the same cactus and strewn rocks until the scene is resolved with a sudden, violent and senseless end, predicated only on running out of time, no creative value to disrupt the descent.
That’s why many of us began to prefer Bullwinkle & Co. for its wit, for treating us as if we were thinking kids.
To that end, the NFL as a thinking fan’s game is trending dead as the NFL has copied MLB’s plan of confusing the declining numbers of baseball fans as to where and when (and for how much more) playoff and World Series games would appear — another short-sighted, anything-for-a-TV-buck treatment of what used to be can’t-miss baseball.
Senseless? No more so than NFL games as we stumbled upon Sunday’s Seahawks-Titans on CBS.
At 7-7 Seattle was very much alive for a playoff spot in a league that rewards mediocrity and less as per Roger Goodell’s sense of quality. Seattle led, 13-10, with 3:38 left in regulation when dueling insanity took over.
The Titans, from close to the Seattle end zone, were stopped cold — until the latter-day unsurprising occurred: DB Artie Burns drew a post-play 15-yard penalty for a flagrant, nobody-disses me body slam of an opponent. Playoffs? Why should he care?
But what once upon a time was unfathomably stupid has become a walk-out item in Dollar Stores. The easily preventable as a matter of team success and applied common sense in a multibillion dollar success-rewarded business has been denuded.
Adding to this redundant insanity, the CBS crew — Andrew Catalon, Tiki Barber and Matt Ryan — spoke not one word of condemnation, frightened, perhaps, of telling a calamitous truth. Instead they adhered to the 21st Century pandering formula of choosing to leave their audience insulted, as if viewers hadn’t seen what they just saw.
Still, the NFL, under the negligent and highly selective social activist/phony Goodell continues its on-field messaging that we’re the ones in need of socialization skills and attitude adjustments.
The Titans scored on the next play to lead, 17-13, but the senselessness was far from over.
With the clock about to strike midnight on Seattle, the Titans went into a loss-inviting “prevent defense” that has been preventing victories for decades (See: the end of Sunday’s Commanders-Jets). Suddenly, the Seahawks, previously stalled on offense, were able to quickly move downfield against soft defense, passing their way to a game-winning TD to make it 20-17 with under a minute left.
Of course, most NFL coaches would order the same prevent defense.
Still the senselessness continued. On the kickoff, the Titans allowed the ball, easily returnable, to become a touchback that would give them the ball at their own 25 rather than have the returner give it a shot with 30 yards of open field in front of him.
We now see that a lot near the ends of close games and it defies sense. Why not allow kick-return specialists to return kicks at the most desperate times?
The TV football visuals included the obligatory: players making group end zone poses, individuals’ first-down gestures after nothing much, visiting players taunting the home crowds with “shush” finger signs and DBs responding to incomplete passes, no matter their impact on the play, by shaking a no-no finger for the TV cameras to show, often in slo-mo replays.
At the start of the second half of Monday’s Giants-Eagles, Fox noted that Tommy DeVito, the most overnight overly done local media story since the 1938 radio invasion of Grovers Mill, NJ by Martians, would not start the third quarter. Fox then threw it to sideline vet Pam Oliver, who provided the unrequited promise that she’d have info on DeVito’s absence.
Instead, she reported that she had spoken to Brian Daboll who told her the Giants’ kicking game needed to improve.
Of course the telecast was loaded and larded with closeup cameo rewards for everyone dressed for attention and the promise of drunk and disorderly conduct that regularly drives Eagles patrons to blood baths and beyond — leaving those who can no longer suffer it watching on TV from home.
And as reader Rich Meyerson notes, those all-circumstances-are-the-same QB Passing Ratings that TV mindlessly provides as significant, thus Bears’ QB Justin Fields, two games ago, was rendered statistically diminished with two interceptions — both on Hail Marys at the close of each half.
Finally we leave you this, as spoken by Fox’s sideline stalwart Oliver, early in Monday’s Giants’ game:
“Well, Joe [Davis], of course it’s every team’s goal to play complementary football. But the Giants understand that their struggles on offense, whatever the team’s success, it’s based on [defensive coordinator] Wink Martindale’s defense.
“He affirmed that, saying it’s something you gotta talk about; you can see it, he said, that players need to embrace the challenge of what he said was the need to outplay the opponent’s offense and their defense.”
Nurse!
Stop the Music! Analyst of the Week — no fooling — is Fox’s Daryl “Moose” Johnston. Monday, he said what this season has gone unseen or unspoken: Giants’ LB/DE Kayvon Thibodeaux, the No. 5 overall pick of the 2022 draft, too often disappears, Johnston: “Sometimes he just gets lost during the course of games.”
As Rutgers played Mississippi St. on BTN, Saturday, analyst Austin Johnson hitched a ride on the Foolish Fad Local, telling us, RU was looking “to run downhill,” as if “run” didn’t explain it.
Shaquille O’Neal and the Mannings are starting to make a move on sports gambling operations for most TV advertising facetime. Soon the only thing left for them to endorse will be asbestos sandwich wraps.
From paying Barry “BALCO” Bonds for exclusive access, selecting Alex Rodriguez as its face and voice of baseball, and gasbag Stephen A. Smith as the face and multiple-dialects voice and face of the entire network, ESPN never tires of making rotten decisions.
Thus, Christmas Day, rather than Jeff Van Gundy calling Bucks-Knicks, ESPN gave us Doris Burke to be heard saying nothing worth hearing, thus devaluing the presence of steady pro Mike Breen.
But basketball remains under self-imposed attack. The final two minutes of Saturday’s Vanderbilt-Memphis on CBS was, because the game was close, stretched to an unreasonable and distracting length by replay reviews, intentional fouls, timeouts and commercials. Another good action game was, by design, unplugged.
The sin of such frequent endings is that coaches huddle with their teams one possession at a time, thus the best prepared and more situational-schooled team — the smarter college team — has no advantages. Just another “advancement” of needlessly diminished standards.