I’m a rarity in some ways that I’m a Ravens fan who doesn’t hate the Steelers. Obviously, I don’t want them to win when they play my team, but otherwise, because of family connections to the team, I’m relatively fond of them. Last year, as the quarterback situation devolved to the point of high comedy with a guy named Duck and a former Oklahoma State QB starting for them. An excellent Mike Tomlin coaching effort along with a great defense guided them to a highly respectable 8-8 record, just missing out on the playoffs. Oddly enough, with yet another laterish round receiver pick (Chase Claypool) and Ben Roethlisberger fully back, apparently a fair bit of commentators pegged them as less than stellar candidates this year. On Sunday, the Steelers pulled out a tough game against the Titans, which they almost gave away, but nonetheless moved to 6-0, their best start since 1978 when they won the Super Bowl. They’ve looked dominant at times this season, matching hard nosed defense with higher flying offense that look strangely familiar to the Super Bowl contender of the early 2010s that they were. Their factory of receivers continues its dominance with Claypool, the rookie, looking like the next Calvin Johnson at times, Diontae Johnson, James Washington and the now aging Juju Smith-Schuster, who as the old man in the receiving corp is only 23. James Conner, while fighting injuries constantly, is running the ball effectively, averaging 4.7 yards a carry. With all that we knew was missing last year, why did so many doubt this team? As a fan of a team in the same division, I’m always scared of the Steelers, mostly for their organizational competence. One of the most disheartening things in sports and maybe the great lament of any fan of incompetent teams, is watching your rivals run everything right from an organizational perspective, doing less with more and handing you your ass every year. Think how Bengals and Browns fans feel about having two teams, the Ravens and Steelers, whose personnel could teach college classes on how to run an organization, in the same division, beating their asses every year. That’s why I’m not surprised by this start at all. Ben still can pull enough out to win with this team. Whether he can do it with his aged self when the weather gets cold will be another story, but I think the defense can carry things if necessary. I’m just frankly shocked this team got shit on at all to start the season and as a Ravens fan with an offense looking shaky as hell, I’m not looking forward to this matchup going forward. I also have to say when it comes to preseason analysis, competent organizations always overcome the odds and no one should lose sight of how important that is to success on the field.
As a child of the 1990s, I was properly introduced to football in the 1996-1997 season, the year Brett Favre was the MVP and won the Super Bowl. It’s the first one I watched, you know when I was rooting for those plucky, hard luck Patriots; in retrospect, I’m so happy they lost. As one growing up in the 1990s, I was always told that the Cowboys were America’s team, so important to the overall health of the league that their value lay more off the field than on it. As I said, the first Super Bowl I saw was the year after they won the last meaningful playoff game. Since then, it’s been nothing but blowhardy coverage of a team that’s barely had enough to conquer an often hapless division. The Eagles dominated the 2000s with a few good Giant teams sprinkled in. All the while and to this day, no one will shut the fuck up about the Cowboys. Listen, I’m a former high school athlete who’s frustrated about how his high school sports career went. Get me drunk at a party with the right mood and I’ll start bitching about my coaches, how they used me, how good I would have been at football had my school had a team, etc. I can’t say that hasn’t happened, but most of the time, I’m fine with everything. Jerry Jones’ fixation on the early 1990s rivals the opening theme to Portlandia because the 90s were awesome, now everything sucks, especially the Cowboys. He can’t stop riding the glory days. On Sunday, the Boys scored 3 points while giving up 25 points to an even more moribund franchise that doesn’t even have a fucking name. Despite having one of the best running backs in the NFL, the Cowboys had 83 yards on the ground and 114 yards in the air, with Zeke Elliot getting 45 yards on 12 carries. The DCers have been competent on defense this season, but the Cowboys have a murderers row of offensive talent, enough that Andy Dalton, before he got injured, should have been able to do something with. We all know what it is, we know the problem and it’s been there since I first started watching football, the year after Barry Switzer as the mistress, went all the way with Jimmy Johnson’s team. It’s Jerry. Don’t get me wrong, I respect Jerry as a man who could sell a literal shit sandwich buffet to a 20 year reunion gathering of a high school tennis team. He markets a steaming pile every year and has ever since I remember learning what football was. Now I’m almost 32 and with my experience in the business world, the only culprit to this team’s incompetence is Jerry. His management style with ominous controlling behavior, always peeking over the shoulder of coaches and whoever makes personnel decisions, spreads havok and dread of the hierarchy of the team. Mike McCarthy was supposed to be an independent minded coach with a pedigree, who in a truly admirable act of self realization took a year off to learn analytics. His competence, mostly on display of the coach of the Packers would give these Cowboys the strong, knowledgable leader they lacked for 10 years (10 FUCKING YEARS) with Jerry’s bitch, Jason Garrett. It’s not happening. Of course today, they floated trades for players while also saying they’d cut those same players if they can’t be traded; way to sell high. Somehow they’re still relevant in the dogshit NFC East, the division every boob on the east coast and in Texas is obsessed with because I guess there’s a population glut in those areas. The NFC East is the CBS sitcom of NFL divisions; bloated, unoriginal, bland and generally uninteresting to remotely intelligent third graders. That makes the Cowboys like Two Broke Girls or The Big Bang Theory, or whatever shit Chuck Lorre makes that could have reasonably appeared as entertainment in the movie Idiocracy. If all that’s true (and it is), Jerry is the Chuck Lorre of at all, because despite having no discernible entertaining value, the master marketer gets everything to eat his shit sandwiches, throw up, then show up the next week like dim-witted amnesiacs. Enough already.
I really envy the West Coast when they don’t have to sit up until almost 1am to watch a thrilling Sunday night football game. I’m bleary eyed and pinching my inner thigh to stay awake even as the Cardinals and the Seahawks put on an absolute circus of a game. Both teams put up a combined 732 net pass yards and over 1,000 total yards of offense albeit with an entire overtime period. With Russell Wilson as the MVP favorite and Kyler Murray lurking as the sneaky second year QB to follow the recent slate of sophomore QBs in the MVP race, I knew ahead of time this game would be special. There’s at least one game each year that renews all of your hope for football as this nation’s most popular sport. Amidst all of the NFL’s inherent problems, bad publicity and general disinterest in the health and safety of their players, a game each year glistens over the season’s ills and reminds us why we’re obsessed with this game. From Rams-Chiefs two years ago, to last year’s evidence that Jimmy G is competent with his tango against the Saints, to this year’s first nominee, each of these games provides thrilling offense, very little defense and typically two quarterbacks peaking during the season. This game had everything, from Kyler Murray’s scrambling runs, which I finally got to see on full display for a full game, Russell Wilson’s runs, both of their incredible abilities as downfield passers and one exceptional play from a man known only as “DK” .
The game started with Seattle dominating possession, forcing Kyler into weird decisions, short runs and generally flaccid drives. The Cards scored towards the end of the 1st quarter on a deep ball to DeAndre Hopkins, but by the same time in the 2nd quarter, Seattle had taken a 20-7 lead. During that time, Wilson threw a bad interception to Budda Baker, who after running almost to the endzone was hunted down by DK Metcalf, arguably the play of the season and one of the best NFL memes of all time already. Few things in a sporting contest have me shouting at the TV anymore, but in this moment I couldn’t help myself, letting out a yelp of excitement as I realized this might be that magical game, once a year, like Christmas that brings me football nirvana.
By the end of the half, Seattle took a 27-17 lead on an absolutely perfectly placed bomb of a pass from Wilson to Tyler Lockett, who while inconsistent at times, looks like a better Will Fuller. Seattle seemed relatively in control. While each team traded blows throughout the third quarter failing to score, Russell and Kyler knew they were building towards a fourth quarter glitterbomb of activity. Kyler finally got the score within reach towards the end of the quarter with a cute TD run. He seriously looks like a cartoon out there with his size, like when cartoon children chug coffee; it’s encouraging for short men to see a man move like that against the physical gods of humanity. Both teams struggled throughout to design run the ball, with each QB leading their teams in rushing through scrambles. There’s few QBs right now who can combine scrambling with straight speed like these two; Mahomes can scramble, Lamar has speed, but I’m not sure either can combine the two as eloquently as Russell and Kyler; it was the best of times watching them run.
After Russell and Kyler traded interceptions at the 4th quarters outset, the bizarre stat line read that Wilson had a 2-2 TD to Interceptions. To give you an idea of how ridiculous the mere idea of Wilson throwing interceptions is, consider that while the Interception% God Aaron Rodgers sits at number one all time, with Brady close behind, no other QB in the top ten has close to the TD amount and attempts that Wilson has. Maybe Alex Smith, but given that he’s in the top 10 all time, along with Derek Carr, Sam Bradford and Carson Wentz, you can see why over time this stat indicates that you’re either a wuss who can’t push it downfield (Bradford, Smith, Carr) or QB jesus (Brady, Rodgers, eventually Wilson). Anyway, after the Seahawks held the ball for almost six minutes in the 4th quarter after Kyler’s pick, Wilson seemingly put the game away with a third TD to Tyler Lockett. With 6 minutes left, it was on Kyler to come back into this game. To his credit, the Cards possessed the ball and with 3 minute left attempted a field goal to make it a one score game. Hilariously, the Seahawks committed an offside penalty and Kyler threw a touchdown to Chrisitan Kirk a few plays later, leaving the score 34-31 in favor of the Seahawks with about 2 minutes left. He obviously left too much time for Russell who just thrives in these weird Seahawks games that to be fair, we could just call Seahawks games. With Chris Carson out, the Seahawks turned to the NFL vagabond Carlos Hyde to ride into the sunset, only to hit a wall, giving the Cards the ball back with a minute left. Kyler then went to work, firing three straight intermediate passes in between spiking the ball, culminating in a 44 yard field goal to bring this berserk game into overtime. I can’t say much about overtime, each team looked gassed and fizzled out drives. The Cards tried to end the game on a bizarre 2nd and 15, 44 yard field goal attempt which made no sense given how bad Seattle’s defense was and that it was 2nd down with 2:50 left in the game. So questionable a decision, really just peculiar and seems like an analytically driven call that lacked situational awareness. With that miss, Russell again had more than two minutes to engineer a miracle and it almost got there. Crossing over into Card’s territory, Russ threw his THIRD interception, unfathomable. The script from there followed the end of the 4th, with just ball out play by Kyler who put the kicker back into range for an even longer field than the weird one on 2nd down, which the kickver made as time basically expired. I couldn’t sleep for a bit after this game despite it being like 12:38 EST and I knew then that if I couldn’t feel that same way again this year, it would be ok. We got that game and should be grateful in a year full of shit that sucks.
Last thing, I continue to be shocked how good Justin Herbert is. I genuinely have a quarterback controversy on my fantasy team because of how good he’s playing, given that my other QB just threw three picks against the Cardinals. Again, Herbert looked timid in college, like he didn’t have that edge, but Sunday, admittedly against the Jags, he earned his well deserved first win after going all out against Brady, Brees and Mahomes, almost defeating all three and looking comfortable. Hell, his first game against the still dangerous Chiefs defense went into overtime. He looks strong in the pocket, fire bombing secondaries with his downfield threats, distributing the ball to all of his receivers and looking like a mini-Josh Allen on his scrambles. Where he looked hesitant in college, he looks like a killer in the pros. I feel bad about Tyrod Taylor and while Hard Knocks gave us little to go on for Herbert, it seems like Tyrod was just there because of his leadership qualities and not much else. It fucking sucks for him that this is how it went, but now Tyrod has fallen so that Herbert, Josh Allen and ughf, I guess Baker Mayfield can live. I’m genuinely excited to watch the Chargers for the first time in a while, so I’ve joined the ten other Chargers fans with that spirit. It’s a fun team with a bright QB who’s casually almost slaying giants.
Bo's Gamut 