December 23, 2003
"The Play" Redux
I haven’t been watching much football this year. Partially because the San Francisco 49ers and New York Giants are both out of it. Partially because blogging (both reading and writing) is taking up more of my time. Partially because sports don’t seem to matter as much to me as they used to (boredom has rarely been a problem for me, and lately, watching sports irks me somewhat since I feel I should be doing something more useful with my time).
But mostly because I hate what the salary cap has done to the sport. Classic example of everything that is wrong with Socialism. If you look at the final playoff teams the past few years, they’ve all been crappy teams. Yes, even when my NY Giants made the Superbowl against the Ravens. I’ll still probably watch a few of the playoff games (at least the Superbowl, for the commercials), but I generally find it more enjoyable to (badly) play Madden on the PS2 than to watch two crappy teams make a mockery of the game. Just like last year’s Niners-Giants joke of a first-round playoff matchup that featured a lot of botched defense and ended on a botched field goal and a botched call.
But I kinda wish I’d seen that New Orleans-Jacksonville game this past weekend, if only for nostalgia’s sake. I’m sure most of you’ve already heard all this by now, but just in case you haven’t, let me do a recap.
The Saints are trailing by a touchdown, 20-13, with only six seconds left in the game and with the ball on their own 25 yard line. Instead of chucking a Hail Mary, Saints quarterback Aaron Brooks throws a 30-yard pass complete to Stallworth at the near sideline between two Jaguars. He looks like he’ll be immediately tackled, but somehow spins away from both defenders. As he turns upfield, four more Jaguars swarm in front of him, but he makes a nifty cut back towards the middle of the field before lobbing the ball to his teammate, Lewis, a few yards to his left (looked like it might be a forward lateral, but it was hard to tell).
Lewis heads over to the far sideline but runs out of room, and while he’s being tripped up, he flips it back to Deuce McAllister (the running back), who runs up a few yards but can’t find much room either. As he’s getting tackled, he throws a nice spiral at least 10 yards back to the middle of the field to Jerome Pathon who’s got a clear path except for one defender trailing him closely. But Aaron Brooks (the quarterback!) throws a vicious block, and Pathon outruns everybody to make it into the endzone for a touchdown!
It was missing only the band on the field and the trounced trombone player to make The Play complete (I went to Cal, by the way — I actually also play the trombone, incidentally). Just as they did then, the officials review it, and finally determine that all the laterals were legal. It’s a touchdown!
And then John Carney misses the extra point.
So the Saints lose. Even worse, the loss eliminates them from the playoffs.
Ouch.
I guess that’s the upside of parity. When every team in football is a crappy team, you just have no idea what the heck is going to happen.
December 23, 2003 01:34 AM in Sports | PermalinkI guess I don’t see it as you do. I don’t think teams are of lesser quality under salary-cap rules. I just think the talent level is more equally distributed, so you have fewer amazing teams and also fewer really, really bad teams. This makes the whole game more competitive.
As a 49er fan myself, I sometimes yearn for the good-ole days when I could count on being a contender every year, and then I look at MLB and am glad that it’s not that way now. Although there a few smaller-market teams in MLB that have managed to pull out World Series wins in the past few years, they are the exceptions and not the rule. This bidding fiasco occurring between the Red Sox and the Yankees is illustrative of why MLB is worse without a salary cap. Who wants to see Steinbrenner buy himself a division championship every year? At least in the NFL, we see teams rewarded for being innovative and putting together teams of fresh, underrated talent.
Posted by brayden at 12/23/03, 03:43 PM (link)Well, I intended to eventually do a separate blog post on the salary cap, but seeing how rarely I do sports posts, I might as well do it here.
I don’t think teams are of lesser quality under salary-cap rules. I just think the talent level is more equally distributed, so you have fewer amazing teams and also fewer really, really bad teams.
I’m sure that’s part of it, but it’s also been my impression that turnover (er.. player turnover, not turning over of the ball) actually increased after the salary cap. Teams tended to try to hoard their highly-paid skill players (often designating them as their franchise player), and would often dump role players with regularity for salary-cap reasons. Players like linemen, blocking tight-ends, kickers, fullbacks, and special-teams players (like the long snapper for the Giants last year). I’m not sure as to the economic reasons why this occurred, just that I kept seeing players come and go much more quickly after the salary cap was instituted (the kickers are probably the most visible of these — remember how long Morten Andersen was with the Saints?).
Football is a sport where players need to practice with each other a lot. This is obviously important for quarterbacks and receivers, where timing is everything on a lot of patterns. But much moreso for offensive linemen, who need to know when to help each other out, and where to run for their blocking assignments without getting in each other’s way. Or for players in pass or kick coverage, who need to learn to trust where their teammates are going to be. It used to be that much of an offensive line would stay together for several years, developing a strong chemistry. And young players would be understudies for the superstars for a longer time, really learning the craft.
But higher player turnover has destroyed all of this. The quality linemen that are being cut are not improving their new teams by as much as their departure hurt their old teams because the line as a whole is not given sufficient time to gel. Younger and cheaper players are pressed into starting service sooner than they used to. Special teams in general is more of a chaotic mess (not just because of the coverage, but because kickers, holders, and snappers don’t stay together as long, which probably had something to do with Carney’s miss).
Of course, it’s done that for every team, so teams are still willing to go this route, and so I think this has drastically worsened the league as a whole. Not just the top teams.
Posted by fling93 at 12/23/03, 06:41 PM (link)