Past Interference

3-13?

2011-11-26T21:56:00.001-08:00

Of course Past Interference would post an item entitled "0-16?" just prior to a Dolphin three-game winning streak. PI must note the existence of the question mark after the "0-16), and PI also clearly wrote "the next two games versus the Chiefs and the Redskins are probably Miami's best shot at a win. If they lose to both, 0-16 going to be a strong possibility." Well, it isnt now. Reality intruded. Only one team's ever gone 0-16. It's incredibly difficult and Miami just wasn't up to the task this year. The two-week stretch against the Chiefs and the Skins were Miami's best shots at wins and unfortunately they were able to put it all together. Then getting the Bills at home while that team was in the midst of a high-speed collapse was the final nail in the coffin for a top two draft pick. Goodbye Luck and Barkley.

But beyond that the shocking three-game win streak suddenly opened the door to a new hellish possibility: the retention of the Sparano/Ireland regime along with a commitment to Matt Moore as the team's quarterback of the present and future. Aaaahhhhh! How many times have we been down that road? "Our QB's good enough if we just surround him with talent." "You win with running and defense and not turning the ball over. We just need a game manager who doesn't make mistakes". No. No no no. We're done with that crap. We need a QB who excels, who makes plays. That's how you win. Matt Moore might be better than Henne. He might be playing better than anybody ever expected. He might be playing as well as what we probably would have gotten had the the team squandered dollars on Kyle Orton (waived this week I see!) in the preseason. But he's not a Pro Bowl QB. In all the praise for how well Miami was playing during their little win streak few pointed just how bad the quality of their opponents were. The Skins might be the 2d worst team in football. KC's not much better. And Buffalo's a shell of what they were two months ago. Miami had to go on the road to play a quality football team on Turkey Day and we saw what happened to the fairy tale. We got exactly what we should have expected. What we'd been accustomed to a month ago. A whole bunch of red zone possessions. Field goals instead of touchdowns. And a blown fourth quarter lead. That's what this team does unless they're playing a true bottom feeder. Not turning it over wasn't enough for Moore. The team needed TD's and he couldn't get them. He passed up a perfectly good chance to maybe run it in inside the five, throwing the ball away instead though he was nowhere close to getting sacked. He missed some open guys. He didn't do enough to win. I'm not saying he's horrible or that he can't get better or that I don't appreciate the effort or that he shouldn't be on the roster next year. What I am saying is that right now there is NO reason to believe Moore is the answer at QB and whoever the GM is in 2012 if they don't take a QB in the first round they need to be fired before the second round starts. Hopefully the loss to Dallas makes it clear to all that the Dolphins have not righted the ship and major changes must be made in the offseason.

0-16?

2011-11-06T09:04:00.001-08:00

The 20-17 loss to the Giants might have been an entertaining game for a disinterested football fan, but for Dolphins fan it was just another one of the team's weekly car crashes. We know we're going to lose, we just need to see exactly how it happens this time. This was a fairly standard affair. A surprisingly strong early start featuring two (two!) first half touchdowns. And then the predictable second-half offensive futility followed by the late Giants comeback everybody saw coming. I suppose the best thing to be said is that whatever Sparano's flaws as a head coach (and they are legion), the tems continues to play hard. Nobody's quitting (yet). But the losses keep mounting up.

The Suck for Luck bandwagon keeps gathering steam as the latest loss leaves the Dolphins and the Colts as the league's last two winless teams. SI's Peter King made the logical point that Miami was unlikely to "earn" that number one draft pick to get Andrew Luck as the Dolphins have proven to be the far more competitive team. The Colts are getting spanked every week while Miami's at least coming close. True enough. However, it must be noted Miami was competitive in a number of games in 2007. They lost 6 games by only 3 points but won only a single game that year. Repeatedly getting close doesn't mean luck will even out during the season. 4 of those 6 close losses all came during the 2007 season's first half. Sometimes losing takes on a life of its own If the losses keep mounting for this year's team, who's to say the bottom won't drop out? The 2007 team got crushed in 4 of it's last 5 games (and in the other also won their one and only game gift wrapped by the Ravens). The Colts negative point differential is way higher than the Dolphins, but so's the Rams. But the Rams are the team with a win so far, not the Dolphins.

So what's my point? Oh yeah, Miami could still lose them all. This can happen. 0-16 or 1-15 is still a strong possibility. And despite decades as a loyal fan, Past Interference is no longer upset by this possibility. The 12-year failure to find a competent replacement for Dan Marino has become intolerable. The Dolphins aren't the Browns or the Lions or the Cardinals. We've never experienced long periods of losing football. This needs to end and it will end if we can get Andrew Luck. If Miami gets him next year, is anybody going lose any sleep about the losses piled up in 2011? Of course the next two games versus the Chiefs and the Redskins are probably Miami's best shot at a win. If they lose to both, 0-16 going to be a strong possibility.

And the Winner is

2011-11-06T09:02:00.000-08:00

With the Steelers and Ben Roesthlisberger triumphing over the Patriots and Tom Brady, our eighth all-time contest between QB's with two or more Super Bowl rings is in the books. Big Ben's win means that Jim Plunkett is now the only QB of the seven involved in these games who does not and will never have a win against one of the others. He's also the only one who won't ever be inducted in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Coincidence?

1) November 14, 1976: Miami 3 @ Pittsburgh 14
(Griese 2, Bradshaw 2)

2) November 5, 1978: Dallas 16 @ 23 Miami
(Staubach 2, Griese 2)

3) January 21, 1979/Super Bowl XIII: Pittsburgh 35/Dallas 31
(Bradshaw 2, Staubach 2)

4) October 28, 1979: Dallas 3 @ Pittsburgh 14
(Staubach 2, Bradshaw 3)

5) December 30, 1979/Divisional Playoffs: Miami 14 @ Pittsburgh 34
(Griese 2, Bradshaw 3)

6) September 22, 1985: San Francisco 34 @ LA Raiders 10
(Montana 2, Plunkett 2)

7) November 14, 2010: New England 39 @ Pittsburgh 26
(Brady 3, Roethlisberger)

8) October 30, 2011: New England 17 @ Pittsburgh 25
(Brady 3, Roethlisberger 2)

Multiple Super Bowl Winning QB's Face Off Again

2011-10-30T08:48:00.000-07:00

It's time to update this list. After 25 years without a single matchup between quarterbacks with two or more Super Bowl rings, we are now about to witness such a matchup for the second straight year. The same two QB's are involved: Tom Brady and Ben Roethlisberger. If Brees, Rodgers or Eli Manning can win a second ring this year we might see such historic games on a somewhat regular basis for the next several seasons.

1) November 14, 1976: Miami 3 @ Pittsburgh 14

(Griese 2, Bradshaw 2)

2) November 5, 1978: Dallas 16 @ 23 Miami
(Staubach 2, Griese 2)

3) January 21, 1979/Super Bowl XIII: Pittsburgh 35/Dallas 31
(Bradshaw 2, Staubach 2)

4) October 28, 1979: Dallas 3 @ Pittsburgh 14
(Staubach 2, Bradshaw 3)

5) December 30, 1979/Divisional Playoffs: Miami 14 @ Pittsburgh 34
(Griese 2, Bradshaw 3)

6) September 22, 1985: San Francisco 34 @ LA Raiders 10
(Montana 2, Plunkett 2)

7) November 14, 2010: New England 39 @ Pittsburgh 26
(Brady 3, Roethlisberger)

8) October 30, 2011: New England @ Pittsburgh
(Brady 3, Roethlisberger 2)

Suck For Luck

2011-10-30T08:08:00.000-07:00

I knew it would happen (see previous post), I just didn't know exactly how. Who could? To find a way to lose a game that hadn't been done in 40 years takes something really special. For 55 minutes Tim Tebow literally could not hit the broad side of a barn and the Dolphins were doing a great job of bottling him up on the ground. But the game lasts 60 minutes and we've known for a long time this team is incapable of putting a complete 60-minute game together. Obviously Miami still would have won if they could just have recovered an onside kick, but an epic collapse takes a team effort and the special teams had to make its timely contribution to an epic loss.

Once the ball slipped through Marlon Moore's hands and into Denver's possession, there was no doubt in my mind Tebow would bring Denver back to tie the game. The outcome was all but scripted. Dolphin fans have seen this before, in 2004 and (especially 2007). Once things start to go wrong on every level, everything just gets worse. There's no turning it around. The season's lost. Only a complete overhaul, a fresh start, can cure the sickness. A new coach, a new quarterback, new talent, a new philosophy. Unfortunately, the current season has to play itself out. Ross could fire Sparano right now but what would be the point? Whoever takes his place is already part of the problem. Who on this coaching staff deserves the promotion to the head job? No outside superstar coach is coming here until the season's over. Back in 2004, Wannstedt resigned during the season, with the team at 1-8. Defensive coordianator Jim Bates took the reins and the team showed a little life, going 3-4 the rest of the way. But why would Miami fans want that to happen? Winning a few more games this year isn't making the future one bit brighter. I hate to say it but yeah, it's Suck for Luck time. We all need to admit it.

Watching Tebow work his magic, I felt no anger or frustration (unusually for me). Mainly, the whole thing struck me as funny. Absurd. Surreal. Outnumbered by a bunch of Tebow fans in a sports bar, I could feel something electric happening. And I went to UF. I'm a Gator, I love Tebow and I don't have it in my heart to root against him. Ever. I'm well aware of his deficiencies as a QB at this point in his career but the guy just knows how to make things happen on the field. There was exactly one player in Sun Life Stadium that everyone was interested in and he wasn't wearing aqua and orange. What Tebow did last Sunday was exactly why we love football so much. And I'm glad I got to see it. And it's alll too obvious Miami needs a quarterback everyone can get excited about in the same way.

If Miami loses them all they likely would have one next year.

I think this was the game that fundamentally changed things. This kind of devastating loss, after a whole series of painful losses, clarified just exactly where this team is for everybody. It's now 2007 all over again. This team is as bad as any team in the league and could well go winless. The verdict's now in on the Parcells regime: Epic Fail. Let's hope Ross makes better choices at season's end than his predecessor did in 2007.

Hail Tebow

2011-10-22T21:58:00.000-07:00

Love him

Oh boy. Today we’ll witness one of the most embarrassing moments in Miami Dolphins history. And no I’m not talking about the game that I fully expect the Dolphins to lose (no doubt in some strange unpredictable way). I’m talking about the fact the organization is actually taking the time honor the starting quarterback of the opposing team. Surely this is a first in National Football League history. Yes, technically the Dolphins are honoring not the Denver Broncos’ QB but the 2008 Florida Gators national championship team, but they picked today as Gator day because currently on the Denver Broncos roster is one Tim Tebow, the man who led the Gators to the title, and an athlete far more popular and exciting than anyone who’s worn a Miami Dolphins’ uniform in the last 12 years. Ok, maybe the Dolphins couldn’t have known Tebow would be named his team’s starting QB the very week of this game (proving I was right about Orton) but WTF? South Florida isn’t Gator Country. I went to UF and love Tebow and that 2008 Gator team but this is just a joke. The Dolphins share a stadium with the Miami Hurricanes, a program that’s won five national titles in the time since the Dolphins last won a Super Bowl. There’s no reason to alienate your community and piss off your players except to sell a few extra tickets to rabid Tebow fans (a plan that worked it must be admitted). But overall it’s just one more step on this organization’s path to becoming the NFL’s biggest laughing stock. It’s one more sign that nobody in the organization has a clue as to what they are doing. It’s one more example that the owner, coach, and GM…ah, what’s the point?! You want to sell more tickets? Find a good coach. Get a real quarterback. WIN SOME GAMES!!!

Chad Henne Time

2011-09-10T12:46:00.000-07:00

The sabbatical is over! Past Interference is back and the 2011 football season is here.

For a moment during the preseason it appeared quite likely that Kyle Orton would the Miami Dolphins' starting quarterback for 2011. If the crowd chanting “We Want Orton” while watching Chad Henne struggle during a training camp scrimmage was a representative sample, then the team’s ultimate decision not to trade for and sign Orton disappointed the majority of Dolphin fans. But not me. It would have been a terrible mistake. Past Interference does not have a short memory. How many times does Miami have to import other team’s jetsam before fans stop clamoring for the same mistakes to be repeated ad infinitum? Must I list them again? Fiedler, Feeley, Frerotte, Lucas, Lemon, Culpepper, Harrington, Thigpen. You want any of those guys back? I didn’t think so. So enough already. Yes, the one exception was Chad Pennington who, when healthy and playing the best ball of his career, actually proved capable of leading the Dolphins to the playoffs. However, the result of that one playoff game demonstrated precisely the limits of how far Pennington’s arm could take a team and his unfortunate fragility meant that 2008, fun as it was, was nothing more than a fluke, a one-shot deal, rather than something to build on. Orton may be an upgrade over Henne. He probably is. But he’s not taking Miami to the playoffs. He’s not good enough and, in his 7th season, it’s unlikely he’s going to get better. He is what he is. So if the Super Bowl is the goal (and it’s supposed to be) why would Miami want him? No, we sink or swim with Henne in 2011. If he doesn’t improve, if he can’t develop, then the team almost certainly pulls the plug on not just the Henne experiment, but on the whole Parcells regime. Stephen Ross will blow the whole thing up and start over in 2012. Signing Orton accomplishes nothing but maybe improving the team’s chances of winning another game or two while undermining Henne’s confidence. At least give him the chance to prove he can be better than a Kyle Orton. Odds are he won’t be but at least the potential still exists. For all the criticism of Henne, all the shots he’s taken, the most important thing people need to remember is this: he’s started exactly 30 games in his career. Two seasons, that’s it. Mark Sanchez has started 31 and Jet fans aren’t down on him are they even though his career stats to date are extremely comparable to Henne’s. People still expect Sanchez to improve. So cut Henne a little slack. Yes, he ain’t Dan Marino. He didn’t enter the league fully formed and demonstrate greatness from the get-go. But nobody else has either. We might not see anything like that ever again (I hope you appreciated it). Even some of the all-time greats struggled in the early years of their career. The Henne Haters’ homework this week should be to check out the stats for the formative years of Terry Bradshaw, Troy Aikman, or Drew Brees sometime. Then try Dan Fouts, Warren Moon, and our own Hall-of-Famer Bob Griese. And that’s just off the top of my head.

However Henne’s Dolphins career turns out, the fact that the organization drafted and a commitment to him at least demonstrates a long overdue recognition that trying to find a starting QB on the cheap ain’t gonna work. It never has for this team. Free agent QB’s haven’t worked. Trading away lower round picks for QB’s hasn’t worked. You want to win, you pick the right guy and draft him. Period. Now Henne might not be the right guy. Generally (not always), you get your guy in the first round. Second round QB’s like Henne hardly ever pan out. And if this doesn’t, I fully expect Miami to take a first-round QB next year. But just think about the first round QB’s conspicuously not taken despite the team’s desperate need for young quarterback talent. Brees in 2001. Rodgers in 2005. The last two Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks. Did you see the passing duel they just put on in the NFL opener two days ago? Either one could be helming the Fins right now. Instead, this team’s whacked out priorities have seen them spending top picks on running backs instead. Two for Ricky Williams! A number two overall pick for Ronnie Brown (when Rodgers was available)! And with both of them in the backfield at the same time Miami can’t even play .500 football.

Williams and Brown have now departed without having helped the team to get any closer to the promised land. Despite occasional moments of brilliance from both men it cannot be said the number one picks invested in them paid off. If you’re counting that’s three first round picks spent on running backs in the last decade, none on QB’s. The 60’s and 70’s are over and hopefully the organization finally realizes the need to stop overspending to build a running game when the key to victory in today’s NFL is an effective passing game. Now Orton would not have been that expensive, Denver supposedly wanted a 3d-round pick. But recall how Dave Wannstedt kept frittering away 2d and 3d-round picks in panicky attempts to keep his job and avoid the rebuilding process. Those picks are still valuable if the person using them knows what they’re doing on draft day. Plus, Orton wanted a long-term contract. The absolute last thing this team needs is to commit that kind of money to a stop-gap solution. If a new regime does take over in 2012, then the new boss is going to need that money to sign his quarterback of the future, whomever that may be. No, better to sink or swim with Henne in 2011. It’s all on his shoulders. If he can’t become one of the league’s better quarterbacks then so be it. The team will have to move on. But Henne’s saying all the right things. Sparano’s saying all the right things. Brandon Marshall’s saying all the right things. Henne’s looked solid in preseason. All his receivers are back. He’s got another target in Reggie Bush. The opportunity is there. Let’s see if Henne's the future.

No QB For You

2011-05-08T13:08:00.000-07:00

I knew it. I knew it I knew it I knew it. The Dolphins needed to draft a top QB prospect. We all knew it. But for the 28th consecutive season, and the 12th since the retirement of Dan Marino, the organization would not pull the trigger on one. Three times in the past decade Miami chose not to use a first round pick on what would have been a franchise quarterback. Drew Brees in 2001. Aaron Rodgers in 2005. Matt Ryan in 2008. All could be Dolphins right now. (To their credit the team also passed on Brady Quinn in 2009). No matter who has had the final say in personnel matters for the franchise, the common denominator has been that none of them believe in gambling a top pick on a quarterback. All have preferred the safety of free agency. And nothing changed in 2011. Jeff Ireland had a chance to say yes to Ryan Mallet, Colin Kaepernick, or Andy Daulton in the first round. He said no. Miami went the safe route and went Mike Pouncey, a center/guard. The pre-draft consensus had Pouncey as a solid dependable player but not quite as good as his brother DeMarkice, a ? for the Pittsburgh Steelers (I saw one commenter at The Herald say "Great. We got the Frank Stallone of the draft"). Well, it's not the like the team didn't need another good lineman. But a new center or guard isn't taking this team to the Promised Land.

Ok, maybe if a qurterback fell Miami could still get a bargain in the next round. Problem was the Fins didn't have a 2d round pick. Well, as it turned out they had a good amount of later round picks to use and they packaged them in a deal to move up into the 2d round. And Ryan Mallet was still there. Would this be the awaited quarterback move? Uh, no. Miami grabbed RB Daniel Thomas instead. Well, it's not like the team didn't need to get a new running back. But focusing on improving the ground game isn't how you win in the 21st Century NFL. Look at all the stud QB's that have won Super Bowls over the last 15 years. Favre, Elway, Warner, Brady, Roethlisberger, Peyton Manning, Brees, Rodgers. Eli Manning was a #1 pick and has been a Pro Bowl QB. The only two Super Bowl winners who might be considered below average, Trent Dilfer and Brad Johnson, also happened to play for teams with all-time great defenses. It wsn't the running game that got those teams over. The Dolphins might field a fine defense in 2011 but I doubt it's going to be the kind of defense that can carry a team to a championship.

There's no obvious answer in free agency and as the lockout drags on there might even be the opportunity to grab a free agent QB. So once again it all rides on Chad Henne's shoulders. Sometimes a team just needs to roll the dice and grab a potential franchise QB. Sure it can blow up in your face but you're not going to win anything unless you try. Look at the Chargers. Could that Ryan Leaf pick have turned out any worse for that team? But just a few years later they got Drew Brees. And a few years after that they spent an even higher pick on Phillip Rivers. They haven't made the Super Bowl yet but they've been a perennial contender at least for the last seven years. Seven! Because they focus on the QB position. Miami doesn't. And until they do they aren't contending for a Super Bowl. Unless Chad Henne busts out of that cocoon in 2011 of course.

BIN LADEN:DEAD

2011-05-01T21:16:00.000-07:00

USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!

YEAH!

Miami Dolphins 2010 Wrapup, Part Three: What Do They Do Now?

2011-04-28T18:01:00.000-07:00

Not going to get too deep in the weeds on this one. It's not that complicated. Miami needs a quarterback. Not a free agent stopgap. Going down that route has never ever worked for this team. Neither has taking a QB outside the first round. Nope, Miami needs to use their 2011 first round pick on a QB. As I type these words the Dolphins are about an hour or so away from making their selection and a lot of QB's are still on the board. Will they pull the trigger on the highest available QB on their board? Given their track record and the current front office situation, I'd be surprised honestly. Whoever they take isn't going to play much, if at all this year, and when you've got a team with a GM worried about job security, you've got a team that's in trouble. Why? Because if a GM thinks he's gone if his team comes up a loser, why would that GM do what's in the team's long-term best interest? He's going to draft in the team's short-term best interest. This is what Parcells has wrought. His presence gave Ireland and Sparano job security. When he bailed early, their job security vanished. They know they need to win now so for Ireland a running back or maybe an O-Lineman make more sense to win a few more games in 2011. But this team's never a winning a Super Bowl without an upgrade at QB. We all have to know that at this point. I still think there's a shot Henne could take that step forward in 2011, but the odds are agin' it and ESPN keeps telling me this is the Year of the Quarterback. So let's take one!

Miami Dolphins 2010 Wrapup, Part Two: Where Did It All Go Wrong?

2011-04-28T17:17:00.000-07:00

So what went wrong? Or, more importantly, who can I blame? Well, there’s a lot of blame to go around as usual but Past Interference is going with H. Wayne Huizenga as our Ground Zero. He’s no longer the owner but his fingerprints are all over the 2010 Miami Dolphins. I’ve written before about all Huizenga’s mistakes in installing a winning management/coaching team but it seemed like he’d learned his lesson in 2008. He cleaned house, canned both his failed GM and head coach, and turned the whole thing over to Bill Parcells to fix. A man who’d taken four different franchises to the playoffs and won two Super Bowls, Parcells appeared to be the perfect guy to fix the organization. One minor problem though—Parcells was a great football coach but he wasn’t hired to be Miami’s football coach. No, he was going to run the football side of the operation. He was going to get the Dolphins a coach, a GM and then find some guys who could play.

How hilarious has it been this week watching Bill Parcells serving as a draft guru for ESPN? We know the guy can coach but his track record as a personnel guy is a mixed bag to say the least. Mike Greenberg somehow overlooked Pat White when he was going over all of Parcells’ draft “finds” in his introduction. In Parcells’ most successful tenure as coach, the Giants years, he had little to do with personnel decisions. Parcells left that gig so he could get more personnel juice somewhere else. And after a few years he would keep leaving those new jobs no matter how successful he’d been. So the while the Dolphins hoped for a successful marriage they should have known it was unlikely to be a long one. Still, Parcells had a lot to do with winning Super Bowls and Dolphin fans were getting far too accustomed to losing. How bad a move could it be? But in hiring Parcells Huizenga planted a time bomb. A Tuna time bomb.

Turns out Miami wasn’t the only team interested in hiring Parcells. Atlanta wanted him and went after Parcells hard. Parcells preferred Miami but when news surfaced that Huizenga planned to sell the team, Parcells wanted nothing to do with an unstable situation and decided to sign with the Falcons. Huizenga put the full court press on Parcells and convinced him he wasn’t selling the team. With that reassurance Parcells inked with the Dolphins and Atlanta “settled” for hiring the unknown Thomas Dimitroff as GM. The Falcons have since made the playoffs the last two seasons and had the best record on the NFC last year. Meanwhile, turns out Huizenga planned to sell the Dolphins after all (surprise!) and there was only one way for the organization to keep Parcells from walking—give him the option to leave the team at any time after the sale while still collecting his full salary for the life of the contract! (Haha. It’s true). Predictably, Parcells began to turn over the key decision-making over to his handpicked GM and coach after just two years on the job and pretty much stopped having anything to do with the Dolphins partway through the 2010 season so he’d presumably have more time to count the money he was earning by doing nothing. But at least he left the team in a whole lot better shape than they were in before his arrival right?

Well, back-to-back 7-9 seasons and the worst offense in the league aren’t what anybody had in mind. Remember, Miami was 7-9 in 2006, Nick Saban’s last year. Parcells clearly failed at making Miami a Super Bowl contender. The team can’t score. And the main reason they can’t score if because they don’t have a good quarterback. And the reason they don’t have a good quarterback is because none of the regimes installed since the departure of Don Shula have valued quarterbacks enough to spend a lot to get a good one. Including Parcells. Miami still has not spent a first round pick on a QB since they grabbed some guy named Marino way back in 1983. Dave Wannstedt traded two number one picks to get Ricky Williams. But he wouldn’t draft a quarterback. Nick Saban used the number two overall pick in a draft to take Ronnie Brown. But he wouldn’t spend what it took to get Drew Brees. And Bill Parcells used the number one overall draft pick in 2008 on an offensive lineman, Jake Long. The QB he passed on, Matt Ryan, fell into the lap of the aforementioned Tom Dimitroff in Atlanta. Now I’m not convinced that when their careers are over this move is going to be a clear mistake. In fact Long is the better player at the moment. But when you are desperate for a QB and you pass up on a top prospect like Ryan, you better have a good backup plan. Miami’s was to spend second-round picks on Chad Henne and Pat White. White proved to be perfectly useless and Henne appears to be on the train to Bustville (but I haven’t given up hope yet!). In two years Miami used three second-round picks on quarterbacks. John Beck and Pat White are no longer with the team and Henne may also not be long for the aqua and orange.

Without the Tuna to lead the team to a championship, Miami’s stuck with his handpicked GM, Jeff Ireland, and his handpicked coach, Tony Sparano. But Steven Ross’ all-too-public flirtation with Jim Harbaugh made it all-too-obvious Ross has 0 confidence in Sparano as coach (ignore the face-saving contract extension). A losing season in 2011 surely results in Sparano’s firing and probably Ireland’s too. So once again the Dolphins are led by people in desperate need of short-term success, something that’s worked out so well before. Thanks to Parcells Miami is now just a year away from engaging in yet another search for that elusive “messiah” to overhaul and rebuild the team into the champion Miami’s been waiting for for four decades.

Miami Dolphins 2010 Wrapup, Part One: Wha' Happen?

2011-01-19T21:02:00.000-08:00

Past Interference has been less than diligent in chronicling the weekly struggles of the 2010 Miami Dolphins. In my partial defense, the team’s performance was so uninspiring, so tedious and dull, that even had I felt like writing something about something, the subject would not have been the 2010 Miami Dolphins. But I do write about the team from time to time and seemingly overnight the Dolphins have ceased being tedious and dull. Well, at least ownership and management aren’t dull. They are…what’s the word? Pathetic? Inept? I mean I thought Huizenga’s mismanagement couldn’t be topped but wow, the Harbaugh/Sparano clown show Steven Ross premiered might have just raised the bar. I’m going to wait a little longer to process it though. Let me just say this. While the whole debacle was going on I was fully engaged and frantically seeking the latest Dolphins news at all hours, something I was most definitely not doing during the season. So at least you gotta give Ross some credit for creating some excitement around the team.

Alright. They say you can’t know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been right? Well it’s something like that anyway. So how did the team get here? Where did it all go wrong? Let’s cast our minds back to the beginning of the season. It all began so promisingly remember? Yeah, I know. It seems like a million years ago. But Miami actually came out of the blocks 2-0. Two road wins, each against teams that made the playoffs the year before. And that turned out to be their longest winning streak of the season. Their only winning streak of the season. Two games. Two losses at home followed and after that it was a frustrating pattern where every subsequent win was followed by a loss. Every time, until the late season collapse of course. They were good enough to win 6 of 8 road games, but bad enough to notch just a single home victory.

After a particularly atrocious loss, a bad beatdown by Ravens in week 8, the season’s key moment arrived. Chad Henne had played horribly in defeat. Miami was 4-4 and winless at home. So prior to the week 9 game against Tennessee Coach Sparano announced he was benching Henne. Replacing Henne would be the hero of 2007, Chad Pennington. This communicated two things to Dolphin fans: (1) After 21 starts Sparano (and presumably GM Jeff Ireland) had lost complete confidence in Henne; and (2) Sparano (and presumably GM Jeff Ireland) was now more worried about his own job security than about the team’s long-term future. So it was a panic move. Word had already gotten out that Bill Parcells (more on him soon) was no longer part of the organization in any capacity but informal advisor. And without the Tuna’s protection his protégés felt they had to win some games right now to keep their jobs. Not what you want. And of course it didn’t work anyway. Pennington predictably got hurt (though I don’t think anybody in the pool picked the second play of the game) and Henne was back in the saddle again. Before Henne too went down with a knee injury he responded with a fine performance, helping to lead the Dolphins to a comeback win. Henne’s injury wasn’t that serious but he had to miss the next game. So enter third-string QB Tyler Thigpen.

Given Henne’s prior benching and Pennington’s season-ending injury, everyone understood that week 10 was Thigpen’s audition for the starting job. And previous flashes of mobility and big play ability had some predicting success for the new QB. Those people somehow ignored the fact that Thigpen hadn’t ever been able to actually win a game in any of his previous game action. But we all hoped for the best. And we got the worst. Thigpen played about as badly as a quarterback could play. I believe “crapped the bed” would be the appropriate expression. It was Ray Lewis all over again. Except I don’t think Lewis ever presided over a shutout at home. So back to Henne in week 11 at the home of the hated Raiders. And Henne was great! He and the team played their best game of the season: a 33-17 thrashing of the Raiders. Clearly the benching lit a fire under Henne and he stepped up his game in response like a true competitor. At 6-5 and with three home games left against the Brown, Bills and Lions, a winning season seemed likely. And if Miami could steal a road win against either the Jets or Patriots, a 10-6 record and a wild card spot wasn’t out of the question. Things were looking up.

Haha. Sure they were. Oh, Miami stole a win from the Jets alright, but that was no thanks to Henne. He was awful. Luckily Mark Sanchez matched Henne awful throw for awful throw and the defense pulled it out. But they couldn’t pull out wins in any of the home games. All hree winnable games, all games Miami gave away because Henne couldn’t make a play. I do not know what happened to the guy. What happened to the guy who led the Dolphins to a comeback win in that Monday Night games versus the Jets in 2009. The guy who wasn’t afraid to take a shot downfield? Now Henne just robotically proceeded through his reads and checked down time after time. He never tried to make anything happen. Even in desperation time. Both the Bills and the Lions games ended when Henne threw short checkdowns that guaranteed the clock would run out instead of passes into the end zone that at least would have given Miami a shot at a victory.

Did the coaching staff screw up Henne’s development? Dan LeBatard makes a convincing argument they did they did. Maybe Henne was never going to be on the fast-track to greatness but benching your starter before he even has two full seasons under his belt is never a good idea. I've been watching football long enough now to see a number of guys need several years to develop into great QB's (Griese, Bradshaw and Brees among others). And you know what else is never a good idea? When your worthless offensive coordinator (yes, you Dan Henning) calls play-action pass after play-action pass even though his QB is on record as hating play-action, and the worthless OC continues to call play-action even on the most obvious of passing downs where no defense is biting on the fake for even a second. Sparano, Henne, and QB coach David Lee have to take some blame here. I’m not saying Henne’s going to have a better career than Mark Sanchez, but LeBatard is absolutely correct to note that Henne's stats for his first two seasons are actually a little better than Sanchez and while Sparano undermined Henne’s confidence, the Jets organization was patient with Sanchez and surrounded him with playmakers. Unlike Miami, a team with no deep threat, no offensive skill players with speed, and a running game that’s just a shell of what it used to be. Henne never had a fair chance.

On the other hand the team managed to construct a very good defense. Wake, Dansby, Misi, Smith. These are good players; the team’s actually not far from having a great defense if they keep making solid personnel moves (never a sure thing with this franchise). They were good enough this to win some games on their own and put the Dolphins in position to win a few others. But the incredibly weak passing game just killed this team time after time. Henne led a few comebacks in 2009, but in 2010 we stopped expecting anything out of the guy. Except turnovers and useless checkdowns. We’ve been here before, for the better part of a decade now. A good but not great defense. An offense tasked with simply not losing the game. And they proceed to do so anyway because you can’t win that way! You need to be able to throw the ball and score and you can only do that with a good quarterback. For the ninth time in the last ten years, Miami didn’t have one.

The Dolphins were at least competitive in the games they lost down the stretch. Competitive until the Week 17 finale that is. The team rolled over and got rolled by the Patriots. One of the all-time franchise embarrassments. After that game team owner Steve Ross, previously inclined to stick with Sparano, suddenly changed his mind and Dolphin fans just had to wait out the coaching search to find out who the new head man was going to be. Right?

The People Have Spoken

2011-01-07T21:20:00.000-08:00

While I continue to compose my thoughts about the ongoing Dolphins trainwreck, here's a Twitter sampling of Dolphin fans reactions to the Harbaugh fiasco:

Another season of glass half-full coachspeak, and fist pumping for field goals. I'm rooting for a lockout. F*@! this team!!!

More micromanaging, scare your quarterback into playing like a pussy, fist pumping field goals, saying K every 5 f-----g seconds bullshit.

I know the off season is long, but I'm honestly having trouble envisioning myself watching the Dolphins on TV next year.

Stephen Ross, you are now officially on my s--t list.

I'd say this loud, public, futile coaching search tops Jacksonville 62, Dolphins 7 as the most embarrassing day in Dolphins history.

Players from other teams are retweeting jokes about the Phins....this has reached "I s--t my pants at work" embarrassment level.

How is it that the Jersey Shore cast has shown better people skills than Miami Dolphins management?

I TALKED ABOUT THE F---------G ROONEY RULE ALL DAY FOR WHAT?!?! I BLAME OBAMA!!!

The Fins have made me so upset, that I've been forgetting to fast forward commercials on DVR

Just to be clear, The Miami Dolphins, can suck a whole bag of d---s

Good times

P.S. I'm pretty good about giving the proper links when I quote something but I forgot to match the tweets to their tweeters at the time I saved the comments. Sorry.

Meet the New Coach, Same As the Old Coach

2011-01-06T20:44:00.000-08:00

Ohmigod. You know what? Suddenly I feel motivated to write about the Dolphins again! Tune in tomorrow...

Tarzan

2010-12-31T12:37:00.000-08:00

One more trip down Memory Lane. While I was going through some of the stuff my mother had in storage, I came across a bunch of old Tarzan paperbacks that once belonged to my father. He left them behind after the divorce and they stayed in a closet for years afterward. Now, while my mother had many virtues as a parent, making sure her kids’ time was occupied was not one of them so consequently as a boy I often found myself bored out of my skull. And on one of those occasions I decided to take a crack at some of those Tarzan books. I can’t remember what piqued my interest about them; probably the great Frazetta covers on some of them (see above, though Frazetta later said he wasn’t even trying his best with those paintings because the publisher was so cheap and wouldn’t give him back his artwork!).

I started with the very first one: Tarzan of the Apes. Unfortunately I never got to finish it because I made the mistake of bringing it to school with me and somebody ripped it off. (Who the hell steals a Tarzan paperbook? They’re cheap. You can get it for free at the library. And no junior high school punk thief reads books anyway.) So I never finished that one. Luckily I already had a comic book adaption so I knew how it ended, and I was smart enough to never again bring one of my own books to school. Lesson learned. I read the second book in the series, The Return of Tarzan, cover to cover. And I loved it. And I loved the next one, and the next one, and the one after that (Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, probably my favorite). Let’s face it, Tarzan’s a wish-fulfillment character right in the wheelhouse of a 12 or 13-year-old boy, something I happened to be at the time. And say what you will about Edgar Rice Burroughs as a writer but those books move (no less a writer than Gore Vidal said Burroughs possessed a rare gift: he could “describe action vividly”). The books are never boring. Well, they aren’t unless you maybe try to read them all in a short period of time. I made it through the first 13 but put down number 14 halfway through and never picked it or any subsequent Tarzan book back up again. The repetition must have gotten to me. But I’ve never lost my affection for the character.

For most people Tarzan’s not a character from a book though. He’s a character from movies and TV. The 1932 movie with Johnny Weismuller was such a hit that it kicked off a movie series lasting over 30 years. The series kept on going well past the time Weismuller got too old to play Tarzan anymore. No problem. They’d just get a new actor to play Tarzan. And I saw a bunch of these movies. Not at a movie theater though. On TV. In the pre-cable era old movies constituted the programming lifeblood of countless local TV stations and where I grew up one station featured a little show on the weekend called “Tarzan Theatre”, which was nothing but the opportunity to show a cheap old Tarzan movie every Saturday. (This clip isn’t of “my” Tarzan Theatre but it's close enough).

At the time of my first exposure to the Tarzan movies I hadn’t yet cracked open the books but my know-it-all father had and he was kind enough to explain to me how the movie Tarzan was actually a much-bastardized version of Burrough’s fictional creation. The book Tarzan was not only clever and resourceful, he was the child of an English lord, the master of several languages including English, and was perfectly at home in either civilized London or primeval Africa. The movie Tarzan on the other hand was a simple but good-hearted man-child who couldn’t speak in complete sentences or comprehend modern civilization (though like his literary counterpart he would deal out some serious ass-kicking when necessary). And while the first couple of Weismuller Tarzan movies were well-done big-budget MGM affairs the later ones, with or without Weismuller, just kept getting worse. Stupid plots. Bad acting. The same stock footage used over and over again. Soundstages instead of location shooting. Even going to color didn’t improve things much. Until 1959.

After Weismuller retired the Tarzan producers replaced him with Lex Barker (for 6 films), and then Gordon Scott (nee Werschkul). But the budgets remained low and Tarzan remained the same monosyllabic character regardless of which actor donned the loincloth. That all changed with Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure. A new producer, Sy Weintraub, took over the series and changed things for the better. Realistic dangers. Sensible plots. Location shooting. And best of all, Tarzan acted and spoke like a normal intelligent human being. With a real script for once Gordon Scott proved to be a terrific Tarzan in his fifth go-round as the character and Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure lives up to its title. The follow-up, Tarzan the Magnificent was equally good. I loved those two films. The highwater mark didn’t last though. Scott didn’t want to get typecast at Tarzan so he set off for Italy to make a bunch of movies there during the height of the “sword and sandal” craze. After that he left show business altogether and kind of disappeared.

Finding that box with my Dad’s old Tarzan books obviously triggered a lot of memories. It also got me wondering about what ever happened to Gordon Scott, my favorite Tarzan. Luckily the internet allows such questions to be easily answered. Turns out that that Scott’s days as a celluloid hero made him a lot of fans and maybe the biggest was a guy named Roger Thomas, all of 14-years-old when Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure came out. As an older man he made it his mission to track down and meet his boyhood hero. After years of trying he finally succeeded and in 2001 he arranged for Scott to visit him in Baltimore. Scott arrived and that “visit” ended up lasting for six years. Scott just basically moved in with the Thomases. Scott was a kind of a mysterious character, a bit of a recluse really, but Thomas loved having his hero around. Can you imagine that happening to you? Your favorite childhood movie star coming to live with you years later? Becoming your close friend and eating dinner with you every night? Unfortunately, Scott developed some serious health problems, had to go into a nursing home, and died in 2007. But this article about the relationship between Scott and his biggest fan is really touching.

As for Tarzan, without Scott the series swung on with Jock Mahoney for two films but at 42 he was already a bit long in the tooth for the part. So Weintraub had to pick a new one from over 300 applicants (including Frank Gifford!) and here I can finally connect up this post to the National Football League because the man selected to play the next Tarzan was an active professional football player, Mike Henry. From the NFL gridiron to the African Jungle. A ninth-round pick from USC, Henry played linebacker for the Steelers from 1959 to 1962 and for the Rams from 1963 to 1965. (9 career INT’s and 6 career fumble recoveries). His 1962 Post cereal football card says “During the off season, Henry works as an extra in several movie and television studios in Hollywood.” But when Hollywood opportunity struck Henry chose movie stardom over NFL obscurity, retiring from the game in order to play the Lord of the Jungle. But Henry’s Tarzan wasn’t really much of a jungle dweller at all. The moviemakers refashioned the character as a globe-trotting hairy-chested James Bond type. Crazy huh?

Henry did three Tarzan films and there the series died. Luckily Henry didn’t die along with it. During the filming of Henry's second Tarzan movie Cheetah, played by Dinky the Chimp, used his fangs to rip open Henry’s jaw. Henry became delirious with jungle fever for several days but survived unlike Dinky the troublemaking chimp who was euthanized for his sins. Henry also suffered several injuries during filming and came down with dysentery, ear infections, and an infected liver as well (Plus a typhoon destroyed the set of his third Tarzan movie and brought with it a typhoid epidemic; bad juju). After making that third movie Henry was sick of the whole thing, called it a day and hung up the loincloth even though he had been all set to star in the TV series to immediately follow that third film. The part instead went to Ron Ely (who was good). The TV show lasted two years and several theatrical movies were cobbled together from some of the episodes but essentially the Tarzan movie series came to an end when Henry left.

A decade later Tarzan finally returned to the screen in two very different films: Greystoke (a fine period piece) and Tarzan the Ape Man (to this day the worst movie I have ever seen in a theatre). Then two more movies in the late 90’s: Disney’s Tarzan (not a bad cartoon) and Tarzan and the Lost City (unseen by me but I heard it sucked). Since then nothing. But in recent years we’ve seen Zorro and Sherlock Holmes refashioned into big-budget special effects blockbusters so I don’t see why the same can’t be done for Tarzan. But I have a feeling that when that future Tarzan movie appears it's not going to bear a whole lot of similarity to the original Tarzan books I read all those years ago.

30 Years Ago This Month

2010-12-28T09:48:00.000-08:00

In my previous post I referred to the one football game I ever attended with my mother. It turned out to be one hell of a game, one of the most exciting I’ve ever seen. The Dolphins shut down the league’s top-scoring offense for three quarters, fell behind in the fourth quarter, rallied for a late game-tying TD, and then, facing certain defeat, blocked a field goal to send the game into overtime. Where they won. Awesome. The greatest NFL game I’d ever been to up to that time. And did I mention this was a Monday Night game? The crowd was absolutely electric that night and when that winning field goal went through the uprights the Orange Bowl was shaking. Literally. What a great game and a great night. But no one was talking about it the next day. Nobody. I found out the next morning before school that while I was yelling and high-fiving and cheering on the Fins to victory, a lunatic had gunned down my hero.

Right before the game’s most dramatic moment, the New England Patriots’ attempt at a walk-off game winning field goal, Howard Cosell informed the audience of the murder of John Lennon. But the 80,000 of us actually at the game didn’t have a clue. We were screaming our guts out and rocking the stadium while everyone watching on TV suddenly could care less about the blocked field goal try.

For days afterward the news was filled with images of people deeply affected by Lennon’s death. People openly weeping about someone they’d never met. I didn’t have that reaction. Like I said, Lennon was my hero but I didn’t cry for him. I just felt weird. More than anything I was confused. I didn’t really know how to react. I didn’t know him and being a teenager, an introverted one at that, I wasn’t really given to openly expressing my feelings. But I knew I’d lost something.

When it comes to music I’ve always somehow found myself behind the times. While the rest of my peer group was digging disco and corporate rock and “Bruce, Billy and Bob” (as one of my friends put it), I was at home listening to my mother’s old Beatles records. My mother was a bit of a hippie and she had pretty good taste in music, assembling a nice collection of what we now like to call Classic Rock. And years after the group called it a day I played those Beatles albums over and over and over again. Their music meant everything to me. They were the Alpha and Omega of rock. My mother primarily owned the later period stuff, so when I wore those grooves out I got myself all their other records too. And I loved them all. I loved them so much that the music wasn’t enough anymore. I wanted to learn about the band too. I wanted to know the legend. Who were these guys and what made them so great? I needed to know. So I picked up a little book called The Beatles Forever and I read it so many times that it eventually fell apart. I’ve read plenty of other books about the Beatles but this one’s still the best as far as I’m concerned. You get the basic history, some fine writing about the music, especially the solo careers, but the author, Nicholas Schaffner, really gets across just how important the Beatles were to the generation that grew up with them. And those were the people shedding tears in the wake of Lennon’s death.

Back in 1987 I saw a show marking the 20th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper and the so-called Summer of Love and at the end each of the surviving Beatles was asked if they believed it was true that “All You Need Is Love”. George Harrison said he did. I can’t remember exactly what Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr said but in the Beatles Anthology McCartney said he did believe that was the essential message of the Beatles. Maybe that’s too simplistic a summary of the entire Beatles catalog but let’s stipulate that McCartney’s right, after all, the man wrote a lot of love songs and he’s surely more qualified than anyone else to say what the Beatles were all about. After all, the Beatle became the most loved band of all time for a reason, or reasons. And surely one of those reasons was their message. Another reason has to be the Fab Four (seemingly) lived their own message, being so close to one another and so appreciative of their fans devotion (at least in appearance). The Beatles Forever lets you see all this from the viewpoint of a fan who felt this connection to the band. And the connection didn’t stop with the band as a group. The Beatles were so famous that each member of the band had a public persona, so every fan had a favorite Beatle. And like so many mine was John Lennon.

Because the Beatles had called it a day by the time I started listening to their music, I learned about them from Schaffner’s book and subsequently from various interviews, mainly Lennon’s famous Playboy interview published shortly before his death. The biting wit, the uncompromising truth-telling (as he saw it), the crazy political stunts (trying to help stop a war). And his songs seemed to come from a more personal place than McCartney’s. He was real. All this strongly appealed to my teenage self. Here was somebody I wished I could be like. Now even then I knew Lennon was hardly, as McCartney put it later, the idealized “Martin Luther Lennon” figure he became after his I murder. He was too complicated and damaged an individual for that. But that didn’t matter. I loved his music and I loved what he had to say on matters both political and personal. I certainly wasn’t alone. And then some crazy person with a gun shot him to death for absolutely no reason. All these years later it’s still horrible to think about.

The day after the game I expected to be able to regale my friends with stories about the game. But that never happened. Nobody wanted to talk about it. Certainly not me, and for the last 30 years I’ve never thought about that Monday Night game without thinking about the death of John Lennon.

Mom

2010-12-18T21:33:00.000-08:00

I profusely apologize to my few readers out there for the lack of posts these past couple of months. While I’ve never been the most prolific blogger, a number of recent events in my life left me with no desire to write even a single word. And the very worst of these events was the sudden death of my mother. I definitely won’t post some maudlin reminiscence of her here or, worse, an explication of our complicated relationship.

No, this is a football blog so indulge me as I remember my mom in relation to football. Basically, she had no understanding of the game whatsoever. None. Simply put, my mom embodied the cliché of the woman who just doesn’t get football at all. She loved the excitement though; she really seemed to be having a good time at the one game I remember us attending. And she certainly enjoyed being around when her boys were home watching a game together and cheering on the Fins. But she couldn’t really follow a game so her questions about, oh, anything having to do with the game (“Are the Dolphins playing today?” “No mom, it’s Saturday) were always good for some laughs. And the introduction of fantasy football just ratcheted up the unintentional comedy. “The Dolphins won. Does that help your team?” “No mom. As nice as that result was we only care about stats in fantasy football.” She never could grasp that. She didn’t comprehend NFL blackout rules either. On those rare occasions the Dolphins didn’t sell out my mother was invariably puzzled to find out I got to watch the Miami game that she, a South Florida resident, had to miss. Of course when the game was televised she never knew what channel it was on anyway and, since she also didn’t quite get the concept of local television markets, she didn’t understand why I couldn’t give her an answer.

We never once had a normal football-related conversation. She didn’t know any of the players outside of Dan Marino. She didn’t know strategy. She didn’t know the rules. But whenever she did ask me something about football there was a real good chance the question was going to put a smile on my face.

Thanks for the laughs mom.

George Blanda

2010-11-06T21:03:00.000-07:00

Alright, I haven't been inspired to write anything lately but if I don't I'm going to forget how so let me dig deep into my past and try to come up with something and see where it goes.

Past Interference was most definitely remiss in not paying homage to the late great George Blanda last month. The shape of that man's NFL career is so strange, impressive and unique that absolutely nothing like it could ever happen again. A failed starting QB stint with the Chicago Bears. Washed out of the NFL at 32. Rejuvenated as the first star QB of the new American Football League. Leading the Houston Oilers to two championships. And the coda: a final 9 seasons of action as the over-40 kicker for the Oakland Raiders. I missed almost all of that. When I was a kid Blanda to me was just that really old guy who kicked for Raiders. Of course 48 seems a lot younger to me now then it did then.

As you may know Blanda's shining moment as a player came in 1970 where he passed and kicked the Raiders to a win or tie in five consecutive contests. This would be pretty impressive for any player but Blanda being 43-years-old and all at the time made what he did instantly legendary. I didn't know about any of this when it happened though. Too young. I've been watching NFL games for as long as I can remember but a game is always in the present. So as a kid the NFL's past was a complete mystery to me. Blanda, Jim Brown, Johnny U, Lombardi, Bronko Nagurski. All of it. Or at least it remained a mystery until I started reading whatever I could get my hands on. Any book or magazine with a piece of NFL history would do. And one of my favorites was a (literally) little publication called Football Digest.

Man did I love that magazine. The pieces I still remember the most ran under the column title, "The Game I'll Never Forget". One was by a guy named Bert Rechichar who recounted an interesting game he played on September 27, 1953. Rechichar, a defensive back for the Baltimore Colts, picked off a pass in that game and returned it for a TD, helping his team win the day 13-9. But what made that game truly memorable for Rechichar were the other points he scored in the game. He kicked a field goal at the end of the first half, and that field goal was 56 yards long. A pretty impressive kick today but a mind-blowing one in 1953 as that boot set an NFL record that lasted for 17 more years.

Another Game I'll Never Forget column that I've never forgotten concerned a game that has probably never been forgotten by anybody who was there. It was the 1970 Lions-Bears game where Chuck Hughes died. The only on-field death of an NFL player. Fanhouse had a good piece about it recently. Unfortunately, I was too young at the time I read the Football Digest column to be able to grasp the essential tragedy of what had happened on that sad day.

But I was old enough to appreciate the Football Digest article that excitingly laid out exactly what happened in each of George Blanda's five clutch performances in 1970 (I wish I had a link to that article but I don't; here's the NFL Hall of Fame's summary). Amazing hardly begins to describe how brilliantly Blanda played through those games. Oakland's quarterback, Darryl Lamonica, suffered several injuries during that stretch giving Blanda the opportunity to both pinch hit at the QB position and make critical kicks, something he did again and again and again (and again and again). Through nothing but the power of the written word Football Digest brought Blanda's heroics to life for me years after the dust had settled on the playing fields. I never saw those games but thanks to that Digest article I knew Blanda had done something unforgettable. I did get that.

But I've only now come to understand what George Blanda's 1970 season must have meant for America as it happened. Very few athletes have ever done something so transcendent at such a relatively advanced age. Nolan Ryan. Jack Nicklaus. And George Blanda in 1970. With millions of men in their 30's and 40's watching and cheering him on. Men many years removed from their own athletic prime, watching a guy, a contemporary, the oldest guy on the field, the oldest player in the game, still playing at the highest level and finding a way to win. Beating players over two decades younger. There's something about that must have resonated with football fans like nothing else could have. I think it's why despite the complete circus his career has now become so many are still rooting for Brett Favre. Thanks to Blanda the 1970 Raiders made a playoff run, ultimately falling 10 points short of the Super Bowl. But today the 1970 Oakland Raiders are barely remembered. It's George Blanda we remember. He accomplished something far rarer than winning a Super Bowl. He became an icon.

What If: Super Bowl V

2010-10-12T21:05:00.000-07:00

One more Earl Morrall-related post for the time being. Let’s revisit the scene of his greatest triumph, Super Bowl V. While Morrall may not have led his team to any actual points that day, he didn’t do anything to cost his team the game either. He entered the game with his team trailing and left the field as a Super Bowl winning quarterback. But it almost didn’t happen. Obviously the dramatic play of the game was the game-winning field goal with five seconds left. But in my opinion the single-biggest play came much earlier in the game.

With two minutes and 48 seconds left in the first half, the Baltimore Colts trailed the Dallas Cowboys 13-6. Dallas had completely shut the Colts down to that point. The Colts had failed to gain a single first down and their only score had come on a 75-yard twice-deflected TD pass caught by John Mackey (the Colts missed the extra point). Johnny Unitas subsequently threw an interception and the hit he took on the play broke some of his ribs. When the Baltimore Colts got the ball back at their own 48-yard line, it was Earl Morrall now taking the snaps from center. And Morrall proceeded to do something Unitas could not do: throw for a first down. Morrall did it twice, moving the ball to the Dallas two-yard line. Three straight runs netted zero yards and with less than 30 seconds left in the half the Colts faced a big decision. Take the easy FG or gamble and take a shot at tying the game? The Colts chose the gamble and lost when Morrall overthrew Michell in the end zone. 13-6 Dallas at the half.

More disaster ensued on the opening kickoff; the Colts fumbled it and Dallas recover at the BAL 31. Five plays took it down to the Baltimore two-yard-line leaving the ‘Boys on the verge of delivering the knockout punch. Then, on THE play of the game, Duane Thomas fumbled it back to the Colts. Or maybe it really wasn’t a fumble. The Cowboys Tight End, a guy named Mike Ditka, later remembered it this way:

We had a talented team that year and lost a game to Baltimore that we really shouldn't have lost, on a very controversial play. An official called a fumble on Thomas, but it wasn't a fumble. If I'm going to remember one play in a Super Bowl, that's the play I'm going to remember because it was a terrible call....I was on the ground, right beside the guy who picked up the ball. The guy who picked up the ball was our center, Dave Manders. The guy who fumbled it evidently was Thomas, but actually Duane really let the ball go when he heard the whistle blow. We felt there was no fumble on the play, and if we had scored then, it wouldn't have mattered what would happened later because the game would have been over.

Regardless of what actually happened, the officials ruled Thomas had fumbled. The Colts remained unable to put points on the scoreboard, but their defense shut Dallas down the rest of the game and two Craig Morton interceptions, setting up a short TD run and an easy FG, gave the Colts exactly what they needed to win. But if Dallas had gone up 20-6 then it’s hard to see how they could have lost. A 14-point lead is all-but-insurmountable in Super Bowl history. And given the ineptitude of the Baltimore offense, it’s hard to envision a scenario where they scored two offensive touchdown. Even if the Colts still score that short TD off of a 4th quarter interception return they’d never get a second INT because Dallas would be protecting a lead. And with a late 4th quarter lead I’m sure Tom Landry could have sussed out that preventing Craig Morton from throwing another pass would have been the best way to ensure victory.

I submit to you then that Thomas’ fumble (or “fumble”), almost surely decided the outcome of Super Bowl V. If Dallas scores on that drive they go on to win that Super Bowl. So in my opinion that fumble is the single biggest fumble in NFL history. The most famous fumble in NFL history is of course “The Fumble”, i.e. Ernest Byner’s fumble in the 1987 AFC Championship Game. But Byner’s fumble only cost the Browns a chance at forcing overtime and a shot at the Super Bowl. Duane Thomas’ fumble (or “fumble”) cost Dallas an actual Super Bowl victory.

So what if Thomas doesn’t fumble? Well Dallas almost surely wins that game. And by winning Super Bowl V as well as Super Bowl VI we’d now be about that Cowboy team as one of the great teams in NFL history. And I think the reputations of two men in particular would have been affected in the most positive way by victory in Super Bowl V.

First, Tom Landry. Landry’s obviously one of the NFL’s all-time greatest coaches but you never see anybody consider him the greatest coach. Generally either Vince Lombardi or Paul Brown top the lists (see here and here). Lombardi’s got the 5 titles and the all-time best winning percentage while Brown’s got three NFL titles (and three AAFC ones) and his reputation as perhaps professional football’s most important innovator. Brown and Lombardi made their mark in the pre-merger NFL of course. Two more recent candidates I’ve seen others make cases for are Bill Walsh who won 3 Super Bowls and changed the shape of the game with the introduction of the West Coast Offense, and Joe Gibbs who won three titles of his own but with a different QB each time. (With three of his own Belichick of course might prove to be a popular candidate when he finally retires). And of course Don Shula’s another strong candidate, with all that winning more games than anybody else business, coaching in more Super Bowls than anybody else, and, oh yeah, the perfect season. Shula coached against Lombardi and kept on winning games after Walsh and Gibbs retired. (Super old school fans might go with George Halas or Curly Lambeau but I’m leaving them out of this.)

But Tom Landry never seems to make it into the conversation despite an incredible resume. Essentially, you look at three things when evaluating coaches: Wins, Influence on the Game, and Championships. When it comes to victories, Landry chalked up more wins than anybody but Shula and Halas. As for influence, Landry’s right up there with Brown and Walsh as one of the game’s great innovators. The flex defense, the shotgun, the use of computers, hiring a quality control coach, etc. And a few of Landry’s disciples went on to pretty good coaching careers, Dan Reeves, Mike Ditka and Gene Stallings. So no doubt what’s keeping Landry out of consideration from the top spot is the fact he “only” won two championships. Halas, Brown, and Lombardi won more in the pre-Super Bowl era. Walsh and Gibbs won three in the Super Bowl era. Like Landry, Shula won but two as well but he won 77 more games than Landry and his winning percentage is a lot higher.

But what if Landry notched that third Super Bowl title? Then he’s got as many NFL championships as Brown, Walsh and Gibbs, and one more than Shula. Only Noll would have more Super Bowls but Landry’s got 61 more wins and a higher winning percentage than Noll and Noll only won with the same corps of superstar players while Landry would have won titles with two different QB’s. As for Walsh and Gibbs, Landry coached more seasons than those two men combined. Here's something else. In their 1971 championship season, Dallas gave up only 18 points in their three playoff games. In 1970, they allowed only 26 points. That's pretty amazing. Just 44 points allowed in 6 playoff games combined. If Dallas goes up 20-6 in Super Bowl V giving that dominant defense a cushion to work with, and with the offense no doubt taking the air out of the ball to eliminate the chance of an INT, it's likely they don't give up anymore points the rest of the way. So now the Cowboys win back-to-back titles while giving up only 34 points total in the postseason. Would be talking about the greatest defense ever? They’d certainly be in the conversation. And the hands-on coach of that all-time great defense? Tom Landry. Now, I’m not saying only bad luck cost Landry that Super Bowl. The TD that could have been was set up by a fumbled kickoff return and Dallas’ only touchdown of the game was set up by an INT. Landry was the one who picked Craig Morton to start Super Bowl V for him even though a clearly superior QB in the person of Roger Staubach was sitting on the bench. But the Cowboys were this close to winning that game.

Landry’s third on the all-time wins list. He posted 18 straight winning seasons at one point. He was an innovator on both offense and defense. In addition to those titles he did win, he had four near misses going up against maybe the two greatest dynasties ever, the 60’s Packers and the 70’s Steelers. With three titles to his credit, including two back-to-back crowns, I really think a lot of people would be naming Landry as the greatest coach ever, not just one of the greatest.

The other guy hurt badly by the Super Bowl loss: the game’s MVP, outside linebacker Chuck Howley. Howley had such a great game that day he earned the MVP award despite being on the losing team. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb in saying that will never happen again. He also had another great Super Bowl the following season when his team won. So had his team won both, Howley would be the key defensive player for a dominant defensive back-to-back Super Bowl winning team. And Howley didn’t just rise to the occasion in the postseason, he made six All-Pro teams. Yet he can’t get a sniff of the Hall of Fame. He’s ever even been a semifinalist! He should be in anyway but if he’d been the MVP of the winning team he’d probably be a lot closer than he is now.

One final thought. It’s a lot more hypothetical but I can’t help but think the Cowboys win Super Bowl V in as convincing a fashion as they won it the next year if Landry had gone with Staubach. And if that had happened, then we might also be talking about Staubach as a strong contender for the title of greatest QB of all-time.

Two Random Observations From Week 5

2010-10-12T19:47:00.000-07:00

1) When the Kansas City Chiefs lost to the Indianapolis Colts Sunday, they left the league without a single undefeated team. Not one NFL team could even make it to 4-0 in 2010. Weird huh? I saw that this was the earliest the NFL’s lacked an undefeated team since 1970. And you know what that means right? You don’t? Well, it means it’s also the earliest the 1972 Miami Dolphins have ever gotten to celebrate the fact that they remain for another season the only perfect team in NFL history. Congrats fellas. No angst this year.

2) When Brett Favre hooked up with Randy Moss for an undeniably exciting TD bomb on Monday night, we saw something very unusual. ESPN’s broadcast stayed with a shot of Favre running down the field towards the end zone so he could celebrate the TD with Moss. No, it wasn’t unusual for ESPN cameras to focus on Favre. I’m aware of that network’s man-love for The Ol’ Dongslinger. What was unusual was the sheer length of time the cameras stayed on Favre’s post-TD antics. Normally what we see any time a TD’s scored are a dizzying series of jump cuts, each one lasting maybe two seconds. The guy who scored. The QB. The coach. Fans in the stands. The cheerleaders. The opposing coach. On and on until it’s time for the replays. Now I’m glad we get such nice state-of-the-art camerawork these days, especially in the nationally broadcast games. And I’m glad for the inventive camera angles. But sometimes, it’s not such a bad idea to just stay with the guy who actually scored or the guy who threw it to him. In their haste to add some human interest the game producers are now actually depriving the viewing public of some good stuff. Case in point: the Dallas-Tennessee game this past weekend. After Jason Witten scored a critical TD, one camera caught offensive lineman Marco Colombo rushing over to him and Witten gave him the ball. And then...the camera cut away for more various and sundry reaction shots. And in the process, they missed the TD celebration that ended when Colombo hit the ground, something that by rule apparently constitutes an unlawful celebration penalty. When this finally dawned on the announcers they explained what happened. But they had to do so without visual aids because all those stupid camera shots apparently meant they missed getting a good shot of the unlawful celebration. You reap what you sow NFL boradcasters. Stop overproducing the games!

Your 2010 Miami Dolphins: Week Two

2010-09-25T21:13:00.001-07:00

Wow. A truly stellar defensive effort by the Miami Dolphins. Shutting down the Vikings in Minnesota, forcing four turnovers, and knocking Bret Favre into next week and possibly an early retirement (we'll see). It's been a few years since Jason Taylor, Zach Thomas and Sam Madison were playing together for Miami and now we're starting to at least see the possibility that the Dolphins may be able to once again field a defense with a number of true stud defenders. Dansby, Vontae Davis, Koa Misi. They all played tremendous football. And look who joined them: Jason Allen. We might finally be able to remove the "Perennial Disappointment" tag from his name. Sometimes you can take a player perceived as a disappointment, surround him with other quality players, give him some good coaching and direction, and lo and behold it turns out the guy's a pretty good player after all. Maybe it was the organization all along.

The offense struggled again unfortunately. They started off promisingly with the bomb to Marshall and the TD to Hartline, but they just couldn't get into a consistent rhythm after that. I'm sure some of it was a conscious decision to go conservative after taking the early lead. But it would be nice to see the passing game start to click a little. In Henne's defense he hasn't thrown a pick yet and his completion percentage is still over 60%. He's not doing anything to put the Dolphins in position to lose games at least unlike a certain two running backs who almost gave away a big win.

Alright, 2-0 is 2-0 and 2-0 on the road is even better. Henne showed what he was capable of last year in primetime against the New York Jets. I'm expecting more of the same Sunday Night.

Earl Morrall Revisited

2010-09-25T20:44:00.000-07:00

A while back Past Interference devoted a lengthy series of posts to the career of former NFL quarterback Earl Morrall. And it's very possible those writings will turn out to be the most important pieces ever posted to this blog, simply because very little has been written about Earl Morrall, a singular figure in NFL history. A 21-year career. Started games in 18 different seasons. Quarterbacked two of the greatest teams in NFL history, the 1968 Colts and the 1972 Dolphins. A Super Bowl-winning quarterback for the 1971 Colts. Won an MVP award with one franchise and was NFL Comeback Player of the Year with another. Yet, as I said, very little attention has been paid to his career. And that little attention paid has mainly concerned Morrall's unfortunate performance in Super Bowl III. He may not be one of the all-time greats but the rest of Morrall's long and unique career deserves some attention!

When this blog chose to pay some attention to that career what I wrote was not as complete as it could have been and in the interests of historical accuracy I'm going to correct that right now. Three years ago I did not know Morrall's career record as a starter. But now, thanks to the invaluable website Pro-Football-Reference.com, I do. It's a very good 63-37-3. A winning percentage of 0.626. Obviously Morrall didn't win 63 games by himself. In fact he played for some excellent teams with some stellar teammates and someone might well argue Morrall's success as a starter was due mainly to the quality of his teams. So how much credit should he get?

What I had done in my earlier posts was take the won-loss records for Morrall's teams in those seasons where he was the primary starting quarterback, add them up, and then compare that won-loss mark to the cumulative records of his teams the year before he became their primary starter (he was never a starter for back-to-back seasons). No need for such crude methods now. Now, I can simply compare that 63-37-3 mark to his teams' cumulative won-loss records in the games where Morrall didn't start. He started at least one game in 18 different seasons. His teams' cumulative record in those 18 seasons was 145-87-10. Subtracting the games Morrall started leaves a non-Morrall record of 82-50-7, a winning percentage of 0.615. So Morrall clearly played on above-average teams, but those teams slightly improved with Morrall as the starting QB.

I also found out something else new from Pro Football Reference. I had thought Morrall started the majority of his teams' games in five different seasons3 (1957 Steelers, 1963 Lions, 1965 Giants, 1968 Colts, 1972 Dolphins). But it was actually six. Johnny Unitas threw more passes than Morrall for the 1971 Baltimore Colts, but Morrall started more games, 9 (he went 7-2). So if we add up the games he won and lost as a starter for those six seasons, it totals 46-21-1, a fantastic 0.684 winning percentage. In the games he didn't start in those six seasons, his teams went 9-5, 0.643. So again we see Morrall improved his team's record.

Almost three quarters of Morrall's career wins came in those six seasons and interestingly he was just a perfectly average QB in the rest of his career starts: 17-16-2. Clearly Morrall's game benefitted when he got to start on a regular basis.

And since I now know about Morrall's starts in 1971, I might as well more accurately revisit what I did before and compare the records of his teams when he was their starter with how they performed in the year prior to his arrival. Again, 46-21-1, 0.684 for Morrall. The cumulative year before (minus Morrall's one start for the 1970 Colts): 49-26-6, 0.642. So whatever method you choose, you'd have to say Morrall's teams were at least a little better with him then without him. And overall those teams performed quite well.

Your 2010 Miami Dolphins: Week One

2010-09-18T20:23:00.000-07:00

Win number one is in the books and while Miami probably should have whipped the Bills by more than 5 points, let's remember that Miami got their butts handed to them the last time they travelled to Buffalo. The defense played especially well. Dansby was a force. Koa Misi looked. And so did Jared Odrick before his unfortunate injury. The front seven harrassed Trent Edwards all game and, as we saw, he is most definitely not a guy who handles pressure well. It would have been nice if Miami could have stopped that 4th-and-11 and avoided the need for a final defensive stand but for the most part they throttled the Bills.

The offense was more of a mixed bag. The running game was fairly effective but the passing game was very inconsistent. Henne avoided the big mistake at least but the team had no real success with the long pass though Marshall was probably more responsible than Henne on the drop of that sure thing underthrown 50-yard bomb. The toss to Fasano to set up the Ronnie Brown TD was perfect but then Miami settled for FG tries way too many times when they had chances to take control of the game. But watching Edwards crumble under pressure followed by Mark Sanchez' pathetic effort the following day has to make any Dolphin fan feel better about our QB situation.

This week's game in Minnesota's going to be a lot tougher. If Miami can take it then we might really have something going with this team.

The 2010 Season Is Here!

2010-09-11T20:22:00.000-07:00

Finally, the NFL is back and the Miami Dolphins will soon be taking the field. Should be Dolphin fans be optimistic? Sure, why not? Parcells and Sparano have methodically jettisoned the mistakes of the Wannstadt/Speilman/Mueller/Saban/Cameron eras and slowly replaced the players from the earlier regimes with better ones (for the most part). The team lacked star players though and recognizing this, the organization traded for Brandon Marshall and signed Karlos Dansby in free agency (and I’m kind of liking the Clifton Smith pickup; he’ll be a better returner than Ginn). Of course not every personnel move made by the Parcells/Ireland/Sparano trio has paid off. Witness the recent waiving of last year’s second-round pick QB Pat White and third-round pick WR Patrick Turner. And Peter King went a little over the top calling Miami’s 2009 draft “disastrous”. Ok, two picks busted but first-rounder Vontae Davis fourth-rounder Brian Hartline are starters and second-rounder Sean Smith will still see the field a lot even if he’s lost his starting gig for now. (You want a disastrous Dolphins draft? Try 1984 or 1987 or how about every draft from 2000 to 2004?

Nobody hits every pick. Not Bill Walsh. Not Bill Polian. Nobody. But you have to like how Parcells/Ireland/Sparano have logically addressed the teams needs over the past two years after taking over a team with a hollowed-out talent base. And not everyone would have approached things the same way. Witness the Denver Broncos shedding quality players from their roster while passing up can’t-miss prospects in the draft to take “character” guys instead. Or how about the Redskins, forever mortgaging their future, trading away draft picks, and year after year riding that veteran free agent train to nowhere. Miami fans have been down that track and we never want to go back.

So I’m not going to lie to you, I’m excited about the Dolphins this year. Mainly it’s going to come down to Chad Henne. I liked what I saw him do last year, the way he approached the game. He rarely did stupid things, he never panicked and he throws a nice deep ball. He looks like a guy who's very confident in his ability. Hopefully he builds on all that and takes the team to the next level. Having Brandon Marshall around should make that a lot easier. Let’s say 9 wins and a wild card.

I love this time of year. Everybody’s still got a chance. Miami could be the surprise of the league. And all my fantasy football teams can still win it all. I can’t wait for kickoff.

PI does want to note here the departure of one of my favorite Dolphins of the last few years, Greg Camarillo. After unwisely trading away Wes Welker, the Dolphins needed some receiving help in 2007 and picked up Camerillo off of waivers. He only caught 8 balls that year but one of them became one of the great plays in Miami Dolphins’ history, his 64-yard game-winning TD in overtime that saved Miami from going 0-16 season. 2007 was such an awful, awful season and Camarillo’s play gave us the one and only highlight that I never ever get tired of watching. Watch it for yourself

It’s got me in the mood for some NFL football! Go Miami.

Don't Hate The Raider Hate the Blame: Part Three

2010-09-05T07:47:00.000-07:00

Well, Past Interference took a more-than-fair look at each of the Raiders prime Hall of Fame candidates and we’ve come to the only conclusion possible: Raider fans have nothing to complain about. Not one of the 9 candidates has anything like an overwhelming case for the Hall of Fame. No bias. However, I can see how you might cry about exactly two of the players on the list: Tim Brown and Ray Guy.

There’s no definition of a Hall of Famer, no specific list of statistical accomplishments or awards won that automatically open the Hall’s doors to a player. A player just needs to have the kind of career resume that convinces enough voters that he’s one of the best ever at his position. Funnily enough, Guy and Brown kind of have resumes that are the polar opposite of each other. In Guy’s case it’s all about the awards. He was the consensus All-Pro punter six times and he’s the punter on the NFL’s 75th anniversary team. No other punter’s ever come close to the kind of recognition Guy received for his punting career. Now, as I’ve already noted, no statistical measure supports the belief that Guy’s the greatest punter ever. But I can see how a fan of Guy could legitimately think the man’s been robbed for years now.

Unlike Guy, Tim Brown’s all about the numbers. Over 1000 catches. 101 TD’s. Almost 15,000 yards receiving. Oh, and commenter JA Morris notes that all of Brown’s punt returns can't be forgotten either (326 punt returns to be exact). And while Brown never made an All-Pro team it’s not like he went unrecognized all those years. He made 9 Pro Bowl squads and got selected as a second team wide receiver on the 1990’s NFL Team of Decade. So while Past Interference’s own opinion may be that as a player Brown’s a cut below Chris Carter, Michael Irvin, Sterling Sharpe, and Mark Clayton, a Tim Brown fan can certainly ask what more was the guy supposed to do to be a Hall of Famer?

Here’s how PI ranks them in Hall of Fame worthiness:

1) Cliff Branch
Tim Brown (Tie)

I’m having a hard time figuring out which of these receivers deserves the honor more. In my heart of hearts I feel that Branch at his best was better than Brown at his best. But it’s hard to ignore Brown caught over twice as many passes as Branch. However, Branch has got those three Super Bowl rings and was the superior postseason performer. On the other hand, Brown made 9 Pro Bowl teams to Branch’s 4. But, Branch made All-Pro three times to Brown’s none. I don’t know. I lean to Branch but both have solid cases for the Hall.

3) Ken Stabler
4) Lester Hayes
5) Todd Christensen
6) Tom Flores
7) Jim Plunkett
8) Ray Guy
9) Jack Tatum

And here’s PI ranks them all in order of their chances for election:

1) Tim Brown
2) Ray Guy: He’s been a finalist 7 times and a semi-finalist 5 times. At some point the voters are going to get sick of hearing about him and they’ll vote him in just to shut everybody up. Like what happened to Art Monk.

3) Ken Stabler: PI’s as surprised as anyone that Stabler’s not already in. As soon as he became eligible he was a Hall of Fame finalist for two straight years, then dropped off the Hall of Fame map altogether for over a decade. A finalist once again in 2003, Stabler then hit another wall; he’s only made it to the semifinal stage every year since.

He was one of the most famous players of his time. He certainly had a flair for the dramatic (“The Sea of Hands”, “Ghost to the Post”, the last-second 1976 playoff win over the Patriots, the (ugh) “Holy Roller”). He won two MVP awards. He won a championship. And he won period. 96 games to be exact, still 14th-most all-time by a QB and his winning percentage is higher than all but three (Manning, Montana, Brady) of the guys ahead of him. In fact, of the top 50 winningest QB’s of all-time only five guys have posted winning percentages than Stabler (the above three guys plus Staubach and Jim McMahon). On the flipside he turned the ball over too much, he was immobile, and he went 1-4 and AFC Championship Games but still, it seems like he did more than enough to make the Hall. But he’s not in. Why?

In comments sptfrn writes In comments sptfrn writes that sportswriters have focused too much on Stabler’s off-the-field activities. And I completely agree this focus had helped keep Stabler out of the Hall to date. But I’m not sure the off-the-field stuff is completely irrelevant. If, as legend has it, Stabler studied his playbook by “the light of the jukebox” then can’t we say his off-the-field activities interfere with his on-the-field play? Stabler played with an extremely talented bunch of teammates and a brilliant coach, yet kept coming up short in conference title games. Maybe a certain lack of dedication to football was in fact to blame. I don’t know. It’s possible.

But Stabler probably won enough on the field to justify his induction. Winning and playing in just the one Super Bowl is probably what’s kept him out so far just like it’s what kept John Madden waiting for so many years. Seems like if Madden’s in now though that the QB who won all those games for him ought to be in too. Stabler’s a senior citizen now and if the voters do plan on getting him in someday they really ought to do it while he’s alive. I think he’ll get in soon.

4) Lester Hayes: Might benefit from the concerted effort voters are making to get more defensive players in
5) Cliff Branch
6) Todd Christensen: Doubt he ever makes it
7) Tom Flores: Never
8) Jim Plunkett: Never
9) Jack Tatum: Never

Don't Hate The Raider, Hate The Blame: Part Two

2010-08-25T21:09:00.000-07:00

Continuing my discussion of the Hall of Fame cases of some former Oakland Raiders:

5) Ray Guy: I already discussed Guy at length here. Simply put, the statistical case for him to be considered the greatest punter of all time is surprisingly weak. But I doubt that’s the main thing keeping him out. No pure punter’s ever been selected but Guy’s come the closest by far. So my guess is he can’t get over the hump because of anti-punter bias, not anti-Raider bias. A good chunk of voters simply don’t believe any punter deserves to go in ahead of a “real” football player. And until somebody can establish that a great punter is as valuable as a great player at any other position, we might never see a punter get in. Plus, with more and more punters coming along who are statistically superior to Guy, his window might have shut.

6) Lester Hayes: The main thing keeping Hayes out of the Hall of Fame isn’t anti-Raider bias. It’s a Raider. Mike Haynes to be specific. Haynes and Hayes made up maybe the greatest cornerback tandem in NFL history. But Haynes was the better player. Hayes made one AP All-Pro team. Haynes made two. Hayes went to five Pro Bowls. Haynes went to nine. Hayes has been a Hall of Fame semi-finalist five times and a finalist four times. Haynes is actually in the Hall of Fame. In 1980 Hayes had as great a season and postseason as it’s possible for a cornerback could have. But, understandably, he never came close to having a season like that again. Haynes had a number of outstanding seasons that could each be considered his best.

Actually, there’s probably one other thing that might be helping to keep Hayes out so far. It’s called Stickum. As you might remember, Hayes was known to cover his hands, arms, elbows, and his entire uniform with the gooey adhesive. At least he did until 1981, when the NFL passed a rule banning any player from using it. And of course Hayes’ INT total went from 13 to 3 the year of the ban. Coincidence? Whether or not Hayes should be in comes down to what your standards are. If Mike Haynes is the standard then Hayes is out. But if there’s room for a defensive back not quite as good as Haynes then Hayes would be a worthy candidate.

7) Jim Plunkett: Jim Plunkett may be one of the greatest QB’s in Super Bowl history but honestly, his Hall of Fame resume doesn’t consist of much else. Plunkett played so badly for his first two teams he was actually out of football in 1978 and his career was all but over. He caught the break of a lifetime when Oakland grabbed him as a backup in ’79 and an injury to the starter (Dan Pastorini) forced the Raiders to make Plunkett their starter in 1980. But excepting the postseason he was never a great quarterback. His lifetime QB rating is 67.5. His career won-loss mark is 72-72. As a Raider he only played more than 9 games in a season twice. He never made an All-Pro team. He never got a single vote for an All-Pro team. Postseason performance is important but it can’t be the beginning and ending point of the discussion. A great comeback story but Plunkett's just not really a Hall of Famer.

8) Ken Stabler: For awhile now I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a lengthy piece about Stabler. I’m still not ruling it out so I’m going to keep this bit short. The big four QB’s of Stabler’s era were Roger Staubach, Fran Tarkenton, Terry Bradshaw and Bob Griese. All four are in the Hall. If you take the totality of each man’s career, i.e. career passing numbers, rushing ability, consistency, postseason play, and championships, then it’s clear they were all better players than Stabler. Stabler played as well as a quarterback can play in 1974 and 1976. He was excellent in 1973 and 1977. And…that’s pretty much it for greatness. You could argue Stabler was a better passer than Bradshaw but you can’t ignore Bradshaw’s four rings versus Stabler’s one either. Stabler took his team to five straight AFC title games but only played in (and won) a single Super Bowl. He missed some chances. I think that, more than anything, is what’s kept him out so far. His laid-back partying lifestyle probably didn’t endear him to sportswriters either. Those guys like their QB’s hanging out in the film room not the bar. Stabler wouldn’t be an undeserving selection but if we want to make room for the fifth best QB of the 70’s I’m not sure that title doesn’t belong to Ken Anderson.

9) Jack Tatum: No chance. Even if the Stingley thing had never happened. If they ever open a Hitters Hall of Fame he’s got a shot.

Don't Hate the Raider, Hate the Blame: Part One

2010-08-20T21:07:00.000-07:00

While researching my post on Jack Tatum, I discovered something I didn't know: lots of Raiders fans believe “the media” holds a bias against their beloved team. And to find an example of this alleged bias year-after-year look no further than the Hall of Fame. Oakland fans swear that anti-Raider bias is the only thing keeping otherwise qualified Raiders from induction into the hallowed halls of the Hall. Of course Past Interference just had to check this out. I might be a Raider-hater of long standing but PI is nothing if not fair and PI knows a great player’s a great player even if that player (shudder) wears the Silver and Black. Please be seated Raiders fans, I have read your complaints. The various cases seem to boil down to a total of 8 players and 1 coach who Oakland fans insist have been denied the game’s greatest honor by biased sportswriters. Are the arguments legit? PI is on the case. Let’s start with these four men:

1) Cliff Branch: I’d love to see Cliff Branch in the Hall. He was one of my favorite players, very underrated, and for a three-year stretch (1974-1976) he was as dominant in his time as Jerry Rice was later on. Of course Rice dominated for well over a decade while Branch was just a good solid receiver after his short run of greatness ended. But if a receiver has to be as good as Jerry Rice to make the Hall then no more receivers are ever getting in. Branch made three AP All-Pro teams, something very few wideouts have ever matched or bettered. If you compare Branch’s career stats to some of his Hall of Fame contemporaries he’s better than Lynn Swann and quite comparable to John Stallworth and Fred Biletnikoff. So why isn’t Branch in?

Well, it’s not anti-Raider bias. It’s statistical bias. NFL passing rules changed in the twilight of Branch’s career, offenses adjusted to take advantage, and for a quarter century now passing and receiving numbers have moved ever upward. Branch’s numbers looked great in his time but look fairly pedestrian now if you don’t make the proper adjustments. Branch dominated at the very height of football’s deadball era. By the time he was eligible for induction, a new generation of receivers (led by Rice) was blowing away Branch’s numbers. Biletnikoff got in before the new era took off and Swann’s and Stallworth’s candidacies got boosts from tremendous Super Bowl performances. But while Branch might not have transcended on the Super Bowl stage like the Steeler duo he did play for three Super Bowl-winning teams himself and caught three TD’s, none in which came in garbage time. And he played in 19 total postseason games and his numbers are pretty good.

So should he be in? Well, it all depends on how you look at the receivers of his time. They just weren’t used as much as they are today. That’s not Branch’s fault. If you do think the best receivers of each era should be treated the same then Branch is very deserving. You can make a case he was the best receiver of the 70’s depending on how much of a premium you put on peak performance. To me he’s got as good a case as Swann, Stallworth and Biletnikoff. But, if you’re going put him in, it should be scheduled after Harold Jackson’s long-overdue induction.

2) Tim Brown: Brown’s case for the Hall is the opposite of Branch’s. Branch has All-Pro selections, big postseason performances, and three rings. Brown’s just got one thing-- numbers. If someone would have told me 20 years ago that an receiver with over 1000 catches, 101 TD’s, and close to 15,000 receiving yards would not be an automatic first ballot Hall of Famer, I would have thought that person was completely insane. Yet here we are. Tim Brown retired with those numbers and was not selected in his first year of eligibility.

Anti-Raider bias? Not hardly. More like Jerry Rice bias. Rice retired the same year Brown did and the voters probably didn’t want to vote in more than one WR in 2010. That doesn’t mean Brown is a lock to make it in the future however. Cris Carter’s been bypassed three years running now and he’s got more catches and TD’s (30 more to be exact) than Brown. As the trend towards bigger passing numbers continues nobody really knows just how impressive Brown’s numbers are going to look in a few more years. Football writer and HOF voter Peter King wrote recently about how the once incredible 1000-catch mark may soon be surpassed by a number of players. So should Brown get in? Well, he never made an All-Pro team and when he was in his prime I never considered him to be on the level of Rice, Irvin, Carter, Shannon Sharpe, or even the Marks Brothers. His longevity is impressive but he never had a single season that blew anybody away. He can’t get in before Carter and if Brown doesn’t get in very soon he might have some trouble getting in at all as he’ll continue to drop on the all-time leaderboards.

3) Todd Christensen: You know, after going back and looking at his stats I have to say there’s no doubt Todd Christensen’s been unjustly forgotten for some unknown reason. Let’s do a quick comparison with the best of his Hall of Fame contemporaries, all Hall of Famers.

Tight End	Rec	Yds	TD
Christensen	467	5872	41
Casper	378	5216	52
Newsome	662	7980	47
Winslow	541	6741	45

Taking only career totals into consideration, Newsome's and Winslow’s numbers are clearly better. Christensen’s numbers superficially appear better than Casper’s but Casper’s peak was in the mid-70’s and so his best years were just as impressive as Christensen’s were in the 80’s. Plus Casper was considered a great blocker. Unlike Newsome, who had the opposite rep to say the least.

But if you look at just the best seasons of Newsome and Christensen you could certainly make a case that Christensen was the better player Newsome. Newsome made one All-Pro team and three Pro Bowls. But Christensen made two All-Pro teams and five Pro Bowls. Plus Christensen should get a little credit for being a key component of a championship team, the 1983 Raiders. So why Ozzie and not Todd? It’s probably the relative shortness of Christensen’s career. Christensen had a ten-year career but he didn’t start a game for his first three seasons. He didn't catch a single pass in his first two and only caught 8 in his third year. On the other end he only started five games in his last season. So really he only started regularly for six seasons. He had a dominant five-year run in that time but it’s still only six seasons. Even if Newsome’s best seasons aren’t quite as good as Christensen’s, Newsome had more good seasons and was at least a solid contributor in his later years. Also, Christensen’s also been hurt by a couple of guys who came later, Shannon Sharpe and Tony Gonzalez. Christensen’s 90-catch, 1000-yard seasons as a tight end don’t seem as jaw-dropping.

If you’ve got a little time, or are already bored with this post, just go here to read a really good list of the top 10 greatest tight ends of all-time. The writer makes a convincing case for Christensen as number 8, one ahead of Newsome.

If you buy that, and think there's room for the top 8 tight ends, then Christensen has a solid argument for the Hall of Fame.

4) Tom Flores: Flores’ number one accomplishment was coaching the Raiders to two Super Bowl wins but two titles doesn’t make a coach a Hall of Famee. George Seifert’s got two also. So does Jimmy Johnson and Jimmy’s got a higher career winning percentage as well. Buddy Parker won two titles with the Lions back n the 50’s and hasn't made the Hall. Flores’ career winning percentage is lower than any current HOF coach except for Weeb Ewbank but Ewbank’s got three rings and some other historical accomplishments Flores can’t match. Rightly or wrongly Flores, like Seifert, is probably also seen as a coach who inherited an already talented team capable of winning a Super Bowl. I doubt he ever gets in and the fact his predecessor as coach, John Madden, did get in should put the lie to any charges of anti-Raider bias here.

They Called Him Assassin

2010-07-31T21:21:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid Jack Tatum was one of the most famous players in the league. Kind of a strange position to be in for a safety. And no one thought he was the greatest safety either; dude never made an All-Pro team despite what some of the recent obituaries are saying. Tatum was a good player but the All-Pro nods in his time all went to guys like Jake Scott, Dick Anderson, Ken Houston, Paul Krause, Cliff Harris and Donnie Shell. But Tatum was a bigger name than all of them. Why? Well, for one he seemed to wind up a part of some of the most high-profile moments of the 70's. Tatum was the guy who popped Frenchy Fuqua in the 1972 divisional playoffs and set in motion the Immaculate Reception. He knocked Lynn Swann from the 1975 AFC Championship Game with a concussion. Tatum was the guy who jarred the ball loose from Rob Lytle causing the fumble that wasn't in the 1977 AFC Championship Game. And Tatum made one of the biggest hits in Super Bowl history when he blasted the helmet right off Sammy White's in Super Bowl XI. Yeah, Tatum made some big hits.

That's what he was famous for. Like another of his contemporaries, Conrad Dobler, Tatum got a rep as a dirty player, a cheap-shot artist. Maybe it was unfair. Maybe he was just a bad-ass. An enforcer. An intimidator. An assassin. If any receiver tried to make a play in Tatum's territory he was going to pay a price for it. Tatum was doing his job. That's football. To some people Jack Tatum played the game like it was supposed to be played. Old school. But I wasn't one of those people.

I've written before about how much I hated those "Bad Boy" Raiders teams. They cheated. They played dirty. And they revelled in it. When Chuck Noll called out the "criminal element" on the Raiders he was referring to Tatum's teammate George Atkinson but everybody took Noll's words and applied them to Tatum as well. Mel Blount and Jack Lambert weren't angels either but there was just something about the Raiders. They seemed to go all-out to move the borderline separating a legal hit from a cheap shot. Tatum more than anyone.

And Tatum's reputation was sealed forever after he delivered his most infamous hit, a hit that unlike the ones listed above came in a game that didn't even count. Tatum didn't get flagged for his paralyzing hit on Daryl Stingley and he didn't get fined either. So it was a legal play, something Tatum's defenders over the years have used as their main evidence that Tatum did nothing wrong. I remember getting into an argument about it with a college roommate (a Raiders fan) several years later and that's exactly what he said. And now in the wake of Tatum's death a lot of people are claiming Tatum was completely blameless over what happened.

To me, Tatum made a conscious decision to try to hurt somebody in a game that meant nothing, on a play that meant nothing. He said so himself in his book, "It was one of those pass plays where I could have attempted to intercept, but because of what the owners expect of me when they give me my paycheck, I automatically reacted to the situation by going for an intimidating hit." And then to compound it all Tatum went and put out that book where he bragged about his efforts to maim his fellow players and seemingly savored his reputation as a football assassin. In fact, he put out a couple of follow-up books as well where he did the exact same thing. Worse, he never expressed true regret over what happened to Stingley. Now I suppose Tatum thought he did nothing wrong so no apology was necessary. But some sort of gesture towards Stingley should have been made, some expression of remorse, some show of kindness. And Tatum never made one. Actually on one occasion, years later, Tatum did make an overture, an offer of reconciliation. But he wanted it to be televised. And Stingley found out why; Tatum had another book coming out. The proposed meeting wasn't heartfelt after all. Tatum just wanted to sell some books. About the affair Stingley said in 2003:

"I told him if they showed up at my door without a camera then we could have some real healing," Stingley said. "This is a world built on hype. Selling newspapers. TV ratings. Those are real. But in my world what's important is to have a forgiving nature. I was always ready for reconciliation with Jack Tatum. I was willing to do it once before until we learned at the final hour that it was about selling a new book. That changed my mind. I could not allow anybody to capitalize on my situation any more.

"I could not understand why a person would still take that approach so many years later. How could he try to take advantage of the situation again? How could he not feel serious regret or remorse for what happened?

"If he called me today, I'd answer. If he came to my house, I'd open my door to him. All I ever wanted was for him to acknowledge me as a human being. I just wanted to hear from him if he felt sorry or not. It's not like I'm unreachable. But it's not a phone call I'll be waiting for anymore."

Though hurt by Tatum's behavior Stingley spoke eloquently and forgivingly about the man. But he died four years later without ever having received the acknowledgement from Tatum that he'd hoped for. Many understandably don't want to think about that in the wake of Jack Tatum's death but I don't see how you can ignore it.

Postscript: The man who threw that fateful pass to Stingley, Steve Grogan, shared some interesting thoughts on Tatum.

Blindsided

2010-07-22T11:57:00.000-07:00

Past Interference’s first book review and I won't make you wait for the verdict. I loved it. The book's great. Buy it. I can't imagine any thinking football fan not liking K.C. Joyner's Blindsided. Joyner's known as "The Football Scientist" but he didn't put anything into his book that's not easily understood by an intelligent reader. No crazy numbers. No esoteric mathematical formulas. Just nicely reasoned discussion. Careful arguments. And tables. Lots of tables. Joyner runs through a wide variety of NFL topics. PI’s long been interested in how the NFL’s greatest teams were put together and in who should be in the Hall of Fame so chapters on those very topics clearly apppaled to me. But I also loved the chapters on things I’ve never thought twice about, like why Art Rooney's Steelers were so bad for so long or why Bert Bell is an overrated NFL commissioner. Really, there wasn't one part of this book I didn't find to be of interest.

Ok, the unalloyed praise is out of the way. Now let me nitpick a couple of things. In perhaps the most intriguing chapter of the book, The Darwinism of the Coaching Forest, Joyner posits the existence of two separate coaching alignments: Personnel/Scheme and Athletic/Hitter. The first alignment divides coaches into those who try to beat opponents with superior talent and those who try win with superior play-calling. The second alignment, as Joyner explains it, divides coaches into those who try to beat opponents with athleticism and those who try to win by administering punishment to the other team. This part of the book is of extra interest to a Dolphin fan since Joyner uses Don Shula's place on each coaching axis to illustrate what Joyner's talking about. Joyner contrasts Shula with Tom Landry to show the difference between a Personnel coach and a Scheme coach. Shula, according to Joyner, designs his offensive and defensive schemes to fit the talent he's got, while Tom Landry runs the offense and defense he wants to run regardless of the talents of his players. Shula tries to acquire the best players he can and makes the most of their talent; Landry tries to obtain those players who best fit into the system he already plans to run. I suppose I can accept that coaches have tendencies along these lines and that Joyner has Shula and Landry pegged correctly. But can we really classify coaches so easily?

Bill Walsh is your classic Scheme coach right? Mr. West Coast Offense. But if you read Dr. Z’s classic column "The real West Coast Offense" you see that Walsh, as offensive coordinator for Cincinnati in 1970, only came up with the seeds of his West Coast Offense after the Bengals QB Greg Cook got hurt. Cook was “a big, strong armed kid who could also throw with touch”. When he went down the team replaced him with Virgil Carter “smaller, agile, quick-thinking”. As Dr. Z puts it:

Carter was able to go through his progressions quickly and throw on the go; not blessed with a big arm, but accurate. So Walsh crafted an offense to suit him, a horizontal offense with a lot of motion and underneath routes and breakoff patterns an attack that now goes by the misnomer "West Coast Offense."

This indicates Walsh might not in fact have been a true scheme coach at all. Rather he designed an offense to fit his personnel. Ok, he was just a coordinator back then, not the coach. And maybe he hadn’t developed his coaching philosophy yet. But how do you explain this? Years later Dr. Z asked Walsh what his system would have been like if he'd had Cook for 10 or 12 years and Walsh said "Completely different…It would have been down the field." So Walsh himself says he would have installed an offense that fit the talents of his quarterback, one totally different than the West Coast Offense. If Walsh had gotten John Elway or Dan Marino to run his offense then I'm guessing it would have looked a lot different than the West Coast Offense he designed for Virgil Carter. And something like that happened in reality with Don Shula who abandoned his run-dominated offenses of the 70’s for downfield passing once he installed Marino as his QB.

Joyner categorizes Bill Belichick as a Scheme coach and claims the reason for Belichick’s refusal to coach the Jets after Bill Parcells stepped down in 2000 was that Belichick knew it couldn’t work since Parcells, a Personnel man, would still be running the organization. That’s certainly a more than interesting hypothesis but I’ve never heard anyone else suggest anything like that as the reason for the schism . It would have been nice if Joyner actually cited to something in support of his theory. I doubt he finds another sportswriter to back that up. (Money and/or power, as is so often the case, seem the more likely answers).

I have even more of a problem with Joyner's second axis, the Athletic/Hitter one. Here Joyner contrasts Shula, the Athletic coach with Chuck Noll, the Hitter coach. Now obviously Noll's teams were known for hitting while Shula's teams weren't. But was that because Shula didn’t stress hitting or because Noll had better hitters than Shula? And even if we can say Joyner’s right on Shula and Noll on the Athletic/Hitter axis why would that axis continue to exist today? Joyner’s got a table of every Super Bowl winning coach and that coach’s Scheme/Personnel Alignment. Lombardi’s Personnel/Hitter. Shula is Personnel/Athletic, Shanahan is Scheme/Athletic, etc. In the first 42 Super Bowls, just ten of the winning coaches are on the Athletic coaching tree. And out of the first 30 Super Bowls, coaches favoring the Athletic alignment won just four of them (Ewbank, Shula twice, and Walsh in his first SB. Joyner has him switching to the Hitter alignment for his two later wins). We know the NFL’s a copycat league. Soccer-style kicking. The Shotgun. The West Coast Offense. If something works other teams are going to adopt it. If something fails miserably teams drop it like a live grenade (anyone bringing back the single-wing?). So why would any coach in his right mind have favored the Athletic Alignment if the Hitter Alignment was going to give you a far better chance of getting a Lombardi trophy? It makes no sense. According to Joyner coaches on the Athletic side have had more success in recent years but were the 2002 Bucs and 2007 Giants really Athletic squads? They sure seemed like hitting teams to me. Well, PI may not have been able to make much sense out of Joyner’s alignments but it sure made for a fascinating read at least.

My one other quibble with the Football Scientist was with his Hall of Fame chapter, specifically with his contention that Ray Guy needs to be in the Hall of Fame. Seems to me you have to do two things to make the case for Guy. First, you have to show a pure punter, any pure punter deserves induction. In other words, quantify a punter’s contribution to his team. What’s the difference between a really good punter and a really bad one? How much greater are a team’s chances of winning with a great punter? Clearly HOF voters don’t think it’s that much as they’ve yet to vote in any pure punter. But you’d think a football scientist could come up with a formula to show us the actual value of a punter. But Joyner doesn’t do that. He simply asserts that since punters are already honored with All-Pro and Pro Bowl selections they ought to be picked for the Hall. The obvious problem with what he’s arguing is that an entire starting lineup is named for the All-Pro team and you get two entire rosters of Pro Bowlers. Meanwhile, the Hall of Fame can only induct a maximum of seven players a year so who wants to waste a valuable spot on a friggin’ punter at the expense of a “real” football player?

But assuming for the sake of argument that the HOF should immediately induct the greatest pure punter ever we also have to know who that is. Is it Guy? Joyner says it is but he doesn’t refer to any stats at all in support of this; he just highlights Guy’s nine selections to All-Pro teams (six consensus All-Pros). I’ll admit that’s impressive but All-Pro selections can’t be the be-all end-all of the “best ever” argument, especially at a position, like punter, where we actually have numbers that can show us how good somebody actually was. And right now Guy stands at 67th place all-time in punting average. And his net average is even worse! Unless you want to argue it’s become a lot easier to post better punting averages since Guy retired how can anyone say Guy was the best ever? Plus there’s like 23 guys ahead of Guy in gross average who started their careers before his anyway. Tommy Davis punted over a decade before Guy came into the league, his average is much better, he punted in much tougher conditions (San Francisco), and he also doubled as a very good placekicker. Why shouldn’t he go in before Guy? Davis retired over 40 years ago and he’s still ranked 9th in punting average!

Guy had a fairly long career for a punter, 14 years, but Jeff Feagles just retired after playing for 22. Guy’s career average is half a yard more than Feagles but what about their other stats? Guy kicked 210 punts inside the 20. They didn't count the stat for his first 3 years so let's be really really generous and bump him up to 300. Jeff Feagles has 497. Guy had 128 touchbacks. Feagles has only 122 in a much longer career. Feagles owns every cumulative punting stat in the book. And his net average, the more important stat anyway, is higher than Guy’s (35.9-33.4). Guy’s touchback, inside the 20, and net average numbers would all indicate that while he might have had a big leg and great hang time he wasn’t all that accurate at dropping his punts where they needed to go. Joyner finesses this by saying he once talked to a special teams coach who told him that when it comes to a punter the only thing that mattered was hang time. Say WHAAAT?! If that’s true then why is Joyner expending all this effort to make a case for Ray Guy? One punter with decent hang time’s as good as the next. Are we going to put them all in the Hall? Or rely solely on All-Pro selections to sort them all out? That doesn't sound like Football Science to me.

Ok, so what about all this All-Pro stuff? Guy had to be great to get picked all those times no? Well, I have a theory about this. Hear me out (or rather, read on). Back in Guy’s day there was no such thing as the internet. There were no pro football databases to access. No websites to check. What you had was the newspaper. And once a week the paper would list the league’s punters in order of gross average. That was it. If you wanted to find out who the leaders were in net average (gross average minus return yards and touchbacks), you couldn’t. If you wanted to know who was the best at dropping kicks inside the 20, too bad. All you had was one stat: gross average. And in his day Guy had a pretty good gross average, better than most of his fellow punters. If you were sportswriter voting for the All-Pro team you looked at the same list everybody else was looking at. Plus Guy played for a great team and was on TV a lot where he could uncork a big punt for all to see. He also had a well-liked coach, John Madden, who told everyone Guy was the best. And without access to the statistics that would sort it all out who could argue? And when you get in once, you've got a good chance to make it again. So Guy would make the All-Pro team year after year based on gross average and reputation. That couldn’t happen today. It’s also likely Guy was aided by weak competition at the position. We might living in the Golden Age of Punting today but when Guy kicked there weren’t a whole lot of quality punters out there. It wasn’t until the late great Reggie Roby debuted near the end of Guy’s career that we had another guy with a big leg and some serious hang time to talk about.

Look, if Guy really had such great hang time on a consistent basis he’d have the high net average to go with it. But he doesn’t. So he’s not the all-time greatest punter. Not even close. Sorry KC. I still loved your book though. And here’s an idea for your next one: come up with a way to mathematically value the contributions of the punter. The world needs it.

Rosy Grier

2010-07-22T10:49:00.000-07:00

Rosy Grier's one of those rare athletes who becomes even more famous for something he did off the playing field. In his case he'll forever be the man who acted bravely in the midst of unspeakable horror and tragedy when he pried the gun from the hand of Bobby Kennedy's assassin. At least Grier helped make sure nobody else got shot on that terrible evening.

Past Interference feels a bit proprietary about Mr. Grier. I have no memory of him as a player but I was just the right age to have witnessed, and in some way been affected by, his brief performing "career", something I once had a bit of fun writing about.

But Rosy Grier's a complicated person, a serious person, who's certainly done a lot for others over the years. And he's still out there trying to make the world a better place. He's worked with troubled street kids, helped organize the construction of federally financed senior housing projects, founded an organization offering job training and housing to inner city residents, and currently he helps the cause of prostate cancer ~~prevention~~ awareness and, an ordained minister, "speaks and preaches frequently on the need to end violence, greed, hatred and racism." It's all here. Read it.

I have nothing profound to add. Good people who do good things deserve some recognition and since this is a football blog I'm using it to salute the good works of one Roosevelt Grier. A great guy. The end.

The Decision

2010-07-22T08:16:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the dearth of posts lately (I love using the word "dearth").

Pundits of all colors and stripes have spent the past two week rightfully excoriating the combination of egomania and stupidity that Lebron James showed in allowing something like “The Decision” to ever see the light of day. No need for Past Interference to beat that dead horse. As for the decision itself, I asked my friend and ex-Cleveland resident Jim for his opinion and he said simply, “He gave them seven years” and “stars always leave Cleveland”. That says it all. No matter how big a jerk King James might have acted towards his now former fans in Ohio they should probably remember Lebron never chose to play there. He was drafted. He might be from there but he never picked them. Only upon the expiration of his contract did Lebron have a chance to choose the place he wanted to play. He did. And he didn’t pick Cleveland. As a free agent he gets to do that. That’s sports. He doesn’t owe them anything (beyond common courtesy).

Past Interference is old enough to remember a time when free agency didn’t exist in sports. A team drafted a player and that team then owned the player’s rights for the rest of his career. And with no bargaining power players in the pre-free agency era could either take whatever money their teams offered them or hold out. Players made just a tiny fraction of what they were worth to their team. NFL players actually had jobs in the offseason. Jobs! Until the free-agency era began, no matter how well they performed NFL players had no leverage whatsoever. With one exception. Or maybe that should be four exceptions.

Four happens to be the number of professional football leagues in the post-war era that made a serious attempt to challenge the dominance of the NFL in America. Ironically, one of those leagues birthed the greatest moment in the history of South Florida sports, the creation of the Miami Dolphins, while another of those leagues was responsible for maybe the saddest moment in Miami Dolphins history.

Each time one of those new leagues came along established NFL players and/or college stars would receive higher-paying offers from the new league than they ever could have expected to receive from the older established league. This is turn created upward pressure on salaries for everybody as NFL owners responded by trying their best to keep their players in the fold. The AFL was so successful in the 60’s that it forced a merger with the NFL that ended the costly bidding wars and brought the Dolphins into the NFL. Another rival league, the WFL, didn’t even last two full seasons but on the way to its own funeral the WFL hastened the demise of the Dolphin dynasty of the Seventies.

The WFL tried to make a splash in 1975 by fielding some top NFL talent, namely three Miami Dolphin stars: Larry Csonka, Paul Warfield, and Jim Kiick. The announcement was made during the 1974 season and so the gut wrenching playoff loss to the Raiders that ended Miami’s year symbolized the devastating consequences of the impending loss of two future Hall of Famers plus another quality RB. Miami never could adequately fill the huge holes at the skill positions those players left behind. Not that you could ever truly replace players of that magnitude, especially Csonka the heart and soul of the Dolphins. When those guys left the era of Dolphin dominance ended and to this day the franchise has never again fielded a team approaching the quality of the Csonka-Warfield era Dolphins.

But who could blame them for leaving? Csonka got over a million to sign with the Memphis Southmen, Warfield $900,000 and Kiick $700,000. All guaranteed. That was huge money back then for a professional athlete and they weren’t getting anything close to that from Joe Robbie. The athlete’s career’s a short one, especially in football, so take the money and run. With free agency (or what the NFL calls free agency anyway), a star player can expect to earn millions off of his labors today No such situation existed in 1974. The WFL’s brief existence came along at a bad time for the Miami Dolphins, but at a great time for Csonka, Warfield and Kiick.

Tommy Thompson

2010-06-15T20:44:00.000-07:00

An odd little debate recently erupted in the football world on the matter of whether the late Pat Tillman should be inducted into the Professional Football Hall of Fame. I most definitely do not want to besmirch Tillman's memory, and do not believe I am doing so, when I say I don't even see how this even is a debate. Election to the Hall of Fame is for the game's greatest players and nobody considered Tillman to be on that level when he left the game for the military. Nor is anybody arguing (I don't think) that Tillman would have become one of the all-time greats had he lived. So that settles it. Past Interference certainly does hope everybody long remembers Tillman's patriotism and sacrifice. Without question he deserved whatever military honors the military posthumously bestowed upon him. But the NFL doesn't give out those military honors, the U.S. goverment does. Sure I understand the thinking behind wanting to induct Pat Tillman; it would be a thank you and a show of respect for the man's service and sacrifice. But Tillman is not alone in deserving the respect of the NFL and its fans. Well over 1000 NFL players have served in the military at one time or another and, including Tillman, 26 of those men made the ultimate sacrifice. If Tillman is to be honored it would only be right to also honor the other 25 who fell. And maybe the league should indeed do something to commemorate all of them but it should be something other than induction to the Hall of Fame.

Past Interference does have a suggestion for the Hall of Fame though. If you're looking for a Hall of Famer there is somebody out there who both served his country with distinction in wartime and also played some brilliant football, somebody who despite all that has for some reason been kind of forgotten. (It was really hard finding out anything about this man beyond the basic historical details). When you're arguably the greatest quarterback in your longtime franchise's history you ought to be better remembered. There's only a few candidates for the title of "Greatest Quarterback in Philadelphia Eagles History" but if your number one criteria is winning then the title has to go to Tommy Thompson.

From 1947-1949, Thompson led the Eagles to three consecutive NFL championship game appearances and back-to-back titles. Including Thompson only 12 QB's have ever won back-to-back titles and they're ALL in the Hall of Fame...except for Thompson (and Tom Brady who will be inducted as soon as he's eligible) (see List 1 below). And, including Thompson, only 8 QB's have ever led their team to three or more consecutive title game appearances and they're ALL in the Hall of Fame...except for Thompson (see List 2). And, including Thompson, only 6 men have accomplished both of the above feats and they're ALL in the Hall of Fame...except for Thompson (see List 3). It can't be said those Eagles teams carried Thompson to the title game--he led the league in passer rating in '48 and '49 and was second in '47. Nor can it be said those were the only three good years of his career. Thompson ranked third in passer rating in 1941 and 1942.

Thompson's career passing numbers look like nothing special today of course. Drew Brees' total passing yardage for the past three seasons alone blow away Thompson's career passing yards. But you have to judge a player by what he does in his own era and Thompson was one of he best QB's of the 1940's. His numbers don't approach those of his Hall of Fame contemporaries Baugh and Luckman, but they're certainly comparable to another HOF contemporary, Bob Waterfield. Waterfield has a small advantage in yards and touchdowns but Thompson's career passer rating is a good five points higher. Both men quarterbacked their teams to two titles and while Waterfield made it to one more title game than Thompson, Thompson has the better postseason winning percentage. Thompson may not have been as versatile a player as Waterfield (who kicked and punted), and Thompson may not have shagged any movie stars, but he didn't share quarterbacking duties in any of his championship years either (like Waterfield did with Norm Van Brocklin).

The reason Thompson's passing numbers aren't bigger than Waterfield's has nothing to do with Thompson's play on the field. World War II was to blame. Thompson missed both the 1943 and 1944 seasons serving in the United States Army. And while fighting overseas he "received the Purple Heart when he was wounded while landing with the second wave at Normandy." He returned to the NFL in 1945 but played very little as the Eagles stayed with the guy holding down the fort in Thompson's absence, Roy Zimmerman. Thompson got his job back in '46 but only part-time; he played well but had to split time with Zimmerman. When the Eagles traded Zimmerman after the season and gave the full-time gig back to Thompson he rewarded them by leading the Eagles to what remains their greatest period of dominance in franchise history.

Had Thompson's career not been uninterrupted by military service, his career passing numbers would have far surpassed Waterfield's and there was also a good chance he would have thrown for more career yards than another Hall of Fame contemporary: Sid Luckman. If that had happened, then Thompson would almost surely have been elected to the Hall of Fame. And I submit to you that if Thompson would be in the Hall of Fame but for his military service, then he should be in the Hall of Fame regardless. He didn't play himself out of a job. He didn't get injured on the field. No, the man fought Nazis in combat. He got wounded at Normandy for crying out loud! He absolutely has to get credit for the yards he would have thrown for in those three years of football he lost in serving his country. And if you give him that richly deserved credit then he's a Hall of Famer. So vote him in already Veteran's Committee. Do the right thing.

1) Back-to-back Titles: Luckman, Thompson, Layne, Graham, Unitas, Starr, Griese, Bradshaw, Montana, Aikman, Elway, Brady

2) Three-or-more conecutive title game appearances: Luckman, Thompson, Layne, Graham, Starr, Tittle, Griese, Kelly

3) Both of the above: Luckman, Thompson, Layne, Graham, Starr, Griese

Past Interference Gets Results

2010-06-15T20:19:00.000-07:00

We get results! A couple of years ago I wrote about the acting "career" of former NFL QB Jim Plunkett. The Internet Movie Database absurdly listed him as having played the role of Stan Laurel in the 1965 mainstream Hollywood non-hit movie Harlow. I hadn't seen the movie (and doubt I ever will) but the absurdity of this struck me as the perfect topic for the stupid kind of blog post I like the best. I mean, just the thought of a teenage Mexican American quarterback playing a famous middle-aged English comedian in a movie. High comedy right? Well, no doubt somebody brought my brilliant post to the attention of the IMDB folks and a recent check of the site now reveals the former two-time Super Bowl winning passer is credited no more with playing Mr. Laurel. A different Jim Plunkett now gets the credit. A mysterious Jim Plunkett as it happens--No other show biz credits. No biographical information. No nothing. But the acting career of "our" Jim Plunkett hasn't vanished into the mists of error, for his other IMDB acting credit still remains: as "Stretch" in The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters. I'd like to confirm Plunkett truly acted in this film but I have to say the odds of me seeing that are even less than of me seeing Harlow. I do love the idea that Kid Plunkett may have acted in something like this so hopefully IMDB got this one right. They don't want another piece of Past Interference.

Pete Axthelm: The Ax

2010-05-30T09:02:00.000-07:00

Lebron James. Why'd he play so poorly against the Celtics? What does it mean for his legacy? Will he ever win a title? What team will he play for next year? I don't know and I don't care. But good grief there was no escape from Lebron-mania the other week. Day after day, hour after hour. Has sports media ever been so all-consumed by anything like this? I thought the Peyton Manning Super Bowl stuff was bad. But it was nothing compared to this Lebron thing. Everybody with a sports platform offered their answers to the above questions with utter certainty although they couldn't possibly have known the answers. The questions aren't currently answerable. I've never seen or heard anything like it. ToO summarize it all in a quick visual, just imagine a bunch of gums flapping and spittle flying in front of a giant screen of endless Lebron highlights.

We're not big hoops fans here at Past Interference. The National Football League, the greatest sports league that has ever existed or ever will exist, will always be our primary focus. So why am I even bringing up Lebron James? Because the whole Lebron saga brought into focus for me just how different the sports media world is now compared to my youth. Not necessarily worse. Just different.

Today we've got a number of shows on TV featuring sportswriters arguing with each other. These are ostensibly supposed to be "America writ large" as they say. You know, "we're just like you and your buddies sitting around and talking about sports". But there's one big difference. You actually like your friends. And you enjoy talking sports with them. Compare that the experience of watching these shows featuring people who, apparently, don't like the folks they're talking to and don't enjoy talking about sports at all. One of the worst offenders is Skip Bayless. I don't get why he goes on ESPN in the first place. When athletes are caught up in scandal, it irritates him to no end. If a player gives a disappointing performance, Bayless is irritated. If someone disagrees with his opinion, he's irritated. Having to show up on the set? Irritating. And having to watch someone who's so irritable? Yeah, it's irritating.

Now if you don't get enough of Bayless on TV there's always the books he cranked about the Dallas Cowboys. He got himself in trouble for this one where he disseminated unsubstantiated rumors about Troy Aikman's personal life. Of course Bayless defended himself by claiming Barry Switzer was the one spreading the rumors and Bayless was just writing about what mean 'ol Switzer was doing, in the process showing just how badly the "ethics" our hopeless political media have infected our sports media. I didn't read that book. I'd already soured on Bayless after reading his earlier book on Tom Landry.

An author couldn't be more condescending about his subject if he tried. The book's not completely without merit. But the way Bayless talks about Landry, one of the greatest coaches of all-time, is just...yeah, it's irritating. As you may know, Landry had a bit of a reputation as a reserved, straight-laced, unemotional person. Or as Duane Thomas ungenerously put it, a "plastic man". As you may also know, Landry was a devout Christian in life and apparently could speak of his faith quite movingly to groups of fellow Christians. To Bayless, Landry walling himself off from his players instead of holding their hands and sharing the Good News somehow represents hypocrisy of the highest sort. To us normal people it's obvious that Landry, a consummate professional, knew his job wasn't to minister to his player's souls but to get them to win as many freaking football games as possible, something incidentally that he did just about better than any football coach who ever lived. To Bayless, 270 wins, 20 straight winning seasons, five Super Bowl appearances and two championships aren't enough. Right.

Believe it or not watching Bayless is actually a joy compared to the chore of seeing one Jay Mariotti in action. Bayless may irritate, but at least you get that he might occasionally respect the opinions of the people he's debating on TV. Not so Mariotti. Has there ever been anyone this smug? With every smirk, with every shake of his hand, with every gesture, Mariotti communicates nothing but his utter contempt for everyone who disagrees with him. In other words, he's dismissive. And when confronted with the spectacle of someone that dismissive that often you do what? That's right. You dismiss them! And I know I'm not the only one.

Like I said it's a different world now. When I was a kid if you wanted sports commentary you didn't get it from TV. The first guy I remember popping up on television to offer commentary on a sporting event rather than call the event was Jack Whitaker. CBS would always drag him out to give us some high-minded verbiage on golf and horse racing. To me he was just a boring old guy in a loud jacket waxing eloquent about stuff I could have cared less about but, to be fair, I was a kid and hardly in his target audience of golfing grandpas. But Whitaker was a rarity. If you wanted sports commentary you got it from magazines and newspapers. I was lucky. My hometown paper, the Miami Herald, had Edwin Pope writing for them. A man thrilled by the best in sports and disgusted by the worst. He was insightful, respectful, perceptive. Clearly not someone cut out for TV work at all. I also got lucky with magazines too; my dad subscribed to Newsweek for years. As a kid the dull dry articles about high finance and world affairs held no appeal for me, bo-ring, but Newsweek had one of the best sports columnists around, maybe the best sports columnist around, Pete Axthelm. He could really write. Just amazing stuff.

I don't know which sportswriter gets the credit for making the first official historic leap to television commentary but the first sportswriter I personally remember making an impact on TV was Axthelm. NBC hired him for their NFL studio shows and when they let him go ESPN snapped him up. I know it's hard to believe but back in Axthelm's heyday ESPN Gameday was only on for an hour and featured just Chris Berman, Tom Jackson and Axthelm. The Ax certainly didn't look like somebody cut out for TV work. He was pudgy and balding and looked like everybody's uncle. While quite witty he wasn't there as a joketeller like we saw years later with Monday Night Football's aborted Dennis Miller experiment. Axthelm knew his football.

I remember after Dan Hampton retired from the Bears Axthelm matter-of-factly stated that while other Chicago defenders might have gotten more press in a few years it was going to be Hampton quietly entering the Hall of Fame (Ax was right). Another time, after the underdog Dolphins were humiliated at home in a late 80's Monday Night Football game, Axthelm sadly and correctly noted that this was the kind of game that the Dolphins used to win. But the funny stuff he said is what has stayed with me. When the Steelers were making a playoff run a decade after their dynasty ended Axthelm pointed out how those old Steeler greats had names that seemed practically scripted: Jack Ham, Lynn Swann, Mel Blount, Mean Joe Greene, and he wondered if the Steelers could win now with guys named Bubby and Weegie.

When Green Bay and Tampa Bay were both horrible in the Eighties and played each other twice a year, Axthelm famously nicknamed the series the "Bay of Pigs". Berman loved that one and used it all the time. My own favorite Axthelm on-air moment was probably his most legendary one. As I've written about before, back in the 70's and 80's it was not uncommon for NFL placekickers to hail from foreign lands. Often a land where futbol is far more popular than football, such as Mexico. And in 1987-1988, three different Mexicans, the Zendejas brothers, Luis, Max, and Tony, each kicked for NFL teams. But none of the brothers turned out to be models of kicking consistency and for awhile every single week one of them was missing a critical kick that cost his team the game. As the misses mounted Axthelm began slamming the brothers every week until he finally snapped and ranted in mock exasperation: "Enough with the Zendejases. Luis , Max, Tony, Julio, Willie and Waylon. How many are there? No more Zendejases!" It was some funny stuff. Axthelm picked the pointspread winners every week and no doubt the misses hurt his picks. More than that they probably cost him some actual money. A lot of money.

You certainly don't have to read between the lines of this tribute column to figure out Axthelm had a serious gambling problem. So his "mock" exasperation with the Zendejas Bros and their missed kicks was probably all too real. I said before that Axthelm didn't necessarily look like somebody made for TV and TV wasn't necessarily made for Axthelm either. The few minutes he was allotted on TV each week couldn't possibly have been enough for him to fully explore his subject the way he could in his columns or his books. And the time he spent working for the networks no doubt cut into his writing time. Axthelm wrote several books in the 1970's, including his classic The City Game, but I don't think he wrote any other books after he became a television fixture. The frequency of his columns dwindled as well. It's understandable though; I'm sure he made a lot more money from TV than from writing.

His writing, his TV work and his life all ended when he died at age 47. From liver failure. Which suggests gambling hadn't been his only problem.

All these years later I still miss seeing him on TV. Nowadays it's all a blur of yelling and arguing and people talking over each other and "controversial" opinions and attention grabbing and ignorance and stupidity. I can't tell you how much I'd like to have Pete Axthelm's eloquence and wit back.

Dio

2010-05-30T07:58:00.000-07:00

I was shocked to find out two weeks ago that heavy metal icon Ronnie James Dio had died at the age of 67. I wasn't shocked that he had died, I was shocked that he was 67. Paul McCartney's 67. Mick Jagger's going to be 67 shortly. Those guys are 60's icons. I never even heard of Dio until that strange brief time when metal ruled the world in the mid-80's. To achieve rock stardom at 40 is definitely unusual, and probably an unrepeatable career path. Not being a metal fan I only became acquainted with Dio through his videos on MTV. Metal bands of that era absolutely loved to make music videos with these elaborate science-fiction, fantasy, or horror scenarios that were then rendered laughable by their inadequate special-effects budgets. You know, like this one.

Anyway I never saw him in concert myself but some college friends of mine went to see him back in his heyday. My friends showed up dressed in their normal everyday attire. As they headed into the arena a Dio fanatic dressed for the occasion in leather, chains, etc., took one look at them and said with disgust, "You don't deserve Dio".

This post is dedicated to my friend Bret. He does deserve Dio.

Two-time championship QB's year-by-year

2010-05-30T07:23:00.000-07:00

Ok, this should be Past Interference's last post on this topic until we approach the November showdown between Brady and Roethlisberger. In 1939 Arnie Herber became the first NFL quarterback to ever win two championship games. He's since been joined by 18 other men. Two of them, Norm Van Brocklin and John Elway, retired after winning their second title. Here's a list showing the years in which multiple-title winning QB's were active with some notes following of things I happen to find interesting:

1940 Herber
1941 none
1942 Luckman
1943 Luckman, Baugh
1944 Luckman, Baugh, Herber
1945 Luckman, Baugh, Herber
1946 Luckman, Baugh
1947 Luckman, Baugh
1948 Luckman, Baugh
1949 Luckman, Baugh
1950 Luckman, Baugh, Thompson
1951 Baugh
1952 Baugh, Waterfield
1953 none
1954 Layne
1955 Layne, Graham
1956 Layne
1957 Layne
1958 Layne
1959 Layne
1960 Layne, Unitas
1961 Layne, Unitas
1962 Layne, Unitas
1963 Unitas, Starr
1964 Unitas, Star
1965 Unitas, Starr
1966 Unitas, Starr
1967 Unitas, Starr
1968 Unitas, Starr
1969 Unitas, Starr
1970 Unitas, Starr
1971 Unitas, Starr
1972 Unitas
1973 Unitas
1974 Griese
1975 Griese
1976 Griese, Bradshaw
1977 Griese, Bradshaw
1978 Griese, Bradshaw, Staubach
1979 Griese, Bradshaw, Staubach
1980 Griese, Bradshaw
1981 Bradshaw
1982 Bradshaw
1983 Bradshaw
1984 Plunkett
1985 Plunkett, Montana
1986 Montana
1987 Montana
1988 Montana
1989 Montana
1990 Montana
1991 Montana
1992 Montana
1993 Montana
1994 Montana, Aikman
1995 Aikman
1996 Aikman
1997 Aikman
1998 Aikman
1999 Aikman
2000 Aikman
2001 none
2002 none
2003 none
2004 Brady
2005 Brady
2006 Brady
2007 Brady
2008 Brady
2009 Brady, Roethlisberger

Notes:

1) Number of seasons since 1940 with no active QB who'd won two or more championships: 5 (1941, 1953, and 2001-2003).

2) From 1954 through 2000 the NFL went 47 consecutive seasons with at least one active QB who'd won two or more championships.

3) Number of seasons with three active QB's who'd won two or more championships: 4 (1944-1945, 1978-1979).

4) Number of postseason matchups between QB's who'd won two or more championships: 3 (1943 title game, Super Bowl XIII, 1979 Divisional Playoffs)

5) Number of championship game matchups between QB's who'd won two or more championships: 2 (1943 title game, Super Bowl XIII)

6) Most seasons started by a QB after winning his second championship: 14 (Unitas)

7) Most seasons played as the league's only active QB with two or more championships: 8 (Montana)

All-Time QB Matchups Between Two-Time (or better) Champions

2010-05-19T20:46:00.000-07:00

Maybe Past Interference is a little obsessed with the topic of two-time (or better) championship quarterbacks, but PI uncovered some more information that was too good not to share. Once again let’s dredge up the short list of matchups between quarterbacks who’ve each led their teams to two or more Super Bowl rings:

11/14/76 PIT 14 MIA 3
11/05/78 MIA 23 DAL 16
01/21/79 PIT 35 DAL 31, Super Bowl XIII
10/28/79 PIT 14 DAL 3
12/30/79 PIT 34 MIA 14, Divisional Playoffs
09/22/85 SFO 34 LAR 10

Just six such matchups total with the last happening a quarter century ago. The first five all featured two of the following three quarterbacks: Bob Griese, Terry Bradshaw and Roger Staubach. Joe Montana and Jim Plunkett faced off in the sixth and most recent matchup. But the Super Bowl era began in 1966 and the NFL was around a long time before that. PI was curious if matchups between multiple-ringed QB’s were more common in the olden days. So we spent a little time at Pro Football Reference and found out that yes, the NFL used to have a lot more of these battles, over twice as many in just a 25-year period. BUT, almost all of those games can be accounted for by maybe the two greatest quarterback rivalries in NFL history. The first takes us back to the days of leather helmets and two-way players. Sid Luckman and Sammy Baugh. Luckman won back-to-back titles for the Chicago Bears in 1940 and 1941. Baugh followed suit with his second title with the Washington Redskins in 1942. So when the Bears and Redskins battled on November 21, 1943, it was the first contest in NFL history between quarterbacks who had each won two NFL titles. Baugh came out on top. But Luckman didn’t have long to wait for revenge. The best kind of revenge. The two men played again for the NFL championship a month later. Their third championship game battle but first as two-time champions. Not only did Luckman triumph, he actually knocked Baugh out of the game with a big hit administered as Slingin’ Sammy tried to bring him down (he played defense too!). The game remains incredibly historic. While first three-time championship QB, and to this day remains only one of six QB’s to win at least three rings. After their titanic 1943 matchups, the two men played five more times, the last coming in 1949. Here’s the complete list:

11/21/43 WAS 21 CHI 7
12/26/43 CHI 41 WAS 21 NFL Championship Game
11/18/45 WAS 28 CHI 21
11/17/46 CHI 24 WAS 20
10/26/47 CHI 56 WAS 20
11/28/48 CHI 48 WAS 13
11/20/49 CHI 31 WAS 21

So by themselves Baugh and Luckman top the Super Bowl era list by one. And the same goes for the great QB rivalry of the 1960’s. Bart Starr and Johnny Unitas brought us seven more matchups between two-time champs (though Starr would have a total of five titles by the time their rivalry was concluded).

09/29/63 GB 31 BAL 20
09/20/64 BAL 21 GB 20
10/18/64 BAL 24 GB 21
09/26/65 GB 20 BAL 17
09/10/66 GB 24 BAL 3
12/10/66 GB 14 BAL 10
11/05/67 BAL 13 GB 10

Starr’s Packers and Unitas’ Colts actually played many more times in the Sixties than Luckman and Baugh did in the Forties, but injuries to Starr, Unitas, or both wiped out six more potential meetings. The most unfortunate being the 1965 playoff tiebreaker game that both missed with injuries (Starr played but got hurt on the first play from scrimmage and never returned). Strangely the game wound up an all-time classic without the two legends, the second overtime game in NFL history. But it would have been the only postseason battle between the era’s two greatest quarterbacks had both men been healthy.

So 14 games total, seven for Baugh/Luckman, seven for Starr/Unitas. But we’re not quite done. PI scoured the record books, looked high and low, left no stone unturned in this matter. The great quarterback rivalry between Baugh/Luckman and Starr/Unitas was between Bobby Layne and Otto Graham in the 50’s. The two faced off in three straight championship games. Layne’s Detroit Lions took the first two and Graham’s Cleveland Browns the third, Graham’s second NFL title. Paul Brown convinced Graham to return for one more season and he did, winning a third NFL Championship, but Graham and Layne didn’t play each other that season and never would again. Other potential matchups never happened. Layne never played Unitas in 960, 1961 or 1962. Bob Waterfield didn’t play Baugh in 1952 in what proved to be both men’s final season. And like John Elway almost 40 years later, Norm Van Brocklin retired right after winning his second title and thus never had the chance to battle another multi-ringed QB. So who does that leave us?

Tommy Thompson’s kind of a forgotten player now, but he led the Philadelphia Eagles to back-to-back titles in 1948-1949. Thompson played one more season in 1950 and his team twice squared off against Sammy Baugh’s Washington Redskins. Pro Football Reference does not have complete box scores for games that old, but they do show Baugh didn’t start the week 6 matchup with the Eagles. This old newspaper article shows the Redskins actually benched the 36-year-old Baugh in favor of 24-year-old phenom Harry Gilmer. But five straight losses must have cost Gilmer the starting job as Slingin’ Sam started the week 8 matchup with the Eagles. It didn’t matter. The Eagles beat the Gilmer-led Redskins 35-3 and they beat the Baugh-led Redskins 33-0. But the latter game it did give us yet another meeting between quarterbacks with two or more championships.

11/12/50 PHI 33 WAS 0

And that would complete our list at 15. Except World War II happened.
Sammy Baugh’s got the reputation as NFL’s first true downfield passer. But some experts believe that honor belongs to a Hall of Famer named Arnie Herber. Herber was certainly a trailblazer in one big way. He’s the first man to ever quarterback a team to victory in two championship games. Her led the Green Bay Packers to NFL titles in 1936 and 1939, then retired after the 1940 season. But his NFL story wasn’t quite over as it turned out. Thanks to WWII, military service took precedence over NFL service, and NFL teams suffered a huge drain of talent during the war years. Desperate for some quality players the New York Football Giants coaxed Herber out of retirement for the 1944 and 1945 seasons. The Giants never played Luckman’s Bears during those two seasons, but they did play Baugh’s Redskins. Four times. Problem is, without boxscores I have no idea if both men actually played each other in any of the four games. Baugh and Herber could have played against each other four times, no times, or somewhere in between. All I can find are scoring summaries for each game. And in not one of those four games did both QB’s throw a TD pass! Great. Baugh tossed a TD in three of the games and Herber tossed three, all coming as luck would have it in the one game where Baugh didn’t throw one. In 1944 the Giants and Skins actually played back-to-back games, the last two of the season. Baugh threw for a TD in the first game and Herber didn’t. Herber tossed his three the next week. Surely Baugh would play a week later too right? Well, he's credited with starting only 4 games and playing in 8 out of 10 in '44. He wasn't hurt either. And he wasn’t suspended. No, according to this book Baugh missed big chunks of time in 1944 “because he had to tend his cattle ranch, as the government was making heavy demands for beef during the war.” Now that is an original excuse. So who knows if Baugh played in week 10 or if Herber played in week 9. Herber’s credited with starting only 3 games in 1944 but he is listed as active for all 10. So maybe he started or maybe he didn’t start but came into the game later. In 1945 Herber didn’t start any games and split time at QB with a couple other guys. He again is listed at being active for all 10 games. It was a different game back then; teams were still making the adjustment from single-wing to the T-formation and most players were still two-way players. Herber also played tailback, blocking back and defensive back. He could have played in those games but not as a QB. Of course he was an older player who’d already retired once. Seems unlikely he’d have done much blocking or defending at the end of his career. Maybe the Giants didn’t want to overwork him at QB. He did throw the vast majority of his team’s passes in ’44 but split more of the passes in 1945. But if Herber only played parts of games should that even count as a QB matchup with Baugh? Based on the information we have, Past Interference just has absolutely no idea how many official Baugh-Herber matchups took place in 1944-1945. If anybody out there has more info on this matter please let me know. Here’s the four games:

12/03/44 NYG 16 WAS 13
12/10/44 NYG 31 WAS 0
10/28/45 WAS 24 NYG 14
12/09/45 WAS 17 NYG 0

So through 2009, the NFL’s seen a total of between 21 and 25 games featuring matchups between quarterbacks who have each won two or more NFL championship games.

November 14, 2010

2010-05-11T06:59:00.000-07:00

Mark it down. We are set for some football history on November 14th, 2010. The New England Patriots play the Pittsburgh Steelers and, if Tom Brady and Ben Roethlisberger suit up at QB, then for the first time since 1984 we'll see our first battle between two quarterbacks with at least two Super Bowl rings. (That's a tough sentence to word properly). The big matchup appeared to be in jeopardy while the spectre of criminal charges loomed over Roethlisberger. But when the State of Georgia decided not to file charges and the NFL then chose to suspend Big Ben for "only" six games, the date with history was back on track. Now it's not a 100% guarantee this matchup comes off. Injuries happen. And Big Ben could still do something involving Little Ben and/or alcohol to get hisself an even longer suspension. Let's just hope he's not as stupid and depraved as he seems.

You know, in my original post on this topic I casually referred to Roethlisberger as a "bastard". Accurate and uncontroversial right? Yet in a comment to that post reader "Mike" asked why Big Ben's a bastard "if he hasn't even been found guilty of anything? Typical lawyers." Well "Mike", if that is your real name, I see from your Blogger profile that you're a doctor, no doubt an arrogant one with a god complex. You don't have to take my word for it Dr. Mike. Nor do you have to believe the accusations of Roethlisberger's drunken accuser. You just have to check out the latest Sports Illustrated article chronicling how

AN NFL SUPERSTAR'S REPULSIVE BEHAVIOR, THE ULTIMATE EXPRESSION OF ATHLETIC ENTITLEMENT RUN AMOK, HAS FORCED EVEN THE MOST DIEHARD FANS TO QUESTION THEIR TEAM AND THEIR FOOTBALL FAITH—AND MADE A SMALL TOWN IN GEORGIA WISH HE'D NEVER PAID A VISIT

The fact that Steelers fans now openly revile the man who not so long ago quarterbacked their beloved team to two Lombardi Trophies says it all.

What If?

2010-05-08T11:24:00.000-07:00

Back in the early 1980's the Miami Dolphins suffered a series of incomprehensible tragedies. Bewildering, staggering tragedies. I'm not talking about the brutal playoff losses, I'm talking about actual tragedy. Death. Three deaths in fact. All to young players in the prime of their lives. Rusty Chambers. Larry Gordon. David Overstreet. All gone within four years of each other. All leaving families and teammates behind to ask why. Past Interference doesn't believe in curses but that is some seriously bad luck. Think about some more recent deaths of active NFL players: Cory Stringer, Chris Henry, Gaines Adams. Everyone was kind of shocked right?. Now imagine all those guys played for the very same team. You'd have to think a black cloud was hanging over that team wouldn't you? Well that was the 1981-1984 Miami Dolphins.

Over a quarter century has now passed since Chambers, Gordon and Overstreet were laid to rest but PI was reminded of their unfortunate fates by loyal reader sptfrn who proposed in a comment that Past Interference begin a series of "What If" posts starting with the question: "What if Rusty Chambers, Larry Gordon, and David Overstreet didn't die?".

That is one great idea. At the risk of exposing my true nerd self, Past Interference read a ton of comics books as a kid and believe it or not one of the comics we really, really loved was Marvel's "What If?". Take it away Wikipedia:

What If stories usually began with Uatu [the Watcher] briefly recapping a notable event in the mainstream Marvel Universe, then indicating a particular point of divergence in that event. He would then demonstrate, by way of looking into a parallel reality, what could have happened if events had taken a different course from that point.

My own personal favorite issue was #3, "What If The Avengers Had Never Been?". Over 30 years later I still remember the answer to that question. (Spoiler alert). The original Avengers fall apart and the Hulk leaves to team up with the Sub-Mariner and fight for evil. So Tony Stark creates some bad-ass Iron Man armor for Giant Man, the Wasp and the Hulk's sidekick Rick Jones and creates a new Avengers. But while this new team is pounding the snot out of the Hulk, Stark's own suit runs out of power and his bad heart kills him. Good times. Bonus: fantastic art by the late Gil Kane.

Hold on another minute. I can't let go of this comic book tangent yet. I'm on a roll. Responding to what's essentially reader mail is taking me back to all the old letter columns I read in the back of my old comic books back in the day. They're passe now thanks to the internet but once upon a time reader letters were the only feedback comic companies ever got and it was the only way for fans to connect with other fans. Naturally DC Comics had super boring titles for their "lettercols" like "Metropolis Mailbag" and "Letters to the Batcave". Lame. But Stan "The Man" Lee, the original hipster doofus, went all out and pushed the limits with hilariously stupid titles like "Sock It To Shellhead", "Let's Level With Daredevil", and my personal favorite, "Let's Rap With Cap". And that was well before anybody invented Rap! Word.

Ok, back to today's "What If" topic from reader sprtfn.

On July 1, 1981, Rusty Chambers died in a car accident in Louisiana and the Dolphins lost the man who had started at left inside linebacker for them for the past three seasons. So what would have happened if Chambers survived to continue playing for the Dolphins in 1981? Did his loss hurt the team? Well, you can't tell from the standings or the statistics. The Dolphins improved from 8-8 to 11-4-1 and the defense went from 9th in points allowed to 5th while staying essentially the same in yards allowed. Miami replaced Chambers in 1981 with backup linebacker Ernest Rhone. Now Rhone may have been a dropoff from Chambers, I don't know enough to say, but he was good enough to continue to start for Miami for another three seasons and it must be noted that Chambers never made a Pro Bowl in his three seasons as a starter. But let's assume there was a bit of a dropoff in talent. Would Chambers have made a difference in the Dolphins' ultimate fate? That ultimate fate proved to be a 41-38 overtime loss to the San Diego Chargers in the divisional playoffs. If you're old enough to remember that game you've never forgotten it. Could Chambers have altered the outcome? In a game that close, with so many twists and turns, so many critical plays and mistakes, you could probably point to almost any player and say he did something to make the difference. He could have made the difference but we have no reason to assume he would have made the difference. But let's say he would have made a key play or avoided a mistake made by his replacement, then what? Well, Miami would have advanced to the AFC Championship Game. And then they would have lost. I'm as sure of this as I am of anything. How do I know? Well, winning a road playoff game against a superior team with the better quarterback is tough enough. Now how about doing it minus-9 degree weather with a wind chill of minus-59? Yeah, no team from Miami is winning that game. Especially not one completely wiped out from an overtime game played one week before in the heat and humidity of South Florida. With or without Chambers then, the Miami Dolphins would never have made it to the Super Bowl in '81.

In 1982, without Chambers, the team did make it to the Super Bowl where they blew a halftime lead, collapsed in the second half and lost to the Washington Redskins. Would Chambers have made a difference? I don't think so. Miami fielded one of their best defenses ever that year. Second in scoring; first in yards allowed. They gave up 276 yards rushing in Super Bowl XVII and let Riggins pound them in the second half, but you can't put that on the defense. I don't want to rehash the whole David Woodley thing again (like I did here). Suffice it to say Woodley couldn't complete any passes, the offense couldn't move the ball or stay on the field, and Miami's tiring defense plumb wore out in the second half (I always wanted to say that). Rusty Chambers couldn't have done anything about that. Dolphins still lose.

Just five months later, on June 25, 1983, Dolphins Linebacker Larry Gordon went out for a jog in the Arizona desert and never came back. He collapsed and died from heart disease. Something called idiopathic hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (though some later spoke of cocaine use by Gordon). How would the loss of two linebackers in two years affect the defending conference champions? Seemingly not at all. Miami finished first in scoring defense, added somebody named Marino to the offense, and won 12 games and a division title. The reconsituted linebacking corps was a mixed bag. A.J. Duhe and Bob Brudzinski constitued a really good left side but Rhone and Charles Bowser left a little to be desired on the right. Still, the Dolphins were heavy favorites to beat Seattle in a home divisional playoff game. But they lost 27-20. A huge upset. Would Gordon and Chambers have made a difference?

That's a tough one. If you look at the stats you'd have to say it was an evenly played football game. Only one number really jumps out at you: five. That's the number of Miami turnovers. Seattle had one. If Miami could have just held onto the ball they probably would have won. Again, the problem was on offense (and special teams), not the defense. Of course, as in the San Diego OT game, any play can be the difference in a close game. Maybe Gordon or Chambers could have made that one sack or forced that one fumble the Dolphins needed to turn the game. It's just too hypothetical to speculate on and PI needs to note here that, like Chambers, Gordon never made an All-Pro team and never made a Pro Bowl. However, I'd say that Gordon, a 100 tackle a year guy and a very good player, would no doubt have been a linebacking upgrade from Rhone or Bowser. So let's be generous and assume Gordon's presence lifts the defense enough for Miami to eke out a win and avoid the upset. What happens then? Nothing good I'm afraid. Miami would have advanced to the AFC title game and travelled to L.A. to face the hated Raiders. The Raiders owned the Dolphins back then and beat them like a drum 27-14 in week 3 of the '83 season (it was 27-0 in the 4th quarter). Of course Marino didn't start that game. He was still a rookie though and the Raiders just blew everybody away in the postseason that year including the defending champion Skins in the Super Bowl. Miami never would have got past them that year even with Gordon and Chambers.

Six months later, June 24, 1984, David Oversteet fell asleep behind the wheel of his car and died when he crashed into some gas tanks that exploded on impact just 15 miles from his home. Yet despite this unbelievable third death in four years, the team's run of success continued on. Dan Marino broke every meaningful single-season passing record and the 14-2 Miami Dolphins steamrolled the AFC on the way to Super Bowl XIX and their much-anticipated matchup with Joe Montana's 15-1 49ers. I wrote about that much-anticipated, hugely disappointing game at length here. Short version: With no running game or pass rush Miami had no chance against a more talented better-coached team, Marino or no Marino! But "What If" the Dolphins had entered the game with Chambers, Gordon, and Overstreet? Well, we move into some very interesting speculative territory here. If you ask me, and why shouldn't you, the absolute number one reason for Miami's failure in Super Bowl XIX was horrible play at the linebacker and running back positions. And Chambers, Gordon, and Overstreet played what positions? Linebacker, linebacker and running back. Would those guys have made a difference?

In the case of Gordon and Chambers we've got a problem. Had they lived, each man would have turned 31 prior to Super Bowl XIX. Again, neither man was ever selected for the Pro Bowl and it's usually the great ones who play well into their 30's. Even A.J. Duhe, a better linebacker than either, was done by 31. Of course even at an advanced football age Gordon might have still been better than what Miami had. I mean Jay Brophy actually started for them in Super Bowl XIX! That's trouble. Perhaps Gordon was a Pro Bowl quality linebacker (he made Miami's 25th anniversary team) overlooked by the selectors. So let's say he plays and and gives Miami a bit of a boost at linebacker. I don't see how it would have made much of a difference. Outside of Lawrence Taylor or Dick Butkus in their prime I don't see how any one linebacker makes the kind of difference the Dolphins would have needed. Joe Montana and the San Francisco offense were simply unstoppable that night. As for Overstreet, I wish we had more to go on. A first round pick he bolted for Canadian dollars in '81. Returned to the NFL in '83. Averaged 4.6 yards on 85 attempts. And died. How good would he have been with a full workload? We saw tantalizing glimpses but who really knows? We can say he almost certainly would have been better, probably much better than Woody Bennett, who was a fullback after all. With Overstreet in the backfield Shula might have been more likely to use the ground game once the Niners countered with 6 defensive backs to stop Marino and the Marks Brothers. But would Overstreet have equalled victory? That's too much of a stretch. Nobody ever seems to put the 1984 49ers in the greatest team of all time discussions but they have to be there. They just have to. Maybe the greatest QB and coach of the modern era. Strength at every single offensive and defensive unit. Great O-line and secondary. That team was loaded. They lost only one game all year, and that by a late field goal. Adding Overstreet and a past-their-prime Chambers and Gordon couldn't have altered what happened. Miami would still get their butts kicked.

1985? Maybe, just maybe, history would have turned in the Dolphins' favor. We can dispense with speculating about Chambers and Gordon at this point and concentrate on David Overstreet. Without him Miami won another division title and hosted their second straight AFC Championship Game. Their opponent? The New England Patriots. A team Miami had beaten 18 straight times in the Orange Bowl. 18. Straight. Times. I repeat each word to emphasize the devastation of this loss. 18 games means 18 years. And this was the Dolphins' 19th season. That means the Pats had beaten Miami in the Orange Bowl exactly once: 1966, the Phins first year. And it never happened again. Until this game. A 31-14 loss to a team that had no business winning the game. A team that just two weeks later suffered a Super Bowl humiliation the likes of which nobody had ever before seen. To the same team Miami famously defeated quite handily. How did it happen? How did the Dolphins lose to the Patriots? To Tony Eason? Turnovers my friends. Turnovers. Six to be exact including four fumbles.

We can say without hesitation that the most critical turnover of the game would not have happened with David Overstreet on the team. How do we know this? Because with Overstreet on the team Miami would never have drafted Lorenzo Hampton. And Hampton coughed it up on the team's first play of the second half. They trailed 17-7. New England took advantage of the turnover to go up 24-7. Tony Nathan had earlier set the tone for the game by fumbling on the team's very first play from scrimmage, leading to an early New Engand field goal. If Overstreet starts then Nathan never fumbles either. So let's say Overstreet starts, gets most of the carries, plays well, and holds onto the ball. It's then not a stretch to say Miami pulls out the game. It's at least a lot closer. Of course it could be a stretch to say Overstreet would have avoided the fumbles that plagued the Dolphins in that game; he had his own fumbling problem in the CFL and his fumble in the '83 playoff game with the Seahawks was costly. But if Miami wins they of course move on to Super Bowl XX and a rematch with the Shufflin' Crew. I don't know if they win but we know they were certainly capable of it. Only one offense ever embarrassed Chicago's 46-defense, Dan Marino's. The Dolphins were the one team constructed perfectly on offense to beat the Bears and the speed of Overstreet in the backfield could only have helped.

After 1985 the Miami Dolphins tumbled into the bowl of mediocrity. None of the deceased players could have helped at that point. A series of bad drafts crippled the team's talent level and a turnaround wouldn't come until 1990. In more bitter irony the untimely passing of Chambers, Gordon and Overstreet from this vale of tears set in motion a vicious cycle. Not only did the team lose the talents of those three men, the attempts to replace them in the draft led to an even further decline in talent. If Gordon hadn't died in '83, the team probably doesn't draft two busts, Jackie Shipp and Jay Brophy, at linebacker in the 1984 draft, and if Overstreet had lived, Miami doesn't blow its top pick on Lorenzo Hampton in the '85 draft, a draft with maybe the weakest running back class ever. However, who Miami would have drafted in our alternate universe is a mystery to me.

So "What If" Rusty Chambers, Larry Gordon, and David Overstreet didn't die? Would the fortunes of the Miami Dolphins organization have changed? After careful thought Pass Interference says no, at least not from 1981 through 1984. But let's linger over the 1985 season for a moment longer. PI thinks there was at least a chance that the death of David Overstreet cost Miami a Super Bowl trip and perhaps the ring that forever eluded Dan Marino.

Ginn again

2010-05-04T21:10:00.000-07:00

I'm losing it. One of my incredibly important points failed to make it in to my last post on Ted Ginn. And the point was that even if somebody thought Ginn would be a great kick returner while chipping in with a few big plays on offense, how the heck would that justify a top ten pick? You spend a top pick on a receiver you want another Randy Moss, a Larry Fitzgerald, a Calvin Johnson. You know, a stud. Sure a great returner would be nice but have you noticed how nobody ever spends a first round pick on one? Rick Upchurch, a 4th round pick. Dante Hall, a 5th round pick. Billy "White Shoes" Johnson, a 15th round pick! Michael "Beer Man" Lewis, undrafted! All those guys were great return men but so-so wide receivers (to be generous). And they weren't drafted anywhere near the first round. And you know what else they had in common? They only lit up the NFL for maybe three or four years at most. Oh, their careers may have lasted longer than that but the return magic disappeared pretty early on. I'm sure I'm oversimplifying here but it sure seems like it's tough for kick returners to stay on top very long. Just check out Devin Hester ( 2nd round pick). He's not even returning kicks anymore and his third year doing it proved to be a major drop-off from his first two. He's just an ok receiver. But Miami spent more and got less. Ginn not only underwhelmed as a receiver, he never came close to approaching Hester as a return man either. Drafting a glorified kick returner with the ninth pick? Doomed to fail.

Ginn Gone

2010-05-03T15:07:00.000-07:00

Miami Dolphin fans can finally shut the coffin lid on the abbreviated Cam Cameron-Randy Mueller era. In his one-and-only season as head coach Cameron "led" his team to a franchise-worst 1-15 record. Mercifully both men were fired before the 2008 season began but the residue of that disastrous season lingered for three more years. And by residue I'm referring to the kickoff to the 2007 season, the spark to the gasoline, the fuse to the bomb, the carelessly tossed match to the devastating forest fire, the Dolphins' 2007 draft. A team’s record resets at 0-0 when the next season starts but for good or bad the players taken in a draft can affect their team for years to come. And no better example can be seen than in Cameron and Mueller’s sole draft together. In one word: disastrous. Just three years later, of the ten players selected by the Dolphins in 2007 only two remain: disappointing defensive tackle Paul Soloai and quality punter Brandon Fields. But the 2007 draft is always going to be associated with the stunning first-round selection of wide receiver Ted Ginn.

Most mock drafts had the Dolphins taking Left Tackle Levi Brown or Defensive Tackle Amobi Okoye. And a few predicted Miami would trade up to snag QB Brady Quinn, who a lot of people thought was the best quarterback in the draft. So what to do? Well the 2006 Dolphins weren't half-bad defensively but their best defensive players (Taylor, Thomas) were on the wrong side of 30. Bringing in some younger talent might have been the way to go given the players available with the ninth pick. As atrocious as the team was on offense though, especially through the air, grabbing an offensive player was a defensible move. And when all the teams in front of Miami unexepectedly bypassed Quinn, everyone expected the Dolphins to snap him up and finally draft a successor to Dan Marino. No need to trade up now. Instead, the commissioner shocked us all by announcing the name of Ted Ginn.

(Flashback: Dolphins fans boo selection of Ginn over Quinn).

The shock wasn't so much the fact that Ginn was picked, a lot of folks pencilled him in as a later first round selection, it was the not taking Quinn part that threw us for a loop. Ginn certainly possessed the much-needed speed the Dolphins O was missing. But it's not like there weren't red flags with this guy. A guy named Justin Davis at the apparently now-defunct War Room Report couldn't have nailed it better:

The easy knock on Ginn is that he is a straight line runner that struggles mightily getting in and out of his breaks at speed, therefore hindering his ability to run even average pass routes and that he has questionable hands. Both of those statements are true.

...

After all of the talk we are hearing about his speed and his big play ability, averaging only 13.2 yards per catch (5.1 yards less that Meachem) this season seems to say otherwise.

...

Sometimes style blocks the view of substance when evaluating young talent. Whatever team takes Ginn in the top half of round one will be guilty of allowing that to happen.

When you're right you're right. And I've never seen anybody be righter. Would that Cameron and Mueller had been half as smart. You know, I'm glad I found that column. Now anytime I question the utter worthlessness of what I'm doing I can tell myself that some other dude who writes for a website is smarter on personnel matters than two guys running a billion dollar sports franchise. Thanks Justin.

Anyway, for the past three years Dolphin watchers have all seen for themselves Ginn's "questionable hands" and his struggles to run "even average pass routes". Of course Cam and Mueller should have known all that before expending a top-ten pick but you see, they had a vision for the team. You might recall the Chicago Bears run to the Super Bowl in 2006. Obviously it was burned into the brains of the Dolphins' brain trust because one key to that Super Bowl run was the brilliant kickoff and punt returning of one Devin Hester. Ginn doubled as a return man in college and Cameron and Mueller obviously thought he could do the same for Miami. So even if he wasn't a great receiver he'd make up for it in the return game. Well guess what? Just as pure speed isn't enough to make somebody a great receiver, it isn't enough to make a somebody a great return man either.  Forget great, how about just average? Here's Ginn's yearly rankings in yards per attempt on kickoffs:

Ginn, KO Average Ranking

2007: 29th
2008: 37th
2009: 13th

As unsuccessful returning the ball as he was catching the ball. Now some have speculated Ginn's failures were the result of a fear of contact. I don't know that. Too often we ascribe a player's successes or failures to amorphous things like character, heart, will or the lack of same.  Maybe it was never in the cards for Ginn to succeed for the reasons Justin Davis wrote about above.  He just wasn't good enough. No hands. No moves. It's not personal. But it is painful, watching a team desperate for talent burn a first-round pick on a guy who couldn't contribute.

Check out some of the defensive players taken shortly after Ginn: Patrick Willis at 11. Darrelle Revis at 14 (Revis! Dang!). Leon Hall at 18. The Dolphins defense collapsed in Ginn's rookie season and any one of these players would have been a huge help. Maybe passing on Quinn was in fact the way to go but if Miami needed a receiver that badly instead Dwayne Bowe (23) and Robert Meachem (27) were sitting there later in the round and the team could have traded down to get a better, more NFL-ready wideout.   So in the end the Ginn pick was yet another in a long line of the past decade's abysmal draft moves for the team.  Honestly, I thought Parcells did a great job getting somebody (the Niners in this case) to even give up a fifth round pick for Ginn. Fans in the city by the bay are going to be horribly disappointed I'm sure. But better them than us. Three years showed me plenty (of nothing) though I'll always be grateful for his two kick return TD's that beat the Jets in New York last year. Ginn's one shining moment. Hey, if Mr. Nolan Carroll (taken with the Niners' pick) turns out to be a solid player for Miami, maybe something will have been salvaged after all from the disappointing selection of Ted Ginn.

More on Marshall

2010-04-21T14:24:00.000-07:00

Past Interference is all in with the Brandon Marshall trade. However, we can't help but be reminded of the Dolphins' last two trades for established stars. Surely all Miami Dolphin fans are still washing the taste of the 2005 deal of a second-round pick for Duante Culpepper. It's only been five years since that train wreck. And the 2002 swap of two number ones for Ricky Williams from the Saints has proved to be at best a mixed bag, at worst a key factor in the bottoming out of the franchise in 2007. So if you predict the third time's the charm with Marshall you're not exactly going out on a limb. I mainly bring up those painful prior trades simply to note that I was also excited about Ricky and Duante when they first donned Dolphin unis and just look how well it all turned out in the end. So let's hope for the best but prepare for the worst if it blows up in the Dolphins' bottle-nosed faces.

Like I said in my last post PI didn't see this one coming. Mainly because of the Tuna's past history. He won two Super Bowls where his leading receivers were Bobby Johnson (who?) and then Stephen Baker the Touchdown Maker. Neither topped 33 balls or 600 yards in those Super seasons.

Now check out this quote from ESPN's Adam Shefter.

Miami is a surprise destination for Marshall because Dolphins coach Tony Sparano hadn't shown much interest in acquiring him. But football czar Bill Parcells, who has final say on personnel matters in Miami, has never shied away from talented-but-troubled wide receivers, working with Terry Glenn in New England, Keyshawn Johnson in New York and Terrell Owens in Dallas.

Yes, Parcells isn't what I call the shying away type. However, unlike Shefter (who I usually like) Past Interference actually knows something about Parcells' career. Sure Parcells "worked with" Glenn. Why wouldn't he? That's what coaches do. But he wasn't happy about it. Is this is a secret or something? I mean the guy was so ticked off about Bob Kraft forcing the Patriots to take Glenn that Parcells actually started referring to Glenn as "She" in press conferences and the Glenn pick sowed the seeds for Parcells' ultimate departure from the team. Seriously, this made lots of headlines. It was on ESPN and everything. And I'm pretty sure Parcells was no happier a few years ago when Jerry Jones foisted his big free-agent haul Terrell Owens on him. This time Tuna decided to simply refer to TO as "The player" with the press. Good stuff. As for Keyshawn, I know of no problems between he and Parcells but again, Parcells didn't draft him and had no say in Keyshawn's addition to the team which came a year before Parcells joined the Jets. Parcells worked with Glenn, Key and TO but he had no choice is the point. Two of those guys he plainly did not want around. He thought he could win without them. So making the move for Marshall was clearly a break from the old Parcells' way. Before, he thought he could win without a great wideout. Now he obviously thinks he can't win without a "talented-but-troubled" wide receiver and he's willing to pay the price to get one.

And the price was high. Two second-rounders. The Ravens got Anquan Boldin for a 3rd and a 4th. The Jets snagged Santonio Holmes for a measly 5th. But Marshall's four years younger than Boldin and he's better than Holmes (plus he's got 5 inches and 30 pounds on him) (double plus he's not currently slated to miss four games on suspension and he won't be a free agent at season's end). This couldn't be better for Henne's and Hartline's development. The offense needed this desperately. Too many times last year they couldn't build on a lead when they needed to. Too many times they couldn't come back when they needed to. I don't think Miami's going to have any attitude problems with Marshall. Whatever flaws exist in Sparano's coaching so far, they don't come in the areas of motivation and discipline. The big worry is Marshall's track record of legal run-ins, especially of the domestic violence variety. Let's just hope he's put all that behind him. If not though we'll be prepared. I cleverly titled this post "More on Marshall" so if things should later go horribly wrong I could break out a "Moron Marshall" when the time came.

Brandon Marshall

2010-04-18T21:20:00.001-07:00

Well, well, well. The Dolphins' front office manages to shock everybody by and quietly executing a blockbuster trade for the man who, as soon as he steps on the field in a Dolphins' uniform, will be the very best receiver this team has fielded since the departure of the Marks Brothers almost 20(!) years ago. Brandon Marshall. Wow. Miami's woes in the receiving corps need no further explanation on this blog. While there was somce speculation the team would use their first-round pick on Dez Bryant, I assumed they'd address their defensive holes in the draft and stand pat at receiver. And I'd been trying to talk myself into thinking this was in fact the smart move. Looking at it like an optimistic homer we could say that in 2009 Bess assumed a bigger role on the offense, Camarillo was as dependable an option as one could be, and the rookie Hartline looked great while averaged 16 yards a catch. (Ginn, well, even aqua-and-orange colored glasses aren't gonna make that guy look good.) Now with another year of experience for that trio and their QB, maybe the existing talent could take another step forward so that Phins'd be alright enough at the position to address other needs.

But no. Parcells and company crossed us up and made the bold move, swapping two second-rounders for a, shall we say, somewhat controversial player. And I love it. If you had your pick of any receiver in the NFL right now to upgrade your WR corps, who would you take over Marshall? Larry Fitzgerald. Andre Johnson. Calvin Johnson. And who else? Nobody better than Brandon Marshall. Dude's exactly what the team needs. A perfect fit really. A huge target for Henne. Tough to bring down. An amazing physical specimen who can take over games. And he's only 26, still in his prime. Sure there's some "character" issues to worry about but the trade's taken care of some of those issues (wanted more $, wanted to play in Fla.) overnight. This is great for the offense and great for Henne's development. Marshall's police record makes him a bit of a risk but using their number one pick on Dez Bryant would have brought a whole bunch of other risks. At least Marshall's a proven stud.

Let's face it, the cliche that the NFL's a passing league is true. The Dolphins just went from having the worst receiving corps in the AFC East to having one as good as anybody else. It had to be done. I'm just glad I no longer have to talk myself into believing the opposite.

Just a few days before we saw the Jets get Santonio Holmes for nothing more than a 5th round pick. And by all accounts nobody, nobody made the Jets a better offer. Sure the guy's a jackass who's been suspended for a quarter of the season but he's better than any Dolphin who caught a pass in 2009. Yet despite how cheaply Holmes could be obtained Parcells wasn't at all interested in him. Now we know why. Let the Jets have the guy. Miami just got somebody a lot better. (And the Jets know it. They tried for trade for him back in March. Haha).

The New York Jets' Historic Streak Ends

2010-04-15T15:04:00.000-07:00

One of the greatest streaks in NFL history has come to an end. This streak lasted for decades and it’s extremely unlikely any team will ever match it, let alone better it. If some team ever does surpass this incredible streak it will probably not be in the lifetime of anybody reading this post. Yet this historic streak and its ending received no press, it got no TV coverage, nobody’s talking about it, and I’m just beside myself that it’s all over.

Since 1960, all the way through the 2010 season, 50 NFL seasons, a half century of football, the National Football League has produced exactly 22 teams who finished a season posting but a single win. Just four teams have gone completely winless in that same time span so we can see just how hard it is for even the worst teams ever to pull off a winless season. 26 of the worst teams ever made a run and 22 of them failed. They failed because some other NFL team proved unable to notch a win against a loser team that couldn’t beat anybody else for a whole entire season.

I first wrote about those teams guilty of Losing to Losers here back in 2007, but now that the first decade of this century is behind allow me to present a complete list of all one-win teams from 1960-2010, with the teams they defeated in parenthesis.

1960: Washington Redskins (Dallas Cowboys)
1961: Washington Redskins (Dallas Cowboys)
1962: Oakland Raiders (Boston Patriots)
1962: Los Angeles Rams (San Francisco 49’ers)
1966: New York Giants (Washington Redskins)
1967: Atlanta Falcons (Minnesota Vikings)
1968: Buffalo Bills (New York Jets)
1969: Chicago Bears (Pittsburgh Steelers)
1969: Pittsburgh Steelers (Detroit Lions)
1971: Buffalo Bills (New England Patriots)
1972: Houston Oilers (New York Jets)
1973: Houston Oilers (Baltimore Colts)
1980: New Orleans Saints (New York Jets)
1982: Houston Oilers (Seattle Seahawks)
1989: Dallas Cowboys (Washington Redskins)
1990: New England Patriots (Indianapolis Colts)
1991: Indianapolis Colts (New York Jets)
1996: New York Jets (Arizona Cardinals)
2000: San Diego Chargers (Kansas City Chiefs)
2001: Carolina Panthers (Minnesota Vikings)
2007: Miami Dolphins (Baltimore Ravens)
2009: St. Louis Rams (Detroit Lions)

As you can see six teams have twice pulled off the feat of falling to an otherwise winless team. But the New York Jets have lapped the field over the past half century, serving as the lone victim to an otherwise winless team an amazing four times! But the amazement doesn’t end there people. Check the years of those four humiliating, embarrassing Jets’ defeats: 1968, 1972, 1980, and 1996. Yep, that’s right, Losing to Losers in the 1960’s, 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s. One loss in four successive decades. Simply incredible. No other team has even done back-to-back decades.

Unfortunately the Jets will have to be satisfied with a four-decade streak. They managed to finish their last ten seasons without once losing to a one-win team. Sad. The 2007 season was their last real shot at one for the thumb but the Jets insisted on toppling the Dolphins twice and forcing Miami to instead beat the Ravens to avoid the ignominy of an 0-16 campaign. But despite the end of their historic streak, the Jets can sit back contentedly knowing the odds of anybody bettering their four-decade streak are practically nonexistent. In recent times we’re only seeing three or four teams a decade go 1-15. And other than the J-E-T-S, Jets Jets Jets, no franchise has managed to lose to a 1-15 squad in consecutive decades. The four teams to fall to a 1-15 team in the last decade will have to do it again in this decade just to have a two-decade streak going. The Jets’ record is totally safe for several decades at least and 31 years from now will be the earliest any franchise would even have a crack at breaking the record should they first be able to set up the loser’s table for a shot at history. We here at Past Inteference mourn the end of the Jets' Losing to Losers streak but given NFL history, their record looks as safe as any record could be.

Your 2009 Miami Dolphins: The Wrap-Up, Part II

2010-04-09T20:25:00.000-07:00

Alright, PI hasn’t posted in awhile and I think I know why. Previously we committed ourselves to writing a summation about the performance of the Miami Dolphins in 2009. (We wrote about the quarterbacking separately here.) I was going to take the time to rehash and research everything and do up a thorough analysis of every position. You know, with a stereotypical “grade” for each unit of the team. But I just couldn’t make myself do it. Honestly what would be the point? You can go to plenty of other websites who actually employ people who write stuff like that for actual money. (Better yet try the Miami Dolphins Spotlight, the guy who writes it is awesome. He really puts the work in. He makes me embarrassed to call myself a blogger). Plus, this just isn’t the kind of stuff PI likes to do anyway. We prefer to write about things that either nobody else has thought about or that everybody else has forgotten about. The stupider the better. So just to get back in the swing of things allow me to go ahead and make a few non-thorough observations about the 2009 Fins. And I’m not giving myself anymore homework assignments. This is it!

Last season was basically a big ball of blah. You could call the team's play mediocre though that might be a tad generous. Maybe slightly-worse-than-mediocre. The offense was average. The defense was below average. The special teams were above average. The offense ran very effectively and passed very ineffectively. The defense wasn't too bad at stopping the run but really really bad at stopping the pass. 10 of 16 games were decided by a touchdown or less. Miami won convincingly exactly once. They lost convincingly twice. They won four times at home and three times on the road. They suffered two three-game losing streaks that bookended the season. In between they posted three separate two-game winning streaks. They played commanding football against the league's two best teams. And they found a way to lose both times. They finished 6 games better than the 2007 Dolphins, but four games worse than the 2008 Dolphins. If consistency was the question, then the 2009 Miami Dolphins weren’t…ah let’s just move on already.

The glass half full side? Definitely Jake Long. Miami “earned” the league’s overall #1 draft pick for the first time in like...ever, and in 2008, they used that critical pick on Long. And he’s made the Pro Bowl in each of his first two seasons. This is important for a couple of reasons. You certainly don’t want to whiff on an overall number one pick. A mundane obvservation right? But just as importantly, the Dolphins had a huge need at QB at the time but passed up top QB prospect Matt Ryan to grab Long. Ryan then played like gangbusters in 2008, looking for all the world like the NFL’s next great quarterback. And no lineman’s gonna be worth more than the NFL’s next great quarterback. But Ryan regressed in 2009 while Long stepped it up. And Henne didn’t look half bad at QB. So hopefully this will continue to play out well for the team--I don’t want to have to write a future post about on the new contender for the title of Worst Draft Pick in Miami Dolphins’ History. Besides Long, Jake Grove and Joe Berger played well at center and Vernon Carey was pretty good too. So the offensive line looked good, especially with an assist from Lousaka Polite at fullback, a real find.

With great blocking up front Ronnie Brown played maybe the best football of his career and 32-year old Ricky Williams played even better. Unfortunately the 28-year-old Brown suffered his second season-ending injury in three years. And Ricky’s now going to be 33-year-old Ricky Williams in a few weeks. So for all we know the team might not have any starting running back 2010’s end. We didn’t see enough from Lex Hilliard to know yet if he’s starting material.

Glass half-empty? That could be generous way of describing the receivers. Ted Ginn. What else is there to say? Miami fans really, really want him to be the deep threat the team desperately needs. Let’s just say that didn’t happen in 2009 and elaborating further would just be piling on, something I’ve probably already done during the course of the season. I’m sure he’s a fine young man trying his best. Devon Bess emerged at Henne’s top target but he had an unfortunate tendency to make mistakes at critical times. Greg Camarillo was the bright spot as far PI’s concerned. The guy’s one of my favorite players right now. I was worried he wouldn’t be able to come back strong from that knee injury but he did and he damn near caught every single pass thrown his way in 2009. Dude was money. And for all the talk about Ginn sucking and Miami needing a deep threat, Brian Hartline looked pretty good for a rookie and averaged over 16 yards a catch. We didn’t see anything from the other rookie wideout Patrick Turner but hopefully he just needed some extra time to adjust to the pro game and is not a lost cause. (I’m an eternal optimist). Lots of talk about how bad this unit is and the need for an upgrade but I’m not convinced that what the team’s already got can’t improve for 2010. (See!).

The defense. Not good. Really not good. Actually, they got worse the farther out you go. The D-Line wasn’t half bad. Randy Starks played very well. Langford and Merling were solid. So was Jason Ferguson but he missed half the season with injuries. But Paul Soliai, ay yi yi. Let’s just say I’m not going to be surprised if the team drafts a nose tackle. But linebackers might be even more of a need. Jason Taylor played great at his new outside linebacker spot and man was it great to see that. But what’s this? He might be leaving again? To go to...THE JETS!!?? This is not happening. This is not happening. I hope this is just some negotiation hardball by the front office. Anyway, Joey Porter regressed so much the team let him go. And Crowder, Ayodele, Torbor? Let’s move on. No really. Get rid of all of them and move on. But bad as the linebackers were the secondary might have been worse. Will Allen played well but of course tore an ACL and missed half the season. Gibril Wilson was a huge bust of a free agent. Vontae Davis played ok for a rookie. I know everybody wants Miami to grab a receiver in the draft but face it, this defense has a lot of holes.

Oh, I guess I have to mention the special teams. They were good. Really good. Sure you’d rather have the offense and defense be really good instead but you get what you get. And we got Dan Carpenter and Brandon Fields doing some fine kicking and punting. And Ginn was a lot better returner than receiver.

Ok, homework's over. Pencils down. We’re done.

More on Big Ben's Causing Trouble

2010-03-10T11:07:00.000-08:00

Of course the reason the NFL's had so few matchups between multiple-Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks is that there's only been 10 QB's period who've ever won two or more Super Bowls and you need to have at least two of them active at the same time to get such a matchup. In fact, there's only been 10 seasons where the matchup was even possible:

1976 (Griese, Bradshaw)
1977 (Griese, Bradshaw)
1978 (Griese, Bradshaw, Staubach)
1979 (Griese, Bradshaw, Staubach)
1980 (Griese, Bradshaw)
1985 (Plunkett, Montana)
1986 (Plunkett, Montana)
1994 (Montana, Aikman)
2009 (Brady, Roethlisberger)
2010 (Brady, Roethlisberger)

We got matchups between multiple-Super Bowl-winning QB's in four of those seasons, 1976, 1978 (twice), 1979 (twice), and 1985. Luck of the schedule was to blame in most of the other seasons. However, 1980 could have seen another face-off between Bob Griese and Terry Bradshaw but unfortunately Griese suffered a career-ending injury several weeks earlier. If we don't get a historic matchup in 2010 it will be due either to injury or a new factor entirely, criminal conduct.

Big Ben Causing Trouble

2010-03-08T20:44:00.001-08:00

Last year I wrote a post listing every NFL game matching up quarterbacks with more than one Super Bowl ring. Counting only games where both QB's had already won at least two Super Bowls gives us the following contets:

1) November 14, 1976: Pittsburgh 14, Miami 3
(Bradshaw vs. Griese)

2) November 5, 1978: Miami 23, Dallas 16
(Griese vs. Staubach)

3) January 21, 1979/Super Bowl XIII: Pittsburgh 35, Dallas 31
(Bradshaw vs. Staubach)

4) October 28, 1979: Pittsburgh 14, Dallas 3
(Bradshaw vs. Staubach)

5) December 30, 1979/Divisional Playoffs: Pittsburgh 34, Miami 14
(Bradshaw vs. Griese)

6) September 22, 1985: San Francisco 34, LA Raiders 10
(Montana vs. Plunkett)

Just six games in the Super Bowl era. And not one such matchup in almost a quarter century. Between the time of Jim Plunkett's retirement and last season there's only been one year where there was even a chance for another game featuring two multi-championship QB's, 1994. Troy Aikman had just won his second Super Bowl and four-time winner Joe Montana was still active. Unfortunately, they didn't play each other that year and Montana called it quits at season's end. John Elway retired immediately after winning his second Super Bowl and AIkman followed a year later, leaving the NFL bereft of multi-ringed QB's until Tom Brady claimed his second title in 2003. He still needed somebody to face off against to give us game number 7 and Ben Roesthlisberger answered the call in 2008. However, the Patriots and Steelers weren't on each other's schedule last year and the Steelers' collapse prevented any playoff matchup.

But this year the NFL comes through. At last, after a quarter-century NFL fans will once again witness a game matching two QB's with multiple championships. Pats vs. Steelers. Brady vs. Roethlisberger. It's gonna happen.

Or is it? Facing possible criminal charges and a civil lawsuit for alleged sexual assault, Big Ben's gone and lawyered up with the guy who got Ray Lewis off. The Steelers organization doesn't sound too happy about the whole thing and maybe, just maybe, the 2010 season will see Roethlisberger missing some time on the field (and deservedly so if the bastard's guilty of something), especially should charges be filed. And if that hypothetical time missed includes the Pats-Steelers game there goes the QB matchup we've been waiting 25 years for. Way to go jerk!

Black History Month

2010-02-28T21:11:00.000-08:00

As Black History Month concludes Past Interference salutes someone whose six-decades-old contribution to the National Football League still reverberates today.

Over 60 years ago Jackie Robinson shattered Major League Baseball's color line, an event so important it transcended sports. Playing courageous and brilliant baseball Robinson proved the utter falsity of the racist beliefs that had kept blacks out of Major League Baseball for so long while paving the way for the Civil Rights movement to come. Arguably the most important athlete of the 20th Century Robinson's virtually a sainted figure in our history now right up there with Martin Luther King, Jr and Rosa Parks. And deservedly so.

But this post isn't about the great Jackie Robinson. (This is a football blog.) Now contrast Jackie's status as an icon with the virtual anonymity of the man who broke the National Football League's color line...a year before Robinson did the same for baseball. There's no mystery about this. The NFL's popularity in the mid-1940's in no way compared to that of professional baseball (it would take over another decade for that to change). Also, the NFL's color line had only been in place for 13 years while baseball had been banning African-Americans for over half a century before Jackie Robinson. But while the NFL's reintegration was not the seismic event that baseball's was, the man who broke football's color line deserves honor and recognition all the same. His name was Kenny Washington and given the nature of the game he no doubt experienced a kind of physical brutality from racist competititors that even Robinson never had to endure. But this post isn't about Kenny Washington either.

Obviously Jackie Robinson didn't singlehandedly desegreate Major League Baseball. For reasons both idealistic and financial Dodgers GM and President Branch Rickey signed him and gave him the opportunity to make history after getting permission from the team's board of directors. By contrast, the L.A. Rams had no interest whatsoever in signing Washington or any African American. So why'd they make the move?

In the standard histories of the NFL that I've read, the L.A. Rams signed Washington as a necessity in order for the newly relocated Rams to be able to obtain a lease to play in the city-owned Los Angeles Colisuem. Officials for Los Angeles County and the Coliseum Commission essentially forced the team to do the right thing. But I should have known that was too simple a story. If history's shown us anything it's that social and political change never comes about from the top down. The people themselves have to make their government act. In a still-segregated nation no government official was on their own going to force a football owner to sign a black player. What if the team balked and went elsewhere? So who pushed L.A. to sign Washington?

It wasn't one person alone but after reading up on the subject it appears that the man who deserves most of the credit is a guy by the name of William Clare (Halley) Harding. Halley Harding was a sportswriter for an African American weekly newspaper, and he was also what a later generation might unsympathetically describe as "militant". Harding did whatever he could to use his forum and his standing in the community to promote the cause of equality for blacks. Recognizing the opportunity the Rams move to his city created, Harding showed up along with the rest of the press for a meeting between Rams officials and the Coliseum Commission where the Rams sought a lease to play football at the city's stadium, the Coliseum. The meeting was open to the public and so Harding took the opportunity to not only attend but to make several impassioned speeches highlighting the contributions of African Americans to Los Angeles, the U.S. of A., and the NFL itself prior to 1933. Taken aback the Rams' representative, "Chile" Walsh, denied any prejudice on the part of the Rams or the NFL. A white commission member, Roger Jessup, then asked point blank if the Rams would bar local legend Kenny Washington from the Rams. Walsh said they would not. Jessup informed him that if Washington didn't play for L.A. the Rams wouldn't be playing there either.

At a later meeting between Walsh and local black sportswriters Harding and others pushed for specific promises from Walsh to sign black players. Pressure from Harding also got the L.A. County Supervisor, Leonard Roach, to put in writing the promise not to discriminate. And so Roach and Jessup later got their share of credit for the Kenny Washington signing. But according to historian Gretchen Atwood,

"Chile Walsh was sick of Harding's constant pressure. And because of the public statements Roach and Jessup made against racial bias, Walsh and the Rams could pass the buck if anyone objected to the signing—basically, shrug and tell other NFL owners, 'Hey, our hands were tied, we needed the lease to the stadium.'"

So there you have it. Roach and Jessup acted but it was Harding who got them to act. It must be noted that All-American Football Conference's L.A. Dons signed a lease with the Coliseum that very same year yet their lease conspicuously failed to include any commitment whatsoever to sign black players, something you'd expect if Roach and the Commission were the ones truly responsible for forcing the Rams to integrate. No, it was Halley Harding who raised the necessary hell and applied the proper pressure to help break once and for all the NFL's 13-year-old color line. He deserves the lion's share of the credit for making it happen and now Past Interference salutes Mr. Harding's long-ago effort.

Postscript: The Gretchen Atwood quote above along with a good bit of the information in this post came from the great Sports Illustrated article by Alexander Wolff linked to above. It's well worth your time to read it.

Mosi Tatupu

2010-02-25T21:45:00.000-08:00

Former Patriots running back Mosi Tatupu passed away the other day at the not-so-old age of 54. Tatupu never starred in the NFL but he was one of those guys fans love: he was versatile, he gave his all, he played a long time and he had a cool name. As Tatupu played at fullback and special teams so he never amassed huge rushing totals. In a 14-year career he topped 80 yards in a game only six times. Here's his six biggest games:

1) 12/12/82 81 yards
2) 11/13/83 95 yards
3) 12/04/83 128 yards
4) 10/07/84 83 yards
5) 10/14/84 93 yards
6) 10/21/84 90 yards

And guess who the opponent was in three of those six games? Of course, the Miami Dolphins (games 1, 2, and 6). Back in the 80's, role players and draft day disappointments frequently metamorphosized into human highlight films when facing the Dolphins defense. Why not Mosi Totupu? One of the above games is kind of famous. Do you know? Do you know? Here's a hint. Final score: 3-0.

It's the first one on the list. A New England victory that we now know as "The Snowplow Game". You know, the one where that convict was somehow allowed to drive his snowplow (really a tractor with a big broom attached) onto the field to clear a spot for the game-winning kick. The only score of the day. The weather was so bad the Patriots completed only two passes all day and pretty much spent the whole game handing off to either Mark Van Eghan or Mosi Tatupu, who got his 81 yards on only 13 carries. Don Shula got so mad about the whole thing he actually got the NFL to impose a new No Snowplow rule. That's right. No groundskeepers may clear snow before a kick now. The last time I saw Shula interviewed about the game he still seemed pretty ticked off about it. The man holds a grudge. But while we remember the stupid Snowplow Game for its infamous ending, on the occasion of his passing let's also now remember it as the very first time Mosi Tatupu helped plow his team to victory.

Too-infrequent Pass Interference contributor Jeff remembers Pete Axthelm, who also left us too early, joking about "the Pats' inexplicable overuse of [Tatupu] in a late season game back when they sucked." The witty Axthelm called Mosi, "the increaingly slowin' Samoan."

Super Bowl XLIV

2010-02-18T07:15:00.000-08:00

PI intended to post its Super Bowl pick at some point prior to the game. In the immediate aftermath of the conference championships PI assumed the Colts would be the pick. The Vikings clearly outplayed New Orleans and the Saints emerged triumphant due only to Minnesota's unfortunate propensity to put the ball on the turf. Meanwhile the Colts impressively came from two scores down to decisively defeat the Jets thanks to perhaps the best peformance of Peyton Manning's career. But immediate impressions can be dangerous ones. PI took a closer look at each team, did some reading, checked some numbers and then changed its mind. PI heard Aaraon Schatz of Football Outsiders say his stats showed the teams as evenly matched. PI heard a gambling-oriented sports-radio talk show host state that the "smart money" was being bet on the Saints. So if the numbers showed the Saints and Colts to be even, then you take the underdog Saints and the 4.5 points no? But unlike the Vegas smart guys couldn't go with the logic. Some nagging feeling or perhaps an all-too-recent reading of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink made us reluctant to part from the early Colts pick.

Let's be honest. It was Manning.

After the fourth MVP award and the impressive playoff wins, the consensus was starting to build that Manning might well be the greatest QB ever. A second Lombardi Trophy would go a very long way to making his case a convincing one. Manning did appear to be playing the very best football of his career. And it's been one hell of a career so far. Click here for Throwing Into Traffic's lyrical analysis of how Manning and the very best of his teammates elevated the rest of their roster to a team capable of winning a championship. It's good stuff. And it had PI almost believing. Given the numbers, the personel, the records, etc., there was no rationale reason to have considered Indianapolis a lock to win. Just look at the QB's. Drew Brees quietly played at least as well as Manning this season, if not better. And his play over the last several years was comparable to Manning as well.

But while he'd never been on the big stage before and hadn't played great in his two NFC title appearances, Manning seemingly ended questions about his big game ability back in 2006. Winning every game he started and finished in 2009, including seven comback victories, lots of people were making the case that the already-great Peyton Manning had managed to raised his game even further. That he was something we'd never seen before in professional football: an equivalent to Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods. Somebody capable of propelling himself and his team to victory through sheer mastery of the game. The most cerebral, most prepared QB the game's ever seen. Was really that possible? A lot of people certainly thought so and those thoughts made PI start to doubt what the numbers were saying. We posted no pre-game prediction.

In the game's early stages Manning emerged looking every bit the player so many asserted him to be, the greatest quarterback to ever play. The game's greatest thinker. Two well-executed drives complimented by a Dwight Freeny-led defense that stymied the Saints completely added up to a dominant first quarter and a 10-0 lead. As the quarter ended all Colts fans had to be confident of victory. No Saints fan could have been optimistic. As we've written about before here Super Bowls do not lend themselves to comebacks. Only two teams had ever come back from more than two scores down to win a Super Bowl. Ten points remains the greatest deficit overcome in victory. The Colts were likely one score away from an insurmountable lead. And then the game changed.

The Saints first two drives ended in punts. The team had yet to cross into Colts territory. But on their third possession Brees started to find his range as they say. A huge sack by Freeney forced New Orleans to settle for a field goal but by scoring three the Saints assured they would not trail by three scores no matter what Indy did on their next possession. The drive also kicked off a streak of six consecutive Saints possessions that ended in Colts territory. The Saints scored on all but one of those possessions. Yeah, and not counting the final kneeldown that accounts for every remaining possession. Essentially, after his first two drives Brees and the Saints offense became unstoppable. And remember the Saints second drive, the one that ended at midfield, would have continued into Colts territory had Marcus Colston not dropped an easy reception.

Brees did nothing spectacular in terms of big plays. The Colts apparently made the decision not to give up the big play. So Brees just efficiently and remorselessly picked the Indianapolis D apart. Rarely under pressure Brees showed near-perfect accuracy. He couldn't be stopped. Every pass was right where it needed to be. But with their early 10-0 lead the Colts could still win if Manning could just match Brees. But the two key plays of the second quarter, the two failed third-down conversions, prevented that from happening. Pierre Garcon's huge drop forced the first Colts' punt of the game. A big gain might well have led to a 17-3 lead and given Super Bowl history the Saints' offense might well have begun to press at that point. Certainly the Colts defense would have been given a big lift, as well as more time to rest. But their defense did rise to the challenge for the last time in the game. A huge goal-line stand put Indy back in the driver's seat once more. And then came the second huge Colts blunder of the game: a run for no gain on third-and-one from their own 10 with 46 seconds left in the half. The subsequent punt gave the Saints a chance to add three points right before the half and Brees easily moved the team into FG range for Hartley.

Now after the game Saints coach Gary Payton was lauded for his aggressiveness. Going for the TD at the one and later calling for the second-half opening onsides kick. Conversely, the Colts were pilloried for playing conservatively. And this alleged conservatism was demonstrated by the Colts decision to run the ball three times on their final drive of the first half. I can't agree with that at all. The Colts played it exactly right; it just didn't work out. When you take possession at your own one-yard line, holding the lead with less than two minutes left in the half, the overriding goal is not to score but to prevent the other team from scoring. Playing it safe is the smart play. Turning the ball over down there and giving up the lead right before the half is a surefire way to lose a Super Bowl. Running it was the way to go. The Saints were weak against the run this year and the Colts ran well in this game--more reasons to to go with the ground game. Plus Manning's reputation as the two-minute warning master aided the Colts here as New Orleans was hesitant to burn their own timeouts in case Indy did try to push the ball into Saints' territory. Two runs gained nine yards. One first down would guarantee at least a 7-point halftime lead for the Colts and they'd have about 50 seconds left and two time-outs to try to add three more. And they'd have the psychological boost of the goal-line stand entering halftime. But they got stuffed on third-and-one, punted, Brees went to work, and Hartley burned them for the FG that effectively erased the Saints earlier failed fourth-and-goal. Just a huge turning point. And for all those who ripped Indy for running it what about the Saints' strategy there? If Payton was so smart and aggressive why'd he let the Colts burn almost a minute of clock. Payton could have used up all his time-outs when the Colts had the ball, trusted his D to get the three-and-out and then Brees would have had almost an extra minute. Not doing that cost his team a shot a game-tying TD right before the half. Had the Saints lost wouldn't we be hearing about that?

This is pure conjecture but if the Colts get that first down and then tack on a field goal to go up 13-3 before the half they probably look for that onsides kick. The bigger lead makes an onsides kick more likely. Anyway if Hank Baskett holds onto the ball then both of Payton's aggressive calls blow up in his face. Not that he made the wrong call either time but no matter how brilliant your decisions you sometimes need some luck too. And the Colts didn't get any. The failed third-down conversions prevented Indy from taking a commanding lead. The onsides kick did the same while also giving the Saints a chance to take the lead and further limiting the number of Colts' possessions (only 4 in each half).

Now the fourth big play that cost the Colts the game was a true blunder and Jim Campbell deserved to be ripped to shreds for sending out Matt Stover to try a 51-yard field goal. Who didn't know he was going to miss? One of the worst coaching decisions I've ever seen. I suppose you could the play before a blunder as well. Going deep on 3rd-and-11 was not a wise choice by Manning. He did the same thing in the 2005 divisional playoff loss to Pittsburgh. Instead of trying to get closer for his kicker he went for the home run ball. It wasn't close. Just getting some yards might have made going for it on 4th down a possibility too. But a pooch punt would have made way more sense. The short field made it just too easy for Brees.

The fatal fifth play was of course Tracy Porter's pick-six. That all but ended the game, the chance for our first overtime Super Bowl, and ensured I would not have to edit my Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time series for at least one more year. (I'd rank this one at maybe 11th).

In the aftermath of the game Manning's place in history became as big a topic of conversation as it had been before the game. But instead of Manning now moving into position to be the consensus greatest ever, the consensus now foreclosed him from ever reaching such exalted status. Now I have no doubt this is true barring a couple of future Super Bowl wins (still a possibility); most people expect to find several championships on the Greatest Ever's resume. But I think heaping most of the blame on Manning's head for the loss is unfair.

When Manning began to drive his team down the field for what they hoped would be the tying touchdown I checked the time and realized the game was at about the three-hour mark. Taking into account the super-long halftime show and the extra commercials we'd been force-fed I realized just what an incredibly fast game we'd been watching. But it perfect sense. Long scoring drives, few incomplete passes and no turnovers until THE turnover equalled fewer possesions, just 8 for each team. I can't remember seeing anything like that before. Here's a list of those 8 Indianapolis drives:

1) 53-yard drive. FG
2) 96-yard drive. TD
3) Three-and-out. Garcon drop on 3rd-and-4
4) Three-and-out. Hart stuffed on 3rd-and-1
5) 76-yard drive. TD
6) 56-yard drive. Missed FG
7) Pick 6
8) 81-yard drive. Turned over on downs.

Except for the interception (and yes that's a big except) what exactly did Manning do to lose the game? For all the talk of how brilliant the Saints defense played in limiting Manning's offense to 17 points I saw nothing of the kind. Check out the stats. The Colts bettered the Saints in yards and first downs. Time of possession was even. Indy was far and away the better rushing team. Now New Orleans obviously made the biggest defensive play of the game but that was just a fantastic effort by Porter. A brilliant gamble. The Saints made the key third-down stop on the Colts' fourth drive, but that was a run. And they did forced Indy into the third-and-long where Manning unwisely went for it all prior to the missed FG drive. That's really it for the great defense we saw from New Orleans. Manning just didn't have many possessions to work with. He thus needed to score four or five times on his eight possessions but blunders by teammates (Garcon, Baskett), himself, and coaches (Stover's FG attempt) thwarted his chances.

One other factor having nothing to do with Manning: special teams. Other than Football Outsiders I've seen no one point to this as the true key to the game. But you've got one team kicking three long field goals and perfectly executing an onside kick, and another team missing a long field goal and botching an onside kick recovery. And don't forget about the field position. The Colts' best starting field position all day was their own 30. New Orleans beat that on four possessions. That wasn't all due to the return game obviously but the Colts didn't have one good kick return all day. Most critically they only started from their own 11 on the drive ending in the missed field goal. The offensive and defensive stats don't show the Colts to be second-best. Throw in special teams and we've got a different story.

So Manning has to get in line if we're looking to blame people for the loss (instead of crediting the Saints). The two missed third down plays in the second quarter. The dropped onside kick. The missed FG. If any of those things go the other way maybe Manning never needs to be in the position to throw that pick to Porter. But he did. So was does that one mistake mean when addressing Mannings legacy? Well, it wasn't a crazy choke job like what Favre pulled in the NFC Championship. Some blamed Reggie Wayne. Some blamed Manning. Some said it was just a great play by Porter. I don't know enough to say how bad of a play it was on Manning's part. But he telegraphed something, showed some tendency, that Porter picked up on at the very least. Manning only made one real mistake in the game but unfortunately for him that mistake made the difference.

But consider how when Kurt Warner announced his retirement a few weeks ago people were falling all over themselves to call him a Hall of Fame lock, an odd thing to say about a quarterback with a mere 5 seasons of great play. In his favor are Warner's performances in three Super Bowls; the three highest yardage totals in Super Bowl history. But Warner lost two of those games. And in each of those two losses Warner threw interceptions returned for touchdowns that cost his team the game. Nobody seems to be holding that against him.

Given the mistakes of his teammates Manning needed to play a near-perfect game to win. He didn't and so he deserves some blame. But plenty of quarterbacks have won Super Bowls while playing a lot worse than Manning did in Super Bowl XLIV. Let's cut him a little slack.

The Pro Bowl, My Best Friend, and John Madden

2010-02-18T07:12:00.000-08:00

I can't believe I put up that stupipd Pro Bowl post without finishing it. The whole reason I wrote about the game in the first place is because I have an actual Pro Bowl memory. You see, I exaggerated a bit when I wrote that no one cares about the game. I'm sure the players cared more once upon a time when they made very little money and worked off-season jobs. Winning meant a winner's share and every little bit helped back then. And besides the players, Past Interference actually cared! It's true. On January 20, 1974, a young me cared. My best friend Lewis and I watched with great interest. We were huge Dolphin fans and among those Dolphins on the AFC roster was my then-favorite player Bob Griese. I was excited. Nobody told me it was a worthless exhibition. The AFC's other Pro Bowl quarterback was Kenny Stabler. And to mine and Lewis' consternation AFC coach John Madden chose to play Stabler for the entire first half! Jerk! We couldn't understand it. Griese had just won his second straight Super Bowl. Stabler was a loser. What was going on? Obviously Madden, the coach of the hated Oakland Raiders, was playing favorites by giving all the glory to his boy the Snake while letting poor gallant Bob Griese waste away on the sidelines. And the AFC trailed at the half thanks to stupid Madden's decision to play Stabler and Stabler only. It made no sense.

Being clever little boys, Lewis and I took matters into our own hands and struck back the only way we knew how. We adapted the then-current Wrigley's Spearmint Gum jingle for our own purposes. The commercial may have hyped "Wrigley's Spearmint Gum, Gum, Gum" but two young budding songsmiths brilliantly repurposed it to say "Coach is very dumb, dumb, dumb". Funny stuff huh? As fate would have it, Madden played Griese for the entire second half. I suppose that might have been his plan all along but I'm sticking with my favoritism theory! Anyway, being the superior quarterback Griese led the AFC to a comeback 15-13 win and the hero of the game was another Dolphin, Garo Yepremian. He accounted for his team's points, kicking five field goals including the game-winner with 21 seconds left. Sweet. Truly we witnessed a football classic that day.

I searched YouTube in vain for that old 1974 Wrigley's commercial. But in the process I turned up something way better: a 90's Russian version of the commercial that has the same basic jingle! The collapse of communism just keeps on giving.

The Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Conclusion

2010-02-06T08:30:00.000-08:00

At long last the conclusion to Past Interference's Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time series, just in time for the Super Bowl XLIV festivities (like we planned it). Here are PI's rankings of the ten best Super Bowls ever played. Click the links at the bottom of this post to read PI's deeper thoughts on each game.

(10) Super Bowl XXIII. San Francisco 20, Cincinnati 16. Montana.

(9) Super Bowl XXXVI. New England 20, St. Louis 17. If this is number one on your own list I won't argue. Personally, I'm still mad about how the Rams D played on that last drive because I wanted me some Super Bowl overtime.

(8) Super Bowl XXXVIII. New England 32, Carolina 29. Pure insanity. Tons of mistakes and penalties, yet action-packed and suspenseful to the final play. Nipple!

(7) Super Bowl XXXI. Denver 31, Green Bay 24. A very underrated game. Given their own unfortunate Super Bowl history combined with the NFC's incredible run of dominance in the big game, Denver's triumph here ought to be more appreciated. High-scoring and close all the way. What more do you want?

(6) Tie: Super Bowl XIII. Pittsburgh 35, Dallas 31. Super Bowl XIV. Pittsburgh 31, L.A. Rams 19. PI would love to go old school and pick one of these two for the number one spot but each game suffers from the same aesthetic fatal flaw, not going down to the wire. Each could have but the Cowboys just couldn't catch a break and Vince Ferragamo turned back into Vince Ferragamo in the 4th quarter.

(4) Super Bowl XXXIV. St. Lous 23, Tennessee 16. A slightly dull first half but a classic second half more than made up for it. You couldn't ask for a better fourth quarter. The Warner-to-Bruce TD bomb, the frantic final Tennesse drive and the fateful Jones' tackle still linger in the memory.

(3) Super Bowl XLIII. Pittsburgh 27, Arizona 23. I had a very hard time figuring whether this game should rank second or third. It wound up third based on what I thought was a slightly lower quality of play than in PI's choice for number two. Both the Steelers and Cardinals looked listless for long stretches of the game especially in the third quarter. The fourth quarter fireworks came as a real shocker precisely because Harrison's awesome first-half ending INT TD appeared as though it would be the only dramatic moment of the night. Luckily the Cards woke up in the 4th and the Steelers then roused themselves for a game-winning drive.

(2) Super Bowl XXV. New York 21, Buffalo 19. An exciting game from start to finish is a real Super Bowl rarity so appreciate it when you get it! Sure you could knock the paucity of truly memorable plays, but the high drama, the wild momentum swings, the heroic efforts on both sides, the true clash of styles, and the final fateful miss earn this easy honors as the best Super Bowl of the first quarter-century of the Super Bowl era.

(1) Super Bowl XLII. New York 17, New England 14. With a perfect season hanging in the balance the NFL owed us a game for the ages. And we got one: the game's drama matched the game's importance. The team's combined for "only" 31 points but with neither team capable of consecutive scores every score equalled a lead change. The tension kept building and building and building in a way that no other Super Bowl's ever matched. And Manning-to-Tyree? I didn't see the Immaculate Reception live but I'm grateful I saw this one. A magical NFL moment, a shocking upset, and, in my opinion, the Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time.

The Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time

Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part I
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part II
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part III
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part IV
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part V
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part VI
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part VII
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part VIII
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part IX
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part X
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Conclusion

You're talking about...the Pro Bowl?

2010-02-05T21:46:00.000-08:00

We've seen and heard something in the last couple weeks that I can't recall ever happening before. People talking about the Pro Bowl. Yes, the Pro Bowl! That most meaningless of All-Star games. A game hardly anybody watches. A game hardly anybody cares about. Even the most diehard of NFL fans, like us at Past Interference, don't care about it. To belabor the obvious, nobody cares because: (1) Nobody tries; it's an exhibition; and (2) End of Super Bowl = end of football interest (until next season). Nothing to be done about reason number one but in a logical attempt to do something about reason number two the NFL (as you may have heard) moved the Pro Bowl from its usual spot, Hawaii, to a new spot, Miami, and from it's usual slot, a week after the Super Bowl, to a new slot, a week before the Super Bowl (8 commas in one sentence). Oh noes! The flood of negative reaction these moves produced might have fooled someone into thinking people now actually care about the Pro Bowl. But really, some people just need something to talk about, argue about and yell about. Yes, there's a small downside to the NFL's plan. Holding the game before the Super Bowl means the guys playing in the Super Bowl can't make the Pro Bowl. The absence of those guys plus the usual injury scratches left us with the ridiculous specatacle of a David Garrard taking snaps for a Pro Bowl team.

So anyway, sportswritersandtalkers ripped the NFL mercilessly for the Pro Bowl move. And guess what? NFL smart. Everyone else stupid. Pro Bowl TV ratings shot up 39% over last year! We got just as silly and meaningless a game as we always get but a lot more people watched this year's silly meaninglessness. Clearly we're starved for some football, any football, during the two week interval before the Super Bowl. Now the Super Bowl players who missed out and all of the participating players who would have preferred the Hawaii Pro Bowl experience have a legitimate gripe here. The move deprived them of something. Jim Florio of ProFootballTalk.com explained the dilemma best on a local radio show I heard. To paraphrase him, he asked "what is the Pro Bowl supposed to be? A revenue enhancer for the league (ratings) or a reward for the players (Hawaii)?" That's it in a nutshell. Where does the Pro Bowl go from here? Well, when you have 32 rich greedy bastards running the show I'm gonna guess money wins out in the end. So long Hawaii.

Favre: The Sucker Punch

2010-01-31T21:03:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty sure I've never ever written anything positive about Brett Favre on this website. I'm just not a fan, essentially for three reasons: (1) Favre extended his career past its natural limit (or so I thought) to break the career passing records of my favorite player of all-time, Dan Marino; (2) the media lauded Favre far far beyond what his on-field play warranted; (3) the annual Favre Retirement Show got old several years ago. Past Interference doesn't dispute Favre's a great player. But surely the countless postseason meltdowns of the past decade should have clued everybody in that Favre's just nowhere near being a contender for the greatest quarterback of all-time.

But PI now admits that Favre's play in 2009 necessitates a reassessment of (some of) the negative words previously posted on this blog, at least in regards to reason one above. After observing Favre's play the last few years, especially down the stretch last year, a ton of people thought the guy was finished. And PI was among that ton. But that ton was clearly, emphatically, demonstrably wrong! Favre posted perhaps the best season of career, at age 40 no less. Dude shut up all the retirement advocates especially the Green Bay management team that got rid of him. Nobody can now dispute that Favre, even at 40, remains one of the league's best quarterbacks and that he was right and everybody else was wrong when he insisted he could still play. Favre knew Minnesota was the perfect destination for him and you have to give him credit, he shrewdly managed to work the system to make that happen.

More credit accured after the Vikings convincingly demolished the Cowboys in the divisional playoff round. Favre stood just one game away from returning to the Super Bowl for the first time in 12 years and a Super Bowl ring to cap a great season would have to put him back into the Best Ever conversation right?

I watched the NFC Championship with no real rooting interest but as the game went on PI began to gain new appreciation for Brett Favre. I couldn't help it. Despite taking tremendous punishment Favre kept making big third down throws. I guess the Saints strategy was to pound Favre into the turf but it wasn't working. Sure he was hurting but his team was dominating in yards and first downs. Watching Favre pick himself up over and over after another brutal hit while throwing great pass after great pass for another first down was truly unbelievable. What can I say? He earned PI's respect. Just an amazing performance for anybody. But this guy is 40! The only real problem was this strange football allergy they developed. Favre himself threw a pick but it should have been nullifed after a cheap shot on his lower leg. And despite all the mishaps Favre had the Vikes just shy of field goal territory as the game entered his final minute. His recent past was about to wiped from our collective memory. And then...

Well, we all saw it. The bad play calling, the 12-men-on-the-field-blunder, and then, the piece-de-resistance, Favre's pick. Despite his unmatched history of critical interceptions he might have topped himself with this one. An absolutely inexplicable throw. A horrible horrible throw. All he had to do was just stumble forward for a few yards and his kicker might have pulled it off. I don't believe any of Favre's prior season killers ever prevented a game-winning kick attempt. Nor did they come for a team that had never won a Super Bowl. A true never-to-be-forgotten-as-long-as-they play-football disaster for Minnesota fans. So what do we conclude? Is throwing horrible INT's at the worst possible moments something encoded in the guy's very DNA? Is that possible? Apparently he can't help himself. I just can't believe I didn't see it coming. I thought this time at least, at that moment, the Vikings had the mojo. That Favre had the mojo. He was still playing well. He knew what he had to do. And then he threw a pick anyway!

Favre suckered me. I thought he was going to pull it off! How did I not see it coming? I admired the grittness and the toughness, ignored the very real history and consequently never saw the inevitable ending coming. Favre's season ended the only way it could. If he wants to come back for another year he should come back but he's never going to win another Super Bowl. He can't overcome his fatal flaw. I should have known that. I blame myself.

Your 2009 Miami Dolphins: The Wrap-Up, Part I

2010-01-27T20:46:00.000-08:00

7-9. Obviously a disappointment coming just one year after an 11-5, division-winning, ten-game turnaround season. But not totally unexpected. The 2008 team saw lots of things go their way, especially the injury bug. The team repelled it in 2008. I guess the normal thing to do here is to analyze the performance of each unit of the team and assign it a grade. But I refuse to do that. I don't feel qualified. I'm not any kind of personnel expert. I'm just gonna give my general impressions of what I saw this year. Quarterback's the one position I have the most to write about as I'm your typical football watching fan who mostly just follows what the QB is doing until he lets go of the ball. So I'll long-windedly address that position in this post and talk about the rest of the team next time.

Alright, in 2008 the Dolphins got MVP-type quarterbacking from imported free agent veteran quarterback Chad Pennington. If you needed an adjective to describe Pennington than you could do worse than "oft-injured". In 2008 he stayed uninjured. In 2009 we got the "oft". But even when Pennington was healthy the team dropped all three games he started. So the organization might have been considering making a quarterback change anyway but once Pennington was relegated to the sidelines for the year Miami was forced to unwrap their 2008 2nd-round pick Chad Henne and thrust him into the starter's role. So how'd he do?

I thought he played fairly well all things considered. His stats aren't great but they're not bad at all for a first-year starter. What I saw in general was a QB with a strong arm, who can make tough throws when necessary, and who doesn't panic when a play breaks down. Sure he made obvious mistakes but Henne didn't go the Rob Johnson/David Carr route and hold onto the ball taking unnecessary sack after unnecessary sack. Henne ranked a solid 12th in sack percentage. Nor did he do the other worrisome thing a young QB will do, repeatedly force the ball into a crowd creating interception opportunities rather than throw the ball away or take a sack. Not that he never did these things. But to my eye he showed good pocket presence given his inexperience.

His TD/INT ratio was poor but nobody should make too much of that. The current Dolphins team prefers to run in the red zone and once Henne took over the team would make a special effort to limit opportunities to throw interceptions in scoring position. The more important stat to look at I think is interception percentage. And there Henne ranked 23rd. Not great but just a hair behind the Mannings, Carson Palmer and Matt Ryan. And well ahead of the disastrous numbers of a Jamarcus Russell, a Matt Sanchez, or a Josh Freeman. You can't say Henne had an INT problem last year. It was the same story with his yards per attempts. Again ranking 23rd. Below average again but given his inexperience and the team's desire to play conservative football it's understand something to build on. It should also be noted that the Dolphins played an extremely difficult schedule in 2009. That's got to be factored into any evauation of Henne. And the super-smart guys at Football Outsiders do factor that into their year-end QB ranking and they've got Henne ranked 17th for the season. The middle of the pack. Not bad for a first-season. Check out just how much better he played than 2009's other QB newbies Mark Sanchez, Josh Freeman and Matthew Stafford. And Henne wasn't that far behind Second-year starters Matt Ryan and Joe Flacco.

The FO rankings have Ryan 13th. In 2008 he was an incredible 7th in his rookie season. Miami passed on Ryan to take Jake Long and when Ryan lit up the NFL right away you had to wonder if that would be one of the organizations all time draft-day blunders. Jake Long looked solid as a rookie but you never want to pass up a franchise QB if you don't already have one. You just don't. Miami's been lookoing for one for a long time now. But Ryan regressed in his second season, Henne showed promise, and Long made the Pro Bowl. So for the moment PI can scratch the "Jake Long over Matt Ryan: Dear God Why?" entry off its list of future blog posts.

Maybe Henne's most impressive feat were the three fourth quarter comebacks he engineered. Henne led a game-winning drive in all three. It might not sound like a lot
but if you can do that every year for 15 years you're up there with some all-time greats. We can't say yet if Henne's the long-term solution at quarterback. But I certainly saw enough to say it's more of a possibility than it was one year ago. Progress!

The true disappointment at QB in 2009 was the play of Pat White. Miami drafted him to be a major cog in its Wildcat offense. But all we got was a minor ineffective cog. He missed on all five of his passes and averaged only 3.9 yards a carry on his 21 rushing attempts. With a QB back there running the offense with the supposed threat of the pass the Wildcat should be even more dangerous. But with White so useless on offense the team had to keep running the Wildcat almost exclusively through Ronnie Brown and when he went out for the year they simply scrapped it when neither White nor Ricky Williams could properly execute it. White cost Miami a second-round pick and it's too soon to write him off but we didn't see one thing yet to justify the pick. So the in-season trade for Tyler Thigpen looks pretty shrewd. He showed real ability in 2008 and some more in the 2009 finale. As I said in my last post, he might be the viable backup the team needs.

Your 2009 Miami Dolphins: Week 17

2010-01-27T20:44:00.000-08:00

The pain of the Dolphins' disappointing season has finally subsided, finally allowing PI to return and chronicle it's bitter ending. However, illness prevented me from watching all but the final minutes of the Week 17 finale so I don't have much to offer. I do know that for the third week in a row the Dolphins came out flat, got way behind early, made a huge comeback to get back in the game, and still lost. If they could have won two of those games they make the playoffs. (And made my preseason 9-7 prediction look Brilliant!). Instead, the season's bookended by 0-3 losing streaks, the team finishes four games worse than last year, they're only the third-best team in its division, and we're all left to wonder if we should be optimistic or pessimistic about the team's future. I'll have some thoughts on this soon, but needless to say the regular season ended far less happily tha it did just one season ago.

If I had to find a bright spot in the loss to the Steelers, I suppose it would have to be the play of third-string QB Tyler Thigpen. From what I saw of him back in 2008 he showed some potential while playing for a terrible team. And he showed a little more of it against the Steelers in the Dolphins' finale. Of course potential doesn't actually mean good and Thigpen thwarted his own comeback story with a killer of an interception that essentially cost Miami the game. But Thigpen showed a lot more in one half of football than we've seen from Pat White all year. With Pennington's future in question and White yet to show anything (more in my next post on this) Miami needs a viable backup to Henne next year. Thigpen might be the man.

Happy New Year

2009-12-31T20:33:00.000-08:00

I can't write up the post mortem on the Fins 2009 season just yet with one game still to be played but barring a miracle the Dolphins are about to do something unique in their history: play an entire decade of football without notching a single postseason victory. Disappointing. Very disappointing. (Also unique: five different coaches in the decade.) But let's be optimistic, at least these last two seasons were an improvement on the two before them. So with hope for the future Past Interference wishes everybody a Happy New Year.

Indianapolis Colts: 14-1

2009-12-31T20:21:00.000-08:00

Finally. We now know that once again another NFL season will end with the 1972 Miami Dolphins remaining the only team in NFL history to finish a season undefeated and untied. After an incredible 14-0 start the Colts fell at home to a mediocre New York Jets team, proving once again just how difficult it is for any team to go undefeated. Don Shula and those old Dolphins players presumably breathed sighs of relief, popped champagne corks, and partied like it’s January 14, 1973.

What? Ok, I know. It’s not that simple. It's what I hoped would happen before the game. But I just wanted the Colts to get beat. Instead, as everyone knows, leading 15-10 Indianapolis coach Jim Caldwell made the curious decision to bench several of his starters including Peyton Manning. Once that decision was implemented the game turned. The second stringers were no match for the Jets and so the Colts went down for the first time this year. The CBS cameras fixated on Peyton Manning’s face while he stood on the sidelines watching his team lose its first game of the year. Hmm. How can I describe it? Well, he didn’t look too happy about it! The fans weren’t happy either. They furiously booed their home team. It was incredible theatre. You could just see how badly Manning wanted to be back in that game. He was clearly pissed.

Now the Colts made it clear weeks ago this might happen. They said they’d rest their stars once the team wrapped up the top-seed so we shouldn’t have been surprised. But I sure as hell was surprised! How could you not be? Who turns their backs on a shot at a perfect season? Bill Polian kept saying a perfect season wasn’t one of the team’s goals. No duh. Who goes into a season expecting to do undefeated? But once it’s there how do you not go for it? The ’72 Dolphins wrapped up their division (teams weren’t seeded back then) in week 10! But they kept playing like every game meant something. I thought for sure the Colts would do likewise. I’m kind of glad they didn’t because I know how much the perfect season means to Shula and his ’72 team. But what the Colts did just makes no sense and Tom Jackson summed it up in one word on ESPN right after the loss when he said he respects Polian but what the Colts did made him “uncomfortable”.

That’s exactly how I felt. To see Manning on the sidelines looking like that. And Wayne, Clark, and some of the other guys didn’t look to thrilled either. Manning knows his football history. Actually, even the dumbest player alive probably knows how special a perfect season would be. A championship’s great but 19-0 would be remembered forever. For Manning personally a perfect season could well earn him consensus “greatest QB of all-time” status. Not now.

So why’d they do it? To avoid injury? Then why play Manning and the rest at all? And why’d they play the whole game in week 15 when they had the top seed already wrapped up? A player can get hurt on any play at any time. Even in practice. You can’t play scared. Or maybe you can. Just leave Manning in but call only runs and safe passes. The chances of winning are still way better than with poor Curtis Painter. If Caldwell just wanted more rest for his players then again why play them at all? One more quarter was the breaking point?

I can see the argument that taking an undefeated season into the playoffs makes it more difficult to win it all. All that extra pressure combined with the extra physical wear and tear coming every week from every team playing you like it’s the Super Bowl so they can knock off an undefeated opponent. A lot of people think the Patriots got worn down by the time of Super Bowl XLII. Maybe it happened to the ’72 Dolphins too. They led the league in offense and defense that year but in the postseason they trailed late in two playoff games and had trouble scoring in all three. And check out this excerpt from an article about the Green Bay Packers first and only loss of 1962:

Lombardi, however, was actually seen laughing in the dressing room as he told the press after the game, "You didn't think we were going to win them all, did you?" He let the team know that the loss was a great reminder of the importance of teamwork and of not ever being overconfident.

Ok, so even Vince Lombardi thought trying to go undefeated could get in the way of trying to win a title. But so what? What do you do if you are undefeated, throw a game? Well you essentially could by resting starters during a tight game. But that just leads to a different problem. Now you’ve got a controversy dogging you the rest of the way. It’s the number one sports story right now: the Colts laid down and threw away a chance at a perfect season. They’re never gonna hear the end of it even if they win the Super Bowl. They threw away a ton of goodwill too. Fans everywhere were rooting for a perfect season to happen and for the game’s most popular player Peyton Manning to lead the way. Now you’ve ensured the reverse: fans rooting for the Colts to lose for angering the football gods by not putting their pedal to the metal and going for 19-0. Backlash! Yoou've got people speculating the Colts purposely lost to get the Jets or Texans into the playoffs and keep Pitsburgh and/or Baltimore out. The press has turned.

I don’t understand the thinking. What the Colts did makes no sense. It rubbed me and every other football fan the wrong way. To keep seeing Peyton Manning, a tremendous competitor, scowling like that on the sidelines denied a chance to do something nobody's ever done was just wrong. You know, this Colts team pulled out a lot more close games this year than you’d expect from a dominant team making a run at perfection. So now they’ve also lost their aura of invincibility if you will. And they can’t win for losing now. If they lose a playoff game everyone’s going to blame the loss to the Jets for killing the team’s momentum. If they win it all, everyone wonders what might have been.

Stupid Colts.

Your 2009 Miami Dolphins: Weeks 15 and 16

2009-12-30T21:35:00.000-08:00

Wow. Two devastating defeats back-to-back, all but ensuring no repeat visit to the postseason for the Dolphins. Strangely, after having problems all year finishing games after strong starts, the team now has come out flat two weeks in a row, gotten way down early, and had to furiously fight to get back in the game but fall just short both times.

The Tennessee was the "shoulda won" game. Six times on the Titans side of the field in the first three quarters and they settle for three field goals while turning it over three times. Three was the magic number. Vontae Davis appeared to be in good position on both of Justin Gage's two TD catches but he never made a play. Miami finally caught a break when Jeff Fisher bizarrely decided not to use any of his three time outs at the end of regulation when the Fins were backed up at their own two. Miami got the ball in first in OT but Henne badly overthrew his pass to Bess, the Titans intercepted it, and when the refs tacked on that terrible unnecessary roughness call on Camarillo (how the hell was he supposed to know the untouched defender wasn�t getting back up to advance the ball?), the Titans were in field goal range even though they couldn't advance the ball any further. It was nice to see Miami fight back to tie the score after being down by 18, but all that effort ended up going to waste.

They fell behind even further to the Texans in Week 16. 24-0? At home? That first half was a complete embarrassment. Way worse than the Week 15 embarrassment. I�ve praised Sparano several times for having his team come out prepared and motivated to compete almost every week so I'm at a real loss to explain what's gone so wrong so early two weeks in a row. Especially with the playoffs on the line. Again, there are positives: The defense coming up big in the second half; Lex Hilliard adequately subbing for Ricky Williams; and especially Henne getting his team back in the game. He�s not afraid to try to make a tough throw and he's only a first-year QB so you have to live with some mistakes. But it would have been nice to see a complete game at some point down the stretch from the whole team.

You know, I'm not one to blame officiating for a loss but you've gotta admit Miami�s getting jobbed way more than the average team this year. The worst this week was that obvious fumble by Chris Brown (recovered by Miami) ruled instead to be an incomplete pass even though Brown ran with the ball for three freaking steps. C�mon refs! And don't forget the ticky tack tripping call nullifying the bomb to Ginn that would have gotten Miami to within 10 with a whole quarter still to play plus all the momentum. The Dolphins just can't catch a break this year (literally in the case of Gibril Wilson who dropped the easiest interception opportunity he's ever gonna have).

My prediction of a 9-7 record was looking pretty good before the twin disasters of the last two weeks. Instead, as Dolphins� radio analyst Jim Mandich wrote after the Texans loss, "I'm sure when I open the phone lines this week for the talk show it will be 'Mad Dog, who are the Dolphins going to take with their first pick?'"

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas

2009-12-24T22:02:00.000-08:00

38 years ago the Miami Dolphins bested the Kansas City Chiefs 27-24 in what remains the longest NFL game ever played. 82 minutes and 40 seconds. I know a lot about this game. I know the Dolphins scored a TD to tie the game with just over a minute left in regulation. I know that all suddenly looked lost for Miami when Ed Podolak, having the best game of his career, returned the ensuing kickoff back 78 yards. I know KC kicker (and future Hall-of-Famer) Jan Stenerud, in the midst of the worst game of his career, then honked the 31-yard field goal try to send the game into overtime. The kicking follies continued--each team missed a FG try in the first OT period; Nick Buoniconti blocked Stenerud's try while Garo Yepremian couldn't convert a 52-yarder for the Fins. So on to double overtime where Miami made the big play that led to the end of the endless game. From their own 35 the Dolphins called a trap play that sprung Larry Csonka for 29 yards. A few more runs, a few more yards, and then Yepremian came in to boot the game-winner that silenced the stunned Chiefs home crowd.

Like I said, I know a lot about this game. But I have no memory of it. I was a little kid at the time and maybe I watched it but if I did I certainly don�t remember. No, my interest in this game came from a book somebody once bought me for my birthday. Each chapter related the saga of how some NFL record was made. And you know what? It was riveting. Man, I wish I still had that book. I remember one chapter related how Bert Jones set the NFL record (since broken) for consecutive completions in a game. That chapter ended something like this: "Bert's father Dub Jones once scored 6 touchdowns in a game. But he only tied an NFL record. His son broke one". Oooh. Chills (haha). Another chapter had a very evocative title that's stayed with me, "The Day The Footballs Flew". That one was on the NFL's all-time highest scoring game, a 72-41 Redskins blowout of the Giants. Jurgensen vs. Tittle. Hard to believe that 113 point total has stood for over 40 years.

Anyway, the last chapter of the book was entitled "The Longest Day". I know now but didn't know then that the title came from Cornelius Ryan's famous book about D-Day (or from the movie based on the book). But it was a perfect title for the NFL's longest game and I must have read and reread that chapter dozens of times. Somehow it connected me to a now-legendary game that maybe I'll actually get to see one day. (When will the NFL open up its library already? I'll pay). The Miami Dolphins first postseason victory in franchise history.

It's a different world now. With cable and the internet there's just so much out there to see and hear and read about football. And you can get sick of it all pretty quickly. But back in the time of Miami's Christmas day double-overtime victory and for years thereafter if you wanted NFL entertainment outside of the games themselves, you actually had to take the time to sit down and read a book. I wish I still knew the name of the one that chronicled the NFL's Longest Day. And I really wish I knew who wrote the thing. But whoever you are nameless author of that NFL book that once meant so much to me, if you're out there somewhere, Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas.

And Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to any readers I have out there in the blogosphere. I appreciate anyone who takes the time to read what I write, especially you sptrfn (I'll attempt to address your "What If" scenarios in a future post).

Ward vs. Harrison

2009-12-24T19:52:00.000-08:00

I didn’t include any stats in my previous post on Hines Ward. Below you can see just how much bigger Marvin Harrison’s career receiving numbers are than Hines Ward’s (through Week 15 of the 2009 season).

Player	G	Rec	Yds	Y/C	TD
Harrison	190	1102	14580	13.2	128
Ward	184	883	10849	12.3	78

That's a big advantage. Of course Ward’s not done yet though I don’t see how he realistically catches Harrison in any major category. However, there is one area where Ward is clearly superior to Harrison. One huge area. The postseason. Check it out:

Player	G	Rec	Yds	Y/C	TD
Harrison	16	65	883	13.6	2
Ward	14	76	1064	14.0	8

For such a great receiver on such a successful team, Harrison’s postseason numbers are shockingly pedestrian. And despite playing in 16 playoff games, Harrison’s only scored twice in the playoffs, both in a wild-card round blowout of Denver. By contrast Ward’s raised the level of his game in the playoffs. Check out the tables below. While Harrison seemed to play worse as his team got farther in the playoffs, Ward gets better each playoff round. The goal of every team is to win. At least in the postseason Ward did a lot more to help his team win it all than Harrison ever did. That’s got to count for something in choosing an all-decade team.

Harrison

Playoff Round	G	Rec	Yds	Y/C	TD
Super Bowl	1	5	59	11.8	0
Conf. Championship	2	7	60	8.6	0
Divisional	6	25	331	13.2	0
Wild Card	7	28	433	15.5	2

Ward

Playoff Round	G	Rec	Yds	Y/C	TD
Super Bowl	2	7	166	23.7	1
Conf. Championship	4	19	287	15.1	2
Divisional	5	27	362	13.4	3
Wild Card	3	23	249	10.8	2

New Orleans Saints: 13-1

2009-12-19T21:52:00.000-08:00

Dude, what is your problem? Seriously. A 24-yarder?

Finally. The Saints at last fail to pull a rabbit out of their helmets and their unbeaten streak is no more. No thanks to Nick Folk (you jackass!) who pulled a Suisham. I'd really like to know what kind of voodoo curses or crude sexual taunts the Saints are using that unnerve their opponent kickers so badly that they miss chip-shot field goals at key moments. Magnets? Hypnosis? Anyway, the ultimate nightmare scenario has been avoided. You know, Drew Bress, leading his team to a 19-0 perfect season, capping it all off with a Super Bowl victory in the very home stadium of the team that not only passed on him twice but previously stood as the only NFL team to post a perfect season. Not gonna happen. One down, one to go. The Colts luck needs to run out soon too. Hard to see them losing to the Jets or Bills though. A loss, if it is to come, may have to wait for the playoffs. Maybe long-time Dolphin fans will wind up rooting hard for Brees after all, but as the instrument that drives a Super Bowl stake through the heart of the Indianapolis Colts' drive for a perfect season.

Your 2009 Miami Dolphins: Week 14

2009-12-19T21:40:00.000-08:00

A nice workmanlike victory over the Jaguars. Thanks to some turnovers the Dolphins were never able to get that one score to put away a game they seemingly controlled from the start, leading to some unnecessary suspense at the end. But beating a solid team on the road is never easy and Miami deserves a lot of credit for the tough win. Henne played extremely well. His one mistake, a interception, came when he got confused by a coverage. It's a shame the Dolphins have scrapped the Wildcat as they were the only team that could execute it consistently, but obviously neither Ricky Williams nor Pat White can run it anywhere near as effectively as Ronnie Brown. But the Dolphins are still doing a great job of running the football regardless. Camarillo looks to be back where he was before the knee injury. With him, Hartline and Bess all looking so good I think we can shut the door on Ted Ginn's days as a starter and once again resources will have to be expended on acquiring a deep threat in the offseason.

A lot of praise must go to the defense which shut down the Jags' passing game all day, especially in fourth quarter, something we haven't seen them do very often this year. So the playoffs remain a possibility. I wouldn't expect the Dolphins to do much should they qualify but playoff experience is always helpful, especially to guys who've never been there before like Henne.

Hines Ward: All-Decade WR?

2009-12-18T21:03:00.000-08:00

Recently SI.com football writer Peter King posted his NFL all-decade team. I don’t always agree with King and his stuff may not be great 100% of the time but he’s a great football writer and I always read his stuff. And I don’t have any criticism at the moment of any of his selections. His most controversial pick is surely Hines Ward as one of his two all-decade wideouts (alongside Randy Moss). King passed up guys with more impressive receiving numbers, most notably Marvin Harrison and Terrell Owens. Now King knows the numbers and preemptively defends the Ward pick, highlighting Ward’s blocking ability and stating it was for a player “who produces and blocks and wins.” I kind of like the call. Yeah, I know T.O.’s caught a lot more TD’s but you can’t ignore the fact that three different teams decided they’d be better off without the guy even though he was putting up great numbers. How many other all-time greats can you name who were repeatedly told to get lost while still in their prime?

As for Marvin Harrison I think you have to adjust his career numbers down a bit because he played his whole career with maybe the greatest passer who ever lived. Notice how Peyton Manning’s in the midst of his greatest season even though Harrison's gone and was replaced by a rookie and a second-year guy with a French name and four career catches. Manning hasn't missed a beat.

Owens and Harrison were able to post bigger numbers than Ward in this decade not necessarily because of superior talent but because they played in better passing offenses. Or at least offenses that preferred to throw. Here’s how Harrison’s Colts ranked in passing attempts for each year of his career:

Marvin Harrison

Year	Rank
1996	15
1997	18
1998	1
1999	13
2000	8
2001	7
2002	5
2003	5
2004	15
2005	15
2006	6
2007	15
2008	5

Four times in the top five, seven times in the top ten, 12 times in the top half of the league.

Here’s Terrell Owens' teams:

Year	Rank
1996	11
1997	28
1998	5
1999	7
2000	4
2001	22
2002	10
2003	19
2004	9
2005	3
2006	20
2007	18
2008	8

Three top fives, seven top tens, eight times in the top half of the league. Now compare Hines Ward's Steelers:

Year	Rank
1998	22
1999	17
2000	29
2001	28
2002	16
2003	10
2004	32
2005	32
2006	14
2007	31
2008	20

Only once has Ward ever even played for a team ranked in the top ten for passing attempts (and that was just a tenth-place ranking!). Only three times has his team ever finished in the top half of the league. We can see he simply hasn’t had the opportunity to post the same kind of numbers year in and year out that Harrison or T.O. have. Ward’s played with a good QB for the past several years. He’s had other good receiving teammates (Burress, Holmes). So clearly the Steelers organization simply prefers to run the ball more than other teams. And therefore it’s only fair for Peter King to recognize Ward for his overall game and great productivity given the conservative offenses he’s played for. You can’t just give the nod to Owens or Harrison because they played on pass-happy teams. You’re supposed to be honoring the individual player, not his offense. It's not insane to prefer Ward.

Mr. Drew Brees

2009-12-12T22:16:00.000-08:00

I continue to follow Drew Brees’ career with a certain horrified fascination. Just knowing he should be but isn’t quarterbacking the Miami Dolphins right now kind of sucks, there’s just no other way to put it. The Dolphins blew it with Brees twice. Wannstadt passed on drafting Brees in 2001 and with the chance to rectify Wanny’s error in 2005 Saban instead passed on Brees in favor of signing worthless Duante Culpepper. And Brees wanted Miami to sign him! That’s the worst part. Actually I don’t know what the worst part is. What I do know is that a team in desperate need of a quarterback for practically this entire decade twice refused to grab somebody who for the last few years has been one of the best QB’s in the game. And every week this year football fans have gotten to see Brees’ incredible accuracy and tremendous decision-making week in and week out. His team’s 12-0, one of those wins coming at the expense of the Dolphins. Brees’ demolition of the New England Patriots a couple weeks ago was staggering. Could any quarterback ever have played a better game?

Making it slightly worse is the fact that Brees seems like a really good guy, someone you actually want to root for. I mean, you’re going to root for your team no matter what but it’s nice when your team’s got some actual quality individuals who deserve the cheers they get. Brees is one of the most respected players in the game. Which makes me wonder something.

Remember a few years back when Bret Favre’s dad died and there was a whole huge media story about how that would affect Favre and if he was going to play that week? That was all we heard about that week and for weeks after (And unless you drink a lot or suffer from early onset dementia you of course know Favre did play and play well that week and for the rest of the year). Well you may not have heard that Drew Brees’ mother passed away back in August. And it was just recently determined that she committed suicide. Also, while previously it was reported the two had not even spoken in the three years before her death it turns out that was all wrong and in fact the two had been working on repairing their strained relationship. So you have to think coping with all of that would be at least as hard as what Favre went through. Yet I heard no preseason speculation whatsoever wondering if after his mother’s death Brees could maintain the level of play that won him the 2008 Offensive Player of the Year Award. I’ve seen no commentary on just how amazing it is that Brees continues to perform like this despite what he’s been gone through. I’m just sayin’.

Your 2009 Miami Dolphins: Weeks 12 and 13

2009-12-12T22:15:00.000-08:00

I’m kind of glad I delayed writing up a summary of Buffalo game. Man that was one depressing game. Coming off two wins in a row it looked like the Dolphins might have been starting to put something together. Climbing over .500 for the season and putting themselves in playoff position would have no small thing after an 0-3 start. Instead we saw Chad Henne seeming to regress, the team unable to execute the Wildcat without Ronnie Brown and a defense once again saving its worst for last-- the fourth quarter. That last item’s a real mystery ‘cause it happens even when the Dolphins are dominating time of possession all day. It’s always easy to overreact to one game but that collapse in the final four minutes really left a bad taste in the mouths of Dolphin fans.

But the high of the week 13 upset of the Patriots washed away that bitter taste real quick. The Patriots should have won that game. Taking advantage of Miami’s unfortunate tendency to give up the big play New England jumped out to a 14-0 lead and, after Miami crawled back into it, took a 21-10 lead in the second half. But the Dolphins kept plugging away. They decided to put the game in Henne’s hands and responded. And the defense made a couple of huge plays, stopping the Pats on a 4th-and-one and picking off Brady in the end zone.

So Miami fans go from pessimistic to optimistic in the space of a week. But losing to Buffalo blew the Dolphins’ margin for error when it comes to the postseason. It’s hard to see how they make the playoffs if they lose to Jacksonville this week.

Chambers and Ginn: The saga continues

2009-11-28T21:34:00.000-08:00

I wrote not too long ago that the big difference between the failures of professional athletes and the failures of the rest of us is that our failures don’t play out in front of millions of people. Ted Ginn seems like a nice young man. I have no reason to question his work ethic, his heart, his desire, or his will to win. I’m sure he’s trying his absolute best. But he is failing. He just can’t catch, at least not consistently enough to be a reliable receiver for his football team. Hopefully it’s something that’s correctible. (I’m sure it’s not but I’m going to keep hope alive here). Anyway, some clever person has made a Greatest Drops compilation for Mr. Ginn and even more cleverly that person has set it to the tune of Snoop’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot”. I do feel a little guilty about linking to it but (1) it’s funny; and (2) if and when Ginn has another good game it’ll help us put it in perspective.

As for the man Miami hoped Ginn would replace (and surpass) as their number one receiver, his amazing mini-comeback continues. Chris Chambers didn’t just put up a nice game last week, he was the big hero in the Kansas City Chiefs upset of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Now PI doesn’t necessarily want to be the fly in the Chris Chambers ointment but check out the highlight of his big catch that set up the game-winning field goal (it’s at about the three-minute mark). He did a great job taking advantage of a blown coverage to motor down the field but what the hell was he doing at the end there? Doesn’t it look like he could have scored if he’d put his head down and tried to plow into the end zone? Why’d he just nonchalant it out of bounds like that? Get it over the goal line man, this is football! I know he’s apparently rejuvenated with the Chiefs but when I see something like that I can’t say I’m too sorry he’s not a Dolphin anymore.

Your 2009 Miami Dolphins: Weeks 10 and 11

2009-11-28T20:46:00.000-08:00

Two games. Two double digit leads nearly squandered. But two wins.

Unfortunately, the biggest story of the Tampa Bay game turned out to be the loss of Miami’s best player, Ronnie Brown. This just sucks. For the second time in three years the guy gets wiped out in the midst of a phenomenal season. “They” say he should be fully recovered from his lis franc injury by next year. Let’s hope so. But he will be 28 any week now and has now suffered two serious injuries. We know Ricky Williams’ next season is his last so the Dolphins could be looking at the running back position in the 2010 draft.

Other than Brown, the big story from the Week 10 win was the team’s last-second comeback. Miami admirably played aggressively late in the game, throwing on third down in an attempt to get the first down that would all but assure victory. However, Chad Henne made one of the single worst throws I have ever seen, well behind the Miami receiver, into a crowd and into the unfriendly arms of a Tampa Bay defender. Honestly, I just can’t fathom how Henne made the decision to throw the ball to that location at that moment. You could watch that play a hundred times in a row and you would never ever fail to be shocked at what happened. But despite his all-out effort at earning goat horns the Bucs scored fast enough to give Henne a shot at redemption. And he came through! That’s big take away from the game. With the game on the line Henne made two big-time key throws to Bess and made another throw that drew pass interference. Very clutch. And Ricky Williams and Dan Carpenter did the rest. An ugly win. You shouldn’t need a last-second comeback drive at home to beat a terrible team but a win’s a win and the experience should serve Henne well.

Against Carolina the Dolphins didn’t need a comeback drive. They were able to hold off the Panthers late comeback. A strong performance from the defense and running game but the team’s knack of giving up fourth quarter points is becoming a little disturbing. The D should be getting stronger as the game progresses when the offense dominates time of possession. But they’re not. Henne continues to impress with his arm. He’s still not posting big numbers but he’s getting key third-down conversions when the team needs them. I don’t know what to say about Ricky Williams. (I do know I’m going to have to revise my Worst Trade in Miami Dolphins History series of posts when this season’s over). How this guy can play this well at age 32 is beyond me. If he’s this dominant now you almost can’t help wondering what kind of a career he might have had without the mental health issues getting in the way. As a bonus Lex Hilliard looked good in limited action. He needs to be good; Ricky can’t carry the entire load. The coaching impressed me. Despite offensive line injuries that forced a lot of shuffling the line was still able to block effectively. While you can question many of the team’s in-game tactical decisions to date the Dolphins remain a well-prepared disciplined team that sticks to its strengths. Hey, just contrast that with Carolina. Can anybody explain why that team refused to ride Deangelo Williams in the second half?

Fourth and Two

2009-11-27T09:58:00.000-08:00

As this is a football blog Past Interference was probably remiss in not throwing in its two cents in the matter of the most controversial play call of the year. So here’s PI’s belated take. Man, you would have thought Bill Belichick ran over somebody’s grandmother the way he got slammed for going for it on fourth-and-two from his own 30. Trent Dilfer, Rodney Harrison, and Tedy Bruschi angrily ripped him. Tony Dungy quietly ripped him. And the avalanche of rippery that followed the next morning was divided between those who attributed the gamble to a Belichick brain cramp and those who chalked it up to pure Belichickean arrogance. PI buys neither idiotic “explanation”. Analogize it to a baseball manager who walks a hitter who’s in the zone even if it “the book” says the hitter should be pitched to in that situation. Belichick simply decided his best chance to win was to convert then and there rather than turn it over to Peyton Manning. Even if the Pats don’t convert Belichick probably figured the Colts would score a TD regardless of field position so giving them a shorter field would at least give the Pats some time to come back.

So it was the right call? Obviously no. It didn’t work. Duh. But was it a defensible call? Well in the wake of the post-game vitriol tossed Belichick’s way, up popped a few people a lot smarter than me who coldly analyzed Belichick’s options instead of talking out of their ass and (surprise!) concluded Belichick wasn’t gambling at all. His decision made all the sense in the world. The percentages actually supported it or at least showed Belichick’s decision was a close call.

When New England’s offense came out for the fourth-and-two play I assumed they were going to try and draw the Colts offsides (a stupid assumption as NE had just burned their last time out and couldn’t afford a delay of game penalty). I just couldn’t believe they would actually go for it. You can’t ever truly know the percentages on any given play but at that time the chances of converting had to be less than what the percentages say. Yeah, the Pats have far better personnel than your average team but the Colts knew NE was going to throw. Especially once they lined up in the shotgun. Plus I don’t think the Colts chances of successfully executing a long TD drive if NE had punted were anything close to a sure thing. Manning might be having his best year ever but he was not at his best that night. He mixed in some horrible throws in with his great ones. But while I thought Belichick screwed up I was glad to see a coach rolling the dice like that.

The biggest post-game head-scratcher was Brushci saying his old coach disrespected his defense by going for it. Huh? What if the Pats got the first down? Wouldn’t the defense have appreciated getting to watch the final moments of a win from the comfort of the sideline? If that dissed D hadn’t allowed the Colts to get back in the seemingly over ballgame in the first place Bill B wouldn’t have to make the controversial move. And by letting the Colts easily move the 30-yards needed for the TD didn’t the defense provide ammunition for any belief by their coach that they couldn’t stop Manning? When a coach has to make a key decision with the game on the line must he also now consider the feelings of a key unit of his team in addition to trying to win the game? I’m just trying to imagine this alternate scenario where the Pats convert, win the game, and the defense can take no solace in the huge win over their arch-rival because their feelings are hurt.

Unfortunately for our society it’s now considered normal to turn over valuable television time to people who lack expertise on virtually any subject of importance (i.e. economics, foreign affairs, military matters, social sciences, environmental sciences, technology, psychology, etc.) and allow them to spout their ignorance on everything under the sun and misinform us all. I’d hate to see sports coverage, an easy enough area to develop some expertise in, following the same pathetic path.

Happy Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T07:53:00.000-08:00

Enjoy Thanksgiving. And what better Thanksgiving memory could there be for a Dolphin fan than the team's classic 1994 comeback win over the Cowboys in the ice and snow. Enjoy seeing Jerry Jones prematurely raise his arms in triumph and TV analyst Bob Trumpy's realization of which player made the blunder that gave the Dolphins a second chance at victory ("it's Leon Lett. Noooo!").

You know, all Dolphin fans really do have something to be thankful for this year. Just two years ago this team might have been the worst in football. Right there with the Lions, Browns and Raiders of the world. But while those teams remain among the league's worst organizations the Miami Dolphins are defending AFC East champs and right now they're back in the hunt for the playoffs despite an 0-3 start. With the right people in charge things can change quickly. So to Bill Parcells, Jeff Ireland, and Tony Sparano, thanks.

Your 2009 Miami Dolphins: Week 9

2009-11-14T20:23:00.000-08:00

Before week 9’s loss to the Patriots, you could categorize the Miami Dolphins’ 2009 losses into two groups: losses where Miami was completely dominated and outplayed (Atlanta and San Diego), and losses where Miami should have won but blew the game thanks to their own mistakes (Indianapolis and New Orleans). This one doesn’t fit into either category. Miami played fairly well but they didn’t win. They smartly stuck with the running game. They didn’t make stupid mistakes. They never played themselves out of the game. But they lost because they’re not quite as good as New England. Really, the key difference between the two teams is the passing game, specifically the receivers. Randy Moss and Wes Welker made big plays for the Patriots. No receiver made big plays for the Dolphins. Ted Ginn yet again displayed his ability to drop key passes. Brian Hartline dropped a key pass. It’s never fun to see Welker reeling them in against the Dolphins when he should be reeling them in FOR the Dolphins. I noted the other day that the Cameron/Mueller regime actually did something right in 2007 by getting a second-rounder for Chambers. But that move by Mueller hardly makes up for his asinine move to trade away Welker months earlier for a second and seventh rounder. He all but gave away an All-Pro caliber player! I’m sure when I revise and update my earlier series The Worst Trades in Miami Dolphins History the Welker deal will have a place of honor.

This loss seemingly finished off any realistic shot at playoff spot for the Dolphins but there's still half a season to go and as we saw last year football miracles do happen. The team's still playing well and hopefully Henne can continue to improve down the stretch. But his job's going to be a lot harder than it needs to be if his receivers don't start holding on to the ball. Miami ended last season with a clear need to upgrade at wide receiver. So far it appears that need's still as great as ever.

Monte Clark (1937-2009)

2009-11-13T21:22:00.000-08:00

Monte Clark had all kinds of success in the NFL. An offensive tackle, he won a title with Cleveland’s 1964 NFL championship squad and played 11 total seasons in the NFL. He didn’t have a winning record as an NFL head coach but he managed to lead Detroit to the playoffs twice, no small feat given that franchise’s post-60’s history of failure. And of course Clark’s best known success was his six-year tenure as the offensive line coach (and later offensive coordinator) for the Miami Dolphins where he helped build maybe the greatest offensive line of all-time. Certainly the performance of that line was the key to the Dolphins’ success from 1970-1975.

A while back I gave a lot of credit to former Dolphins’ GM Joe Thomas for the all the brilliant moves the organization made in building the Dolphins’ championship teams. However, I now know I gave way, way WAAAYY too much credit to Thomas. It’s kind of embarrassing to have gotten basic facts so totally wrong (and I’ll get around to completely rewriting that earlier post at some point so I won’t link to it, just forget it ever existed!) but I’m going to get them right here. this nice Dave Hyde tribute to Clark makes it quite clear that Don Shula and Monte Clark deserve most of the credit I gave to Thomas. It was Clark who convinced Shula to sign (and start) Jim Langer (a Hall of Famer), Bob Kuechenberg (perennial Hall of Fame candidate) and Wayne Moore (a fine player). And what better evidence of Clark’s greatness as an O-Line coach than the fact all those guys were once free agents given up on by their original teams? Clark saw something in those players missed by everybody else, he got Shula to grab them for nothing and then he molded them and rest of the team’s linemen into a dominant unit.

Monte Clark’s a key figure in Dolphins history and I should also add I can't recall anybody ever writing a single negative comment about the man.

Chris Chambers Catches Up

2009-11-13T21:16:00.000-08:00

Did I put some kind of reverse jinx on Chris Chambers? Finding himself on his third team in less than three years, his career seemingly over (or so I speculated), the guy blows up with a huge game. Or rather, a huge final three minutes. He scored two TD’s, nearly brought the Chiefs back from a huge deficit and nearly cost me a much-needed fantasy football victory (my opponent started Matt Cassell). Well, last week Ted Ginn came out of nowhere to make Week 9 headlines before going back to dropping passes and doing nothing in Week 10. Can Chambers produce two weeks in a row?

Catching Up With Chris Chambers

2009-11-07T21:41:00.000-08:00

Just as Ted Ginn makes some national headlines so too does his predecessor as disappointing go-to Dolphins receiver, Chris Chambers. Coincidence?

Chambers made some of the most athletic catches you’re ever going to see but he just couldn’t reel in passes consistently; his catch percentages were routinely terrible each season. But I shouldn’t be too unfair to him. While he never became the dominant player Dolphin fans were hoping for he did make a Pro Bowl and he had three different seasons for the Dolphins where he scored more receiving TD’s than Ginn’s current career total of five. Maybe Chambers never broke through to become an elite player but at this point Ginn would have to make serous strides just to become as good as Chambers was in his prime.

The reign of error that was the 2007 Miami Dolphins season has been well-documented. But no one can deny that the Cameron/Mueller regime actually made one small shrewd move while the team collapsed around them. In the midst of disaster Miami traded their best WR Chambers away for a second-round pick. Some criticized the move but in the two years since the trade Chambers has done virtually nothing while Miami used the draft pick they got for Chad Henne. You may have heard of him. Miami got a starting QB. San Diego got a guy who they just waived.

But why’d they waive him? Well you might think it was a matter of declining skills (he’s 29 now) evidenced by an inability to produce despite the presence of an excellent QB and other quality offensive talent. But you’d be wrong. At least according to Chambers.

He claims San Diego dumped him because he’s being stalked by the woman with whom he cheated on his wife. Not sure I’m buying that. I mean, Shaun Merriman’s done worse and he’s still a Charger right? However, I suppose it’s possible Chambers’ messy home life could explain his lack of production in 2009. Surely we’ve all had bad days at work because we’re distracted or consumed by personal problems. Football players are no different. Except their workplace failures tend to play out in front of millions of people. And fans aren’t going to be very understanding either unless you consider the words “You Suck!” to be understanding. On the other hand, who’s going to sympathize with a cheating bastard?

Given that Chambers’ career arc follows a predictable pattern for an aging receiver I’m skeptical of his explanation. But as a Miami fan I rooted for him so I’m going to hope I’m wrong and that somehow, someway he returns to his old productive yet frustrating form as a newly signed Kansas City Chief.

Your 2009 Miami Dolphins: Week 8

2009-11-06T12:47:00.001-08:00

A disappointing day on offense and defense but who cares? Sweep baby! Three in a row! The Dolphins first season sweep of the Jets since 2003. The first time they’ve beaten New York three times in a row since 1997! What other info do we need to prove the Parcells/Ireland/Sparano troika is turning around this franchise? Jets lose. Jets lose.

Something interesting’s always going to happen in a Dolphins-Jets game. This time out it was…Ted Ginn? And in a good way? I recently read somebody’s (I forget who’s) speculation that Miami drafted Ginn because they wanted their own Devin Hester. I’m sure that’s right. When Miami took Ginn the Bears had just gone to a Super Bowl with Hester’s phenomenal season as a return-man a big reason why. Miami’s offense was, what’s the word, moribund? Impotent? Embarrassing? Pathetic? So why not draft a guy that at least shortens the field for an impotent offense? It made sense in theory but until last week Ginn was no Devin Hester. He wasn’t anything except a guy everyone hated ‘cause he sucked. No big plays in the return game. And for the most part no big plays in the passing game either. Well, not unless you count catchable balls clanking off his hands into the arms of a defender who proceeds to return it the other way for a TD.

But finally, last Sunday Ginn turned into the Devin Hester Miami was hoping for since 2007. At least for one game. Without his two spectacular back-to-back kickoff return TD’s Miami doesn’t win that game. Did getting called out by Kooch, Mercury Morris and Mark Duper provide sorely needed motivation? Is it a fluke? Who knows but hopefully Ginn can keep stepping it up in the return game. It just doesn’t look like he’s ever going to have the hands to be a dependable receiver for Chad Henne.

Two other notes. First, while so far Sparano appears to be doing a fine job of motivating and preparing his players each week I’m starting to get a little concerned about his technical in-game judgments. The questionable clock management and play-calling in the Indy game, the time out blunder in the New Orleans game, and now the crazy decision to go for two after taking an 11-point lead. It made no sense. With 8:48 left in the game who cares if the lead is 12 points or 13? The Jets needed two TD’s to win either way. But if you don’t make it, which Miami didn’t, the Jets now can tie it with a TD, a two-point conversion, and a field goal. And that almost happened! If the Jets had successfully executed that last two-point try then instead of a game-losing incomplete pass on their last play they probably would have kicked a game-tying FG. It could have been OT in New York (shudder). Sparano lucked out.

Second, I grew up in South Florida and suffered through many TV blackouts of Dolphins home games. So I listened to lots of Dolphins games on the radio as a kid (Rick Weaver was the man). And there’s nothing like the thrill of the hyperactive radio calls of a biased home-town announcing team. Former Fins Jimmy Cefalo, Joe Rose and the great Jim Mandich did the honors last Sunday. I could listen to these over and over again.

Your 2009 Miami Dolphins: Weeks 5-7

2009-11-05T21:16:00.000-08:00

Overdue for some quick recaps

Week 5

I know it was just an early regular season game but this Monday Night win against the Jets had to be one of the greatest wins of the decade for Miami. No really. I'm not kidding. First of all, beating the Jets is never a bad thing. That makes a game great in itself no? And doing it on Monday Night just adds to the thrill. Can you ever think about these two teams playing in prime team without thinking back to their most memorable Monday Night game: that horrific 2002 collapse when Miami blew the 23-point fourth quarter lead and lost 40-37 in OT. (The defining game of the Wannstadt Era). I still have post-traumatic Dolphins stress syndrome from that game. Finally some payback! Driving the length of the field to break Jet fans hearts with a game-winning TD in the final seconds. Awesome. And maybe the best part was just how great and how clutch Chad Henne played. We’ve been waiting this entire decade for Marino’s successor to show up and in his first start Henne sure looked like he might be that guy. That perfect bomb to Ginn was kind of a shock and everyone took notice when Henne zipped in those critical third down throws to keep that last drive alive. Actually Henne’s performance was the second-best part. The best was the pre-game Jets hype getting flushed down the toilet. “How are the Dolphins and their rookie quarterback going to be to able to handle that Rex Ryan defense?” Oh, we’re so scared. Not a Rex Ryan defense. Just forfeit the game right now. Jaws says they're too good.

Well, everybody got their answer didn't they. Miami handled that Rex Ryan defense by kicking its ass! A great night to be alive.

Week 6

Bye Week

Week 7

The high lasted all of one week. Miami faced an upgrade in quality of opponent in week 6: the undefeated New Orleans Saints. A powerhouse offense led by the man who could have and should have been quarterbacking the Dolphins for the last 9 years, Drew Brees. A surprising defense stifling its opponents weekly. Most were skeptical of Miami’s chances against the Jets the week before. Everybody thought the Saints were taking this one. And surprise! Miami, not New Orleans, looked like the Super Bowl favorite. They outplayed them. They outscored them. They throttled them. They crushed them. Unfortunately I’m only talking about the first half. Miami’s offense kept matriculating the ball down the field and the defense wasn’t letting Brees do anything. And then three disastrous mistakes somehow worked in tandem to turn the game around in New Orleans’ favor just as the first half ended.

First, leading 24-3 with less than two minutes left, the Dolphins had the ball at the Saints’ 40. Another score, especially a TD, probably puts the game out of reach so I understand Coach Sparano’s decision to aggressively press his team’s advantage. But he might have been better served keeping the ball on the ground. Given their remaining time outs Miami still had plenty of time to score. And they didn’t need that many more yards to get into field goal range. But they decided to try to pass it down the field. First play—sack, necessitated a second-down pass, a pass caught by Devone Bess and promptly fumbled. Blunder Number One. Scoring opportunity gone. The focus shifts from scoring to just stopping the Saints and preserving the still fat 21-point lead. Bress did manage to drive the Saints to the Miami 21 and field goal range with no time outs left. But the Saints got greedy. They took a shot at a TD with only 12 seconds left. Brees hit Colston inside the five, not the end zone! Two Dolphin defenders dragged him down at the one before he landed over the goal line and the clock ran out before the Saints could try a FG. 24-3 halftime lead. Scratch that. The clock didn’t run out! It SHOULD have but the refs never saw Colston’s knee hit and so they ruled the play a TD. The worst call in a game filled with bad ones. Blunder Number Two. A replay review correctly overturned it but the game stoppage gave the Saints time for the one-yard field goal attempt they didn’t deserve (there needs to be a rule tweak to address this; maybe some sort of time runoff). Ok, 24-6 is still a three TD lead. Still good. But enter Blunder Number Three (can you enter a blunder?) Sparano called time out! WTF? Given the time to talk about it and the Saints decide to go for the TD and of course they get it. 24-10 at the half. All momentum to the Saints. Second half? Brees picks up where he left off, on fire. Miami made some stupid mistakes (and got screwed by a Saints INT TD return that should have been a touchback for Miami). And so the game was lost. The Dolphins had that game. They should have won it. It could have been their defining game of the season. But they blew it.

Beyond the screwed-up end of the first half, the biggest problem, the biggest disappointment was the offense’s struggles to hold onto the football. The 2008 Dolphins were practically mistake-free. This year’s model keeps turning the ball over and dropping passes. And the biggest offender? Ted Ginn. He just can’t reel in perfectly catchable balls. Between Ginn and the already waived John Beck it’s looking more and more like that 2007 draft was almost as big a disaster as that season itself was.

The Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part X

2009-10-31T21:06:00.000-07:00

Top this catch

How bizarre is it that after only two last-minute championship-winning touchdown drives in 87 years of NFL history, it’s now been done in two straight Super Bowls? Both Super Bowls XLII and XLIII were won on last minute TD passes that capped desperation drives. But there the similarities between the two games end. Super Bowl XLII was probably the most anticipated Super Bowl ever. Super Bowl XLIII? Well, let’s face it. Nobody really cared if they weren’t diehard Steelers or Cardinals fans (if there is such a thing as the latter). Super Bowl XLII: Close and competitive the whole way, exciting from start to finish. Super Bowl XLIII: To be honest, I thought it was all over at halftime. In 18 unbelievable seconds the Cardinals went from about to take a halftime lead to trailing by 10 points. Coming back to win a Super Bowls after trailing by that many points is dicey anyway (it’s happened once). But coming back after that James Harrison punch in the gut INT return? No way. And the Cards did pretty much sleepwalk through the third quarter. The Steelers just needed one more TD to put the Cards away. But they couldn’t get it. They were so afraid of making the mistake that would let the Cards back into it that they only could tack on three more points…and they let the Cards back into it.

The game’s final eleven minutes made up for how incredibly boring the second half had been up until then. But if Super Bowl XLIII lacked the arc of the previous year’s Super Bowl, or some of the other great ones, it did feature something else that maybe no other Super Bowl has ever matched: the sheer number of great plays. If you were trying to make a list of the greatest plays in Super Bowl history, you’ve got three from this game alone. No other Super Bowl can say that (if a Super Bowl could talk).

What are the five greatest Super Bowl plays ever? Let’s see, Manning-to-Tyree. Riggins’ run. And…well I don’t know what the other three would have been but take away two of them and substitute in Harrison’s INT return and Santonio Holmes’ game-winning TD. Now when you’re picking the greatest Super Bowl plays ever they have to be plays that were both spectacular and critical to the outcome. Marcus Allen’s amazing TD run in Super Bowl XVIII was spectacular but his team was up by 19 points at the time. That game was over. Jim O’Brien’s final field goal in Super Bowl V couldn’t have been more critical. It was the game winner. But c’mon, how spectacular can a 32-yard field goal be?

But Holmes’ catch! There’ve been four late game-winning Super Bowl TD catches. Clearly Holmes’ TD beats out John Taylor’s in Super Bowl and jailbird Burress’ in Super Bowl XLII. You could make an argument for Issac Bruce’s in Super Bowl XXXIV as the best as it was a 73-yard bomb. Holmes’ 6-yard catch had a higher degree difficulty with that while tapping the toes in bounds thing and it came a little later in the game so I’d lean toward that one as the biggest. Of course we could find room for both on our top five list.

Harrison’s TD is almost certainly the greatest defensive play in Super Bowl history and one of the greatest INT returns in NFL history. The only other great defensive Super Bowl play that comes to mind is Mike Jones’ tackle to seal the Rams victory in Super Bowl XXXIV. And as great as that tackle was I don’t see how you can rate it ahead of a 100-yard TD return where the returner improbably stayed in bounds, avoided tacklers, and fell into the end zone with no time left on the last play of the half. Yeah it wasn’t a game ender but it was at least a 10-point swing as the Cardinals would have at least come out of there with a field goal. In a game decided by 4 points it was huge.

And there’s one other play we can’t forget. I can’t put it in the top five but it sure might make my top ten (I see a future post in the making). It’s Larry Fitzgerald’s 64-yard TD that gave Arizona its first lead of the game with 2:37 remaining. Without Roethlisberger’s and Holmes late heroics that would have been the game-winning TD. Besides Bruce’s TD referenced earlier the only other 4th quarter TD bomb I can remember that gave a team the lead in a Super Bowl was the 85-yarder to Muhsin Muhammad that put Carolina temporarily on top in Super Bowl XXXVIII. That was a huge play but Fitzgerald’s catch gets the edge for being more dramatic as it was later in the game and Muhammad’s catch resulted more from a blown coverage (he wasn’t covered) than a great play call. Warner–to-Fitzgerald also put the capper on the Jerry Rice-like postseason Fitzgerald was having.

So when you’re talking about Super Bowl XLIII you’re talking about three of the greatest plays in Super Bowl history. Only Super Bowl XXIV can even claim two and those two aren’t quite as impressive as Super Bowl XLIII’s top two. If you like great plays and a classic finish, and who doesn’t, Super Bowl XLIII’s a contender for the greatest Super Bowl of all time.

The Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time

Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part I
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part II
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part III
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part IV
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part V
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part VI
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part VII
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part VIII
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part IX
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part X
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Conclusion

Henne and Penny

2009-10-09T22:35:00.001-07:00

It’s weird how sometimes sporting events can almost play out like a novel. And if you missed the novel that was Miami’s week two game with the Colts, then the first drive of their week three game against the Chargers served as a handy Cliff’s Notes version of the Colts game. The dominant running game. The perfect execution. And the devastating blunder negating all the hard work that came before. Against the Chargers it was Ronnie Brown’s fumble at the one that squandered the momentum and cost the team a TD. But of course that was just the prelude to the true football tragedy--Chad Pennington’s season-ending shoulder injury.

Now Sparano previously made it clear Henne would get his chance to play at some point this season. And after three straight losses the odds shot way up for Henne to be playing sooner than later. But it’s sad that it took a horrible injury to Pennington to bring about Henne’s first start. I need to write a few words here about Pennington. My first real memories of the NFL start date to about 1974. So for almost all my first 25 years of football-watching I saw great quarterbacks leading the Miami Dolphins. I expected it. First Griese. Then Marino. And then for eight solid years the Dolphins trotted out pathetic QB after pathetic QB. Jay Fiedler was probably the best of them and he barely rose to the level of mediocrity. And what came after. Ugh: Ray Lucas--high comedy. A.J. Feely---arguably the worst trade in team history. John Beck--utter waste of a high draft pick. Duante Culpeper--we could have had Drew Brees! (Nick Saban’s an idiot!). Cleo Lemon--a more aptly named player there has never been. You had to wonder if the Dolphins would ever start a quality QB again.

And then, thanks to Bret Favre not retiring for the fourth or fifth time, Chad Pennington dropped into the team’s lap. Pennington took the opportunity to post an MVP-type season, the best quarterbacking season of any Dolphin not in the Hall of Fame, and lead Miami to a division title and the playoffs. Playoffs! After a 1-15 season nobody saw that coming. Dolphin fans used to take the playoffs for granted. By 2008 it was a distant memory until Chad Pennington started taking the snaps. He gave us a minor miracle. Even if he never puts on a football uniform again Dolphin fans owe him a lot. Thanks Penny.

As for the other Chad, Chad Henne didn’t play all that well against San Diego. But I’ve seen worse (Hey Ray Lucas. How's it going A.J. Feely?) At least Henne showed flashes of potential, something we waited for in vain with John Beck and the other parade of losers I mentioned above. Against Buffalo Henne showed a lot more than flashes. He managed to play his entire first start without making one single catastrophic error, something that hasn’t been so easy to come by in this decade for Miami. Getting that first win was big. It was just two seasons ago that Miami was forced to yank Beck as the starter and reinstall Cleo Lemon at the helm (yeah, that was the sequence of events. It’s true) in a desperate attempt to get some kind of win someway somehow to avoid the stigma of an 0-16 season. And that plan actually worked. But nobody wanted a repeat of anything like that. Ever. Now without question it should be Henne’s team all year. He faces a tougher opponent this week so we shall see but so far so good.

Your 2009 Miami Dolphins-Week Two

2009-09-26T21:31:00.000-07:00

OK, time to worry.

When you physically dominate a team like the Dolphins did to the Colts last Monday night and you don’t come away with a win, something clearly went wrong that should not have gone wrong. And what that something was was coaching. Sparano deserves a lot of praise for the job he’s done since filling the tiny shoes of Nick Saban and Cam Cameron, but blame for the 27-23 loss to the Colts rests squarely on Sparano shoulders. A coach is responsible for a lot of things and Sparano got a lot of things right in Week Two. The game plan was great, the execution was better, and we saw a much more motivated and mistake-free performance than we saw in that Week One atrocity. But the in-game play-calling and clock management…ugh.

The three moments that stood out: (1) Facing third-and-seven at the Indy 32 with 56 seconds left in the first half, the Dolphins run Ricky Williams for five. Then they kick the FG on fourth and a short two. The play-calling here foreshadowed the later events including the devastating sequence that probably cost Miami the game. Going conservative and settling for a long-field goal attempt. I thought Miami should have gone for it on 4th down. And since they left 43 seconds for the Colts to score the tying FG, they probably should have. At the very least Sparano should have learned a lesson here. But he didn’t; (2) Third-and-six at Indy 30. 4:33 left in the game. 20-all. A simple 3-yard Ronnie Brown run and a FG for the sadly all-too-brief lead. Sparano went conservative and played for the field goal even though he knew he’d be leaving Manning almost four minutes only trailing by three. Insane. Bill Parcells is supposed to be this guy’s mentor! After playing so well all game why wouldn’t you try to put the Colts away here with a first down?; (3) The botched two-minute (plus) offense. This was what everyone was talking about after the game. ANd rightly so! I haven’t seen a worse hurry-up offense since Donovan McNabb vomited away Philly’s chances in Super Bowl XXXIX. Running on the first two plays. Wasting a time out. Not getting another play off before the two-minute warning. WTF? Miami had one last shot from the Colts 33. Now imagine if they had one or two more plays. Pulling out a win would have been a realistic scenario. I still can’t fathom how the team blew the end of the game that badly. Pennington’s an experienced QB. He knows what to do in that situation. Sparano and coaching staff didn’t help him.

The Dolphins blew a game they should have won. Now coming off a short week they’ve got a west coast game against a good team. You can’t like those odds even against a banged up San Diego team. I’ll say this. If Miami can take this game Sparano will have gone a long way to removing the taste of that coaching debacle from everyone’s mouth. If Miami loses, they drop to 0-3 and a return to the playoffs is pretty much out of the question. And so will be the chances of Chad Pennington QB’ing this team for 16 games.

Your 2009 Miami Dolphins: Week One

2009-09-14T21:02:00.000-07:00

Oh Lordy.

I knew my 2009 NFL predictions would eventually prove embarrassing, they always do, but I expected that to come well into the season not the very next day! Who’s the opposite of Nostradamus? We need a term for that. I am that guy. Past Interference hereby officially apologizes to all the guys I singled out for improvement this year. Ronnie Brown? Did virtually nothing yesterday. Anthony Fasano? Well he improved in the category of fumbling the ball away. Jake Long? Manhandled by John Abraham. Pat White? My excitement wore off about the time he sailed a pass about ten yards over Ted Ginn’s wide open head. I mean a wide open Ted Ginn’s head. Oh it was ugly. Let’s not overreact to one bad loss, a road loss to a 2008 playoff team no less, but Miami played very, very badly yesterday and the score could have been a lot worse. The one bright spot was the run defense totally shutting down Michael Turner. Just keep repeating that Dolphin fans. It’s all we have. And Davone Bess looked good.

The worst part of it all was Chad Pennington playing like the 2008 playoff Chad Pennington, not the 2008 regular season Chad Pennington. That’s two horrible games in a row now for him. Sure the offensive line wasn’t giving him much time but Pennington had chances to get rid of the ball and either took a sack or was unable to hit an open receiver to salvage some yards. His arm strength looked weaker than ever and the team resorted to having him throw on the run several times to try to get something going. I should have put a big fat caveat in my 9-7 prediction. We might well see Chad Henne at QB sooner rather than later if Pennington keeps this up much longer and if that happens a losing record is likely. Not that I’d have a problem with the team putting Henne in there if Pennington is no longer what he was most of last year. The team simply couldn’t make any big plays yesterday. The few times they used the Wildcat it didn’t work. They might have been trying to set up a big pass play from White by running out of the formation the first couple of times. If that’s so it would have been brilliant except for White’s inability to hit the broad side of a barn on the play ‘cause that should have been 6. The big pass play Pennington pulled off came off a flea-flicker, not a downfield strike. Don’t be surprised if Henne gets in there sooner than you think (Is that another prediction?! When will I learn?). I still trust the management and coaching when all’s said and done so I’m not too worried (yet) despite yesterday's debacle.

You know, at least my playoff team picks don’t look half bad after a whole week. But I can’t figure out why I named Carolina as a playoff team. I thought they made a big mistake in resigning Jake Delhomme to a huge deal when he appeared finished last year in the playoffs. Like Pennington he’s picked up where he left off. Looks like Atlanta’s the better team right now. But don’t worry Panther fans, A.J. Feely’s on the way! Haha. (Did that trade Wannstedt made for him really happen? A second-rounder? Really?).

Wildcat

2009-09-13T09:47:00.000-07:00

Pat White's listed as the #2 quarterback today! C'mon kickoff.

2009 Predictions

2009-09-13T09:03:00.001-07:00

Hallelujah. Finally, the NFL is back. Life is so much more boring without it. I think I started the last two seasons by blogging my predictions but I’m torn about it dong it again. Mainly, because they’re a huge embarrassment! Completely off base and giving anyone who cares to a pretty airtight case that I know nothing about football or anything else. But, in the short history of this blog making bad preseason predictions is the closest thing PI has to a tradition so let’s go ahead and do it anyway. Then forget this post ever existed.

The Miami Dolphins shocked the football world (and me) in 2008 by going 11-5 and winning the AFC East just one year after their 1-15 horror show. The reasons for the turnaround weren’t too hard to spot. With the new Parcells-Ireland-Sparano troika we got a solid draft, good personnel moves (signing Pennington especially), inspired coaching (the Wildcat), and basically the first time this decade the fans felt the team had people in charge who knew what they were doing. However, the Dolphins also prospered thanks to an easy schedule, almost surely an easier one than what the team’s going to face this year. Also, Pennington’s best-ever season made him an MVP candidate. Given his age and injury history odds are 2009 won’t be quite as magical. And with Tom Brady back at least one division opponent is likely to be much improved. Finally, where Miami’s luck in 2007 was all bad, everything that could go wrong went wrong, that all turned around completely in 2008 and the team finished with an impressive record despite only a slightly above-average point differential.

So there’s lots of reasons to think the Dolphins regress in 2008. Regression to the mean, coming back to earth, whatever you want to call it, there’s two things that cut against it: (1) Better players and (2) Playing better. Who knows how the team’s 2009 draft class turns out but so far they seem pretty high on Brian Hartline, they addressed a clear need in the secondary, and I’m gotta say I’m real excited to see what Pat White can do in this offense. Also, Jason Taylor’s back and while he may no longer play like a defensive MVP, any Jason Taylor is better than no Jason Taylor. As for better players, I like Ronnie Brown a lot this year (and my fantasy teams reflect that!). The guy was dominant on a horrible team in 2007 before he got hurt. He’s now in his second year back from the ACL-tear. And you know Miami’s offense is going to revolve around him. I’m looking for the 2007 Brown to be back. With another year experience the receiving corps should also be better. I don’t know about Ginn but I do like Bess and Fasano to step it up this year. And Jake Long will show he was worthy of this draft slot.

The team should be better in 2009 but might have a worse record due to the much tougher schedule. So I’ll say 9-7. Whatever happens it’s just comforting to know the team’s in good hands again. Growing up watching this team in the 70’s and 80’s, I just kind of took for granted the team would always be a playoff contender. But the post-Don Shula/Jimmy Johnson era wised me up permanently. You hand over the reigns of a franchise to incompetents and fools and your team can hit rock bottom pretty quickly.

The Rest. Sure why not. I have no limbs to crawl out on. New England and San Diego should easily win their divisions. The Colts should squeeze out another division title. And the one team I don’t hear too many people talking up is Baltimore. I didn’t like what I saw out of Pittsburgh on Thursday and the last time they won a Super Bowl they collapsed the next season. I can see that happening again. To me the Ravens look like the team to beat in the AFC North. All they need is for Flacco to build on his rookie season to challenge the Pats and Chargers for the Super Bowl. And with New England’s suspect defense and San Diego’s coach, I’m going to say the Ravens make it to the Super Bowl. Yeah, that’s right. In the NFC, the Giants, Eagles, Packers and Bears are the only teams I like as Super Bowl contenders. Seattle and Carolina are probably the best of the rest. I like the Vikings, Cowboys and Cardinals to collapse in the second half of the season. I’d kind of like to pick the Packers or Bears to go to the Super Bowl but the Giants are the best team.

Glad that’s over. Football’s back!

The Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part IX

2009-08-31T18:18:00.000-07:00

“They have to win now! That’s what teams of destiny do.”

--Me to my wife after the Manning to Tyree play.

In rethinking Super Bowl XLII, I’ve got to say I kind of feel sorry for Patriots fans (a little anyway). Not because their team blew a championship, a perfect season, and a claim to be the greatest team of all time. That’s sports. No, I feel sorry for them because to most of us that game was one of the most thrilling, electrifying sporting events we’ve ever seen. To them it’s just a sad and bitter memory, a reminder of the immortality their team lost that night.

That game was like one of those super-vivid dreams. You know the ones that seem so real, so detailed even though they’re so bizarre they couldn’t possibly have happened. And when you wake up you go over it in your mind while simultaneously coming to grips with the fact that no matter how intense it all was it in fact was just a crazy dream. Yeah, Super Bowl XLII was a little like that, except it all actually happened. The G-Men shutting down the greatest offense ever; Brady-to-Moss seemingly shutting the door on the upset bid; Manning-to-Tyree; the Plax TD; and the exclamation point--the big hit on Brady in the final seconds. I still can’t believe all that stuff happened. But it did. Or like an old Silver-Age DC comic would put it: Not A Hoax! Not A Dream! Not An Imaginary Story!

A few points about the game:

1) The Past Interference staff likes to think of themselves as basically humble people. But I’ve got to give myself some credit being the first person anywhere to realize the historic nature of what Eli Manning pulled off on February 5, 2008. No, not the huge upset; a lot of people noticed that. I’m referring to the winning drive. Before Super Bowl LXII, exactly two quarterbacks had ever led their team on a championship game-winning touchdown drive ending in the final two minutes of play. With his TD pass to Burress, Manning joined Bart Starr (The Ice Bowl) and Joe Montana (Super Bowl XXII) as the only QB’s to ever lead a last-minute championship TD drive. That’s right. Two Hall-of-Famers with nine combined championship rings…and Eli Manning. And those other guys started their drives trailing by 3. Manning trailed by 4. So only Eli began his historic drive with the pressure of knowing it had to end in a TD. Cool huh?

2) Now I’ll point out something else that I haven’t seen anyone else note: this was the closest Super Howl of all-time. I’m not just talking about the final 3-point margin of victory. Obviously there’ve been a few other three-point games. What I’m talking about is the score at any point during the game. At no time during Super Bowl XLII did either team ever lead the other by more than 4 points. In every other Super Bowl save two, one of the teams led the other by at least 9 points at some point during the game. The only other Super Bowls where nobody ever led by more than one score were Super Bowls V and XXII. The Colts won the former game by 3 and trailed by a full 7 points earlier. The latter game’s biggest lead was also 7 points and the final margin of victory was 4. So from start to finish Super Bowl XLII was the closest, most competitive game in Super Bowl history.

3) Finally, has any Super Bowl ever had more pre-game anticipation than this one? I don’t think so. New England shooting for perfection obviously interested just about everyone. You can’t compare the Dolphins in Super Bowl VII to this one; it was just a different media world back then, before the internet and the 24 hour news cycle. They might as well have broadcast that earlier game by crystal radio when you look at the mountain of oppressive hype you get today. Further jump-starting the pre-game chatter was the opponent, a New York team(!), one that almost beat the Pats in the Week 16 finale. I can only think of one other Super Bowl that came close to this one in terms of public interest: Super Bowl XIII, the Steelers/Cowboys rematch. I previously wrote that game was the closest thing the NFL ever had to an Ali-Frazier fight. But in the post-ESPN age you have to give the edge in “buzz” to Super Bowl XLII. I know it’s hard to imagine but trust me, there was once a time you actually could turn on a TV and never be able to find a single show featuring grown men yelling at each other about sports. Radio too.

After the Giants pulled off the upset for the ages, many called it greatest Super Bowl ever. And if you were arguing for it in a court of law you’ve got a lot of evidence. Let’s see: Unparalleled pre-game anticipation. Excitement and electricity that slowly built throughout the game. Close and competitive from the opening kickoff through the final seconds. The greatest play in Super Bowl history. And maybe the biggest upset ever.

I loved that game.

But I reflexively rejected the “best ever” level, probably due to my contrarian nature. I knew I’d have to think about it for a long while before determining how it ranked with all 41 of the Super Bowls that came before. And a year later, just when I’d finally processed it all and reached a conclusion, they had to go and play another Super Bowl that might have been the best ever.

The Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time

Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part I
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part II
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part III
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part IV
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part V
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part VI
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part VII
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part VIII
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part IX
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part X
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Conclusion

Stuff I Saw On YouTube: Commando

2009-07-31T20:47:00.000-07:00

A few months ago “Meet the Press” had an episode featuring various state governors as guests, one of whom was Arnold Schwarzenegger. My wife said to me she couldn’t believe someone as stupid as Arnold could get elected governor. I replied that she was way off base. Sure California might be in utter ruins by the time he leaves office but he isn’t stupid. My evidence? Simply this. Could an overly muscled guy with a funny name, a thick Austrian accent, and no apparent acting ability become the biggest box office star in the world if he wasn’t super smart? I don’t think so. Of course luck played a part in Arnold’s rise also. He hit the movies at the perfect time.

The 1980’s ushered in a new kind of action movie. Our ‘80’s army of one-man armies, aided by nothing more than their own superior training, sophisticated weaponry, the suspension of certain physical laws, and millions of dollars in special effects, slaughtered and dispatched hundreds of unmourned mercenaries, foreigners, traitors and aliens. Thankfully innocent bystanders always emerged completely unscathed in the countless explosions and deadly crossfires. Sylvester Stallone’s First Blood probably ushered in the age of the’ 80’s action movie but he opened the door for the combined acting talents of Chuck Norris, Steven Segal, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, and whoever else I’m missing. Box-office gold. But Schwarzenegger was the king of them all y’all.

Now Arnold went on to make a few pretty good movies, but if you’re looking for the one movie that defines the ‘80’s era of good clean gratuitous slaughter, the apotheosis of the genre is Arnold’s true masterpiece: Commando. Now believe me, I’m not claiming it’s actually a good movie. You can’t defend this crap on any aesthetic level. But it’s a historic movie, the one introducing us to the on-screen Schwarzenegger persona that went on to rule the box-office. It’s the first time Arnold gets to kill people and be funny. For pure mindless entertainment you’ve got to check it out and the single best way to watch it is not as a full-length feature film, but rather as a series of hilarious clips on YouTube. It’s the only way to appreciate the absurd, gruesome yet cartoonlike violence, terrible acting (beside the point in a film such as this), and of course the classic Schwarzenegger one-liners uttered upon each ruthless dispatch of another hapless victim. Plus, by watching random Commando clips, you dispense with all those boring parts: you know, the parts advancing the narrative, i.e. the parts where Arnold’s not killing people or blowing s##t up. The real challenge is trying to figure out just which scene is the movie’s best.

Is it this one, Arnold’s first kill of the film? I love the stilted stoner dialogue (“Mellow out man”) delivered by the unarmed kidnapper. What was the dude's backup plan? Check out how Arnold offs him with one perfect shot from the gun he never even bothers to raise and aim. And I’m no firearms expert but that gun sure looks like it would blow someone’s head off, not just put a neat little hole in it.

How about this one? The bad dude Henriques manages to raise his arms after Arnold breaks his neck while the passengers mysteriously remain blissfully unaware of this carnage in their midst.

I’ve got a soft spot for this one. David Patrick Kelly, “Sully”, is a classic 80’s movie villain and for my money Arnold ends his miserable existence with the best one-liner of his career. Actually, it’s probably the single greatest line of dialogue in the history of cinema. You don’t believe me? Just watch. The final line’s pretty good too. James Bond did this stuff first but face it, Bond just isn’t all that funny. Arnold’s funny.

Ah, the infamous "Shed Scene". Hundreds of rounds of bullets and one severed arm prove no match for Arnold and some expertly wielded gardening implements. According to some YouTube commenters at least some DVD versions of the movie censor this scene. What's the thinking there? Who could possibly take the scene seriously? It parodies itself.

The final showdown with Bennett. Until this scene, the movie never really established the source of Bennett’s murderous grudge against Arnold’s character. Getting kicked out of an elite commando unit creates a need for lifelong revenge? Seems kind of lame. But at last the scales fall from our eyes during the final showdown. The wounded Schwarzenegger, uh, I mean John Matrix, psychologically manipulates Bennett into throwing away his gun so the two can engage in your classic mano a mano clash. How does “Matrix” do it? With a disturbing speech bursting with homoerotic sadomasochism. How else do you read this?

Put the knife in me and look me in the eye and see what's going on in there when you turn it…It’s between you and me. Don't deprive yourself of some pleasure. Come on Bennett, let’s party.

On top of that, pay attention to the facial expressions on the face of the leather-and-chain-mail clad Bennett while Arnold tempts and taunts him. Just in case the words alone weren’t “subtle” enough to clue the audience in. Yes, in the end it’s the 1980’s version of Gore Vidal’s script for Ben-Hur ("I'm not gonna be overt. There won't be one line. But I can write it in such a way that the audience is going to feel that there is something emotional between these two that is not stated, but that blows a fuse in Messala. That he is spurned. So it's a love scene gone wrong"). “Let off some steam Bennett” indeed.

Or what the hell. If you don’t have time to bleed just cut to the chase. Skip all of the above and just watch the one clip that trims all the fat and extracts the movies’ true essence. Killing. Yes, witness every single killing in the entire movie packed into one explosive four-minute clip. Kudos to whoever put that together. Time well spent.

The Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part VIII

2009-07-27T21:04:00.000-07:00

The Sloppy Joe of Super Bowls

What if we watched a Super Bowl that was:
1) Close
2) High-scoring
3) Had a couple 4th quarter lead changes
4) And was decided on a last second field goal

That has to be the greatest Super Bowl of all-time right?

Well, what if we filled out the picture with a few other critical details:

1) Lots of penalties
2) Offensive, defensive and coaching blunders at key moments of the game
3) Terrible special teams play
4) Excepting a five-minute stretch of the 2nd quarter, no scoring in Quarters 1-3
5) Game overshadowed by Janet Jackson’s exposed nipple.

Now where does it rank?

C’mon we can’t be picky. You know how many Super Bowl blowouts there’ve been? If you watched a lot of Super Bowls in the 80’s then you better get down on your hands and knees and thank the football gods every time you get an entertaining Super Bowl like Super Bowl XXXVIII. If it’s close and comes down to the wire it’s a great game. And so it was.

Now calling it the greatest Super Bowl ever is another matter. To earn that honor the game must succeed on a number of levels. And one of those levels is Quality of Play. You want what an earlier generation of sportswriters might have described as a “Crisply played game”. Super Bowl XXXVIII featured too many mistakes to be the best ever. 20 penalties alone (25 called) disqualify this game from best-ever status. And what about the special teams? Adam Vinatieri cemented his legend as the greatest clutch kicker ever with his 41-yard game-winning kick. What’s that? He earlier missed 31 and 36-yard attempts? Move along, nothing to see here. Of course Carolina kicker John Kasay greased the skids for the Pats winning drive by sending his kickoff out of bonds, setting Brady and Co. up at their own 40. Brady and Co. should have been driving for a tying, not a winning FG, but Panthers coach John Fox panicked and started going for 2 prematurely, costing his team three points (New England never would have gone for 2 if they’d led 27-24 instead of 27-22). Then again, Carolina was lucky to even have a shot at the end.

The real story of the game was New England’s continual squandering of chances to put the game away. In the first half we had the two missed FG’s and later a loss of ten yards on a botched trick play on 3rd-and-3 from the CAR 31 that cost NE a shot at another FG. In the 4th quarter, NE gave up a 33-yard TD run right after going up 21-10. Then, leading 21-16 in the 4th, Tom Brady drove his team to the Panthers 9 with less than 8 minutes to play but instead of icing the game the supposed best big game passer of his time threw a pick in the end zone. A few plays later, Bill Belichick’s great D forgets to cover Muhsin Muhammad and he blew all our minds with an 85-yard TD score to give the Panthers their first and only lead of the game.

It was non-stop action the rest of the way. But overall just too many mistakes to be the best ever. Plus Janet Jackson’s nipple. Let’s call it the Sloppy Joe of Super Bowls.

The Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time

Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part I
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part II
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part III
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part IV
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part V
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part VI
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part VII
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part VIII
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part IX
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Part X
Greatest Super Bowl of All-Time, Conclusion