'For Who? For What?': JoePa FTL!

This wrap-up of the weekend in both college and pro football is named after the classic post-game quote immortalized by all-time favorite whipping boy Ricky Watters.

A couple of week's back, I predicted Penn State would make the National Championship game. I underestimated their ability to implode. I never thought the Nittany Lions were the best team, or one of the best for that matter. I just thought their schedule gave them a significant advantage over the other unbeatens in major college football. I still believe that -- that advantage just wasn't enough to overcome Penn State's shortcomings. Alabama and Texas Tech, on the other hand, each survived the first of three obstacles on their path to a clash in the National Championship game.

Here's the latest Top 10 from yours truly:

1. Texas Tech (10-0)
2. Alabama (10-0)
3. Florida (8-1)
4. Texas (9-1)
5. Oklahoma (9-1)
6. USC (8-1)
7. Penn State (9-1)
8. Utah (10-0)
9. Boise State (9-0)
10. Oklahoma State (8-2)

Meanwhile, in the NFL this week, some things became a little clearer:

--The Patriots are re-emerging as a contender in the AFC -- something I predicted a few weeks back. At 6-3, they're tied atop the AFC East with the Jets, who they square off against this Thursday night. The winner emerges as the top team in that division (especially if it's the Pats, who would then hold the head-to-head tie-breaker), and joins the second tier of teams in the conference behind the Titans -- a group which could include the Steelers, Ravens, Dolphins, Chargers, and Colts.

--Speaking of Indy, they seem to be picking up speed as they head down the back stretch. They followed up a tight victory versus New England last Sunday night with a big road win at Pittsburgh this week. Suddenly, they appear poised for a stretch run along with the Pats. Could we see another big Indy/New England tilt in the AFC playoffs come January?

--The Giants are good. Like really good. You know they won the Super Bowl last year, right? Despite that, it's been easy to ignore them this year. First, even when they won the Super Bowl the big story was more about the Perfect Pats lost. Then they started the year in the shadow of rival Dallas, who prognosticators already had going to this year's Super Bowl. Then, when Philly and Washington looked strong early, the big story was how great their entire division was great -- they were just among the best. As the season stretched on, and they established themselves as clearly the best team in the NFC, they still found themselves in the shadow -- this time of Tennessee, the league's only undefeated team. But it's time people start to say it: The Giants have to be the favorite to repeat as Super Bowl champs.

With all that said, here's my take on the current hierarchy of the top teams in the NFL:

Elite
New York Giants
Tennessee Titans
Carolina Panthers

Flawed But Dangerous
Arizona Cardinals
Pittsburgh Steelers
New York Jets

Never Underestimate Experience
Tampa Bay Buccaneers
New England Patriots
Indianapolis Colts

On The Upswing
Washington Redskins
Baltimore Ravens
Atlanta Falcons

For Who? For What?: The Definition of "Indisputable" is Indisputable

This wrap-up of the weekend in both college and pro football is named after the classic post-game quote immortalized by all-time favorite whipping boy Ricky Watters.

The state of instant replay is a joke right now, and I think it comes down to semantics: Referees do not grasp what the word indisputable means. Seriously. I refs can broken down into two groups: the ones who think “indisputable” means “probably”, and one which thinks it means “Only if the Lord himself appears before you and says “Overturn it”.

In the last two weeks I’ve seen a play get overturned when the replay was dark, shadowy, grainy, and, to my eyes at least, very disputable, and another play stay as called despite a replay clearly showing the call was wrong. You just don’t know what you’ll get in any game – will it be a head ref incapable of convincing, or one who’ll take any excuse to overturn a call.

The added issue of the head coaches being consistently and maddeningly ill-prepared to make the right call about when to use their challenges, and the whole replay experience has become a bit of an eye-sore on the NFL landscape. When a call is clearly butchered a fan has so many things to worry about: "Will the coach challenge?", "Will a replay show conclusive evidence?", "Will the ref be reasonable?"

The more I think of it, a hybrid between the college and pro system might be the way to go. Take the best from the college system (Every play is eligible for booth review, coaches still get their own challenge if booth won’t review, an off-field official in the booth making the calls), and the best from pro system (two challenges, three if you get the first two right), and you have a workable system, where everybody has a chance to right a wrong, and on-field officials aren’t asked to do too much.

College Round-up:

--After another exciting weekend of college football, here’s my new Top 10:

1. Texas Tech (9-0)
2. Alabama (9-0)
3. Penn State (9-0)
4. Texas (8-1)
5. Oklahoma (8-1)
6. Florida (7-1)
7. USC (7-1)
8. Oklahoma State (8-1)
9. Utah (9-0)
10. Boise State (8-0)

Last week, I said Texas or Alabama would lose (and likely both), and it only took me one week to look prescient,. Of course, I also said this loss would allow Penn State to sneak by them and into the top two, so how come I still have them at #3? Well, for two reasons: 1) Texas Tech was too impressive this weekend to keep out of the top spot, and 2) I only said Penn State would make it into the top two by the end of the season, and I still believe that for the same reasons I did then (more on that below).

--Texas/Texas Tech was a game for the ages. The atmosphere was intense, the momentum switches were dramatic and only increased in frequency as the game went on, and the ending was one for the ages. Texas almost withstood one of the great tests a #1 team has ever had – playing the nation’s top passing combo, and a fired-up defense in a tough road venue – and, in doing so, almost overcame one of the great schedule tests a team has ever had – facing four Top 10 teams (Oklahoma, Missouri, Oklahoma State and Tech) all in a row.

Now, Tech is Big 12 team with a bull’s eye on their backs, and they’ve just begun to run their schedule’s Top 10 gauntlet – their next two games are against Oklahoma State and Oklahoma. If they get through all that, they can look forward to a date with Missouri in the Big 12 Championship Game. That kind of run of tough teams was the reason I thought Texas would end up with at least one loss, and as good as the Red Raiders looked Saturday, I have to say the same thing about them. Still, I’ll be rooting for Mike Leach’s darkhorses from Lubbock to keep the magic alive, if only so his success can remove the stigma pirate fetishists have long been saddled with.

--Next week’s big game: ‘Bama tries to stay at the top of the polls, by keeping their perfect record intact at LSU. It’s the first of three tough tests, the Tide will have to overcome to play for a championship under Coach SatanSaban.

NFL Round-up:

--In my initial NFL wrap-up column, I touted the Dolphins and especially the Falcons as two young teams on the rise, with impressive rookie coaches, who just might continue to confound preseason expectations. Four weeks later and they still look good.

The Falcons, behind former Jags defensive coordinator Mike Smith, are 5-3 and are a serious threat to win the NFC South, depending on how they play the Panthers and Bucs later in the season. Meanwhile, the ‘Phins are 4-4 behind Parcells chosen one, Tony Sparano, and though they likely won’t make the playoffs (they are last in their division), they seem to be well on the path to competing in the near future.

--Is Dallas dead? They sure look it. Though they still have a winning record at 5-4, they are in last place in their division, are without several key players, and now have a QB controversy on top of everything. With Tony Romo still out, the offense struggling, and both Brad Johnson and Brooks Bollinger playing give-away with the football, the team appears rudderless. In that division, they can’t afford to sink any further, but there’s no help on the horizon – at least for a couple of weeks until Romo gets back. By then it may be too late.

Random Rant: Zen & The Art Of Football Viewing

This is where I rant. About random stuff. You might've guessed that from the title.

The gift of modern technology has blessed football fans in many ways over the years, from the original TV broadcasts which brought the games into homes in a way radio never could, to instant replay, and right on down the line. The ridiculous creature comforts of today -– tiny, omnipresent on-screen scoreboard boxes, first down lines, even streaming fantasy stats -– make it easy to forget what is arguably the greatest leap of all time -- the advent of NFL Sunday Ticket in 1994.

Before that time, if you lived out of the area where your favorite team played (as I have since 1989), you had three choices if you wanted to see them play: 1) Pray they were lucky/good enough to be in either a nationally televised game or that they game happened to be shown in your area, 2) Go to a sports bar with a satellite dish to watch the game, or 3) Be disappointed.

I was actually lucky, because during the time I was in Boston at college and in Boulder after graduation, the Niners were such a good/popular team they were often on anyway. In fact, you knew going into each year they were good for three Monday night games, two Sunday night games, and plenty of late afternoon national games. It helped they played the late games, where’s there less competition, and also that NBC/CBS (whichever was covering the AFC) always used a NIner game -– of which they had two per year -– to jack up ratings by making it a national game. In short, I was spoiled.

Most other fans who lived out of town had to suffer the indignity of calling 1-800 numbers or staring at the Headline Sports ticker for score updates. So when it arrived, Sunday Ticket might as well have been the Holy Grail to football fans. Suddenly, it didn’t matter what game the stupid network chose to put on in your area. It didn’t matter if they played some crappy local matchup over a classic game going on at the same time (I dealt with this a lot growing up -– the Raiders were always on 1pm PDT even if their game sucked while Elway and Fouts were in a shootout at Mile High). Hell, it didn’t even matter if there several great games on at once -– you could watch them all.

But that’s the thing -– you can’t. There’s only so much you can swallow at once. Of course, we didn’t know that in those giddy early days. Like teens discovering the joys of a box of wine, we didn’t just get tipsy on our new delight, we gulped it down until our heads were splitting. Soon, it became clear there were limits (aren’t there always?) -- you have to know when to say when, or risk ruining a good thing. Thus, The Theory was born.

The core belief of The Theory is this: Two football games is the most you can watch and still have a clear idea what is going on in both at all times. The jump button is a big part of this (and the two-tuner receivers have added to that*), but the same is true at a sports bar – watching three games at once is the point when things become disjointed. You start to lose key bits of narrative – an injury update, a measurement, a key play here or there. But that’s not to say you can’t follow more than two games played at the same time. It takes a thoughtful, methodical approach, but I’m just the kind of lazy, underachieving loser who takes non-valuable time out my schedule to come up with approaches to these types of things.

See, while you can only truly follow two games at any one moment, games last much longer than a moment. They last over three hours, and each has its own unique rhythm and pace. Teams get out to big leads, allowing you to drop them from the rotation -– if the score tightens up later, they may re-join it. Some games move along more rapidly than others –- particularly quick games go to halftime early and may be dropped from the rotation temporarily, particularly slow games can be saved until later because the opportunity will still be available.

This brings up one of the key tenets of The Theory: Games which are closer to ending should be given rotation priority over games with more time left. Often this can be the overriding factor –- If three games are tied in 4th quarter, watch two with the least time left. This can change with the score, however. If one of those three hypothetical games was a one-point game (and therefore less like to go to OT), it should be given slight preference over a tie-game with about the same amount of time left.

The Theory is really like a constantly shifting organism –- Game A and B are in the rotation until Game B turns into a blowout and it is replaced with Game C. Soon after, the pace of Game A begins to slow down and it is replaced by Game D, which is speeding to a conclusion. By the time it’s done, Game A is a blowout, but Game B is tightening up, so that jumps in. And so on, and so on. It actually sounds like a lot of work written out like that. And maybe it is. But it’s a labor love.

New Stars:

While we're talking about football on TV, here are a couple of thoughts I've had this week on that subject:

--Sometime 'Inside the NFL' correspondent Jenn Brown -- on the show this week with a piece on the game in London last week -- is suddenly in the argument for "Who's the world's hottest female sportscaster. While I think she's certainly the kind of change we can believe in, this election season I'm still casting my vote for Erin Andrews. It comes down to the big issues: experience, and bigger tits.

--Speaking of sportscasters whose previous TV experience came outside of the sports world, there's a bright new star on the football color commentating landscape: Jesse Palmer, late of 'The Bachelor' and a former 3rd string QB in the NFL (including a brief stint with the Niners). Late last season, he did a few NFL games for FOX and displayed a lot of skill. This year, he's at ESPN, covering college football as both a studio analyst and color commentator on the Thursday night games with Chris Fowler. He's smart, funny, and makes his points without droning on or repeating himself unnecessarily.

----Osi Umenyura did a guest spot on 'Inside the NFL' this week, and while I know he has a whole lot of good football left in him, he already appears a better fit in the studio than former teammate and current NBC studio analyst Tiki Barber, who retired early just so he could announce. Umenyura was brutally honest, handled tough question deftly, showed uncommon insight, and a million dollar smile. You haven't seen the last of him on TV -- although you may have to wait 10+ years until you see him.


* Now you can switch away from a game and know that even if you “miss” something big while watching the other game, you’re still recording on the other tuner and can rewind the see what you’ve missed.