OK, break it up. Move along, nothing more to see here. Parade’s over.
Giants fans can now await the 2008 schedule. And they can fully expect that as NFL champs and a New York team the Giants, more than ever, will be a TV money team. They’ll be a 4:15 team, a Monday night ESPN team, a Sunday night NBC team, a Thursday night NFL Network team.
Giants tickets next season will become the perfect gift for the school and work night wanderers in your life. The NFL, having sold its sense of common decency to TV, will sustain its habit of punishing the fans of Super Bowl champs. Entering this past season as an 8-8 team, only four of the Giants’ eight home games began at 1 p.m. This time next year, that should seem like a lot.
The fans of the worst teams – the ones TV can live without – will get all the sensible times, the 1 p.m. starts. Fans of the Falcons and Ravens and Chiefs will be treated like well-adjusted and intelligent humans. Giants’ fans will be treated as if they’re night crawlers.
It’s the NFL’s way of saying, on behalf of its team owners, “Thank You, TV networks, for making us so greedy that we’re no longer able to feel shame.”
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Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve:
Fox’s Chris Myers should have given Bill Belichick what he deserved. During their postgame chat, as Belichick continued to give short, graceless responses, Myers should’ve said, “You know what? My dignity is worth more than this. Back up to you guys.”
And the NFL should have given Belichick what he deserved, too. With :01 left and the field finally cleared of the premature rush Belichick instigated, ref Mike Carey should have flipped on his field microphone, then announced that Belichick has been penalized, five yards, for delay of game.
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Tell me that this is what the NFL intended for its replay rule:
With 11:07 left in the third quarter of the Super Bowl, the Pats, up 7-3, punted from the Giants’ 44.
Commercials ran for the next three minutes, during which time the Pats’ coaching staff detected that Giants’ special teamer Chase Blackburn, running toward his sideline and away from play, appeared to have been half-a-step short of the sideline before the snap.
Back from commercials, Belichick threw a challenge flag, even though there was no call to challenge. The game again stopped for several minutes to review far away evidence as to whether one or both of Blackburn’s feet were still on the field.
Finally, Carey announced a 12-men-on-the-field penalty against the Giants. First-and-10, Pats, on the New York 39.
That such use of the replay rule could have played a significant role in determining the winner and loser of a Super Bowl seems especially absurd in that the rule was never intended to be used in such a way.
If this was what the replay rule was designed for, there wouldn’t be a replay rule.
The replay rule was introduced to reverse egregiously incorrect calls. Yet, how often is it used that way? One in 20 times?
Had the Pats scored after that call, then eventually won a close game, Super Bowl XLII, one of the most memorable, would have been recalled as a colossally bad joke – a championship game determined by the unintended application of a rule to adjudicate a microcosmic irrelevancy.
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Caution, Role Models At Work:
Sunday on MSG, a high school girls’ basketball game – nice! – between Trenton and Trenton Catholic opened with a come-on about how the teams’ head coaches, both adult males, don’t like each other, how they even trash-mouthed each other in that day’s Trenton newspaper.
Yet, MSG’s three adult male announcers seemed far more excited than distressed by this. Not one word of disapproval was spoken about the coaches’ pathetic behavior.
At game’s end, as the opposing players shook hands, the two coaches avoided each other. One exalted as if he’d just won an Academy Award, never making a move toward the other coach.
The other coach disappeared, bringing an “Elvis has left the building” crack from one of MSG’s adult voices, a laugh from another.
Next, Player of the Game Lakeisha Sutton, just a kid but way ahead of the adults on this day, was asked about the bad blood between the coaches.
“That’s gotta stop,” she said.
