Personal fouls … rarely show up in halftime or postgame analyses, but they sustain drives, kill drives, radically alter field position and, eventually, play significant roles in determining final scores.
Y OU know the drill. Before any televised football game, but especially during the fortnight before the Super Bowl, football experts, real and imagined, are asked what Team A or Team B “must do to win the game.”
The stock answers, often supported by irrelevant statistics, include, “They’ve got to control the line of scrimmage,” “Schmidlap has to be given time to operate out of the pocket,” and “turnovers will be the key.”
But you never, ever hear or read, “The team that best behaves itself will have a distinct advantage.”
By now, we should’ve been hearing and reading this for quite some time because the personal foul – 15-yard penalties rooted in self-indulgence – have in recent years determined the outcomes of as many college- and pro-football games as have team play and acts of individual skill.
Personal fouls, as a matter of self-control – not fate or skill – rarely show up in halftime or postgame analyses, but they sustain drives, kill drives, radically alter field position and, eventually, play significant roles in determining final scores.
The poor guy who unintentionally fumbles or drops a pass today runs the risk of being painted the goat. The guy who sustains the opponents’ drive with a late forearm to the head of a QB on third-and-12 more likely is to be championed as a member of Howie Long’s “All-Tough Guy Team.”
Remember the play late in the Bills-Dolphins playoff game on CBS, Jan. 2, when, in the fourth quarter and the Bills down by 10, Bill WR Andre Reed was ruled down on the one-foot line?
Reed, convinced he had scored, rose in a rage, bumping an official. His team was penalized 15 yards and Reed was ejected. Instead of scoring a TD from the one-foot line on the next play, the Bills were backed up 15 yards, then used clock time trying to score a TD – and without Reed – before settling for a field goal.
The Bills, with seconds left in regulation, would lose, 24-17, on a Doug Flutie fumble deep in Miami territory.
But here’s something you probably don’t remember: In the 1992 Super Bowl, the Bills trailed the Redskins, 17-0, in the second quarter, when Reed, thinking he’d been the victim of interference, reacted to the non-call by slamming his helmet to the turf. He was penalized 15 yards, taking the Bills out of field-goal territory.
Instead of 17-3, the score at the half remained 17-0 and Buffalo never had another opportunity to get back in the game. Seven years later, Mr. Reed provided conclusive proof that he still doesn’t get it. But who does? *T HE Super Bowl, being sports gambling’s biggest day of the year, also inspires exotic propositions. In some places, you can bet the coin toss, you can bet over-unders by the quarter and you can get odds on whether the first TD will be scored by the defense. With that in mind, we’ve established a TV line.
Odds on John Madden bashing the officials for a bad call: 1-5.
Odds on replays showing John Madden to have been mistaken: 3-1.
Odds on John Madden admitting his mistake: 45-1. WWF boss Vince McMahon is very proud that his business – presenting prime-time porn to kids on USA Network – is going so well. He’s so proud, he’s spending an estimated $1.6 million for an ad within today’s Super Bowl.
And McMahon’s especially proud that today’s ad, a wiseguy, shock-filled spot, will hint at the WWF’s particular form of “entertainment.” McMahon is fond of calling the modern WWF, “edgy,” which, based on the viewing, is a euphemism for profane.
Fox, long rumored to be eager to buy into the WWF, has no problem accepting McMahon’s money in exchange for peddling his junk to the nation’s largest TV audience.
“For any pundit to be critical is hypocritical,” said a Fox Sports spokesperson. “The same tongue-in-cheek humor and scripted action ‘violence’ is put forth on other TV shows and commercials.”
Not only is this rationalization the same one that McMahon now employs, it’s untrue. While TV grows more prurient and violent by the week, there is no prime-time show, especially one that so clearly targets children via content and commercials, that comes close to the particular brand of lurid programming that the WWF now provides and profits from.
In fact, if McMahon is so proud of what the WWF presents, why “hint” at it in a commercial? Why not show today’s Super Bowl audience exactly what the WWF now regularly presents to kids?
Why not show clips from recent shows, perhaps the crucifixion angle, or the castration angle, or the transsexual oral sex angle? Perhaps some of the negative stereotype ethnic angles, or racial gang angles, or the weekly sexual degradation of women, women now known to young WWF audiences as “hoes.”
As long as McMahon spent all this money on Super Bowl advertising, why doesn’t he advertise the over-sized, styrofoam middle fingers that he sells at WWF shows, then has the TV cameras capture on the hands of children?
Bold as he is, McMahon would never go that far in front of today’s Super Bowl audience, a massive national audience that would indeed be so shocked by what he has been selling to kids that there’d be a sustained national outcry against Fox, the WWF and USA Network.
Regardless, Fox would never allow him to go so far as to show exactly what the WWF sells, yet Fox will defend McMahon’s programming as no different than what appears all over TV.
Last week The New York Times described the WWF’s Super Bowl ad as, “a sassy retort to critics who complain about the pervasive violence and vulgar sexual imagery in wrestling.”
But why play “the critics” versus McMahon, as if there’s room for debate?
The fact of the matter is that the WWF on USA has become so lurid that no mass-circulation daily newspaper can describe exactly what’s seen and performed or quote exactly what’s said and chanted on these shows. Then consider that these shows appear in prime time, on national TV and they’re aimed at kids. Forget the critics, that speaks for itself.
