It’s hard for more than a pimp out here. Even your run-of-the-mill, mostly decent, non-human-trafficking NFL fan is facing hard times, but let nobody tell you that them times ain’t interesting.
As the 2017 NFL regular season is close to wrap up it behooves us, those who still haven’t given up on the most entertaining and deeply flawed sports league in the world, to take stock of the most interesting stories to have transpired since August last. We’ll take care of the meta, serious stuff first, and then nerd out on the action:
1) The NFL is dying. We remaining NFL fans are like a guy who has a beloved suped-up, super fun muscle car that, after a long and legendary run, is falling apart. Although it still runs, the trained ear can hear the death rattles. The mechanics can only patch things up for so long. Eventually that engine, that suspension, that everything is gonna have to be taken in and rebuilt, top to bottom, and it's gonna cost an arm and a leg.
The single, solitary way the NFL is going to remain a leading sport in this country, let alone retain its perch at the top of the pile, is to fix the head trauma issue. Much like the problems of society at large, there ARE solutions out there that could fix or at least greatly ameliorate the problem, but the powers that be ain’t about that life, and there is zero chance that the current regime of the NFL will adopt these measures. It is becoming increasingly difficult, for anyone with morals, to condone what’s happening to the players we use for our diversion – no matter how handsomely some of them are compensated for it. It’s getting harder to ignore the fact that many of those who were our golden heroes of toughness and grace at thirty are diminished husks of rage and befuddlement at fifty.
Therefore, as fewer and fewer parents consent to send their children to get long-lasting head trauma, eventually the NFL will go the way of boxing, but way worse. See, boxing, for all the fancy training systems they have nowadays, is a low-tech, low-overhead proposition: Two guys (or gals, please don't hit me, Ms. Laila Ali), a ring (which is actually square but never mind that now) the size of a small room, and some more room for paying customers to gather round and watch. A single NFL game is a monstrous undertaking in comparison: At the very least 92 players, more than an acre of land just to play on, and that’s without all the hi-tech required to deliver the experience to the viewers at home in a pleasing, easy-to-follow manner. Both talent pool and viewership will dwindle to the point of near-irrelevance. The dazzling heights of athletic performance we take for granted, 21 weeks a year, may be thing of the past within a decade.
In response, amidst much blather of taking the issue seriously, the worst commissioner in all of sports hands out one-week suspensions for intentional hits to the head way after a play was over, and has the temerity to demand $50M a year and a private jet for life for his continued disservice. (Eventually he only got $4M/yr in guaranteed money, with the rest of up to $40M/yr total tied to financial benchmarks the league’s not likely to make.) Ratings are falling, and will continue to fall as more "economically anxious voters" realize this generation of (mostly black) football players isn’t interested in bojangling for their entertainment and keeping their mouths shut while their brothers and sisters are shot in the streets like it ain’t no thang.
So some in Trumpland are taking their lead from the Tangerine Tantrum Thrower (who only hates the NFL because it wisely declined to let him buy a team) and are turning their back on Sunday football, and ratings continue to mostly decline. As entire teams took a knee in protest of police violence, or in a “show of solidarity”, the man who started it all (OG Colin Kaepernick, and put some respect on that name when you say it), is still without a job while vastly inferior signal-callers start and backup all around the league, including on some teams with putative playoff aspirations. #IJS.
2) In related news, is it just me or is the number of marquee players who missed significant time or won’t be making it to the post-season (aka the main event) at all exceptionally high this year? Unlike the head trauma issue (which can be fixed with stricter rules, serious enforcement and radically better protection gear, which isn’t being adopted because, well, a big ball of foam padding outside the helmet would look goofy as fuck, and the ones running the show prefer CTE to a less-telegenic product) this is something I do not see a solution for. The human ligament system was not designed to carry these loads at these stress levels without snapping often. It just wasn’t. But walking with a tight hitch in your step when you’re 50 is one thing, and walking around at 50 unable to remember your grandkids’ names is quite another. If the game is brutal only on the body, enough people will be willing to remain engaged.
So now that that’s out of the way, and if I haven’t bummed you out yet, let’s talk actual football, because this season has been all kinds of interesting. True, some things remained the same – the Patriots are on track to host the AFC title game, should they reach it, Pittsburgh is strong, the Browns suck; but aside from that – few people saw all the curveballs coming this year.
Ram! Bam! Thank You Ma’am!
In 2016, the Rams returned to Los Angeles after a 21 year stretch representing St. Louis, and opened their new age in town in the most inauspicious way, going 4-12 and scoring a sorry-ass 14 points a game behind the rookie they gave up the farm to trade up for in the draft, Jared Goff. In 7 games in which he actually played, Goff completed a miserable 54.6% of his passes for only 5 TDs to 7 picks. Young man had bust written all over him.
In 2017, with no splashy additions in the talent department (save a preseason trade for WR Sammy Watkins, who isn’t tearing it up but is preventing opponents from effectively covering other receivers on the team), Goff is a completely different player. He is completing over 62% of his passes, for 24 TDs and only 7 INTs, and has led the Rams to 10 wins in 14 games and an almost certain playoff berth, maybe even a 1st round bye. Most astounding of all, the Rams, the worst-scoring team in the league a year ago, are the most potent offense in the league this season, scoring 31.3 points per game. When the same Rams, then in St. Louis, transformed from 24th in scoring in 1998 to “The Greatest Show on Turf” in 1999, it was considered an unmatchable turnaround. This is simply inconceivable.
So how did it happen? Two lines: The sideline and the O-line. Head Coach Jeff Fisher, who hadn’t shown a spark of competence since Steve McNair, Jevon Kearse and Eddie George literally carried him to within a yard of a title 18 years ago, was finally released from his duties. Rookie HC Sean McVay, after three years of breaking franchise records as Offensive Coordinator in Washington (we don’t say the name of that franchise here), brought in a pair of opposites to serve under him: A seasoned old-school veteran in silver-haired fox Wade Phillips to coach the defense, and a young, new-age whippersnapper in QB wizard Matt LaFleur, fresh off coaching Matt Ryan to a juggernaut season as QBs coach with the Falcons, to shake up the phlegmatic offense. The defense under Phillips became more than decent (5th in points allowed, 12th in yards allowed, with a boost from rookies like S John Johnson and NT Tanzel Smart) and the offense joined the 21st century and got creative.
Of course, creative is not enough; you need the pieces, the hardware. So McVay got himself some foundation blocks for a capable offense (also known as offensive linemen, who really don’t get the props they deserve) in Center John Sullivan and the great Andrew Whitworth at OT. Now that Goff actually has time to throw, and receivers have time to complete routes, McVay and LaFleur, aided by the contributions of rookie WR Cooper Kupp and free agent WR Robert Woods, have unleashed a balanced and pretty unstoppable force on the league – featuring RB Todd Gurley, who finally has the blocking and the credible passing threat to justify his 2015 pre-draft hype, with almost 1200 yards and 13 TDs in 14 games this year.
The Rams, fresh off an emphatic spanking of the disintegrating Seattle Seahawks, leading the league in defense-adjusted-value-over-average by a wide margin (again, in bizarro-world contrast to last season), finish the season at Tennessee and against the 49ers. A victory in either game gives them the division championship and their first playoff appearance since the 2004 season. If Tinsel Town actually wants a football team (let alone two), it couldn’t ask for a more Hollywood-ready, rags-to-riches, last-to first fairytale to get behind.
City of Brotherly Hope
A similar story, albeit one with a tragic detour, is unfolding in the City of Brotherly Love. It’s a somewhat lesser version of the above: The Eagles weren’t as awful as the Rams in 2016, going 7-9, and rookie QB Carson Wentz, whom Philadelphia likewise traded up for a hefty price to pick in the draft, wasn’t considered as obvious a bust. Wentz had flashes of brilliance in ’16, started from week 1 and completed over 62% of his passes, but threw 14 picks to only 16 TDs, leading many to doubt if the Eagles had done well in surrendering so many future draft picks for a guy who, all due respect, played for North Dakota State, against inferior competition.
2017 dispelled all those doubts. Wentz actually completed slightly fewer of his passes this season (just over 60%), but who cares when you double your TD total, halve your INT tally, and do it through just 13 games while posting an NFL-best 11-2 record? Nobody saw that coming. Alas, in the third quarter of that 13th game, a microcosm of his entire season (underwhelming accuracy at 57%, but 4 TDs to just 1INT in just under three quarters of football and the eventual dub), Wentz suffered a serious injury to his knee ligaments in a goal-line collision that ended his season.
Philadelphia, which hasn’t had a serious Super Bowl contender since 2004, will have to hope that backup Nick Foles can recapture his 2013 magic (27 TDs, a shockingly low 2 INTs in 10 games started) rather than his form the rest of his career since. The first test was passed successfully, but it was against the woefully underachieving New York Giants. To reach the Super Bowl, Foles will have to do better.
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Aight, I know not everyone is as big a longform freak as your humble narrator, so I’mma break it up here and post the rest of my scintillating (and humble!) observations in a part 2. Thank you for reading and please show some love below.
(Thanks to Jon Ledyard of http://www.insidethepylon.com and to my homies Yoav Stein, who also read the draft, and Ariel Greisas, for their thoughts on the leading stories of the season).