After an insane weekend of blown ACLs, blowouts and blown calls, without further ado here are the highlights and low-lights…
HIGHLIGHTS
- Torrey Smith-Playing with an unimaginable heavy heart Torrey Smith turned into one of the most courageous performances in NFL history. For someone to lose their younger brother hours before game-time and then not just playing, but putting up the kind of numbers he did (127 yards and two touchdowns), is unimaginable. He was the spark that fuelled the Ravens all night and he made clutch play after clutch play all night. For what he did, what it meant to his team and the millions of people of around the World who resonated with his story , it might just be the single most inspirational performance in the history of sports.
- The Music City Miracle 2.0- The Lions-Titans was not only packed with wall-to-wall entertaining plays for 4 quarters and an overtime, but it was an absolute delight to watch Tennasse turn back the clock and pull from its bag of tricks the old Music City Miracle lateral on the kickoff return. Now while this play is still a sore spot for Bills fans, everyone else must have been amused to the device employed with success once more in Tennasse. Take solace Bills fans, at least this time it was clearly a lateral.
- The Raiders Comeback- I would like to clarify from the outset, that I am in no way shape or form a Raiders fan. I found the late Al Davis’ later career decisions to be incredibly offensive which included the always classy moves of routinely firing coaches in their first year and calling plays from the owner’s box. Moves like these have cast a dark light on the Raiders franchise and made them largely irrelevant for many seasons now. However, on Sunday the Raiders did something they haven’t done in a long while, played as a team, played with heart and overcame an incredibly strong performance by Ben Rothelisberger and came back to beat the heavily favoured Steelers. I thought that when Heyward-Bey was knocked out of the game on a non-call in the endzone, that the Raiders were done. Well they weren’t, and to my incredible surprise the Raiders came together and seemed to actually play for their fallen teammate. A Carson Palmer touchdown and two Janikoswki field goals later the Raiders had pull it out.
- New York Giants winning with injuries- After losing to the Cowboys at home and needing a miracle comeback to beat the Bucs, few had given the Giants a chance to win against Carolina (myself excluded). And why not, Cam Newton and the Panthers were just coming off a big win again the Saints, and the Giants, in addition to not playing particularly well to start the season, were all besieged with injuries at key positions. However, not only did the Giants prove the naysayers wrong, they absolutely STOMPED the Panthers in their own house. Say what you will about Eli Manning, but he has a way of bringing the best out of his teammates no matter who they are. Season after season he takes unknowns like Hakeem Nicks, Victor Cruz, Mario Manningham, Kevin Boss, (and now Martellus Bennett) and makes them into playmakers with eye popping numbers. The ability to do this is the hallmark of all the greats, and in this department Eli Manning is second to none.
LOWLIGHTS
- Derrelle Revis’ blown ACL- If you thought the hopes for success this season were on thin-ice before, the loss of all world corner Derrelle Revis sinks this team. Mark Sanchez is at best a mediocre quarterback, Tim Tebow is nothing more than a sideshow, the wide receiving corps is a joke, the once heralded running game is terrible (trust me I have Shonn Greene on my fantasy team), and the defense that was holding on by a thread, much like Revis’ ACL, just snapped with this injury. Why? Well in games Revis plays the defense is able to hold offenses completion percentages in the mid-fifties. Without him that number skyrockets into the 70s. There is no way this Jets squad gets anywhere allowing that. Period. Season over Jets fans, sorry.
- Tampa Bay Buccaneers play calling- When a team is down by two scores late in the fourth quarter what do they do? Do they continue to try and run the ball when it has not worked all game or do they turn to the passing game and try to win the game through the air? They throw right, everyone at every level of football knows this. However, for whatever reason the Bucs coaching staff absolute refused to adhere to basic common sense and insisted to ineffectually pound the ball on the ground even though they had no success with it against the staunch Cowboys defense. I know Greg Shianno has been criticized for his decision to blitz his players when the other team has already won the game (and rightfully so, play defense before the last minute of the game moron), but his decision to pursue the rungame despite the circumstances is equally if not more disturbing.
- All the Missed Hits- This weekend’s aforementioned missed call on the blow to the head to Heyward-Bey in the Raiders-Steelers game was by no means the only missed call of this weekend as Matt Shaub almost had his head taken off (and in fact lost part of his ear) in the Denver game. I didn’t think that things could get much worse after the hit Golden Tate laid on Sean Lee in the Dallas-Seattle game last week, but here we are. It truly is amazing that a league that generates billions of dollars and is probably valued at several trillion dollars, is willing to jeopardize its own players’ safety by allowing its players, the ones that are responsible for the money the league rakes in, to keep taking these vicious hits because they refuse to shell out a couple of bucks to get the best officials possible to be in charge of safety on the field. This situation would be comical if the NFL did not just come out and declare player safety as one of its most paramount objectives, since they did however, its just humiliatingly tragic.
- The end of the Seattle-Green Bay game- Who would have thought that a virtual non-name like Golden Tate would be in the headlines two weeks in a row, but this is the new look-replacement refs era of the NFL where anything is possible. A week after lucking out by getting away with a dirty cheap shot an Cowboys linebacker Shaun Lee, Golden Tate is back in the headlines in the most talked about NFL game of the season. At the end of the Seahawks-Packers game on Monday night, not only did Tate blatantly shove a Green Bay defender out of the way, an offensive pass interference call made by any competent person alive, but he was awarded a touchdown when Mr. Magoo now working as a replacement referee decided to award him a touchdown despite the fact that M.D. Jennings had already intercepted it. There is not much more I can say about this that has not already been said but I will say two things. First, Golden Tate wherever you are you need to go out and buy a lottery ticket, you are the most mediocre overachiever since Jeremy Lin, so try and cash in while you can. Second, by allowing these incompetent officials to keep incompetently officiating is only going to do damage to the NFL in the longrun. In the short term, maybe not because it is a horrible train wreck that everybody wants to see, but after a while people are going to get tired of looking at the chared wreckage and the league is going to start losing money. The league will either lose dollars directly due to lost advertising, lost fan attendance or perhaps most obviously having to pay the real refs more due to the loss of leverage the league incurs due to public outcry or indirectly when current and former NFL players and their lawyers start to win law suits based on the NFL’s lack of safety. Either way the longer this goes the worse off the NFL will be.
