Gotta Have Skin in the Game

How can you be interested in a sport if you have no team in the hunt?

In the case of college football, I don’t know why I watch college football at all. If it were just for Rutgers, there would be no way I could watch it. It’s hard to get interested in a game for which your local representative plays so poorly. Speaking as a Rutgers alumnus, thank you very much but I’d rather have no football program at all than have to be embarrassed every week by Rutgers and the complacent Greg Schiano. Just to put perspective around how bad Rutgers really is, Schiano’s defense against the likes of Cincinnati was torched for 60 or so points while Connecticut just held them to 17 points. I could grab a couple of kids off the street who’d play better pass defense than Schiano’s sorry group in the secondary.

Nevertheless, I’m sitting here watching Michigan State start to pound Penn State (it’s now 21-10) . And why exactly? Well, Penn State after all has Joe Paterno as the head coach and it’s a clean program too, as far as anyone can tell. What’s not to like about Penn State? They always play defense and very seldom embarrass themselves. They are the anti-Rutgers.

Ohio State too in the Big Ten gets some of my attention if only because my son went to school in Ohio and I can recall a great time watching an OSU game in a shopping mall in Columbus. I also had a friend and co-worker whose daily fervor for the Buckeyes was easily enough to get me excited. But if it weren’t for those two teams, I wouldn’t be watching at all. You have to have a team in the hunt…some skin in the game. That rooting interest can spring from locale of course but only as modified by a team’s ownership and management and players from year to year. Oh yeah, and whether they win or not.

If loyalties depended entirely on wins and losses though, everybody’d be a Yankee fan. Happily for human nature and pocket books everywhere, that is not the case.

My chief interest this time of year goes to professional football, mostly, to be honest, because that’s where my skin in the game resides. We live in the New York area, of course, so why would I like any other team besides the Giants or Jets?

The answer lies in fantasy football, of course, a place to field my very own team. So my rooting interest this Thanksgiving was firmly with the Saints and Drew Brees, who had the skill and moxy to throw long down the field on a third down to hit Bobby Meachem in stride for about 60 yards before delivering a perfect strike to, who else, Lance Moore for a touchdown. And I managed to get a glimpse in the 4 o’clock game of Miles Austin, wide receiver for Dallas and Dem Crabs, racing around the end for about 60 yards and a TD against the Lions.

But overall it was a bad day. The Saints scored mostly on the ground and Jahvid Best didn’t play at all, making my decision to bench Ahmad Bradshaw look ridiculous, despite Coughlin’s foolish decision to punish him. My opponent didn’t fare too well either though, starting with Mark Sanchez, who didn’t exactly shine in the Jets victory over the Bungles. And his star player, Jacksonville’s Maurice Jones-Drew, has to face the Giants on Sunday, a matchup that should favor the Giants, who aren’t as yet totally decimated on the defensive side of the ball.

If I can be said to have a team at all in the NFL, it is the Giants, who are in trouble now after losing several key players to injuries. The Giants are owned by one of the most venerable football families in the universe, the Maras. They’ve won multiple Super Bowls and have brought us great players and great management too. They have a long-time philosophy that stresses the running game and defense. Their GM’s and coaches have generally excelled over the years. Although they might not quite match the Rooneys in Pittsburgh, they are a team well worthy of commanding my attention.

On the other hand are the Jets. Although I like the head coach, the owner’s a little too theatrical for me. He’ll always take the hit in my mind for Brett Favre becoming a Jet, thus single-handedly taking them out of the playoffs. Their GM is totally heartless, a reflection of ownership too, I guess, as he has shown year after year, most recently in the dumping of Leon Washington. The players themselves are a mixed bunch. They have a bunch of guys that are hard to warm up to, Bart Scott, Braylon Edwards, and yes, even Santonio Holmes and his remarkable elusiveness in the end zone. But their success is hard to ignore despite their frailties in the character department.

My point is, it’s easy to be an NFL fan, less so for NCAA football and, heretofore at least, it’s been almost impossible to follow any brand of basketball, be it NBA, NCAA or otherwise. Once again, those feelings can be directly traced to the sorry state of the Knicks, Nets, Rutgers and Seton Hall. If our local team in either MLB league were the likes of the Chicago Cubs, it’d surely affect your love for the game and the league bringing it to you.

Happily for basketball fans, the Knicks mismanagement has considerably improved and the Nets have changed dramatically for the better. The Knicks finally have some players D’Antoni actually likes and the Nets under Avery Johnson have begun to show some predilection for playing on the defensive side of the ball. I’m enjoying basketball again.

I now find myself watching the local games, the NBA Network and yes, I even crave the witticisms of Charles Barkley. I even joined a public fantasy basketball league. Who’s next? Hubie Brown?

A Disappointing NFL

Disappointing. That’s what this year’s NFL season has been thus far. There are just too many bad teams, very bad teams, to be honest.

Let’s take this past week’s slate of games. The Jets beat Oakland 38-0. The Chargers beat the Chiefs 37-7. The Colts took the Rams 42-6. The Pack killed the Browns 31-3. The Pats trounced the Bucs in London, of all places, 35-7. The Bengals walked all over the Bears 45-10, but it was somewhat of an anomaly, the Bears just having a very bad game. The Skins only lost by 10 to the Eagles but they were never really in the game.

So… of 13 games on the schedule (6 teams had byes), there were 7 totally boring games. The losers were never in it, not for one moment. There wasn’t even any anticipation of the game being close. Worse still, of the 6 teams on byes, 3 of them are awful, Detroit, Tennessee and Jacksonville. If they had played, it would have been a bleak Sunday indeed.

Why is the disparity so bad this year between the haves and have nots? It’s ownership in most cases, and not in a financial sense so much as in an intellectual sense. The bad teams have made bad decisions, on players, especially quarterbacks, and also, and maybe even more importantly, on managers and coaches, and thus on game plans. They’re bad, and they don’t have good prospects for ever being good, not soon anyway. Maybe in the next life.

Take the Skins, please. Dan Snyder’s been the owner for quite some time. His tenure has been marked by frequent changes, in head coaches, in players, and their quarterback is awful. Jason Campbell’s only gift is height.

The Raiders are next in line for some bashing. Al Davis is behind the times. He’ll never catch up. Every year, he drafts the fastest player he can and hopes for the best. His head coach just beat up one of his assistants. His quarterback is the worst in the league, Jamarcus Russell. He too is tall and beefy…..and that’s about it.

The Tampa Bay contingent let their good head coach go and elevated a fellow who turned a good pass defense into a sieve. The QB they’re playing now, Josh Johnson, runs around a lot, and yes, pretty much like the proverbial chicken with his head cut off.

Detroit is perhaps the poster-boy for horrible ownership and management year after year. There may be hope for the Chiefs, who will slowly recover after years of Herman Edwards’s tutelage. Tennessee will come back too, but will Vince Young really be their savior at that all-important quarterback spot?

There may be hope for the Jaguars but their long-time head coach, Jack Del Rio, will never win any contests for coaching acumen. The Rams too can have hope for the future; it’s just the immediate present that will be extremely challenging. Even the Bills may eventually right themselves, but I don’t know precisely why I feel that way, maybe because they always wind up being at least mediocre.

You hear a lot that any team can beat any other on any given day. That point is proven too, but only every once in a while, most recently by the Eagles losing to the Raiders. Every once in a blue moon, even a good head coach seems to lose his mind in the heat of a losing battle. In that particular game, Andy Reid forgot he had a running game (once again) even though he was facing a team with no run defense. Color him hard-headed.

What’s most upsetting to me are those franchises who spend big money on bad quarterbacks, or those who year after year will draft a wide receiver with their number one pick. Other franchises will ignore their obvious problems. Some teams never field a decent pass defense; others can never stop the run, year after year. It’s friggin’ inexplicable. But troubling.

The Giants fix their problems right away. So do the Jets. They’ve been right on their big acquisitions at quarterback, and at most other places too. Both Coughlin and Ryan are good coaches with good staffs. Every week, New York fans of either the Green or the Blue can feel that their respective teams will be in the hunt. Problems that develop, such as the Giants pass defense or the Jets offensive headaches of the moment will be addressed.

Football is unique, of course, with respect to the number of injuries that occur every week, and some are very serious injuries to key players. The Jets, for example, just lost Kris Jenkins and Leon Washington for the season. Those two can’t really be replaced. Their effects will be reflected in the final standings.

Oakland couldn’t take advantage of the Jenkins loss but other teams almost surely will. The Jets were also smart enough to protect their young quarterback and rely on their running game. They were also quick to pick up another defensive lineman; not all teams would have been so quick to assess their reserves and react. It’s a very good sign of their commitment to winning.

The Giants’ pass defense problem is more problematical. Injuries in the secondary are playing a part but their linebackers don’t really seem to have the speed or coverage ability that will be needed against the better passing teams. Their last two losses to the Saints and Cards were entirely predictable but they’ll still prevail against lesser squads.

The Jets have to face Miami again next week while the Giants have the Eagles on tap. Neither game will be a gimme by any means. The Jets were victimized by the Fish not too long ago while the Eagles are one of those strong passing teams, one of those teams quite capable of ringing the G-Men up for a few to several touchdowns.

How both teams react to these challenges will be quite telling, I think, both to guage their intellect and character.