Pats and the weak one

What happened on Thursday to Hoodie and Brady is quite rare. Alex Smith and the Kansas City Chiefs handled them rather easily and that just doesn’t happen in Foxboro on championship banner unfurling, season opening, Thursday nights. This game started off very much according to script after a rather showy ceremony where the Pats celebrated all their championships, including the latest one. They earned it of course and we can’t really complain. Not after what the Falcons did in the Super Bowl. Then the game started and Brady drove them down the field to score as he always does. The Chiefs fumbled the ball and gave it right back to the Pats on Kareem Hunt’s first NFL carry. What an inauspicious beginning to Hunt’s career if you are a superstitious person like me.  This is how Pats have been wining for years. They are the better team most of the days, but they don’t have to be. They just don’t make mistakes and they induce the other team in to such mistakes. In football, more than any other sport, mistakes make a huge difference between winning and losing, sometimes winning and losing big. The ball and breaks always seem to go the Pats way. It’s no luck if it keeps happening repeatedly because that means the Pats are doing things a certain way causing the ball to bounce their way.

The Pats drove the ball again after the fumble and seemed to score on an impressive Gronk reception. Seemed like any other typical Thursday night in Foxboro. But the review pulled the ball back as it showed that the ball hit the ground. The drive surprisingly stalled as the Chiefs stopped the Pats when Hoodie went for it on 4th down. This was great for the Chiefs who made the best use of this event. A Pats score there to go up 14-0, this game might have been a completely different story. Instead, the Chiefs steadied the boat and Hunt got going. They went toe-to-toe with the champs, cut down on the big mistakes, and kept scoring. Pats defense didn’t look great. As the second half got going, It became obvious that the Alex Smith led offense had the talent and juice to score. Alex Smith hit Tyreke Hill and Kareen Hunt on long bombs and this KC chiefs offense looked much more potent than it had looked anytime during the last few years. They may have some special weapons, though Jamaal Charles was no joke for stretches during those years. Their defense was better than the Pats for sure and got some key stops. They won it going away at the end with Alex Smith putting up gaudy numbers like Tom Brady and Brady looking a little, shall we say, old. It is too early to write-off Brady. But he does have to get old at some point. Lets see if it is this year.

It is good to have football back and to sit on the couch and watch a game that mattered. Of course, more games that matter are coming our way on Sunday. Not to mention, college football is getting going as well. The first 2 weeks of college football used to be for non-conference pasties. Now, they are switching that up too a little bit to have a strong kick-off week. They play a few big non-conference plays before going into the pasties for a week or two and then jump back into conference play. For instance, Alabama played Florida State last week on prime time and settled into Fresno State this week. Both are non-conference team, both FSUs, but completely different football pedigree. Of course, for Alabama, they all seem like pasties anyways. Coming back to the NFL, the Seattle at Green Bay and NYG at Dallas games are the big ones. I can’t believe Ezekiel Elliott got out of the suspension this year via the legal option much like Brady did 2 years back. I thought he didn’t have the time to pull it off, but the court somehow obliged and gave an early Christmas gift to a whole bunch of risk-taking fantasy football owners who picked EE in round 2 or higher.  Good for EE and his teams, both real and fantasy.

I still don’t think EE gets off the suspension as the arbitrator actually upheld the 6-gamer. The only question is, is he going to serve it later this season or next season like Brady did.  Unless the courts go a step or two further and suspend the suspension, he will miss 6 games at some point. I doubt the courts will do anything more to help EE, but then again, I am not an expert on law or the judges in Texas courts. All I know is, EE is a truly elite player, but this is a bad message to send to the society if he did indeed beat-up the woman. The guy seems like a bad dude and hope he changes his ways. It will also be interesting to see how the players handle these rules in the next NFL CBA. Right now, the Commish has a lot of power and he is not shy about using them. On the field, week 1 will be exciting for everybody. There is hope and excitement everywhere including some of the inferior teams. I am especially curious to see how the San Diego chargers look, what does Leonard Fournette do in Jacksonville and Kyle Shanahan in San Francisco do to their respective teams. The 49’ers host Cam and a tough Panthers’ team, but what can the offense can do? Last but not the least, I am always ready for some Brees. Can the Saints compete this year or they just going to be an offensive juggernaut as always with an added side-show in Adrian Peterson?  We will not have all the answers this weekend, but we will start to learn a lot. And sorry Browns and Jets fans, I still can’t think of anything to  get excited about your teams,

Pigs Get Fat. Hogs get Slaughtered!

I hate to be the guy quoting Mark Cuban. He is one of those guys who is smart because he is a billionaire and not exactly the other way around. He has mastered the art of making one sensible point out of every 4, but sounds thoughtful saying all 4 despite the obvious .250 batting average. He said about 2 years back that NFL is too greedy and is going to suffer some setbacks. He called it a hog and said it's ripe to get slaughtered. As a recent article on Yahoo sports pointed out, he might have gotten this one right. NFL is suffering through some horrible TV ratings and attendance this year due to a variety of reasons. This week's Thursday night football triggered this whole thought process in my mind as 2 horrible offenses were on display. I am glad Arizona earned a season-saving win and I am also 50% sure that with Carson Palmer, at least their offense would have looked less putrid. By the way, is there anything more nebulous than being 50% sure!

In any case, the game was played in front of a half empty Levi (I will come to that later) and the TV ratings cannot be good for a Blaine Williamson Gabbert versus Drew Emeric Stanton matchup - middle name references in honor of their criminally bad QB play. The two wizards combined for 286 yards. Thats like the equivalent of 50 yards in 1995 if you adjust for the passing game inflation in the NFL over the last 15 years. NFL shamelessly puts this on national TV and has been doing this for a few years now with the Thursday night football (TNF). Ironically, I felt like this was the first year the teams have finally learned to play semi-decent on Thursday nights, but a game like this is still a good reminder that TNF is a horrible idea. TNF epitomizes the greed that Cubes pontificated about. Aside from the scant disregard for player health and practice time for the teams, TNF also takes away one of the traditional strengths of the NFL - limited availability and appointment viewing.

With the upcoming Saturday schedule, we are going to have NFL on TV 4 nights a week soon and I can pick and choose when and what I want to watch. That usually affects the ratings in the long run, though the overall advertisement revenue might be good enough for the hogs on Park Avenue. People will start skipping Sundays now because their team has already played on Thursday or the best game of the week is on Saturday or whatever and the league will soon be dealing with a splintered and non-committal viewership thats not on the hook on Sundays. MNF has suffered a drop in ratings for 3 years in a row and nobody knows why. You can blame this year on the election cycle, presidential debates, Manning's retirement, and Brady's suspension, but I think the story goes deeper than that. The health problems this sport creates has driven a lot of viewers away already. I cringe at many hits during a game and I don't know how long I can keep watching like that. These are the same hits we were celebrating 10 years back due to our ignorance about what they were doing to an athlete's body. Ignorance was truly bliss in the NFL.

Rules have been changed to dilute the product, but it is still a brutally violent sport. It has a long way to go in this path of player safety and this sport won't even look the same in 10 years. It may or may not be interesting to us, but thats why the suits get paid the big bucks. They need to maintain an interesting product while injecting these athlete safety related changes periodically. But the real threat to the NFL is not that the game will look different on the field, but the players are going be very different too. Most parents are going to keep their kids out of it. This will drastically affect the pipeline delivering top athletes to the sport in addition to having a huge impact on it's popularity as most families won't have any personal connection to it. Football will become the next boxing where only the poor and the desperate kids take to it as a way out of their harsh lives. You could argue this is already a reality in sports in general and football in particular, but this will become more pronounced in the coming years for the NFL.

For a sport already facing these existential challenges, short-sighted and greedy maneuvers like TNF only make things worse. TNF helps nobody - not the players, ticket holders, or the TV audience. If TNF is the symbol of NFL's greed, their stadium deals and the ticket prices are the cherry on top. Levi stadium being half empty on a Thursday night is no surprise because going to watch that horrible Niner team is only going to cost you much more than what you have already paid for the tickets for very little enjoyment in return. You have to take time off work and fight through weekday traffic to get to the stadium by 5 PM Pacific to park, a simple act that will cost you routinely 50 bucks or more these days. A ticket for a mediocre seat that itself should cost no more than 50 bucks will cost you upwards of 100 bucks, or 200 bucks for a "premium" game like the season opener or when the Pats come to town. How can a horrible team play a "premium" game? And the watered down beer is 12 bucks. Basically, only the upper middle class and the rich can afford tickets in these modern day stadiums and they neither have the time nor the interest to sit there in the cold and cheer for a horrible team. Another side-effect of the TNF is, it's hard for the "road warriors" to make the trek for the game because it's in the middle of the week.

In our social network driven, self aggrandizing, A.D.D culture, most of these fans just want to see and be seen at big events. If it's not an "event," they want no part of it. So when the team is bad, everybody is trying to dump these tickets online and nobody who can afford it wants it. If it's a winning team with a superstar or two, then everybody wants in and the casual (but rich) fan is there. The team then rips you off even more every year and the prices keep going up with no signs of ever coming down. Sports are the only remaining monopoly operating in our supposedly democratic, marginally free-market society. There is nowhere to go but to your local team if you are a sports fan. They can do whatever they want and they often do. The personal seat licenses in football stadiums, with it's various disguised monikers, are the best example of a greedy monopoly making all the money it can with no conscience. NFL teams are charging 50,000  dollars for PSLs for the better seats in these new stadiums for a sport with 8 home dates! They force you to buy 2 more pre-season games that even the referees don't want to show up to. That is 25% of the regular season. So if you were to sell some of the tickets from the regular season to try and break even, it's virtually impossible between the pre-season overhead and other online transaction fees for those 5 or 6 games you can realistically sell. That is if the team is good. Good luck if they are bad!

NFL is the biggest hog on the farm and even the other fat pigs like the MLB, NHL, or the NBA are no match for their greed. Roger Goodell is spearheading a system now where the fans just can't win and if their team can't win either, fans get pissed off in a hurry. NFL is being dumb by leading us all down this dirt road to a point of no return and they will get slaughtered in due course. Either that or they are being super smart and are well aware they are sitting on a diminishing asset. Their response to the clear and present danger confronting their sport seems to be, let's make more money while we can and are milking us all to their heart's content before the oncoming slaughter.