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.

HarBowl

All the talk in the NFL right now is about the HarBowl on Thanksgiving night. The niners are playing the Ravens and the Harbaugh brothers are (head) coaching against each other for the first time. NFL put this game on Thursday night for this storyline, but now this contest is also a premier game of the week since the niners are much better than expected under Jim. Not only are they good, they actually have a better record than the Ravens at 9-1. The Ravens are still the favorites here since the game is at Baltimore and since the jury is still out on the niners. San Francisco's defense is definitely great, but their offense - especially the passing game is still shaky. The Ravens are inconsistent themselves, but their offensive talent is a little more legit than the niners. If the niners win this game on a short week, we better put them in the contender circle for good. They are not Packers yet - no team is. But this game can establish them firmly in the second tier with the other good teams. They will still not have a Drew Brees or Tom Brady playing QB for them, but they may have the best defense in a league without many dominant defenses this season and that should count for something. This game should be a great night-cap on Thanksgiving.

The day games feature the usual dates in Dallas and Detroit, but Detroit is good this year for a change. This makes the turkey day games really interesting as all 6 teams involved won last week. Of course, Dallas should still win against Miami easily, but the Dolphins have been playing way better lately. Undefeated Green Bay is going into Detroit and that should be a good one. Nobody will be surprised if the Packers lose as Detroit will be up and ready for this one against their division rival. Detroit had a great game last weekend and they might have even found a running game in Kevin Smith. The NFC north has some of the best arms in the league with Matthew Stafford, Aaron Rodgers and the now injured Jay Cutler. This game should feature a lot of bombs from both QBs and should be a lot of fun. The Bears were playing really well too and it's too bad Cutler is hurt. Denver released Kyle Orton - a former Chicago Bear, today. It's a smart move. They are hoping Chicago will pick him up and pay the rest of his salary saving Denver some cash. John Elway decided to cut Orton, but is still refusing to completely endorse Tim Tebow. Elway seems to be caught between a rock and a hard place.

In college, USC beat Oregon by a field goal to put the BCS in a high-speed spin cycle. Now the top 3 teams are all from the SEC and the prospect of a Alabama-LSU rematch looms large. Arkansas is third and they play LSU next. Things will get really interesting and confusing if Arkansas upsets LSU and Alabama wins the iron bowl against Auburn. In that case, Arkansas has to be ahead of LSU and LSU beat Alabama. But Alabama can't drop from 2 to 3 after a win against Auburn. Also Alabama has already beaten Arkansas. This means Alabama will jump to 1, Arkansas 2 and LSU 3. This is not because that's how they rank on the field, but because that's the ranking that looks the least stupid. If this is not an argument for a playoffs, nothing else can be. I am not a BCS hater. In a non-playoff world, BCS is a decent effort to implement a system, but it just doesn't work because it's dealing with a problem that is intractable. So you need a playoff and you need to decide all this on the field. But I have to add that I do see the argument that playoffs will dilute the value of these weekly games. If there was a playoffs down the road, I will not care all that much about the LSU-Arkansas match-up this weekend. The fact that this game can eliminate LSU does adds a lot of juice to the contest and that's not a bad thing. But that juice is not worth all the squeeze and we need the playoffs in College football, period.

Thank the honeymoon

When somebody is new at their job, we always use the term "he is still in his honeymoon period". San Francisco 49'ers coach Jim Harbaugh had a classic honeymoon moment last weekend. The niners were leading and playing really well against the Cowboys when they stalled at about the 37 yard line and settled for a 55 yard field goal with over 11 minutes to go in the game. The kicker nailed it, but the boys committed a penalty - the kind of penalty that would typically be considered back-breaking. These are the penalties that gives life to a stalled offense and drags the defense back on to the field and asks them to now defend an even shorter field. It was a 15 yarder and offered the ball to the Niners offense at the 22 yard line. Harbaugh surprisingly declined the penalty and instead decided to tag it to the kick-off. I was shocked to say the least. Sure, it was a long field goal, but it was a 15 yard penalty. Even if the offense didn't move an inch from there, it would have given the niners a 39 yard field goal, which you would assume is pretty easy to convert in this day and age of HGH enhanced athletes. If it was a 5 yard penalty, it would have been a different story. The worst case scenario would have been a retry on a 50 yard field goal and who knows if the kicker converts again. But he declined a 15 yarder. This decision basically meant Harbaugh had no faith in his offense. The only way this penalty was going to hurt the niners was if the offense either fumbled the ball, threw an interception or got sacked way behind or sacked multiple times and gave it's kicker another long field goal. All things a decent offense and an average QB can avoid.

Bad things can happen and does happen to NFL offenses every Sunday, but you can't play or coach scared. There is a difference between being conservative and being scared and Harbaugh was scared in this case. He was scared to put the ball in his offense and Alex Smith's hands. He was scared that his offensive line was going to screw up. All valid concerns given the talent on that side of the ball, but if you can't accept the ball on their 22- yard line, you have bigger problems. Being conservative or even scared is not going to save your season in that case. To be fair to Harbaugh, Brian Bilick on TV was not sure if he should take the penalty either. The logic was that you don't take points off the board. I am sure there is some unwritten rule somewhere for coaches on this and thats why Bilick was very familiar with it. But Harbaugh followed the rule to the T. The niners went up 24-14 at that point and the Cowboys went onto tie the game and won it in overtime. Interestingly, Harbaugh was scared for his offense and his team losing the game, not for his job. From a job security perspective, it was safer to take the ball back because a turnover then would have been Alex's or Gore's fault and not his. By making this decision, it was all Harbaugh's fault. Thats a level of cunning he doesn't have to resort to in his 2-Nd game as a head coach and hopefully never. But it is also because this is just his second game, that he gets away easy. He better be glad he is still in his honeymoon period because if Mike Singletary or Mike Nolan had done this closer to the end of their coaching tenure, the niner faithful would have roasted them over the coals.

This game also made a hero out of Tony Romo and rightfully so as he came back with a broken rib and played real well to put the boys over the top. He went from goat to a hero just like that and all the toughness questions were erased overnight. Thanks to his honeymoon, Harbaugh is not facing too many tough questions either. The niner faithful is still busy scheming how to get Alex Smith out of town! Across the bay, the Raiders are also dealing with the aftermath of a tough defeat they snatched from the jaws of victory. They let the Bills score in every possession in the second half to the tune of 35 points and lost a game they were dominating in the first half. Jason Campbell played real well even without 3 of his top receivers and his top TE. I don't ever remember the top 4 pass catchers being hurt and out. Good for the Raiders, none of them are that good anyways! They seem to have replaced them rather easily. The Bills and Ryan Fitzpatrick are playing great right now. Next week's Bills-Pats contest should be an high-octane affair and might surprise us just like last week's Bills-Raiders. In Carolina, Cam Newton continues to impress. He threw for more than 400 yards again. I am glad I predicted it will happen again, though I didn't expect it so soon against the world champions. He is hosting the Jaguars this Sunday and Blaine Gabbert is going to start for the Jags. That an interesting storyline for the weekend for sure. Arizona Cardinals lost a tough one on the road, but the overall outlook for the team still looks good. Kolb is doing well and the Rams are not doing great. So the Cards can easily make it to the playoffs if they don't self-destruct.

Overall, the Lions, Redskins and the Bills are looking better than expected and the Rams, Chiefs and the Colts are looking worse than expected. Week 3 will clarify things much more. Bring on week 3!