Neither the Bears nor the Lions are supposed to be very good this year. The Bears have poor coaching and a quarterback who is not quite ready for prime time. The Lions I do believe have been the worst team in pro football over at least the last ten years. While the Lions are supposed to be improved this year, especially on defense, the hole the Lions franchise is climbing out of is so deep that, basically, no one thinks the Lions can make the playoffs this year.
So in short this was a meaningless game. I was watching just to chill out and to see if I could get more interested in pro football this year than last year when I was mostly uninterested. But while trying to get interested I ran into the following fiasco.
A pro football player catches a pass in the end zone for a touchdown. But there is some incredibly dumb ass rule that results in the referees declaring that the catch was not really a catch! And they do this with a straight face; they don’t burst out laughing while announcing the catch was not a catch as I would. What’s especially funny (or pathetic) too is how awkward the discussion was among the announcers regarding the catch (or non-catch) as they tried to defend the indefensible: as they tried to defend the catch being declared to be not a catch. Check it out and see how Detroit Lions Wide Receiver Calvin Johnson was robbed of a catch which at the same time cost the Detroit Lions the win: EARTH TO NFL: HE CAUGHT THE BALL FOR A TOUCHDOWN YOU DUMB ALIENS, OVER So as if they don’t already have enough problems with 50% unemployment and all the fires and so forth, Detroit was robbed on opening day of the 2010 NFL season. And I was robbed of a stress free football watching experience. When you think about it, the unbelievably bad NFL rule that cost the Detroit Lions a win on opening day 2010 is based on the same mistake we like to remind basketball coaches and managers not to make all the time. The rule brings the style of the player into the question of whether it was a catch or not. If the player uses the wrong style his catch is no longer a catch even if it was a touchdown catch and the bad call costs his team the game.
JUST LIKE THE NFL, YOU WILL BE A LOSER IF YOU GET HUNG UP WITH STYLES OR PERSONALITIES IN BASKETBALL
Because the problem is so prevalent and serious and because we are probably the only basketball site that has proven beyond a doubt that if you think that player styles and personalities are important you will never win a Championship, we are always reminding coaches, managers and owners to not get hung up on those personalities and playing styles. Coaches and managers who make decisions based on those aspects of players are shooting themselves in the foot with respect to the Quest for the Ring. Professional sports are supposed to be a “style-free zone” and mostly a “personality-free zone.” Styles and personalities don’t matter where it counts on the scoreboard.
Players whose styles and personalities are so bad that their sports performance is too low to be pros are weeded out long before they get to be on a pro team. So if you are a manager or a coach of a pro team and you are all hung up about styles or personalities you are wasting most and probably all of your time. If you are a coach, once you have what you think is a bad style or a bad personality on your team, the only correct thing for you to do in the season at hand is to mostly and preferably completely ignore what you think is the bad style or the bad personality.
Go to the managers and ask them to get rid of that player at the earliest opportunity if you feel strongly about it, but in the here and now don't deprive your team of that player's skills and abilities just because you don't like his style or personality. Sure, fans might find a particular players’ style or personality to be lousy, but who cares when there is a Championship to be won. Championship teams deploy every player they have according to each players’ skills, abilities, and work product while mainly ignoring each players’ style and personality.
Of course, if the owner and/or the managers of a team have decided that they are just out to impress the fans and fill the seats even at the cost of wins, then they will want to get all hung up on personalities and styles. If that is your objective, best of luck to you and sorry we won’t be seeing much of your star personalities and great styles in the playoffs (because you are not going to be going very far in the playoffs assuming you make them at all).
Meanwhile, what are the Lakers thinking about this subject? They are thinking that they will take Ron Artest and his rotten to the core personality all the way to the NBA finals precisely because they don’t care that he has a rotten personality. (But for the record, not only do they not care, but they also don’t know exactly how rotten Artest’s personality is. And nor do they care that they don't know exactly how rotten his personality is, laugh out loud.)
ANOTHER REALLY REALLY BIG PROBLEM WITH FOOTBALL BESIDES THAT A CATCH IS SOMETIMES NOT A CATCH (AS IF THAT’S NOT BAD ENOUGH)
I mostly ignored the 2009-10 pro football season. Why? Because the previous years’ Super Bowl was a travesty. In Super Bowl 43 the Arizona Cardinals led by quarterback Kurt Warner and Wide Receiver Larry Fitzgerald outplayed the Pittsburgh Steelers but lost the game as the Steelers scrambled down the field in the closing minutes for a come from behind win. The Cardinals, however, beat the Steelers in the great majority of the statistical categories.
While in basketball the team that played better in a game (as shown by performance measures or in other words statistics) wins about 99% or more of the time, in football the team that played better in a game wins much less often than that. In other words the wrong team often wins in football. As a very rough estimate, I’d say the wrong team wins about 20% of all football games. In these games the losing team actually outplayed the winning team. This is virtually unheard of in basketball. In basketball whichever team plays better wins the game almost all of the time.
There are at least three reasons why football games are often not won by the better team: (1) Compared with basketball, the number of scores in football is very small. This alone increases the odds that the wrong team (the worse team) will win the game. (2) Sometimes a team will have a lot of instances where they just barely miss a first down. A yard here and there and a team has to settle for one, two, three, maybe even four field goals which might have been touch downs had that extra inch or yard or two been gained. (3) The mother of all reasons why football games are often won by the wrong team is turnovers.
Its really not turnovers per se but turnovers resulting in massive field position gifts that are the problem. Turnovers are always very damaging. But when a team fumbles or throws an interception near its own goal, the other team is given a tremendous freebie in the form of extremely good field position. The team that makes an interception or recovers a fumble and then sets up inside the 20 yard line of its opponent (inside the “red zone”) now has a far easier task than usual. They have already got a field goal in the bag and getting a touchdown is far easier than it usually is. In other words, the team that fumbled or threw an interception has paid a massively huge penalty for that one mistake (assuming the team that intercepted or recovered the fumble scores and keeping in mind that the number of scores is small in football games.)
BASKETBALL IS BETTER
In basketball, turnovers sometimes result in automatic fast break scores. But many turnovers result in nothing more than the other team getting the ball with no unusual advantage at all. And turnovers that result in fast break scores are less damaging than turnovers in football are because there are far more scores in basketball than in football and one score is not all that much to worry about.
We have our problems in basketball but they are nothing compared with those of football. In basketball if the ball goes in the hoop it is a score regardless of the style that was used to get it in there and regardless of the personality of the player who scored the ball. The referees never huddle up after a basketball score and then announce that the score was not a score because the player did not have an acceptable style as he made the score.
In the NBA I’ll wager that the refs will never take away a score and announce any of the following:
--“There was a little too much pump faking for our tastes”.
--"There was one too many jab steps, only two are allowed; Shame on you, Carmelo Anthony”.
--"The power forward got the assist which is not allowed with two minutes left in either half."
--“The player didn’t jump quite high enough so under the rules he was not allowed to hit a midrange jumper.”
--“The teardrop looked too much like a smile drop”
--“The ball spun around three times and only two revolutions are allowed while the ball is in the air.”
--“The player was smiling during the dunk, which is not allowed”
--“The player gave me a dirty look while coming down the floor and I’ll be damned if I’ll allow that without a penalty”.
--“Allen Iverson has already attempted too many shots in this game so he isn’t allowed to score anymore”.
Laugh out loud.
CHANGE YOUR DAMN CATCH RULE, NFL
Since where there is smoke there usually is fire the NFL rulebook probably needs some serious work. I would be surprised if there are no other asinine rules in the NFL rulebook other than the “what is a catch rule”. At the very least the NFL has to make all catches in the end zone touchdowns regardless of the particular style the player uses after he catches the ball. The NFL is apparently worried that fans will find this and other asinine rules in their rulebook, because they are trying to keep it secret from the general public. They have only a “digest” of the rules on their web site and not the full rule book.
Basketball is not perfect, but compared to American football, basketball is the perfect game. The NBA is mostly fair and just while the NFL is often unfair and unjust. Basketball referees never make announcements about scores that are not scores due to some dumb ass rule. Get your act together, NFL, and stop spoiling my attempts to enjoy your game. Now that the NFL has been revealed as having an asinine (and secret) rulebook former football fans are welcome to crossover from the dark side and join me and other basketball fanatics here in the light.
LIONS WIDE OUT CALVIN JOHNSON SHARES A LAUGH ABOUT THE CATCH RULE WITH THE NFL COMMISSIONER
