Whenever NFL RedZone host Scott Hanson says “BYE-magddon” there’s reason to be concerned about the quality of NFL football on television that particular Sunday. For the first of two weeks this season, six teams were on a bye. Four teams were on a bye Week 7, and that was the most unentertaining week of NFL football this season.

Last season’s Week 7 BYE-mageddon resulted in not a single game that Sunday finishing with a one-score margin of victory, and the Thursday and Monday games that did were as thrilling as the fireworks that are sold in the grocery store. After witnessing last season’s dud of a week with six teams on bye, the NFL added a second BYE-mageddon this season.

If that week of NFL action provides half of the entertainment that yesterday did, football fans be prepared to leave your seat as often as Hanson does. Not only were many of the Week 9 games close, a few teams that were perceived to be good — but not elite — let it be known that they are ready to take on all comers.

Hopefully Tuesday’s midterm elections will also bring some unexpected positivity.

Geno Smith goes on a late-game tear and now the Seahawks are 6-3

There was every reason to count the Seahawks out after Smith’s pick-six, midway through the third quarter. The Seahawks’ passing offense was largely ineffective up until that point, and that big play was just what the Arizona Cardinals needed to take the lead at home.

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For the rest of the game, all but one Seahawks’ possession would end in a touchdown. The one that didn’t would be the final plays in which they took a knee to run out the clock. Smith led the Seahawks on two 13-play drives after the pick-six that would end in touchdowns. Their third touchdown drive was spearheaded by a swing pass to Noah Fant on 3rd and 3 that went for 51 yards.

Little was expected from the Seattle Seahawks this season after being the only team in the NFC West that didn’t make the playoffs last year. With a slim division lead they could’ve crumbled and put their 2022 playoff hopes in jeopardy after that pick-six, but they responded and now sit at 6-3. The Seahawks also have a quarterback who is one of the best statistical performers in the league at his position.

The New York Jets are neither a joke nor a fluke

Zach Wilson is not doing much to separate himself from the BYU quarterbacks, not named Steve Young, who failed to statistically produce in the NFL the way that they did in college. He plays for the Jets, which would normally warrant his performance to be graded on a curve, but that grace is not needed this year.

Through eight games, the Jets are 5-3 and on Sunday knocked off arguably the best team in the NFL, the Buffalo Bills. Wilson’s performance did little to prove he was worth the 2021 No. 2 overall pick, but a strong defensive performance and rushing attack led the way to a victory at MetLife Stadium.

The Jets were down 14-3 with six-and-a-half minutes remaining in the 2nd quarter, and only gave up three points the rest of the game. Josh Allen threw two interceptions and no touchdowns, while only averaging six yards per completion. He was great on the ground, rushing for 86 yards and two scores, but no one else for the Bills with multiple rushing attempts averaged four yards per carry.

While the Bills averaged more yards per carry as a team, the Jets rushed for 40 more total yards and got strong performances out of multiple players. Combine that with their defense putting a padlock on the Bills’ passing attack, and the Jets appear to be more than an early-season feel-good story. They are a team that is standing out in the NFL’s best division. And head coach Robert Saleh still has those receipts.

Count out the Tennessee Titans at your own peril

Injuries are again coming for the Titans. Also, this season, instead of four games, they will go 17 games, and likely through the end of time, without A.J. Brown’s services as they traded him to the 8-0 Philadelphia Eagles. First-round draft pick Treylon Burks was supposed to help ease some of the pain of that loss to the Titans’ wide receiver corps but he is currently on injured reserve. Up and down the Titans’ depth chart they have been without key players for much of the season, and Derrick Henry hadn’t often looked like one of the world’s greatest athletic specimens since suffering that foot injury in 2021. Even starting quarterback Ryan Tannehill has been on the inactive list for consecutive weeks.

On Sunday Night Football against the Kansas City Chiefs, The Titans held Patrick Mahomes’ offense to 20 points and pushed the game to overtime. Henry looked like the athletic specimen that he was at Alabama, and rookie third-round pick Malik Willis put together a respectable effort on offense even though he didn’t complete a single pass to a wide receiver.

The Titans defense made Mahomes uncomfortable for much of the night, and his runs on the Chiefs’ final drive in regulation accounted for all of the success that they had on the ground. While the Chiefs pulled out the victory, the Titans put the rest of the AFC on notice. They aren’t a team only capable of beating teams like the Las Vegas Raiders, Indianapolis Colts, and Washington Commanders. Come playoff time, winning the AFC Championship will require taking down last season’s No. 1 seed.

As far as public statements go, this one rings pretty hollow:

To make a long story short, in the late hours of Thursday, in the hopes of sneaking through to Friday-news-dump territory, the Bruins signed minor league defenseman Mitchell Miller. Whether that name is familiar or not, it’s important to remind everyone that Miller was the player the Coyotes had to renounce the rights to after it came to public awareness that Miller had spent most of his teen years bullying and abusing a disabled classmate who also happened to be Black. The details were galling to the least, and Arizona had little choice after the public outcry.

The Bruins would like to tell you they took all of this into consideration. What that means is that GM Don Sweeney saw it as an advantage. He saw Miller as a devalued asset, whose past abhorrent actions were nothing different than an injury he’d overcome and made him more available. He was a talent shrouded in a cloud that kept him hidden from those who didn’t want to win as badly as Sweeney did, is how Sweeney assuredly saw it.

After a weekend when his own players made it clear they didn’t want this shitbird on their team, his own fans did the same, and he made Gary Bettman look like the good guy when the commissioner made it clear Miller wasn’t eligible to be in the NHL and likely wouldn’t be, only then did Sweeney put his tail between his legs.

Make no mistake, there was no “new information.” The Bruins thought this all had blown over, and that their own fans’ veracious support would clear the runway just enough. Hockey men still have no idea how the world works outside of hockey, and Sweeney was under the impression that the kinds of things Miller did are simply hijinx of young hockey players who have been allowed to get away with everything for so long. Sweeney was blindsided that his players, his league, and his fans actually have a social conscience beyond what the hockey world engineers. He never saw it coming because he’s never had to before.

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It’s a small, ugly step, but it is progress that the Bruins had to walk it back, and likely no team in the future will make the same mistake. Hockey should not be for people like Miller, and this is how the sport and league goes about making it so. It’s going to take more hockey men being unpleasantly awakened in public like this, or embarrassed if you like. The teaching isn’t going to come from within, that’s for sure.

If the charm, and sometimes the frustration, of baseball is that everyone gets an AB, the big moments can land on anyone, and any player on the roster could etch his name in history, then it feels as if there is a higher power when the best in the game get to write their signature on something that will go down forever. We know who the greatest are, but only a few get definitive moments that will define a particular season or postseason. There’s Reggie. There’s Kirby. If I’m being honest, Jeter, too, even though it pains me. All who weren’t just some of the best to do it but who will be defined by certain plays or specific moments. This being baseball, they have to share that mantle with the likes of Luis Gonzalez or Francisco Cabrera or Madison Baumgarner. Some really good players, maybe even great at times, but who carry moments that in other sports would belong to the titans only.

The 2022 MLB postseason essentially started with a Yordan Alvarez home run to win a game, and it basically ended with one. Once he shredded a Robbie Ray fastball in Game 1 against Seattle, you kind of knew how this was going to go. He added one more in Game 2, but that’s one we won’t remember as much. We will remember his World Series Game 6 homer, given not just its importance but its authoritativeness. Same with that homer to kick off the Astros’ run. Those moments of contact, the sound they made off the bat, or the way the ball looked blasting off the bat, and the way each cut through the entire moment like wheat, that’s what will make them signature. For one brief second, at each end of the playoffs, all there was was Yordan Alvarez pulverizing a baseball. Two instants when the world stopped for him. They will be the Yordan Alvarez Playoffs.

The funny thing of course is that Alvarez was pretty terrible in between those homers. He hit .192 for the three rounds. He struck out 16 times in 61 plate appearances. But no one’s going to care too much about that, or even remember it. Reggie Jackson had two hits in the ALCS in 1977, and only two hits in the first four games of the following World Series. Don’t hear much about that.

That’s probably another charm of baseball. Everyone might get a turn, and you’ll always get another one. Alvarez had probably been waiting for three whole rounds for another chance, struggling as he was. The possibility of something memorable was always hanging around. And then it happened. One to erase all the others that came after the first homer. Bookends, except they erase everything in between instead of bracing them.

Alvarez won’t care how his postseason will stand in juxtaposition to the bitterness that most of baseball still has toward the Astros and their second World Series in five seasons, to go with their two additional World Series appearances. It won’t be long before the “Yeah but…” disappears from every mention of Alvarez’s October. Fans outside of Houston can rage all they want, but in 10, 20 years it’s more likely that 2017’s cheating scandal will be covered in more sand than the replays of Alvarez starting and ending the 2022 postseason. That’s how baseball works.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Green Bay Packers have been a colossal disappointment this season, and that’s putting it nicely. Aaron Rodgers’ numbers aren’t horrible, but his efficiency has dropped considerably from his two previous campaigns, where he won back-to-back MVP awards. This year, compared to those performances, he looks finished.

All you need to do is look at the Packers’ Week 9 game against the Detroit Lions, a team Rodgers has dominated (like the rest of the league) during his career. Coming into this week, Rodgers had thrown four interceptions in eight games. The Lions forced A-Rod into three INTs in the first three-quarters of the game and led 8-6 heading into the fourth quarter.

Before Sunday’s game, Rodgers had thrown 52 career TDs to just eight INTs against Detroit. Now, Rodgers is struggling to complete passes he used to make with his eyes closed. The Lions aren’t suddenly some tough defense that makes it hard to move the ball down the field. Green Bay’s offense hasn’t been what it once was without Davante Adams on the outside catching passes.

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Rodgers hasn’t developed much chemistry with his young receivers and still doesn’t seem to be taking accountability on the field for the team’s struggles. He’s still pointing the finger and blaming others when it’s him who has fallen off. Many of Rodgers’ passes this year are either late, off-target, or just bad decisions. That throw he used to make look so simple, where he turns and throws off his back foot, is no longer hitting the mark consistently.

Entering Week 9, Rodgers averaged just 225 passing yards per game, which is the lowest since he became Green Bay’s full-time starter in 2008. If you think this argument is alarmist, just look at Rodgers’ performance against the Lions, where he and the Packers’ offense scored nine points against arguably the worst defense in the NFL. The Lions ended up beating their NFC North rival 15-9. Rodgers completed 53 percent of his passes against Detroit, which is his lowest of the season.

We can continue to blame Green Bay’s inexperienced wide receivers or young head coach, Matt LaFleur, but at some point, the finger needs to point back at the guy pointing his outward. Rodgers clearly isn’t the same quarterback he was last year, and part of that is the absence of Adams, but a large part of it stems from Rodgers being over the hill. It’s time to face facts. Rodgers and the Packers’ championship contention window has slammed shut, and they squandered it by relying only on his arm and not building properly around him.

Because the NFC is so wide open this year, there’s still an outside shot the Packers could climb into playoff position but don’t expect them to win any postseason games. If Green Bay has any chance at doing that, they’ll need to quickly get this offense back on track. The Packers dropped to 3-6 after the loss to the Lions. Green Bay might not win another three games if they continue to produce this kind of outing.

Welp, that could be it, folks.

It looks like the Ben Simmons-Brooklyn Nets marriage is already in trouble and needs resuscitation. According to Ian Begley of SNY, the former Rookie of the Year could be on the trade block.

“Ben Simmons’ name came up in the talks, sources say,” Begley reported.

Since bringing in Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving in 2019, Brooklyn has not done anything right. If the goal is achieving individual milestones, then they’re on track, but not if the goal is winning titles. The signings of Durant and Irving look like one of the biggest NBA mistakes of the past decade. This could be worse than the previous regime trading for Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett when they were past their primes.

Owner Joe Tsai must be kicking himself every time Irving opens his mouth or Tweets incoherently, only to play the victim when the backlash comes in waves. Tsai has probably seen his name in headlines more often than he ever thought he would after buying the team.

Of the moves Brooklyn has made (and there have been plenty) since 2019, none have produced the results Tsai paid for. Durant sat out the first year, which was interrupted by the COVID-19 global shutdown, and since he’s returned to the court, all they’ve done is advance to the semifinal round of the NBA Playoffs. That’s the furthest Brooklyn’s gone, and just last season, they were swept out of the first round.

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The Ben Simmons trade in February for the player (James Harden) they’d traded for one year earlier was supposed to rejuvenate this roster and add a wrinkle the team was missing. Well, Simmons finally made his debut as a Net this season, and that wrinkle, whatever it’s supposed to be, is still missing. Not only is that wrinkle missing, but so is Simmons. He played in the team’s first six games to open the season but has been inactive over the last four with a knee injury.

In less than two years, the Nets have had two iterations of a big three, and neither has gotten them close to a championship. Apparently, the last couple of years was the fault of former head coach Steve Nash, who was fired by the team last week. Obviously, it’s Nash’s fault that Kyrie is nothing more than an updated version of the And 1 mixtape tour, and KD couldn’t lead a trail of ants to sugar.

NBA head coaches are usually an easy scapegoat for struggling teams, as it’s always tougher to replace players, especially stars. Nash was in over his head from the jump and certainly should have some blame placed on his shoulders. He wasn’t ready for a high-profile NBA job like Brooklyn’s. The former back-to-back league MVP would’ve been much better served to start in a place like Oklahoma City or Orlando, where there is zero expectation. Instead, Nash was allowed to scurry up the ladder because of relationships with Durant and general manager Sean Marks, ultimately biting off far more than his jaws could chew sufficiently. And the first name we hear as Nash’s replacement is suspended Boston Celtics head coach, Ime Udoka. So, Brooklyn’s answer to fixing a mess is by adding to it.

As much as it would hurt Tsai to admit, it’s time to blow this team up and start over again. Irving is a free agent at the end of the season, and there’s no way Tsai is giving him a new long-term deal. Durant has a few years left on his contract, but if Irving isn’t re-signed, he’s not going to be happy, and he hasn’t shown the ability to lead this franchise effectively, so you might as well grant him his wish and ship him out. The same goes for Simmons, who missed all last season and is already on the injured list again after participating in just six games. The Nets still lack in-depth and frontcourt production, among other areas. The eastern conference is stacked again with little room for error.

Sometimes you’ve got to know when to say when. It’s tap out time for Joe Tsai and the Nets. 

San Ysidro teammates Mikey Williams and JJ Taylor’s committing to play for Memphis next season would have been the biggest recruiting heist in college basketball two years ago. But for a variety of reasons, Penny Hardaway’s track record with one-and-done phenoms at Memphis has been worse than the now-defunct Donda Academy’s. Hoops stars don’t leave Memphis as frustrated as they do Kanye’s unaccredited high school, but it’s a close second.

Much of the blame doesn’t fall on Hardaway, which is probably why the blue chip recruits keep rolling in. Yet, no coach has repeatedly found himself in the inauspicious position Memphis has over the last four years. The other elephant in the room is the plummeting stock of Memphis’ newest recruits and the parallels to the stunted developments of their most recent one-and-downs.

In 2019, Hardaway came roaring out of the gates with a top-5 class headlined by five-star bigs James Wiseman and Precious Achiuwa. Wiseman, the Gatorade National Player of the Year as a senior, played only seven games before announcing his departure. Wiseman had been playing up to the lofty standards set for him, but off-the-court drama involving payments made by Hardaway to Wiseman’s family for moving expenses led to him putting college hoops in his rear-view mirror.

One year after becoming the first sophomore to be named the Gatorade National Player of the Year, Emoni Bates reclassified to play at Memphis a year early alongside Jalen Duran. While Duran wound up getting drafted in the lottery, Bates averaged 9.7 points, 3.3 rebounds, 1.3 assists, and found the rim more often than the net.

Unfortunately, the projections for Williams and Taylor have been trending downward for multiple years. Mikey Williams has already been a freshman phenom with over one million Instagram followers before beginning high school playing alongside AAU teammate Bronny James. Overall, he was considered the top player in their class as an eighth grader. Williams’ twitchy athleticism and preternatural scoring touch have been a staple of his game for years and basketball insiders have observed him since he was a pre-teen. Yet, what Williams’ upside is remains one of prep hoops’ biggest enigmas.

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During his freshman season at San Diego’s San Ysidro High School, Williams set multiple California freshman records en route to being named MaxPreps Freshman of the Year. Since then, Williams has transferred multiple times and returned to San Ysidro for his senior year.

He’s a social media hoops heavyweight, but his one-dimensional game and only one inch of growth since middle school have submarined his value as an undersized combo guard. In 247 Sports’ Composite Rankings, Williams has fallen to 23rd while ESPN dropped him to 30th and removed a star from his five-star rating. Williams’ social media fame has outpaced his game. He’s never been a part of USA Basketball, passed up opportunities to participate in FIBA events that could give a better idea of how he stacks up compared to his peers.

However, Instagram popularity doesn’t always translate to Division I hoops. Bates’ problem was his father’s meddling, meager athleticism, strength due to him being thinner than a 90s mo and his overrated jumper.

Williams will be joined at Memphis by his San Ysidro teammate JJ Taylor. Taylor, recently left Donda Academy after the program was essentially scuttled overnight. The 6-foot-8 forward has the prototypical size for a forward and was once ranked top-five across all major recruiting ranking platforms. As of Nov. 6, he’s 45th on Rivals and ESPN and 117th in 247 Sports’ ranking. Like Bates’, Taylor was viewed as a KD-clone. Given his current trajectory he may be closer to Bates’ ceiling than KD’s stratosphere.

Bates’ freshman year was so disappointing it left a scuff mark on the Memphis program that nearly cost Hardaway his job, which makes Williams and Taylor’s commitments so monumental. It signifies that Memphis is still a hotspot for big name recruits with questionable games.

The implosions of Bates and Wiseman didn’t deter Williams and Taylor from committing there for next season, but it will make Memphis’ 2023 team the most hit-or-miss powder keg in college basketball.

Soccer doesn’t really lend itself to playoffs. It’s why league seasons and cup competitions are generally separate, and the latter are understood to just be goofy, random collections of games where just about anything can happen. As soccer games are still decided on maybe one or two moments, one or two moments that no team or man can ever truly control all the time, pinning one’s whole season to a do-or-die game is about as unfair as it gets.

Which is why most knockout games you see, such as the World Cup, are more often turgid tests of one’s patience or, indeed, pain threshold than they are exciting and memorable. Teams, terrified of those one or two moments going against them, do their best to make sure they never come around.

However, in MLS where nothing really has to make sense, the league is so bent on attacking and weighting their limited budgets to that side of the field, sitting back is rarely an option. So while MLS generally nullifies its entire regular season with its playoff structure, they usually do it in such a fireworks-show-out-of-the-bathroom-that-burns-the-whole-house-down fashion that few people really care. The MLS Playoffs are raucous, chaotic, mysterious and, much like wrestling, a roaring good time as long as you don’t stop to think about it too hard.

Their unpredictable nature is why it had been 20 years since the top two seeds met in the league’s final, as LAFC and the Philadelphia Union did yesterday. But rarely are the two top seeds so far and away the best teams. No one in the Western Conference was even in the same zip code as LAFC this season, and only Montreal for a brief time could even make a local call to the Union in the East. Since about July it felt like these two were destined to do this dance.

For the styles-makes-fights crowd, this final was tantalizing. The two teams were perfectly juxtaposed. LAFC loved to paint pastels with their passing and attacking play, dripping with creative players like Carlos Vela, Chucho Arango, Kellyn Acosta, and Denis Bouanga. They not only want the ball, they treat it with respect and admiration and show it the time of its life.

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The Union abhor the ball. They don’t want anything to do with it until they absolutely have to have it. It’s the definition of a transactional relationship. Eventually the ball has to end up near and in the goal, and that’s only when Philly are around. They defend, they counter at pace, they get it up the field as quickly possible, and then they boot it into the net, more than any other team in the league. And then the Union and the ball separate again, with loosely scheduled appointments to meet again later in the game but barely any contact until then.

Widening out, the two clubs are run in opposite ways as well. LAFC are the glamor team now, the one who looked at the Galaxy across town before their existence–the Galaxy that had boasted Beckham, Ibra, Keane, Gerrard, whoever else — and said, “We can be bigger, better, slicker, cooler, and swaggier.” And then they were. This is the team that can sign Gareth Bale and Giorgio Chiellini, somehow, and then not feel like they have to play them all the time either.

The Union are far more aerodynamic. They scout well, they sell well, they’re not interested in splurging on anyone and when someone gets expensive they move them on and find the next one. There’s a rigid plan to how they play and how they build and nothing will dissuade them from it. Neither approach is wrong, because each landed the Union and LAFC at the final.

And of course, this being MLS, the two teams reversed styles for the match. The Union had more of the ball, thanks to their initial foray of launching high long-balls toward their dual strikers of Julian Carranza and Mikael Uhre. That bypassed LAFC’s press and then the Union consistently won the second ball to establish possession behind where LAFC might have pressed gave far more of the ball to the Union than they ever have. The relationship went from transactional to bordering on personal.

LAFC’s glitzy frontline is always a threat on the counter, but also didn’t have a lot of speed to get into the open spaces. And both teams were clearly always coming to terms with the tables rotating on them, which led to a pretty frantic but sloppy game (41 combined fouls). These were two teams hurling themselves at each other but with weaponry they had rarely if ever trained with. Had a swordsman a mace and it’s going to look pretty awkward for a while as they mean to inflict the usual damage while more aware of taking their own face off.

Which is probably why the first five goals of the game came off set-pieces. Neither team could complete enough passes to forge coherent attacks in abnormal situations, while the constant stream of giveaways left defenses out of positions and gaps that could only be solved by hacking an attacker down before they could find the leaks.

LAFC took the lead on Acosta’s deflected freekick. The Union equalized early in the second half when off the reset of a freekick, Jose Martinez attempted a shot from 35 yards that had about as much chance as finding the target as a blindfolded sloth would have, ended up being the perfect through ball to Uhre. It was symbolic, as Martinez has been his usual defensive rock but a great majority of his passes and shots on the day had the same accuracy level as an attempt to throw pudding at a moving target.

LAFC would take the lead again in the 83rd minute off a corner when Jesus Murillo headed in, but the Union only needed another three minutes to equalize again off their own free kick thanks to center back Jack Elliot. Elliot would score again in extra time, after LAFC were down to 10 men after their keeper Maxime Crepeau was sent off for the denial of a clear goal scoring opportunity, and he had to be red carded while being loaded onto a cart after turning his knee into paste in the process. All of which led to maybe one one of the last great moments in Twitter history:

There was also the small matter of former Union keeper and Philly resident John McCarthy coming on for the dismissed and shattered Crepeau, in a banner week for Philly kids piercing the dreams of current Philly fans. The lesson being that if you want to experience joy as a Philadelphia homeboy, it’s best to turn on those who raised you. Even the Phanatic would admit this.

The Union should have found it pretty simple to see out the last six minutes or so with an extra man and an extra goal, but once MLS takes off the lid of its own personal Pandora’s box, you’ll never get the spirits back into it, once they’ve tasted freedom and the insanity they can cause. Bale, who had barely touched the ball since coming on as a sub, simply horsed Elliot for a cross to head and the game to penalties and sent chills down every USMNT fan because he’s likely to be just as inactive for most of that opening World Cup game, and yet will always be capable of something like this as long as he’s upright:

Insert Aaron Long for Elliot, change the color of the jerseys, and everyone can see it. We’ll save that for a couple weeks from now.

And of course the penalties came, where the Union didn’t make a one and were stared down by a former teammate. Because of fucking course they were. LAFC won the MLS Cup for the first time.

They are worthy winners, as they’ve been the class of the league since they showed up. It was MLS to the tee, distilled to its essence. It was two teams, much like the league, going hell bent for leather without worrying too much if at all about the necessary steps to do so, only focused on the end point. It wasn’t a great game quality wise, but it was the highest level of theater and drama as it bounced wildly between a demolition derby, a horse race, and the occasional attempted ballet performed by rhinos. No team in MLS is ever truly secure enough to lock down an important game and smother it out of life, and just about every MLS team has just enough invested in their attackers to always come back and make something come to life.

Is it the best way to go about it? Probably not. Is it wildly entertaining? You bet your ass. MLS will happily settle for that.