The college and pro football seasons are underway and what have we learned?
The Steelers can lead their AFC North Division at 1-0 despite not scoring a single touchdown so far in the regular season, largely reminiscent of this preseason and last year.
This is because, for all its customary hype, the AFC North is weak.
Cleveland always seems to have key injuries or under-performing healthy players.
Cincinnati is trying to win with a suspect offensive line, no marquee running backs and a shortage of wide receivers. Under those circumstances, it doesn’t matter how much you pay your star quarterback.
And the mighty Baltimore Ravens have a quarterback who continues to come up small in big games. The Ravens would seem to be the best of a bad lot – someone has to win this division.
While Democrats rail about expanding abortion options, the NFL has aborted traditional kickoff rules, creating quite the unseemly mess in the process.
The “dynamic” kickoff has debuted, looking like the rules of Rugby, traditional American football and Australian rules football were thrown into a blender, along with a dash of rioting and mass panic.
The ‘dynamic” kickoff gives us a “landing zone” sounding like a mix of D-Day and Apollo moon missions. Kickers are background players and the majority of players line up watching each other from close range way down the field. Mostly, it’s confusing and unproductive, which typifies the NFL circa 2024. Throw this into the don’t-just-stand-there-do-something, stupid, bin of thought.
The good news for me is I waste precious little time watching NFL games these days, not wanting to be assaulted with the combination Woke and pop culture (is Taylor here????????) indoctrination the broadcasts have become
I do try to watch college football, but that is becoming a challenge, too.
This week’s AP poll has Southeastern Conference teams in six of the top seven spots, a record for one conference in the 88 years the poll has been conducted.
It starts at the top with Georgia and has a seeming powerhouse Texas team second.
As for the Big Ten, Ohio State, which spent the offseason transferring in talent, is third, and Penn State, a narrow winner over Bowling Green Saturday, is eighth.
The less-than-spectacular play of Ohio State so far, and Michigan’s pounding by Texas, suggest Penn State might not be doomed to its customary losses to Ohio State and Michigan. Then again, that tight Bowling Green win for Penn State might indicate the history continues.
At least Notre Dame managed to gag one early, inexplicably losing to 28.5-point underdog Northern Illinois, and hopefully preventing the Fighting Irish from slipping into the playoffs with a schedule long on opposition like Sisters of the Poor and School for the Blind.
Another disconcerting aspect of college sports in general, and football specifically, is the presence of Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) millionaires in the games. If I wanted to watch semipro football I’d just settle for UFL games.
But, I’m watching Texas pummel Michigan early Saturday and there’s a Dr. Pepper commercial — one of their Fansville efforts — featuring Texas quarterback Quinn Ewers. Ewers is reported to be earning $1.7 million annually in NIL money.
Even worse, his backup quarterback at Texas, Arch Manning, is raking in $3.1 million in NIL money each year. As Hunter Biden discovered, there’s money in a last name. Just pay the taxes.
Finally, we come to analytics that have come to dominate football, and other sports.
Some guys sat around with their computers analyzing optimum strategy and too many coaches blindly follow the data.
There was an interesting discussion of this on a CBS postgame show Sunday from a panel that included former Steelers coach Bill Cowher.
First, the larger the number of samples in a statistical study, the more accurate the results should be. If you have, say, 1,000 outcomes and the preferred strategy works 70 percent of the time, that’s 700 successes, but also 300 failures.
What bugs me, and apparently Cowher, too, is that some of the failures are more costly than others, and some of the successes are less meaningful.
You face fourth-and-two at your own 30-yard line. Even if you go for it and make the first down, most often you need many more successes to have it pay off in the form of points.
But, if you fail, the other team is poised to score, in many cases without advancing the ball an inch.
Analytics also fail to take into consideration that the games are played by humans, with all the attendant influences of emotion. Success produces confidence and momentum. Failures produce uncertainty and fear. Things can snowball, in either direction, based on that one chance taken
Cowher, and at least one other member of the panel, preferred to have coaches make decisions based on feel in the moment – confidence in their team’s ability to make the play at that given time, not in the other 999 or more chances of the large sample.
I think the panelists hit the nail on the head when they said over-reliance on analytics is widespread largely because it gives failing coaches an out. It didn’t work, but, hey, they were just following the analytics.
My own personal analytics indicate I’ll be watching more Major League Baseball this month and next, and a lot less college and pro football.
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