Patriots vs. Ravens

Someone needs to trap and tag that thing on his head.

I hate Boston teams. Love to hate them, really. I love to hate that they keep winning. I love to hate Boston itself, which, in the cultural lore that I adhere to, is the most racist city in America, and deserves everything bad that ever happens to it, in the realm of sports or otherwise. If that sounds too caustic, I refer you to the definition of hate, dude.



I hate Curt Schilling’s ol’ Republican ass for the hand he had in swinging Massachusetts to the dark side.

  

Would you look at this...oooh, I can't take it!

I hate Kevin Garnett. Oooh, I hate KG. He was a mild-    mannered statesman when he was losing in Minnesota, but  oncehe won one title, ONE TITLE – bare minimum for a player of his talent to sleep at night –  in a Boston uniform, he was suddenly a junkyard dog frothing at the mouth after every layup or defensive stop.

I hate Belichick for cheating, and that mainstream sports coverage has asked us to forget as much despite the fact that this is football, not baseball. In this game, cheating is, in fact, cheating.

I hate Tom Brady’s hair. I hate that the NFL invented a rule to protect him and his dainty sensibilities from being injured on the field again.  I hate that he married Gisele, who I like to imagine he’s not even attracted to (yes, somehow he's the only one) but married out of a need to attach himself to the consensus #1 A+ Cream of the Crop supermodel because for him, winning is everything . 




I hate Boston sports, thoroughly, always and forever, but it occurs to me before I leave to watch Sunday’s Patriots vs. Ravens game at Hamilton’s Bar in Capitol hill that there may be at least a couple reasons why one could probably stand to hate Boston teams a little less …in case the spite is costing you sleep or something.

First, and I’m talking about the Patriots here, they embody what football's about.



Schilling (right) with Emperor Palpatine



Wait, what? The Pats are the devil. True, but let me explain: football isn’t a team sport so much as a machine sport. Team sports involve humans  working in concert. Chemistry matters. Personalities matter. In team sports, the team that’s been together longer usually has an advantage that’s evident in their style of play if not always the game’s outcome.

Machine sports – and I should say machine SPORT, singular, because I can’t think of another game quite like football in this regard – involve a collection of replaceable parts. With the exception of maybe three positions on the field (quarterback, left guard and a shut-down cornerback), football players are not only highly replaceable, it’s almost a given that they will be replaced for financial reasons.

Take the Patriots’ Vikings’ Randy Moss. He's up for a contract extension this season and wants more money. In fact he wants something in the range of Tom Brady money, which, you know, is called Tom Brady money for a reason (did you hear he’s married to a Gisele?), and when the Patriots had had enough of his talking about it, they traded him to Minnesota for a third round draft pick.

"Say it with me, Randy. T-O-M B-R-A-D-Y M-O-N-E-Y. You can't have it."

Only in the NFL would this not be considered absolute, mind-blowing insanity. One of the game’s top (albeit declining) receivers traded for a guy who at the moment is eating cereal in a Big Ten college dining hall.  Done and done. Put a bow on it.  And only the Patriots could have made it look this easy. Once they got rid of Moss, they simply reacquired Deion Branch,  their receiver from four years ago – a guy who was done, by most peoples’ assessment. And lo and behold, Branch has a nine catch, 98 yard day in his first game back for New England, leading Pats fans to ask “Randy who?”

This is why I like but don’t love football. I prefer games where the name on the jersey matters.  But if you love football, you ought to at least admire that the Pats have for a long time now been making the right calls as to who they can do without, and when to start doing without them.

***

The other reason why you can stop hating Boston sports quite so much?

They’re just not that good. Not any more.

Red Sox? Comatose.

Celtics? On their last leg,  with an average roster age of 55.6.

And the Patriots. OK this is where my premise gets shaky. They’re 4-1. They’re the only team in the league to average over 30 points a game through the first six weeks.  They’ve beaten a couple strong teams in Baltimore and Miami and, as discussed, have dealt with Randy Moss’ departure as well as any team could.  

But look under the hood of this thing and you’ll see that they have the 30^th ranked defense this year, which is antithetical to what Belichick teams have been about in the past. Their running game is suspect. And, most importantly, no one’s afraid of them. Teams want to play the Patriots this year. And I don’t mean that in a you have to beat the best to be the best sort of way, but rather that other teams sense that the Patriots’ brand is stronger than the actual team, and beating them is an opportunity to get respect without having to topple an actual giant. Understand that these things only last for so long.  What the Patriots are (a good, but not great, team) will eventually eclipse the lore of what the Patriots used to be (three Superbowl titles; undefeated regular season) and that, you may be surprised to find, will be a sad thing for everyone.

Take this week’s game against the Ravens. I’m at Hamilton’s, a diveish bar in Capitol Hill. Imagine my beloved Grevey’s from last week, and know that Hamilton’s is its diamtetric opposite: loud, intense, packed with Pats fans slash Hill interns, a combination so obnoxious it defies reason. But it doesn’t take long for me to see that beneath all those layers of J. Crew, these kids are nervous. As they should be. The Ravens, it turns out, are pretty good when I’m not looking. They spanked the Pats in their house in last year’s playoffs and the fans here are still a little thunderstruck by it (it was the Pats only home loss in the last three years). In fact no one relaxes until after the Ravens first play out of fear that there’d be a repeat of that playoff game, when on the first down, Ray Rice (a bad, bad man) ran 83 yards for a touchdown. Sure enough, the Ravens run on first down, only this time Rice is only good for a two yard gain. Ah. Collective sigh of relief. There's a real humility among this group, something conspicuously absent from Pats fanhood just a couple years ago.

It turns out to be a great game. A defensive battle -- which plays into the Ravens' hands, one would expect, except eventually someone has to put points on the board and the Patriots get the last word today (a game winning field goal in overtime). Hamilton's goes nuts. A guy wearing a Wes Welker jersey drums his hands on the bar for a solid fifteen seconds, looks around, pleading pathetically for others to join him. They do. Of course they do. Playoff-demons excorcised, it doesn't look like anyone's going anyhwere soon. It's a party. I love parties. If it were any other team i'd have ordered a second beer and blown off the work I'd planned for later that afternoon, but this is a Boston pah-tee (I haven't heard one Boston accent since I've been here, disappointingly), my resentment's building, and I should skeedaddle before I'm tempted to remind them that they beat a team whose quarterback went to the University of frikkin Deleware.

Anyway. The point remains: for the time being, the Patriots are gatifyingly contemptible. Enjoy it while you can for all good things, including a nice hardy hate, come to an end.













Week 5: Bills vs. Jaguars

I messed up. 

The Buffalo Bills vs. the Jacksonville Jaguars? How could I have done this to us.

In short, piss poor planning. 

I picked eight teams to cover over the course of the season: Bills, Ravens, Steelers, Patriots, Jets, Eagles, Giants and of course the Redskins.

I watched the Redskins play the Cowboys in Week One, the Ravens against the Bengals in Week Two, took a personal bye in Week Three and saw the Eagles and the 'Skins again in week four -- which, while not a bad slate of games, was the scheduling equivalent of eating the broccoli and potatoes first to build anticipation for the steak: namely the Pats, Steelers and Jets. 

HOWEVER... both the Steelers and Patriots had bye's in week 5. Now I'm left with a choice between catching the Jets vs. the Vikings, or the Bills vs. the Jaguars, two games on different planets in terms of potential for excitement. Problem is, the Jets game is on Monday night, and I don't do Monday night games. They're too much  -- the racing home from work, walking the dog, feeding it, feeding me, fighting traffic to the bar, fighting for a seat, getting home at midnight with work the next morning. To quote Danny Glover in all three Lethal Weapons, I’m too old for this shit. 

All of which is to say, I chose to watch the 0-4 Bills host to the 2-2 Jaguars, two teams no one, and I mean no one, cares about. And worse than that, you now have to read about it. 

Through internet research, I find a spot called Grevey's in Falls Church right on Highway 50. It's said to be the Bills bar in Northern Virginia and so popular that parking can be an issue. I already resent the inconvenience. It's the Bills. Of all the ways being a fan of that team is problematic, it doesn't seem fair that parking is one of them.  

The Bills room

But Grevey's is a nice place. It's got one of those we’re-the-official-headquarters-of-five-different-NFL-teams things going on, but the Buffalo fans have a large room in the back all to themselves. And despite the 0-4 start, the room nearly full, and I grab one of the empty stools at the bar.

I don't realize right away that the throwback White Sox shirt I'm wearing has the same shades of blue, red and white as the Bills uniform, so when the guy sitting to my left asks if I'm a Buffalo fan, I give him a HELL no look and immediately feel the same kind of awful as when someone asks if you're dating someone you're not attracted to, and you're all HELL no before you realize a) the person in question is perfectly nice and undeserving of that reaction, and b) who the hell are you to be giving hell no looks. 

Jamal and his dad.

Jamal (that's his name) doesn't hold it against me. A soft-spoken guy, he  briefly walks me through the roster . It’s unobtrusive commentary on a game we're both half-watching. Jamal's father is sitting to his left. They get together for the game every Sunday, usually with other New York transplants here at Grevey's, and, looking around, I can see why they come back. It's comfortable here.  It’s almost serene. The patrons, many of whom, Jamal says, are the same faces that have been showing up for years, sit with their spouses and children at round-tables in the center of a room kept just bright enough by the afternoon’s natural light.

I realize all of my previous bar visits had been so...intense...in comparison. So much yelling, so many twenty-somethings, and no families. Why do they all packed into a standing-room-only space when they could watch the game at home, or at a quieter bar, and have actual conversations....with their dads. Where is my dad? Still in China on business, I think. Why don’t I know for sure? Because, unlike Jamal,  I’m a lousy son.  I order coffee and bread pudding – it’s good here, I’d heard - and dwell on this and other bad thoughts, before realizing I’m just tired. I am really, really tired, y’all. *Cue violin*  I work a 60-hour work week, go to school and keep up with chores at the apartment (sorta), and now I’ve committed three hours of my Sunday to watching football a different bar every week (four when you add in the round-trip commute), which doesn’t sound bad until you consider that I go alone, don’t drink for a lack of a DD, and usually can’t manage to get to the bars early enough to grab a good seat, which means I end up wedged into a corner, craning to see the TV . Watching football should be a respite. It should be Grevey’s.  I wonder, finally,  if it matters how good or bad the team you follow is. If what matters is having a space and familiar people to fill it, week in, week out, over a span of years.  And if my messy scheduling was serendipity delivering me to where I belong.

SPOILER: He breaks this and every other Bills tackle like a Kit Ka

And then, I start watching the game, and realize how bad the Bills are. What on earth…They’re awful. The 0-5 record doesn’t do their kind of bad justice. Missed tackle. Missed field goal. Incomplete pass that you could tell wanted to be an interception when it grew up, and nearly became one.  What makes it worse is that the Bills aren’t rolling over – they’re playing really, really hard and are just horribly over-matched.  After Maurice Jones-Drew rattles off a 25 yard run for the Jags, stepping on three Bills players’ heads along the way, I look to Jamal for explanation.

“Yeah,” he says. “That’s the defense’s reputation. Can’t stop the run, can’t get pressure on the passer.” 

But that’s ...that’s everything, Jamal. The defense is bad at everything.
 

“Yeah.”

A few plays later, they let Garrard, the Jaguars buoyant quarterback, dance to an eight yard gain on a broken play. 

“I didn’t think he could move like that,” I say to Jamal.
 

“I don’t think he can.”  

Nope.  I can’t go out like this. When the game ends mercifully in a 36-26 loss for the Bills, I say my goodbyes to Jamal and his pappy and resolve to look ahead a couple weeks to make sure I’m where I need to be. To that end, here’s a list – an actual list – to keep me organized:

Bills

Redskins

Ravens

Eagles

Patriots

Giants

Jets

Steelers

Only good games from here on out, I promise, even it means standing elbow-to-elbow with undergrads in Georgetown or showing up a half-hour early for a spot at the bar in Adams Morgan…on a Monday night. Eff it, I'll drink a Red Bull. My new motto is go where the action is, be grateful that you can get to it and sleep (or be a Bills fan) when you die.   

Week 4: Redskins @ Eagles

VS. 

*Also known as*

The Embattled Black Quarterback Bowl

This was a special week. A cultural phenomenon, really. Michael Vick and Donovan McNabb, head to head, playing out their weird love triangle with the fan base that has at times abused them both.

You can't ignore the racial element, but since mainstream sports coverage likes to do just that while at the same time going upside your head with racially tinged euphemism after racially tinged euphemism, let's do that here. Just for fun.

In one corner, you have Donovan McNabb,  the electric, unpredictable quarterback that, after 5 playoff appearances - including a run to the NFC Championship game -   Philly saw fit to replace with steady pocket passer Kevin Kolb. In an ironic twist, Kolb suffers a concussion in the first game of this season, and is replaced as a starter by Michael Vick, a talent  even more dynamic and unpredictable than McNabb. In fact it was only three years ago that Vick was into all sorts of unpredictable shit that people from unpredictable communities get into... namely making dogs bite each other to death. Only now, Vick looks tremendous through three games. He's running well, he's throwing well, he's been cast the early season MVP, all of which has led a lot of us to forget that the Philly fans turning on him is a matter of "if" not "when".  And when it happens, the final judgment is going to be loaded with all sorts of stereotypical bullshit that makes me want to punch someone.

Look, there are three stages of Black Quarterback Fanhood.

Stage 1: Overweening Pride 

"That dough boy’s your quarterback?  *Snort* Cute.  Me personally? If I had to watch that  vanilla five-step-drop-back every week, I’d fucking kill myself. But good for you, man. Good. For. you.  Anyway, I gotta go, ___  just slipped three tackles on the way to a  24 yard run. That puts him at 115  on the day, bro. Yeah, I got him on my fantasy team, too. How many passing yards, you ask? Psssh. You’re shackled by a 1950’s mindset. It's 2010, brotha. Free your mind!"

Stage 2. Doubt

"Soooo.  I don’t mean to complain, because ____  has clearly been a beast for us (clearly). But sometimes…I dunno. I feel like I wish I could mix a more traditional skillset with his insane athleticism. Like in a lab? I know, that sounds stupid, and believe me when I say that I’m the first to speak up when I catch some old bastard saying a running quarterback can't win in this league . I guess it’s just the couple losses in a row and the bye week are fucking with my head. Anyway, carry on."

Stage 3. Concerned Dad

"Listen. We gotta talk brass tacks for a second.   You've had plenty of time to grow out of ...whatever it is you think you’re doing out there. But from where I sit, it's all a little too much sizzle, not enough steak.   I'll tell you what I tell my teenage daughter:  some people are special, and some are just a spectacle. And I think after 6 seasons [*author’s note: including 4 playoff runs, invariably] we’ve seen which one you are. M'kay? Good talk.  Best of luck to ya, son, but don't let the doorknob hit you in the butt."

That's the way it goes. Always. Since forever. And it's with the 3 Stages of Black Quarterback Fanhood in mind that I head to Bailey's Sports Bar in the Ballston Shopping Center to watch the game. I'm already mad - both at Philly fans for what I imagine will be an ungracious reception for McNabb, their one-time savior, and also for their full, unashamed embrace of Vick, the man that they'll likely give the same "what have you done for me lately" treatment - and by "lately", I mean in the last quarter - that McNabb suffered all those years.

I don't make it to the bar until halftime (work emergency), so it's from my couch that I confirm that I was wrong on one count: the Philadelphia fans treated McNabb to a standing ovation when he was introduced. Huh. Didn't see that coming. 

Second surprise: Once at the bar,  I take a quick poll about Vick's performance in the first half before he left the game with a rib injury. Consensus: "He was killing it." As I said, I watched the first half. He was not killing it, he was so-so with flashes of brilliance (namely the 40 yard run that led to the rib injury). I'm starting to find the loyalty a little disconcerting.

Finally twist: When Vick doesn't come back in the second half and instead we get two quarters of steady pocket-passing coach's son workhorse Kevin Kolb, there's an unmistakable feeling among the fans here that not only is he unlikely to do well, these guys aren't sure if they want Kolb to do well if it means giving him back the starting job.

I ask James, a white retired marine, how he'd feel about reinserting Kolb into the first string if he pulls this game out. 

He shakes his head. "Vick earned it."

But what if Kolb is awesome?

"He won't be. And even if he is, it's just one game."

I gotta goad him now. Come on, James! We've seen this before! Like McNabb before him, Vick can look incredible, but if you're serious about winning, don't you eventually have to settle down with a QB who plays a winning brand of football?

James shrugs. "We're 2-1 with Vick. So he's got a winning brand, right? "

Damn.

I'm half a second from bringing up the dogs, but it's pointless. These guys are ready to ride or die with Vick.  I'll have to get all militant elsewhere. Still, I do want to kick it the Eagles fans again, if only to see how things play out what is now a wide open division. Besides...Michael Vick, man. There's something about the dude. Sure, his decision making can be frustrating, but he's such a specimen...