On Randy Moss, and frailty | They are both winners | Crashing the college football playoff | GRUFF, Vol. 6
An immortal's illness hits home, we learn why you don't do the Mount Rushmore sports media trope, and a 'Bama-free College Football Playoff is a win in itself.
It feels like a minute since the last installment. Continuing on with the football-pertaining diary.
i. No. 84
Randy Moss might be running the Norm Macdonald play.
Does the NFL immortal have liver cancer, and if so, how aggressive and advanced? There are disclosures and denials about what health challenge forced Moss, who is first in line for sports greats whom this athletics supporter fanboys over, to step away from broadcasting. With 4K, no one who is on TV can hide health adversity. His words are that he is “battling something internal.”1
(Update, Dec. 13: Moss revealed on Instagram Live that he had a six-hour surgery after cancer between his pancreas and liver was confirmed. Next for him is chemotherapy and radiation.)
One could infer, from the practiced gravity that other talking heads intoned, that Moss’s “personal health” challenge is not run-of-the-mill. The healthful tack is to grant permission to let it be affecting — feel the feels, and hope it works out for him.
Randy Moss is the main catalyst for why I hitched my wagon to the eternally star-crossed Minnesota Vikings, and we are the same age, and well before he was in the National Football League, he was a sportsperson I wanted to understand. In the presnt, there is all the same exposure and vulnerability, and one should do their best to understand how a desire for anonymity could lead everything to get into the weeds. Privacy is still a thing.
It hits, just a bit. We all age, if we are lucky enough to, and being at ease with it attests to character. So does feeling untortured since your favourite NFL team has a fanbase that has made a meme out of, “we almost always almost win.” Vi vinner nästan alltid nästan; I am going to get that in a wood-burned sign with the Vikings logo. Kirk Cousins was the ideal quarterback for that, and Sam Darnold might pull it off even better; sorry/not sorry if you are not in on the bit. The only certainty is a new game to look forward to every week, and there is going to be playoffs. Whoever coined the cliché that the goal in football is just to “go 1-0” each week hit the nail on the head.
And now you get some malformed Football Theory, all inspired by Randy Moss.
ii. the greatest WR Room
The all-time wide receiver troika, agree to disagree, is Randy Moss, Jerry Rice, and Larry Fitzgerald, ironi-awkwardly enough.
Please note that they are grouped, not ranked. Why is that? Football is a team sport. It cannot always be the same star making the big play at a crucial time. Wide receivers, it’s been said, are the Lord Byrons of the football field: sought-out talents who are also dangerous and disruptive.
Picking a trio, hopefully, is a thought exercise. It involves imagining where they would line up on the field in one realm where all three are together on one team near the peak of their abilities. How they would coexist.
There are other reasons why it must be three. A modern NFL offence runs with three wide receivers — called ‘11’ personnel, with one tight end and one running back — more often than with any other grouping. In the mind’s eye, maximum organized chaos on offence would involve a scheme with three wides, two running backs with premium receiving skills, and a running quarterback à la vintage Steve Young, or Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills. Oh, the opposing defensive coordinator is going to dial up blitzes to force us to keep a tight end or H-back in to block? You will be wheel-routed, tunnel-screened, and flare-passed into retirement, or commentating games on the ACC Network.
Having a group of three also takes a shot at other lazy and bad sports media tropes. One is incessant ranking. Might we please just appreciate that there are no GOATs, no definitive way to know who was the best?
The other is where someone picks four people for ‘a Mount Rushmore.’ Ick. You should lose that. The actual place is is a “monument to white supremacy” that is “carved into stolen land that even (the United States) Constitution holds to be illegally occupied.”2
The actual Reader’s Digest version holds that the creator of it meant for it to be taken as an eff-you to anyone who gets in the way of “the doctrine that says the taking of any land needed for U.S. expansion was not only right but inevitable.”3
That might seem topical to many Canadians, if you believe the polling.
Evoking it reinforces wrongheaded notions, bundled under whitaïveté, which one is obligated to unpack and put in the bin. That is not a smug judgment of anyone who has ever used the trope to structure a piece of writing they had to turn around on a tight deadline. But if you did not know, now you do, and now we can be friends.
Jerry Rice is the ah-duh first choice. He set records for setting records. He inspired the YAC stat, yards after catch. Peak Jerry Rice is the flanker, usually running from the quarterback’s play side. Send him in motion, throw him open so he can run after the catch, turning 10-yard crossers into 70-yard touchdowns.
Larry Fitzgerald would play as the slot receiver. That entails being able to “block with your heart” and he applied that across the second phase of his 17-season career, putting up 1,000-yard, 100-reception seasons in his 30s.4
And then there is Moss. A split end, in the old-timey argot, straight-line fast. Able to go up and get jump balls so much that they verbed his name for it — a defender gets Mossed when a receiver out-leaps and out-stretches him to make a reception.
Anyway, that is why they are the ideal trio. I do not want to belabour and re-hash others’ published work. It is an NFL catechism that Randy Moss was an “otherworldly talent who loved the game only when he saw fit to love it … (a player) who, when focused, loves and understands the game better than anyone in the world, but just as easily falls into indifference with the game when it bores or angers him.” I can’t improve on that capsule characterization from Drew Magary.5
The other definitive Moss take comes from Nate Jackson’s NFL memoir Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival from the Bottom of the Pile (HarperCollins 2013). Jackson, who entered the league as a wide receiver before beefing up to be a backup tight end/special teams player, recounts the week in 2003 he pantomimed Randy Moss on the Broncos scout team.
“Randy’s inconsistency works to his advantage and allows him to survey the scene, wait for his moment, then attack the defense deep or across the middle. Football is all about angles: linear movement in a contained area coupled with a finite amount of time in which to exploit it. Randy understands that finite time period better than anyone and can narrow the gap between action and reaction because he’s really damn fast.
“As he lazily skips off the line of scrimmage, everyone else explodes into the play. This forces the defenders to account for both his slowness and everyone else’s speed … Randy’s able to let the play develop in front of him before he joins in, and streaks up the field for an 85-yard touchdown.” (Slow Getting Up, pg. 37)
If Broncos, Vikings, 2003 twigs a reference point, good for you. That was the game where the Vikings had a Hail Mary situation at the end of the first half. Moss made a play that has been immortalized. Daunte Culpepper, the Vikings quarterback, aired out a long, cross-field pass from his own 40-yard line. Moss came back to the ball, made the catch, and threw an over-the-shoulder lateral while being tackled by Broncos safety Nick Ferguson, hitting running back Moe Williams in stride for a touchdown. Purple is purple, he later explained.
Who does that? It is one of those bits of brilliance. All from someone truly great who, through paying attention and reading a lot about football, and through his own notoriety, became talismanic well before he even played a down in college. Let alone, the NFL.
iii. Flashback, 1998.
Please do not let him go to Dallas, went the hope-against-hope while watching the 1998 NFL Draft. There should be no ret-conning beyond that.
At that time, in the Web 1.0 days, media was consumed and shared much differently, much less instantaneously. And a limited amount of news could break through the bubble that forms around a 21-year-old university student, even a news hound.
The NFL Draft, which a court once ruled illegal, is impressive insofar as how largely scaled it is. Grant it credit for becoming a cottage industry. Beyond that, drafts are a distraction. There is so much more in the sports world, never mind the wider world, to appreciate and assess. The proof is in the gameplay.
And, at that stage, the draft was at a bad time, during final exams. Through the previous fall, in 1997, there had been a late Saturday afternoon ritual spurred by Randy Moss. It involved going on ESPN.com to see how he and the Marshall Thundering Herd, a first-year team in the top flight of college football, had fared in their game that day.
How many yards, how many touchdowns. Marshall, playing in the Mid-American Conference, was not on telecasts that you could get on basic cable in Kingston. However, reading up on why Moss ended up at a comparatively small program in West Virginia was a story in itself.
It had been covered in Sports Illustrated and competitor consumer magazines such as Inside Sports. How Moss’s path had been altered by the racially charged fight at his high school that led to him spending time in jail, and led to high-and-mighty Notre Dame denying him entry.
In ways inarticulable, something spoke about it. Free association was involved, some liberal guilt too. It came across as a tale of someone with great gifts, but also someone who was also sensitive about inequities, which Jock Culture says are supposed to be left at the door to the arena or stadium. But that runs counter to being yourself and being authentic.
It also smacked as a reprise of the well-covered saga with Allen Iverson in Virginia a short time earlier.6 Grossly generalizing a bit, but it seemed like part of the problem when the onus was entirely on a Black teenager reacting to racist aggressions than it was on addressing why racists felt comfortable. Restorative justice concepts contain space to sort out both ends of it.
Something else that twigged that sense of injustice happened later in 1995 in an Ontario provincial park, about a five-hour drive away from where I lived at that time. A police officer shot and killed Dudley George, who was pointing out the feds’ broken promise. That took care of some accumulated and acculturated whitaïveté and stoked skepticism about authority and expectations it would be on the side of fairness and reason.7
Of course, that did not necessarily connect to an American football player; not then.
It was the hype, plain and simple. Moss was vaunted, and the chain of events and own-goals that led to him being at Marshall added a human interest and gothic piece — this was a decade before movie about the plane crash. A small-town sports-loving kid with a rough start carried a certain vicariousness. Through 1996 and ’97, I was poking around online to find out how he was getting on.
So, there is a memory burn of making a point to follow the ’98 draft live on a Saturday instead of studying for an exam.
The Vikings were not quite my team. They were a team 1B. Up until then, starting in 1989, it had been the Philadelphia Eagles, on account of Randall Cunningham and one cover of Sports Illustrated that appeared on my parents’ kitchen table one August day.
There was also a regional connection — the Eagles had a guard, Mike Schad, who went from the Queen’s Golden Gaels to being a NFL first-round choice. That waned when the Eagles’ fortunes did, and they moved on from Cunningham in 1995 after a new offensive coordinator, Jon Gruden, had a hand in phasing him out as their quarterback.
The Vikings were often in the playoffs, and had the snazzy purple uniforms with the horns on the helmets. It spoke in ’97 that Randall Cunningham went there for a new start, and plugged into NFC East rivalries when he engineered an unlikely wild-card round playoff win against the New York Giants.
The thought Randy Moss would be on the board when they picked at No. 21 overall did not enter the mind.
The NFL makes its legend and lore, it does not need help.
It has all been well-documented how Jerry Jones flinched. Dallas had the No. 8 choice.
Jones chose to take whoever. And the phenomena on any draft floor is once one team passes on a high-ceiling player who supposedly brings up Character Questions, it is easier for the next team to do it. At that time, there was not much questioning of the character of the people passing judgments.
Juxtapose: whose character has been revealed better? The wide receiver who smoked cannabis and went to Canton, or the fossil-fuel fortune team governor who once stood with school segregationists in 1957 and who has never hired a Black head coach? Let that one marinate.8
After Dallas, another 11 teams went in a different direction with their pick. By the end of the day, Moss was a Viking, and so was I, as a committed fan.
It is embarrassing to say more might have been read into it. Moss and I made it into the world 40 days apart. The two quarterbacks who connected with him on the bulk of his 157 touchdowns were also share the same birth year, 1977.
I fall more into the never-meet-your-celebrity-heroes camp. It has been some sustaining self-flattery to know I picked him as one to watch, without scouring recruiting websites — and to have had it work out that he ended up on a preferred team. It never changed a thing that it did not work out with a Super Bowl ring with the Vikings or one of his other teams.
Now you know the rest of the story. And now Randy Moss is sick. He is not playing there, like he did when he would skip off the line. One does their best to understand why he would skip on wanting it out in public.
iv. The Bills, Lions and Vikings are a combined 33-6.*
There is not a lot in the playbook to help process this. I do think I know enough about storytelling to understand why the Detroit Lions being the best team in football would draw more eyes than the success, to date, of the Bills or the Vikings.
There was a time when receipts would have been collected about supposed media slights against the Vikings. That does not happen with acceptance that it might be someone else’s time, as some other fanbase might deserve a blessing just as much, and probably more. It’s mildly amusing that the Vikings are chronically unable to lose and let the Lions get comfortable and rested for the playoffs.
So, yes, as a fan of a team in the same division, I hold space for the Lions’ hopes. That is intertwined with not having any of the fatalism attributed to being a fan of a team that has not played in any of the last 47 Super Bowl contests.
It took some work — an absolutely fraudulent 13-win Vikings team in 2022 was a big assist — to get to that point. There is to be no imagining how the rug might be pulled. And, if it ultimately it is, there is the shruggery of just knowing that who wins a football game between two eminently capable teams is half arbitrary, and half refball.
One hard line is an admonishment to not lump together the Lions (currently 12-1), Vikings (11-2), and Green Bay Packers (9-4). Green Bay is not part of this beautiful suffering society.
Packers fans and Chicago Bears fans are rated in the top quartile of “Rudest NFL fans,” and pollster methodologies never produce outcomes that miss the mark. The Lions and Vikings ranked right in the middle, with their most commonly cited party foul was “drink(s) too much.”
Remember, if anything, it’s not discussed enough that the Packers enable cults of personality. Jordan Love, the current QB, seems likeable. He was preceded by Aaron Rodgers, who spread COVID-19 misinformation. Rodgers followed Brett Favre, who stole from the poor to build a volleyball arena. Character counts.
The Vikings never allow any quarterback to stay around long enough for familiarity to breed contempt. It helps impart that the NFL stands for Not For Long.
v. The College Football Playoff will be played in the co-co-cold
One proof that I am still Canadian. I get annoyed when, after seeking out what’s been written about the weather factor in College Football Playoff, I come across this line:
“Indiana quarterback Kurtis Rourke comes from Canada, and should be unaffected.”9
Great research, bud. At this writing, on a Wednesday evening, it was 1C in Oakville, Ont., Rourke’s hometown. It was -4C in South Bend, Ind., where Rourke and the Indiana Hoosiers will face Notre Dame in a CFP first-round game on Dec. 20. That is five degrees colder, and work out your own Fahrenheit conversion.
Either way, a healthful Magaryean first principle is that the 12-team College Football Playoff tournament is going to be “cool to watch.” Everything else, then, involves playing in the mud. Presumably, you have filled your plate with hot takes about who is in the field, and who is not.
This 12-team format, like seemingly everything in American college sports, is only temporary. One cannot expect the blueblood Southeastern Conference (SEC) will stand too long for only getting three berths.
Indiana-Notre Dame, apparently, does not have the highest probability for havoc-causing weather. That falls to the SMU-Penn State and Tennessee-Ohio State matchups, both involving southern teams travelling. Clemson-Texas is the can-they-both-lose-somehow matchup. That’s not much deep analysis, eh.
Friendly reminder
My marginalia on other topics are posted in Notes. Hopefully, this is enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind.
Dec. 11-12, 2024
Hamilton, Ont. : on the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas.
Melina Khan, “Randy Moss doesn't have liver cancer, his son says. Why Brett Favre spoke out,” USA Today Network,” Dec. 11.
Nick Tilsen, “T——’s Mount Rushmore fireworks show is a Fourth of July attack on Indigenous people,” NBC News, July 3, 2020.
Melba Newsome, “The Racist History of Mount Rushmore,” Reader’s Digest, May 2.
Josh Weinfuss, “Arizona Cardinals' Larry Fitzgerald embraces blocking in slot role,” ESPN.com, Sept. 25, 2015.
Drew Magary, “Randy Moss: The Weirdest Ever,” Deadspin, Aug. 2, 2013.
See the ESPN 30-for-30 documentary No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson (2010), dir. Steve James.
Kate Dubinski, “25 years after his death, Dudley George's fight for the land continues,” CBC News, Sept. 6, 2020.
“Jerry Jones Addresses 1957 Photo From Little Rock,” NBC Dallas Fort-Worth, Nov. 24, 2022.
Shehan Jeyarajah, “College Football Playoff first-round games: How early weather forecasts look in South Bend, other campus sites,” CBS Sports, Dec. 9.