Super Bowl edition of Like It Or Strike It
Kansas City shaded San Francisco, and now it is time analyze the professional over-analyzers. The worst reaction you could have is to take any of this seriously.
How symbolic that the Super Bowl turned on an injury to a player named Greenlaw. No better illustration of the NFL, whose detractors often liken it to watching grass grow, struggling to grow grass.
So, what happened? Dre Greenlaw is the cover linebacker in the 4-2-5 base defence1 of San Francisco. In the second quarter, with Kansas City yet to score any points, he tore his left Achilles heel just from running onto the field to start a defensive series.
There are a thousand points of data in a game as amplified as the Super Bowl. Whatever the reasons, San Francisco losing a second-level defender twigged a ‘here comes K-City’ automatic thought. Greenlaw is a second-level defender whose duties include throttling inside receivers. Just over half of Patrick Mahomes’s passing output, 169 of 333 yards, came through Travis Kelce and two other soft-mitted white dudes. Mahomes and his receivers completed 100 percent of their pass attempts covered by the backup cover linebacker. Greenlaw was also not there when Mahomes supplied his own rushing game.
Checking back, the NFL held steadfast that the playing surface would not be a problem again. Last season, in Arizona, the big game “was marred by players constantly slipping and comparing the field to an ice rink.”2 Per the Boston Globe on Feb. 10, the Bermuda grass field “is brand new and isn’t used by the Raiders during the regular season.”
The live broadcast commented on the absence of Greenlaw. If there was any commentary on CBS about the prep work on the field, or what happened last season, I must have missed it.
Actions follow intentions. The NFL prefers domes so that rain, snow, and climate change-goosed extreme weather events do not affect the pageantry and spectacle. Changing over the field for aesthetics tempts fate. Whose fate, though? Greenlaw gets the bill for that. He’s also not a quarterback, or the beau of a pop singer, and the focus does not go to those other pieces on the football chessboard.
Talk about creating a problem through hubris. That is the NFL and every other sport that has forgotten the KISS principle. Maybe it was a problem with the cleats, like it was for Kirk Cousins and Aaron Rodgers. Either way, injury experts said it was the “craziest” instance of a player going down, and it did not have to be that way. Easy to say in hindsight.
The spectacle will always win overall. I watch the NFL, so obviously I am OK with it. Even a diehard has times when they know they are being served too much of the absurd sauce, even if has the electrolytes that plants crave. This was the second season in a row that the condition of the field was too big of a factor in the Super Bowl. It shouldn’t be one at all. Call me a purist, but beyond what weather can do to a playing surface, a fan should not worry about the field.
San Francisco's losing Greenlaw completed a matched set of pumped-with-pathos pratfalls that one could seize to define the 2023 season of the National Football League. If you are pro-player health and safety, with some nerdish purist leanings, you should be PO’d by the fact the turning point was not even on actual play.
This is part of a longer late review of the game that, like “The Editors” sketch on The Kids In The Hall, goes over the hot takes that came out after the Kansas City Mahomeys won their second Lombardi Trophy in a row. I will talk about takes one would be wise to lose (“Strike It!”) and ones that are the second part of that meme with Drake (“Like It!”).
The injury came exactly five months to the day that Aaron Rodgers tore his Achilles on his first play with the New York Jets, also without being contacted. That came on FieldTurf Core HD at the shared stadium in New Jersey. Again, it might be an issue with football cleats. Kirk Cousins of my Minnesota Vikings also popped his Achilles, but it was during a game played on grass (and in true Vikings fashion, they already had the game won and had no need to try a pass there).
Cripes, get it right, NFL.
Now, Q-A-Anon Rodgers and the Jets receiving the most Jets outcome is funny. But not every player whose career is hurt by lacking field management can make as much money outside football as Rodgers, or expect a free pass on getting busted with psilocybin. And the longer-memoried might remember Rodgers’s willingness not to run with the traffic led to him being one of the few white quarterbacks who ever spoke up for Colin Kaepernick.
But you know that already! The point is, as a terminally online sportsfan, he typed with deep self-loathing, what ‘takes’ are valid and which ones shore it up.
The rules here are made-up and the points don’t matter. Hey, just like the NFL regular season!
Strike it! Mahomes > Brady
Any GOAT talk is too much GOAT talk, and any sheeeeitposter worth their 17th free trial of Canva Pro ought to be aware of it. There is no greatest of all time. It is about who is best, at particular specialized skills, in a given era.
Lately, I have been second-time reading Baseball Prospectus / Effectively Wild mainstay Russell A. Carleton’s The New Ballgame: The Not-So-Hidden Forces Shaping Modern Baseball (Triumph Books, June 2023). It has a chapter theorizing how an average MLB team in 2022 would adapt if it was sent back through time 50 years to 1972.
Football, in that era, still expected quarterbacks to call the plays instead of an offensive coordinator with an aerial view. They often played on rock-hard artificial turf when the officiating standard allowed defensive ends to use quarterbacks like lawn darts. Loosely, that includes Terry Bradshaw with his four rings and Ken (Snake) Stabler and his one with the 1976 Raiders. Roger Staubach had his plays sent in by Dallas coach Tom Landry, but he was ridiculously athletic and tough, and most of his signature moments came when he changed the play Landry sent in. There were challenges they didn’t have to face that 2020s quarterbacks deal with. Defenders were smaller and slower, for one.
No one can know how hidden forces would have shaped the career arcs of Brady (born 1977) and Mahomes (born 1995) if they had come of age as pro athletes during the 1960s and 1970s. There is a good chance one or both might have played baseball, instead.3
Like it! You cannot spell Patrick Mahomes without M, A, T, H.
Mahomes has shown that he is, per the analysis of Neil Paine, “literally impossible to stop when you need to stop him.” Brady-era New England was sometimes stopped on do-or-done drives.
The frightening part for 30 or so NFL teams is, what if the proficient output by Mahomes increases in efficiency like it did for Brady after he hit the Big 3-0?
In 2024, Mahomes will embark on his age-29 season. Through his age-29 season, the season best for Brady in adjusted yards per pass attempt (AY/A) had topped out at 7.5. As a 29-year-old in 2006, he ranked 10th in the NFL with 6.72 AYA.
New England traded for Randy Moss before the ’07 season. Brady led the NFL in AY/A in two of his next three full seasons. He had eight 8.0 AY/A seasons over the next 14. That might not be in the coach’s play cards for Mahomes. Andy Reid likely will not coach another 14 seasons, and Mahomes might not play until his mid-40s, but proficiency is always better than longevity.
Strike it! Kyle Shanahan screwed up by taking the ball in OT
The San Fran head coach is a dislike on sight at Chez Sags, and the reason is so dumb. It is not because of “28-3,” or his nepo baby origin story as the son of a Super Bowl-winning coach.
Not that. It is that Shanahan wears a snapback hat with next to no brim-bend. That is code for the nepo baby trying too hard to look authentic, or raw, and comes off as fake, at least to a slightly older Xennial with Strong Chapeau Takes. Shanahan is a coach who makes US$10M a season. He has enough job security to ask the team for flex-fit or fitted hats.
There has been some questioning of whether Shanahan screwed up the receive-or-kick-off choice in ‘enhanced overtime.’ San Francisco won the coin toss and took possession.
Ah, but the Durr Analytics rump legislature who prattle about letting the players play forgot how much the San Fran defensive players had played.
Check the drive chart starting from the mid-third quarter. The biggest deflator of an NFL defence is the sudden change, especially after it just forced a punt. San Fran was put back out there after a flukey fumbled punt, and gave up a one-play touchdown drive …. in the area Greenlaw likely would have covered.
Both KC scoring drives in the fourth quarter involved double-digit snap counts. That included the march to the equalizing field goal with less recovery time.
Like it! Next time, surprise onside kick to start ‘enhanced overtime’
Under this fandangled playoffs-only enhanced overtime rule, both teams are supposed to get one possession. A question put to me by a friend, well, what if someone starts overtime by recovering an onside kickoff? Does that count as the receiving team having a possession, especially if it was a clean recovery by the kicking team, without a Brandon Bostick deal?
I do not know. I am not a special teams coach. It is very possible the 49ers did not know, since they never had a team meeting to discuss the overtime format. But it would be a high-reward, medium-risk maneuver. If the opponent recovers the ball to create a short field, well, they were a good likelihood to score anyway, and you are supposed to go on offence second, right?
Strike it! Every “Dan Campbell should have kicked” take from two weeks ago.
Supposedly, when the Detroit Lions lost 34-31 against touchdown-favorite San Francisco at the penultimate stage of the NFL playoffs, it was due to their coach being too much of a gambler. It is true Good Dude Dan Campbell went all-or-nothing on fourth down twice rather than sending out his kicker to try field goals. That got the whole mudslide rolling.
It has been a minute since I read a Football Outsiders annual almanac. Their research has shown there is not as much cause-and-effect between the outcomes of an NFL team’s offence and defence as ex-players in the booth would have you believe. They feel that way because of their own experience. An analyst who is a former quarterback had it drilled into him all his life not to have turnovers. Anecdotal fact: Kansas City lost the turnover battle 2-1 on Sunday, and won the game. An analyst who played defence will always remember a time a screw-up by the offence put them in a bad spot and ‘cost us the game.’
But pinning the fate of those fightin’ Detroit Lions on the coach illustrates what George Monbiot meant about humans’ inordinate capacity to get mad at the wrong thing. Not “taking the points” was not the biggest factor keeping Detroit out of the Super Bowl. Their defense was scored against five times in a row in the second half against San Francisco.4 And that was against a team that has Brock Purdy behind centre. The Super Bowl passing split for Purdy when the first read is not open can be summed up as ‘hide your eyes, offensive coaches.’
From Bill Barnwell at ESPN:
“When Purdy's first read was there, he was generally excellent; on throws within 3 seconds of getting the ball, the second-year quarterback went 17-of-22 for 189 yards and a 9.7% completion percentage over expectation (CPOE). After 3 seconds, he was just 6-of-16 for 66 yards with a minus-13.7% CPOE. When he didn't get the look he expected or hoped to see, he seemed to struggle getting deep into his progression or creating out of structure.”
That’s the off-script or off-schedule element some clean air-loving ginger Glibtard mentioned the other day, by the way.
Meantime, hidden forces redeemed Dan Campbell. Shanahan let his offence try a fourth-and-3 situation in the red zone. They got it and promptly scored a lead-retaking touchdown.
Also, Dan Campbell knows what hat an NFL coach should wear.
Like It! Steve Spagnulo saved the Super Bowl
Was anyone else dreading that the end of this Super Bowl would reprise the end of the previous one, with kneeldowns using up the time before a field goal? One variation of absurd sauce is that NFL fans are expected to go along with Smart Clock Management in place of actual competitive plays.
It would have served Kansas City right if San Francisco had driven deep into field-goal range with the score tied, drained them of timeouts, and used up all the time before sending on their kicker. That would have been a reversal of fortune from the decider of the 2022 season. The KC Mahomeys and Philadephia were also tied at two-minute warning.
Refball reared its head with a third-down holding penalty to Philly pass defender James Bradberry that created a first down just outside of the 10-yard line. Then it became a ridiculous game of stoop tag. Philly tried to let Kansas City score so it could have 100 seconds of football time to respond, but the KC ground-gainer Jerick McKinnon flopped down on the two-yard line. Then Mahomes took intentional losses of yardage to use up time before a Butker kick won it. Oh, and there were timeouts used to set up kneeldowns.
SUCH EXCITEMENT!
Losing yards on purpose should never be allowed to use up 40 seconds of a scarce resource, the time on the clock. But Galaxy Brain tells us this is smart, instead of a glitch in the game.
So, Sunday, after the two-minute warning, San Francisco and Purdy needed five yards to make the line to gain on third down. A first down would have allowed San Francisco to burn the remaining time to about 25 seconds before kicking.
That would have been bad viewing. Spagnulo called the right blitz. Slot corner Trent McDuffie rushed and batted down the pass by Purdy. The stopped the clock, leaving a slew of time for Mahomes to author a game-tying drive.
Strike it! Enhanced overtime in the regular season
Big Minimalism does not play that way. More gameplay in the regulation time and less contrivance about breaking deadlocks on the scoreboard, please.
Since the NFL, and every league, are wired into the attention economy and engagement addiction, there will be chatter about using the overtime rule in the regular season. At that stage of the season, the game ends with a touchdown, and the extra quarter is a maximum of 10 minutes.
And that is fine. Anything beyond that is another instance of demanding more labor out of the players while paying lip service to their health. And that’s a flat-out lie. The truth is that football players are short-burst, fast-twitch athletes, and not wired to play a fifth quarter. You could see the sloppiness and entropy creeping into the players the longer the overtime went on Sunday. Who wants a long overtime stretching out an Arizona-Carolina game, forcing NFL Red Zone to skip early action in the late afternoon window?
Like it? Fix the frickin’ kickoffs!
This is unapologetic Canadianness talking.
The mostly better-designed three-down code of football has it all over the NFL on special teams. It brings excitement, not grumbling from the Olds in the room that kickers are too good.
Special teams are a true third phase. The principle is sound: every play should have the potential for points or a turnover, some of that Chaotic Good. The NFL claims to be an exciting league with world-class athletes, then turns the diminutive speedster into a spot-duty offensive player.
There needs to be an acknowledgment of a study Jon Bois performed that noted kickoffs are “stupid and bad.” There should be fewer kickoffs, but all of them need to be returnable. That is another post.
Either way, dead time presented as gameplay is bad. Minutes passing without an actual ball in play? That is why we have baseball. Predictability and standardization equal ennui, and lead to extinction.
Sunday reflected the third phase being a vestige of the NFL being the No Fun League, no matter how much elaborate staging is added to the game. Kickers and punters have become too ridiculously good. Each kicker on Sunday set a Super Bowl record for the longest field goal, with Harrison Butker taking away the mark at 57 yards. None of their kickoffs were returned. The punters both averaged 50.8, and there were exactly 12 punt return yards combined (well, all from one team).
The NFL could do with some of that Canadian strange, eh.
The CFL has more punting due to never adding fourth down. The no-yards rule means the returners have to field the ball. And every so often, the fill from the coverage team is slow to seal all escapes and the returner bursts out for a house call. It is beautiful. And you have a reasonable chance of seeing it once a fortnight.
In the 2023 CFL reg-season, a special teams return touchdown happened once every 7.36 games. In the NFL, it happened every 21.33 games, or about less frequently. Channeling David Krumholtz in the party scene in Superbad, “I’ve been waking up every day, hoping to see a return touchdown.”
Sunday, the only real bit of special teams providing a weird outcome was some announcer jinx from Jim Nantz of CBS. In the third quarter, when Kansas City was punting, Nantz reminded viewers the Super Bowl has never had a punt return touchdown. And San Francisco fumbled the punt. Kansas City recovered and scored their only regulation-time touchdown on the next play.
And it was a seam route in the middle of the field where Dre Greenlaw could have and should have been.
Strike it! Complaints about the halftime show, and the supposed surfeit of times Taylor Swift and other celebrities were on camera
Your beef should be with private jet usage and people driving to destinations well within walking distance, full stop. Otherwise, celebrity worship is just noise to be filtered out with an invention called the mute button.
I know what I like, of course, and the pop music at the Super Bowl halftime is not it. So what, though? After a certain age you should age into your personality and find something to like about pop singers. It’s based on four factors pulled from everywhere.
Marge Simpson saying "popular music is none of my business!"
Emphasis on business. Even if you are on Team No Billionaires, tip of the cap to Taylor Swift. As long as it not a snapback. Call-back!
Quoting Hansel in Zoolander when he says "Sting is a hero of mine ... the music he makes, I don't listen to it, but just knowing he's making it..."
Again with a Simpsons quote? Homer claims it's a scientific fact rock-n-roll achieved perfection in 1974. As an Xennial, I just add, “And from 1991 to ’95.”
Like it! The Vanier Cup does a better job with the individual awards than the NFL.
Of course, Mahomes was going to be the MVP. Twenty-one out of the last 26 Super Bowl MVP awards have been presented to a quarterback or wide receiver.5 It seems odd, since lines win championships. Almost no team wins without a stout defence and an offensive line.
And yet, season after season, no individual recognition. The media votes on it, and they contribute to overemphasizing the quarterback.
Well, north of the order, U Sports got wise about three decades ago. The Vanier Cup presents an MVP award and a Defensive Player of the Game award. It makes sense since the MVP is the winning quarterback most of the time, and if it is not the QB, then it is one of their receivers. The MVP can still go to a defender, although Éric Maranda, a Laval linebacker, was the last such honoree in 2006.
A second award would keep individual defenders’ merit more on the front-burner. Maybe it is weak to end off here, but you know, whatever.
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and be kind — especially to yourself.
Four linemen, two linebackers, and five defensive backs (two corners, two safeties, and a nickel back/slot corner).
The obvious Arizona Coyotes attendance joke is obvious. It was not completely like an ice rink in Arizona, since there were more than 5,000 people there…
Pointing out that Tom Brady was drafted by the Montréal Expos as a catcher out of high school… that’s a paddlin’. Eighteen-year-old Brady turning down being a Michigan Wolverines quarterback to go play for a Gulf Coast League rookie-ball team in West Palm Beach, Fla., never would have been approved by the Illuminati.
Also, that 1995 Expos farm team had three catchers who played in MLB.
Three touchdowns and two field goals gave San Fran its nut in the 34-31 win after it trailed by 17 points at halftime.
Three of the other four have been linebackers: Von Miller of Denver in 2016, Malcolm Smith of Seattle in ’14, and Ray Lewis of Baltimore in ’01. A safety, Dexter Jackson of Tampa Bay, won in ’03. No running back has won it in the last 26 seasons.