The Hard Knocks Effect

This must be what middle age does to you.

Sure, I have not yet technically hit middle age quite yet but I have noticed some changes. Maybe not changes quite as obvious as the annoying hair like that last ‘change’ about twenty years ago but there are changes nonetheless.

The first hint was when I found myself on occasion rooting for a Steve Spurrier coached team.

I know – it scares me too.

Just a decade ago, literally my entire week could be made by a Spurrier visor being ripped off his head and thrown to the turf. There was nothing I loathed more in this world than Spurrier (well, almost nothing. Ever smell someone throw up? Yeech).

Even five years ago, when he joined me in D.C. as the coach of the Redskins and the Super Bowl hype went through the roof, I enjoyed nothing more than watch his pathetic press conferences as the never-ending arrogance was slowly chipped off him like the funk in that disturbing Axe body wash commercial.

But now that he has left the Swamp and Fed Ex Field behind and become the relatively harmless coach of the Gamecocks, I have come to enjoy his antics and his taunting.

If this is maturity…I don’t like it.

So now that I wear my visor in concert with Spurrier (occasionally), I have noticed another equally frightening development over the last week. I…. (gulp)…(deep breaths)…almost like the Cowboys.

Damn you HBO.

For those of you not willing to pay HBO’s extortionate rates, the Cowboys are the subjects of this year’s Hard Knocks, HBO’s sort-of annual behind the scenes look at one NFL team’s training camp. Last year we were subjected to Herm Edwards’ endless stadium step running and his underachieving, uninteresting Kansas City Chiefs. Given the Chiefs are the fierce rival of my boys in blue and orange it was never a concern I would find myself cheering for them. In fact, a full year later, still the only redeeming quality of my hours of Hard Knocks viewing was my introduction to Mrs. Brody Croyle. When Brody is inevitably waived and his NFL career ends, I will be here to console her.

But this year is different. While I have always hated the Cowboys and reveled in their annual playoff failures, I have found myself enjoying the series and have come to start to like some of the players, even T.O.. Yes, the scourge of the Forty-Niners, Eagles and Skip Bayless comes across almost exactly like you would almost never expect – relaxed, having fun and coming across as a good guy. His stuffing of Jerry Jones’ grandson in a bucket of ice water was one of the best moments on TV not involving Michael Phelps in the last month.  

NOTE: Did you ever think we would see a summer in which the two greatest sporting moments would be a tennis match and a swimming relay race? I don’t even know what to think about this. But I have to admit, I am a little frightened.

All of this begs the question – if even I can feel a small ember of warmth in the cold of my heart for the Cowboys, why don’t more teams give fans a behind-the-scenes look at the team, so we start to realize that these guys (despite all outward appearances) are human?

Brian Billick was a genius at this. As the participant in the initial Hard Knocks after the Ravens Super Bowl win in 2001 and then allowing John Feinstein unlimited access for the book Next Man Up during the 2004 season, Billick seems to have realized long ago that being open and honest with the media and your fans goes a lot further then being secretive and paranoid.

It could probably even be argued that Billick’s persona kept him in the job of Ravens coach for a season or two longer than he would have if he viewed the NFL on par with national secrets like some of his coaching brethren.

It is a simple fact that it is much easier to complain about and disagree with faceless football uniforms or maniacal coaches on the sideline than someone you feel like you know personally.

Look at the rise of the internet. It is a lot easier to be mean, rude and insulting from the safety of your keyboard – not that I know anything about that. In a face-to-face conversation a lot of those inept, incompetent and insulting comments posted on the internet would probably never see the light of day.

I am as critical on Mike Shanahan as anyone and much of that can be traced directly to his secrecy and his seeming belief that he knows better than anyone else all of the time. A little transparency and openness might make his decisions a little easier to understand.

Unless he keeps reading playbooks while on vacation. That is just sad.

Just reading the book mentioned the other day – A Few Seconds of Panic – provides more understanding of Shanahan and the decisions he makes than anything else we as fans ever get to see. I still may not agree with some of his decisions but I have a better understanding of how he arrived at them.

Isn’t that all we ask for as fans?

So while I still may think that Wade Phillips and Tony Romo will never lead the Cowboys to a Super Bowl title, I can at least understand why this team improved drastically under Phillips last year and I can understand why despite his public antics, T.O. is one of the best receivers in the game.

And to answer the un-asked question:

Yes, I think Bill Belichick would still be a total jerk if New England participated on Hard Knocks.

Pledges in the Coaching Fraternity

One of my pet peeves of the pre-season is teams that try to pretend they are better than they really are by doing more game planning or leaving 1^st and 2^nd teamers in longer than their opponents to help run up the score. I assume these coaches think they can trick their fans and the ‘experts’ into really believing that they are going to be surprisingly dominating this year but unlike college football, thankfully, high expectations won’t get a team anywhere. I would guess that when you see teams doing this, there is probably also a high correlation to coaches in their first season, trying to prove that their hire was the right move.

I remember when Steve Spurrier joined the Redskins, in his first game he left his University of Florida re-treads…I mean starters… in the game to run-up the score on the Forty-Niners, the final score being something like 35-10. Living in D.C. at the time, suddenly the radio was awash with expectations of great things (although coming off of Norv Turner and Marty Schottenheimer as head coach, can you really blame Skins fans for getting abnormally excited?). Of course after two seasons and a combined record of 12-20, Spurrier took his visor and scurried back to the golf course and the comfort of an SEC campus.

I get the sense that Wade Phillips is doing the same thing this year. In his first two games as head coach he has outscored the Colts and Broncos 54-30. When John Lynch came out this week and said that the Cowboys surprised the Broncos with their game planning and blitzing, it started to make sense (though that doesn’t excuse how bad the Bronco defense has looked in both pre-season games to this point). Coming out with two lackluster pre-season games would have re-enforced what most people (including myself) have said about the hiring of Wade Phillips: that it was a desperation move by Jerry Jones and that Phillips will have a hard time following in the footsteps and incredibly high waistline of Bill Parcells. Now with two dominating games, the already overblown hype that always surrounds the Cowboys is starting to reach New York Yankee levels.

If these new coaches have gone out of their way to endear themselves to the fans, then Cam Cameron is a pioneer – a rookie coach who seems to be actively trying to make Dolphins fans loathe him. Following Nick Saban’s ‘I would never take the head coaching job at Alabama…ummm, unless they offer me lots of money’ routine, Cameron came in with more goodwill from his fan base than probably any new coach in the NFL this year. Yet, we haven’t played a real game and he has already done nothing but antagonize his fan base.

With the number one issue in Miami being the never-ending quest to replace Dan Marino, Cameron’s first draft pick was (logically) a wide receiver/kick returner with a questionable foot– though at least Cameron is a close friend of the pick’s father. In the second round he did pick a quarterback…a 26 year old quarterback. Cameron’s next priority was to get 37 year old Trent Green from Kansas City, who missed most of last season due to a concussion and someone so valued by the Chiefs that rather than re-sign Green they will go into the season with an 11-year veteran back-up and second year middle tier prospect as their possible starters.

This week after two preseason games, Cameron (shockingly!) named Green as the starter for the season, despite a stat line of 10 of 22 for 101 yards, one interception and no touchdowns. He beat out fan- favorite Cleo ‘Laser’ Lemon (fan-favorite label based on an informal poll of my friend Doug, the one person I know who still admits to being a Dolphin fan) with their 2^nd round rookie draft pick, John Beck (did I mention he is 26?) languishing in 3^rd string. Cameron may have done more harm to the Dolphin quarterback situation than anyone since Ray Finkle kidnapped Dan Marino the week before the Super Bowl.

Cameron also cut last year’s starting tight end and traded one of their receivers to a division rival. It’s fine though they were only the two leading receivers for the team. Why would their new quarterback need them to throw to?

So while Phillips may be setting himself to be as big a regular season disappointment to his fans as Spurrier was, let’s take our hats off to Cam Cameron, a man who seems to take pride in giving no false hope to his fans. Let’s amend that – no hope period.

Reviewing a Preview

Tuedsday, July 31

Before diving into my usual inane rambling below, I feel like I should say something about Bill Walsh. Every person that is in some way associated with the NFL and football have been and will be eulogizing him (and most of them much more eloquently than I ever could), so I will keep this brief. For all intents and purposes, on Monday we lost the father of football as we know it today. Rest in peace, coach.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Thanks to a weekly cross-country commute for work, I spend a lot of time sitting in planes or airports reading. This week I flew on Sunday, which is nice in that I get to travel in flip-flops and t-shirt, rather than a weekday wardrobe of work slacks and button-up.

Traveling on Sunday also means I can spend the entire flight reading football magazines without a guilty pang that I should instead be actually doing work. I will make wild-guesses (i.e. 100% guaranteed predictions) for the coming season (both real and fantasy) at some point, but we should wait until closer to the beginning of the season (right, 2006 drafters of Clinton Portis?). That doesn’t stop the professional prognosticators from making wild statements light years before the season starts.

This week I picked up the Athlon Sports Pro Football preview issue to check in on how they see the upcoming season shaking out.

(NOTE: One of my favorite things about these preview issues is how the cover is tailored to each city. My copy has a young, floppy haired Jay Cutler plastered on it, implying that Cutler is a huge story this season and Athlon projects big things for the Broncos. Well, Cutler gets no more than the two paragraphs allocated to every quarterback and the Broncos are expected to dominate so thoroughly that they place a solid second in their own division.)

I will cut the editors of Athlon some slack for having several discussions of how Vick will play this year (that week #4 match-up with Matt Schaub isn’t nearly as exciting as it was a few weeks ago, huh?), I know financial necessity requires them to go to print long before they can make a really accurate prediction.

What I will not cut them slack on is their predictions for the season. Apparently they use some sort of WOPR computer system to basically crunch any number in some way, shape or form associated with football to predict who will win every game of the year (including but not limited to: number of children fathered out of wed-lock by a team’s quarterback, percentage of starting linebacker corps under house arrest at any one time and the percentage of his children’s’ life-altering moments a coach misses to watch a three year old game film of his next opponent).

Clearly the WOPR has evolved quite a bit from the good old days when it confused a simple game of Tic-Tac-Toe with Global Thermonuclear War.

Anyway, this computer system is so smart it has determined that after the Cowboys beat the Bears in the NFC title game and the Patriots beat the Chargers in the AFC title game, the Patriots will win their fourth Super Bowl by beating the Cowboys.

Apparently the computer system has never learned the term ‘coaching change’.

I will almost give a pass to the WOPR for the Chargers pick, they have such a talented team, loaded with Pro-Bowlers (and in Shawne Merriman’s case, lots of illegal chemicals) it is easy to dismiss the fact that they lost their entire coaching staff in the offseason. It might be a littler more palatable if they were bringing in proven winners, to get them over that last hurdle Marty Schottenheimer couldn’t, but instead they bring in a coach with an all-time record of 58-82-1.

Will Norv Turner be able to harness his vast playoff head coaching experience to take this team to the AFC title game? I doubt it, as he has a lifetime postseason record of 1-1. But the Chargers do still have LaDanian and Phillip Rivers so it seems reasonable that they could win their division and one playoff game. I’m just not holding my breath.

So, now let’s look at the Cowboys going to the Super Bowl. Ummmm…what? Beside Athlon’s factual error that Tony Romo’s dropped field goal hold cost them a trip to the NFC title game last year, I find it almost completely incomprehensible that a team with a quarterback with 11 career starts, a border-line nut case wide receiver on the down hill slide of his career and a mediocre defense will be significantly better with Wade Phillips at coach in place of Bill Parcells.

I know Wade Phillips, Wade Phillips was my team’s head coach at one time, Wade Phillips, you sir are no Bill Parcells.

Wade Phillips is a fine defensive coordinator and over the last couple of decades has directed some of the best defenses in the league (San Diego 04 – 06 and Denver in the early 89 - 92) but he has already had 2 completely unsuccessful attempts at being a head coach. What has he done that would make Jerry Jones think the third time is the charm?

(Note: that entire last paragraph applies to Norv Turner as well, if you replace ‘defensive coordinator’ with ‘offensive coordinator’.)

At least he has an experienced offensive coordinator to guide a virtual rookie quarterback…oops, never mind. That would be first time offensive coordinator Jason Garrett, best known as that red-head back-up quarterback wearing a headset as Troy Aikman talked to Jimmy Johnson back when the Cowboys legitimately could plan on Super Bowl trips.

So, what has the Athlon Season Preview taught me (beside the fact that football season previews should not be written in June)? It has taught me that computers may be great at chess; but football? Not so much.

Of course, if I am wrong and the Patriots really do vanquish the Cowboys next February to hold up yet another Lombardi trophy…well just remember I paid $6.99 for my Athlon preview, how much are you paying to read this?