Tuesday, February 12, 2019

2018-19 Super Bowl

Pats 13-3 Rams

This will be remembered as the Super Bowl where nothing happened. The Pats moved the ball reasonably well but outside of their single late TD drive, they always managed to sputter. The Rams, on the other hand, never got any offense going at all. Brady and Goff's stats were eeirly similar considering that Brady kinda moved the ball whereas Goff went 3-and-out on virtually every drive. Belichik and Brady win another one, the torch has yet to be passed.

The fact that people were bored by spectacular defense calls attention to a weird anomaly of seeing football on TV: in football watching the ball means you miss the entire defense, you literally only get half the game. In basketball and hockey, you can generally see all the players at any given moment; in baseball and soccer, there's pretty much nothing to see away from the ball. But in football there's a lot of action the TV audience never gets to see. Really all you ever get to see is the QB, another factor in the QB being the most famous, highest paid player on each team. Yeah, this game was so unmemorable that pointless observations like this were more interesting to me that revisiting the game itself. I admire good defense, but football without offense gives the viewer a lot of time to kill.

The Pats are in that year-to-year mode and looking over that AFC East, unless there's big leaps forward by Josh Allen (I suppose it's possible) or Sam Darnold (doubt it, NYJ are born to suck), I gotta give the Pats at least one more year in the playoffs with a good shot at a bye in the first round. As for the Rams, there's more competition in the NFC and still a decent chance that Jimmy G and the Niners make a push and the Seahawks are still hanging around; Goff looked shaky in the last two games and Sean McVey is not quite right to put the other coaches out to pasture, but I like the Rams to be a factor in the post-season next year.

*sigh* I miss football.

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