1. I find Fans always complain about Kansas City and Patrick Mahomes I get all the calls – I hear it every week. Well, he got a bad decision in his favor on Sunday night, and a terrible non-decision went against him. Whatever the case, two terrible refereeing decisions marred the end of the game. With 57 seconds left, eight seconds less, Mahomes scrambled toward the right boundary and was blocked by the safety Jonathan Owens. Replay showed both of Mahomes’ feet were still inbounds when Owens hit him after a lead of 10, but the flag came out and added 15 yards at the end of the game. Now KC had the first down at Green Bay’s 45-yard line. Absolutely no unnecessary harshness toward Owens. Then Mahomes threw deep up the middle Marquez Valdes Scantling upon his return to Green Bay. Valdes-Scantling reached for the ball and was ambushed by the rookie corner Carrington Valentine. Both Cris Collinsworth And Terry McAulay said no question, it was a disturbance. Would have given Kansas City a first down at the five yard line. Should have given Kansas City a first down at the five-yard line. Back judge Greg Yette I just can’t handle a game-winning move like that.
2. I think There are nits to pick at Jordan loveSunday night is Green Bay’s game, but he has shown in the second half of the season that he is worthy of every doubt as Green Bay’s long-term quarterback. A pass rate of 69 percent with eight touchdowns and no picks, as well as a rating of over 115 during Green Bay’s three-game winning streak, is a testament to the fact that Green Bay drafted him and patiently developed him.
3. I think I don’t write much about the office because it always seems like a fruitless endeavor. But the end of this game on Sunday night couldn’t have been more influenced by big calls. Shame.
4. I find that can be said with certainty Nick Sirianni doesn’t like the San Francisco 49ers.
5. I find I can’t remember the last time a flexible schedule said as much as the one recently announced for Week 15 (December 14-18). The details:
- The first-ever Monday night flex moved Kansas City-New England from Monday night to the early Sunday slot at 1 p.m. How the mighty have fallen. The NFL is moving Patrick Mahomes outside of prime time is revolutionary – and then moving it to a regional Sunday game is almost as baffling. That’s how bad the Patriots are now. I am certain Andy Reid loves the sanity of an early Sunday game; KC will now return home around 9:00 pm CT on Sunday night instead of 3:00 am on Tuesday.
- Too strong a game in the late Sunday window on December 17th (Dallas at Buffalo) to include Mahomes in the doubleheader.
- Philadelphia at Seattle was a logical move to Monday night, but the logistical implications are significant. It’s probably a good thing for Seattle to bolster its home-field advantage for a must-win with a game on Monday night. However, in a normal game prep week, Philadelphia certainly didn’t expect to be home at 6:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday. The good thing for the Eagles is that they finish with a pretty easy home stretch: Giants, Cardinals, at Giants.
- This is the weekend when the NFL will select three Saturday games from five scheduled to be rescheduled when the schedule was announced in May. Vikings-Bengals at 1 (slight surprise for me over Bears-Browns), Steelers-Colts at 4:30 (good pick), Broncos-Lions at 8:15 (the only pick). Not a bad game day, but I would have preferred Chicago-Cleveland leading the day. It seems better Justin Fields He’s trying to win the Bears’ QB job for 2024 against a team playing for the playoffs while keeping the quarterback situation with duct tape.
6. I find I don’t understand why the Patriots, who are clearly going nowhere with two shaky quarterbacks (that’s being nice), don’t start with the eventing tournament Malik Cunningham At least a few times before the end of the season. What is there to lose?
7. I think Tommy DeVito has become a good story and perhaps even a prospect to remain on the Giants’ 2024 roster. I like his presence and his confidence. But the hype surrounding him is a bit too much for me. He has put up 19 points per game in his three starts, one against a good team (Dallas) and two against Washington and New England (combined record: 6-19).
8th. I find Ron Rivera need to know it’s over.
9. I find Of all the injuries sustained in Week 13, Houston was a rookie receiver Tank Dell Losing with a broken fibula has to be the most damaging thing for a competitor. Seven touchdowns, a 15.1-yard average, a true deep threat (not a bad 12-game performance for the 69th pick in the ’23 draft), lost. “I’m hurt,” he said CJ Stroud. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it.” That increases the pressure Nico Collinshad an outstanding year and was a real number one in the last five weeks.
The Texans’ youth movement helps Houston win
The FNIA team discusses the Texans’ win over the Broncos and how Houston’s talented young players are leading the team to the playoffs.
10. I find These are my other thoughts of the week:
A. Michigan, Washington, Texas, Alabama. Understandable. But Georgia wins 29 in a row, including two championship games (by a total of 73 points), then loses the SEC title game to the great Saban by three points and is eliminated. Seems wrong. But I get it – how can Alabama not be there after winning the SEC title, and how can Texas not be there after winning the Big 12, winning by 10 points at Alabama and going 13-1?
B. Pretty amazing, KISS are playing their last show after 50 years on Saturday night. It came 51 years after key player Paul Stanley brought friends to see Elvis Presley at MSG and basically said, one day I’ll play on this stage.
C. What’s even more amazing is that 77-year-old Dolly Parton sold more albums than ever before with her 49th album, “Rockstar.”
D. What if Dolly Parton got Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr to sing “Let It Be” with her? Who could do that? She is fantastic. What a good person.
e. Baseball Story of the Week: Tyler Kepner of The Athletic on Joe Westthe controversial referee being considered for Cooperstown.
F. Kepner is so good. Thoughtful, excellent reporter, with good nuggets like this: West has thrown out 196 people in his refereeing career. I read everything Kepner writes. Kepner writes:
West, whose career began in 1976, could be outspoken and sarcastic, confrontational and aggressive. He didn’t embody the adage that the best referees are the ones you never hear about.
In the 2004 American League Championship Series, West called out Alex Rodriguez for knocking the ball out of Bronson Arroyo’s glove in Game 6 at Yankee Stadium. In the 2016 World Series, West suspended Game 7 in Cleveland after nine innings due to a brief rain delay; The dazed Cubs, who had lost the lead in the eighth, regrouped at halftime and won.
And yes, that was West arguing with Leslie Nielsen in 1988’s “The Naked Gun.” “You can’t throw a referee out of the game!” West cried – but Nielsen (or was it Enrico Pallazzo?) did just that.
Refereeing has changed significantly since West’s debut, a Sept. 14, 1976, doubleheader between the Astros and Braves in front of just 970 fans in Atlanta. Barrett said referees have essentially designed their personal attack zone for years and the goal has been to keep it consistent. Now they are striving to reach the computerized zone where performance is evaluated.
G. Football Story of the Week: The New York Times’ Jody Rosen on what’s happening in the adaptation of the highest-rated TV show of the last 12 seasons, NBC’s Sunday Night Football.
H. Incredibly detailed history of roses. The best thing I can say is that I bet anyone who works in the industry will learn a lot about how to televise a big game. NBC had 10 trucks with a 200-person crew in the season opener, which Rosen writes about.
I. Rosen writes:
Then there were the microphones. Many cameras had microphones attached. There were six parabolic microphones, devices resembling satellite dishes that operators dragged to the sidelines like sandwich boards to pick up sounds. The NFL is very particular about what audio is allowed to broadcast – no bench conversations are allowed – but for each game the league mikes several offensive linemen so that the broadcasters can hear the quarterback grunting his rhythm and the crunch of the pads collide after the snap.
The person responsible for the sonic personality of “Sunday Night Football” is Wendel Stevens, the lead sound engineer. That morning, Stevens was getting ready at his workstation, a 144-channel mixer in the show’s main production truck. What viewers might think was an immediate flow of in-game audio is more akin to a live DJ mix put together on the fly by Stevens, mixing sounds from dozens of sources. “You don’t want this constant roaring and thundering,” he said. “Football is a dynamic game in terms of sound.” It has different rules. One of them is: You can’t miss “the doink,” the percussive blow when an errant kick hits the goalposts, which swing like a giant tuning fork. Stevens presided over NBC’s broadcast of the Bears-Eagles wild-card playoff game in 2019, which ended with a Bears field goal attempt bouncing off the left upright and onto the crossbar – an event that went down in NFL lore as the Double Doink .
J. TV Story of the Week: NBC News’ Anne Thompson reports from Churchill, Manitoba, on the polar bear capital of the world.
k. Twice as many bears have come to the northern Manitoba town in search of food because ice sheets that were expected to form in the waters surrounding the area have not yet formed due to climate change.
l. Another thought on the garbage of college football weekend.
M. My feeling after watching highlights of the great Pac-12 championship game between Washington and Oregon: disgust.
N. This is very old, I know. But anger simmered as they watched two major regional rivals play for the regional conference championship. Because of money, one of the major regional conferences in American sports is being thrown into the toilet, leaving schools like Oregon State and Washington State out in the cold. The stupid, absolutely stupid, revised 2024 Big Ten football schedule has UCLA traveling to State College, Pennsylvania on October 5th, Piscataway, New Jersey on October 19th and Lincoln, Nebraska on November 2nd travels. And how about the Central Florida-Utah rivalry in the Big 12? What a great regional connection Stanford-Boston College is for the ACC. They are only 3,132 miles apart.
O. Palo Alto to Boston is 160 miles further than Boston to Dublin.
P. I hope disenfranchised alumni continue to tell Big Ten-affiliated USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington, “What you’re doing is absolutely insane.” We haven’t even talked about the idiotic logistics of kids playing sports and are supposed to be students, to make 10 and 12 hour round trip plane flights to play games. Logistically, how is it even possible for Cal to play a midweek softball game at Clemson? This is all a great example of adults making stupid decisions just because of money and forcing 20 year old kids to pay for those decisions.
Q. Imagine you are the parent of a bench player on the USC football team and your child tells you that he is missing 2.5 days of school to go to a game at Rutgers.
R. RIP Henry Kissinger. I remember this story Linda Zimmerman told about her husband, the late Paul “Dr. Z” Zimmerman and Henry Kissinger, who was a Jets fan. Dr. Z and Kissinger lived in the same Manhattan neighborhood, Washington Heights, at different times. Kissinger rose to positions of political power. Zim covered the Jets and later the NFL. As it turned out, Zim didn’t particularly like Kissinger. One day in the Jets Super Bowl era about 50 years ago, Kissinger went to a Jets game and some reporters asked him about professional football. One asked if football was Kissinger’s favorite sport. Kissinger said “the honest truth” is that American football is his favorite sport. Zim asked him, “Can you define truths that are not honest?”
S. Was there ever an occasion when Dr. Z didn’t have a great response?
T. Now seriously… Obituary of the week: NPR’s Tom Gjelten on Henry Kissinger, who died last week at the age of 100.
& RIP Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female Supreme Court justice in the country. Her connection to football began in 1985 when she sat at a table at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington John Riggins, who at the gala poured two double scotches and then a full bottle of red wine after the pre-dinner beer. And Riggins thought she was a little too straightforward. “Ease up, Sandy baby!” he said. “You’re too tight.”
v. And as Riggins recounted after O’Connor’s death, they were at an event together in Washington about a decade ago, and O’Connor was the speaker that night, and at one point she said, “There’s one thing I’ve wanted to do for a while.” For years I’ve been saying, ‘Easy up, Johnny, baby!'” Riggins loved it.
w. Coincidence of the week: Between 2000 and 2012, the College of William & Mary in Virginia had two chancellors: first Henry Kissinger, then Sandra Day O’Connor. They died two days apart.
X. Many thanks to the Houston Texans and the communication tsar Omar Majzoub for the donation of sneakers with the inscription of the thing that is important to me, which is based in New Jersey, the charity organization for youth competence Write on Sports, just in time for our Christmas auction, our last donation campaign for this year.
j. Main article: four Lower Bowl tickets to the Cardinals-Eagles New Year’s Eve game at 1 p.m. at Lincoln Financial Field. Our sincerest thanks to the anonymous donor who provided these great seats as the Eagles strive for a home run in the NFC playoffs. Every cent of the winning bids will go toward literacy programs and summer camps for adolescent students, primarily in middle school.