- Getting Even in Week 2
- Source: SI
SI.com's Andrew Perloff takes a look at some of the rebound performances from Week 2, including the Steelers, the Bills and the Seahawks.
Last week I thought the replacement officials were adequate. Watching football Sunday, I felt like a passenger in a car going 20 miles an hour too fast on a mountain road with hairpin turns; we weren't going to die, but it was going to be a dicey ride.
The Philadelphia-Baltimore game, in particular, careened from one wild post-whistle scrum to the next, with no ejections; from one two-minute warning to another (there were two in the fourth quarter, one with 2:05 left in the game); and from one replay reversal to another (there were three reviews and two reversals), including the strangest and most illogical three-minute delay of the day.
With two minutes left in the game and the ball at the Baltimore 1-yard line, Michael Vick went back to pass, with replacement referee Robert Frazier standing five yards behind him, looking directly at Vick. Haloti Ngata rushed, and just as Ngata wrapped up Vick, the quarterback threw a pass about five yards, incomplete, as he fell to the ground.
The CBS replay from behind, in slow-motion, showed Frazier staring at the play and ruling ... nothing. The other officials looked at one another, unsure what to do, and Frazier jogged into the area around the 2-yard line, where a Raven was laying on the ball. Three officials looked at Frazier, who said something, and then head lineman Michael Bell pointed that it was Baltimore's ball, and a first down. "They're ruling Baltimore football!'' an incredulous Greg Gumbel said on TV. Frazier walked away, fiddling with the microphone on his belt, as if he wanted to say something to the disbelieving crowd, then saying nothing, then, a few seconds later, saying the play was under review.
I should hope so.
Three minutes and three seconds later, Frazier emerged from under the hood to say the play was reversed, and it was an incomplete pass.
Frazier was staring at Vick as he was contacted by Ngata, began to fall, and clearly threw the ball five yards down the field. Maybe it's intentional grounding. Maybe it's a simple incompletion. But to miss that call, or, worse, to be too indecisive to not make the call and simply hope someone else had a better view of it and could rescue you from making a game-turning call, illustrates how ill-suited this crew was for a game of this intensity, this magnitude.
At the NBC studios, where I watched the games Sunday, I sat for much of the day with former NFL official Jim Daopoulos, hired by the network as an officiating consultant. Daopoulos thought the replacements did a passable job in Week 1, as most impartial observers would have. But he thought there was something troubling about the Week 2 performances.
"Now the players are taking advantage of the lack of experience and the lack of game-control by the replacement officials,'' Daopoulos said during the second half of the Sunday night game. "They're just too inconsistent. The players are pushing them. And the inconsistency is natural, because this is not something you can learn as quickly as they have to learn it. They don't know what illegal contact is; it's a rule that was put in to allow receivers to be able to run free after five yards, and these crews do not know the rule, or they're not calling it correctly.''
During the day, I saw Daopoulos texting a few times. He was communicating with officials he knew from his years on the field and as an NFL officiating supervisor, a job he left last spring. "The officials want to talk. They want to be back on the field. To a man, they want to come back,'' he said.
Roger Goodell added $1 million to the league's offer to the officials 16 days ago, the last day of substantive talks between the regular officials and the league. Now each side has gone underground; the NFL has dug in, believing it's made its final offer, and the officials have stopped returning phone calls (mine, at least) and emails, clearly figuring they have nothing to say except at the bargaining table. One officiating source told me Sunday there will be pressure this week from the rank-and-file to make one last push to try to get something else from the league, and then settle.
What do I think will happen? Roger Goodell, who thinks he's given enough already (raises of about $50,000 per official over the life of a new contract, while converting to less lucrative pensions, which the league has done with the majority of its full-time employees), will stay dug in. If union leaders Scott Green and Jeff Triplette hear the siren song of their men, I think either this week or next, there will be renewed talks, and the deal will get done. But that's if Green and Triplette give in, and I don't know if they will. I sense Green is the hard-liner here. If he's not willing to give in on the pension, the situation could last a while.
Whatever, Joe Flacco said the thing that made the most sense Sunday, and the only thing that's regrettable is he was the losing quarterback in Philadelphia, so what he says can be seen as sour grapes. Flacco said of the NFL: "They talk about the integrity of the game, and I think this is along those lines. The fact that we don't have the normal guys out there is pretty crazy.''
The game in Philadelphia showed that.
Now on with the rest of Week 2.
***
Five takeaways from Sunday:
1. Handshake, shmandshake. I knew the Georgetown and Michigan coaches (Schwartz, Harbaugh) were too smart, and their PR staffs too worldly wise, to allow the handshake thing to simmer Sunday night. So they shook hands before the game, looking friendly, and spent a good three seconds together post-game in a fraternal shake.
2. Coughlin's right. Schiano's wrong. I agree with playing to the final gun. No problem. But when one team is holding up the white flag, with a quarterback in full kneel-down mode, it's a mistake to pig-pile on him. There's a 1-in-1,000 chance the defense can jar the ball loose before the quarterback kneels and the whistle blows, but more likely what results is the risk of injury, on both sides of the ball. No question in my mind that if Schiano keeps trying to wreck victory formations, his own players will pay for it -- and maybe in the form of retribution from vengeful players in the future.
3. Kudos, Reggie Bush. I have to admit I never thought I'd see the day when Bush carried it 26 times for 172 yards against a front like Oakland's. More about Bush in Tuesday's column, but he did tell me after the game, "This doesn't surprise me. I always knew whatever my role was, and however they want to use me, I can do it.''
4. And kudos to you, Andrew Luck. RGIII last week, Luck this week, with a 20-of-31, 224-yard, two-touchdown, zero-turnover day. "I'm getting more comfortable every day,'' he said from Indianapolis. Luck made a beautiful touchdown throw to Reggie Wayne, a 30-yarder as time ticked down in the first half, looking off the safety -- actually, throwing it over the safety -- and making sure he didn't get too greedy too early in the throw against the Vikings' Cover-2. I asked him what he'd remember most about the day when he thinks back on his first NFL victory. "Adam's kick,'' he said, referring to Adam Vinatieri's 53-yard game-winner in the 23-20 win. "And I'll remember looking like a fool when the refs didn't run the clock when I thought they should. I bet that looked really nice on TV. I'm sure I looked like a fool -- but I'll take it.''
5. Nice run by Tebow. So far the Timmycat has yielded 11 snaps at quarterback and one run -- for 23 yards Sunday at Pittsburgh. We're still waiting for the fun, Rex.
***
Has the balance of power shifted West?
After tonight, when the 1-0 Broncos and 1-0 Falcons meet, there will be a nice symmetrical breakdown in the NFL standings, barring a tie in the Georgia Dome:
Teams with 2-0 records: 6.
Teams with 1-1 records: 20.
Teams with 0-2 records: 6. There's only one 0-2 team in the NFC -- New Orleans.
The NFC West went 4-0 Sunday. The San Francisco win over Detroit was expected, but the other three outcomes -- Arizona 20, New England 18; St. Louis 31, Washington 28; Seattle 27, Dallas 7 -- were not. Add San Diego's 38-10 annihilation of Tennessee and the possible ascension of Denver with Peyton Manning, and you see how the rise of good teams in the two western divisions could turn out to be one of the story lines of the season.
For the record, there have been only two of 46 Super Bowls featuring both teams from the Mountain and Pacific time zones: San Francisco over Denver in 1990, San Francisco over San Diego in 1995.
If it's a California Super Bowl rematch from the Niners-Chargers of 18 years ago, I doubt it will be the same kind of game as it was then, when Steve Young set the Super Bowl record with six touchdown passes. San Francisco has the NFC's best defense, and San Diego has played great defense through the first two weeks. A quick look at the three teams in the West that have started 2-0:
Arizona. What a game the Cardinals' D played in Foxboro Sunday, in their upset of the Patriot that no one saw coming. Arizona now has a premier pass-rusher, Calais Campbell (two sacks of Tom Brady), a great and versatile defensive tackle in Darnell Dockett, speedy linebackers in Sam Acho and Daryl Washington, and an excellent secondary with strong safety play from Adrian Wilson and Kerry Rhodes, and the man who personally stopped an important New England drive in the fourth quarter. Cornerback Patrick Peterson overpowered his blocker to stop Stevan Ridley for a four-yard loss, forcing the Patriots, down 11, to punt. He could have been an outside linebacker or safety on the play, watching him shed the block so easily.
"Well,'' he said by phone later, "I have the size for both of those positions. That was a huge, huge play.''
Playing 96 snaps -- all 82 on defense, 12 on special teams and two on offense -- Peterson and the Cardinals showed remarkable staying power, and obviously got lucky at the end when Stephen Gostkowski shanked what would have been the winning field goal. "Fifty-three men expected this,'' he said. "No one else. This is the kind of win we can use to build something solid here."
San Diego. The Chargers have held Darren McFadden and Chris Johnson, two threats to win the rushing title, to 49 yards in 23 carries. Rookie 3-4 defensive end Kendall Reyes has shorn up a weak position, and the Chargers finally seem to have found some help for a defense that too long relied on underachieving high draft picks. Offensively, Philip Rivers is a 74-percent passer with a bunch of targets he's still getting used to, but the best news is he's not taking the kind of risks that got him in so much trouble last year, when he threw 20 interceptions. Through two games, he's thrown one.
San Francisco. The 49ers and Houston have distanced themselves from the pack in the first two weeks. They're the best teams in football. Sunday night against Detroit, Alex Smith continued to show he's more than just a complementary piece to the puzzle. He makes winning plays, winning throws, and he is the perfect pilot for Jim Harbaugh's methodical, exacting ways. In the second half Sunday, with Detroit hanging around, Smith engineered drives of 10, 10 and 13 plays in succession. The results: field goal, field goal, touchdown. Smith's 115.9 rating after two games is best in the league for quarterbacks who have played two games. And on Sunday night, Smith got cut on the bridge of his nose when he was hit while sliding. "He's as tough as a two-dollar steak,'' Harbaugh said. More valuable too.
17 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://si.com/2012/writers/peter_king/09/16/week-2/index.html?eref=si_writers
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