Another Burgandy and Gold (And Blue) Monday

Each of the Redskins losses during their current 6 game losing streak have been agonizing in their own way, and yesterday’s 27-24 home loss to Dallas followed along that same path. Their 20-13 home loss to the Eagles was the long-awaited Rex Grossman-meltdown game. Take back his 4 interceptions, and who knows what the outcome would have looked like. Their 33-20 loss at Carolina was a reminder of how bare their cupboard truly is. The Panthers, who are no good yet in their own right, at least were able to show off their shiny new toy in Cam Newton. In that game, the Redskins happened to turn to a 30 year old journeyman who had never won an NFL start (and still hasn’t). The 23-0 sha-lacking handed to them by the Bills in Toronto showed a complete lack of effort and preparation by what is supposedly a professional sports team (they allowed John Beck to get sacked a franchise record number of times against a team that hadn’t been able to touch an opposing QB all season long until that point). The ugly 19-11 loss to San Fran at FedEx Field wasn’t even as close as the score indicated. The 49ers were superior enough to play sloppily and unevenly, and yet it still appeared that they were just toying with the Skins for most of the game. Last week’s 20-9 loss at Miami served notice that the season was, for all intents and purposes, over. The Dolphins had only gotten their 1st win of the year a week before. If Washington could find a win anywhere on their schedule for the rest of the season, certainly it would be in Miami, but afterwards it was tough to envision another winnable game for them in 2011.

Sunday’s OT loss to the Cowboys was a different animal all together. The Redskins were an almost unheard of 7.5 point home dog to a divisional opponent (and hated rival). Washington made enough bumbling plays to assure everyone that they were in fact the same old Redskins: a Fred Davis fumble, an ill-advised Rex Grossman interception, letting an All-Pro yet not exactly “fleet of foot” tight end score on like a 60 yard pass play, allowing the Cowboys to pick up a 3rd and 15 in overtime, etc. And yet at the same time they actually displayed some fight and enough play-making ability at other times that they probably should’ve won the game. A win would have done some good for this franchise. It would have ended a 5 game losing streak, avenged another last second loss to said hated divisional rival from earlier this year, and put the Skins at 4-6, which as bad as they had been for 5 weeks would have only put them at 2 games out of 1st place in the mediocre NFC East with 3 divisional games still left to play against the Eagles and Giants…still, while that would have put them mathematically still in the playoff hunt, I think only the most widely delusional Redskins fans would mistake that for an actual shot at making the postseason, but as fans all we ask for is the illusion of hope sometimes. When Graham Gano’s 52 yard overtime field goal attempt sailed just a smidge wide, and then the Cowboys kicker narrowly made his attempt only a few minutes later even that glimpse of hope was extinguished yesterday as well.

Ahhh...the illusion of hope.

What kind of drives me crazy about this season is how people have generally lost sight of the fact that this was supposed to be a rebuilding year in the 1st place…such is the curse of having a surprising 3-1 start I guess. And the Shanahan regime has been far from perfect, but I think it’s fair to say that most of this team’s problems stem from poor decisions made by previous eras of Redskins decision-makers. I guess it is less fun to talk about the sins of the last 10-15 years than to bash the current head-honchos though. For years, Washington was constantly in win-now mode as they signed every high-priced free agent they could find and gave away early round draft picks like they were free samples at the supermarket. This personnel acquiring style generally doesn’t work in any sport, but especially not in pro football. What it did was allow the Redskins to at the very least be mediocre every year, usually hovering in the 6-10, 7-9, or 8-8 record range. Every once in a while they would actually have a year where they were good enough to be 9-7 or 10-6 and make the playoffs, but this was more fool’s gold than anything else, further convincing the Redskins brass that they were only a player or 2 away from being a true Super Bowl contender, and thus continuing the personnel cycle described above.

What’s happening this year is what knowledgeable Redskins fans have feared for quite some time. Eventually, someone at Redskins Park would come to their senses and realize that the real-life fantasy football league strategy they had been employing wasn’t working, and they would finally decide to burn the whole thing down and start from scratch. The side effects of that previous strategy include a lack of young talent, a lack of depth, and an abundance of overpriced and rapidly aging players. Cleaning house is absolutely what needed to be done to fix the franchise for the long term, but having a truly ugly season or 2 is kind of the cost of doing business. Shanahan’s biggest mistake thus far was the 1st big decision he made since signing on with Washington, and looking back it might be one the franchise doesn’t recover from before Shanahan’s time in DC is up: Donovan McNabb.

I don’t think many people thought McNabb coming to DC was a bad idea at the time. Hindsight tells us differently, but even though some wondered why Philly would trade McNabb within the division I think most people thought McNabb was a good fit with the Shanahan offense, and at the very least he would be a serviceable stopgap QB for a couple seasons. I don’t remember anyone saying he would be a huge bust that wouldn’t even make it through a full season in Washington before being relegated to wearing a headset and a baseball cap. McNabb was only 1 player, but it may have set the franchise back several seasons. 1st, it meant Washington had wasted another year without finding their franchise quarterback. Outside of Sam Bradford, the crop of QB draftees was pretty weak that particular year, but perhaps Shanahan could have signed a less expensive stopgap that season (or just rolled with Rex Grossman as a stopgap a year earlier). Also, the draft picks they gave up to get McNabb (a 2nd round pick and either a 3rd or 4th round pick) could have helped further along the rebuilding process as well. 2nd round picks should be immediate contributors and NFL starters in my book. I would consider a 3rd/4th round pick as a guy that might need a little more seasoning, but who could be a starter after a year or 2 as well. That’s 2 potential starters right there. Like I said before, hindsight is always 20/20, but knowing what we know now wouldn’t you have rather suffered through Grossman as your starter last year, used that 2nd round pick on another offensive lineman, a corner, or maybe a rush-linebacker (like they got with Kerrigan this year)? Then, depending on what you got the year before you could have either used your 1st round pick this year on Kerrigan (who looks like he is a stud…so if you think I want a do-over on him, think again) and taken Andy Dalton in the 2nd round, or used your 1st rounder on someone from this year’s talented crop of rookie QBs like Blaine Gabbert or Christian Ponder. I don’t remember the exact order of the draft, but it’s not like they couldn’t have gotten 1 of them by moving up or down in the draft or something. Either way, the team would have been a season or 2 ahead of where they are now in the rebuilding process.

This guy would sure look good in burgandy and gold.

Unfortunately, Shanahan tried to kill 2 birds with 1 stone. He tried to start the rebuilding process while at the same time still trying to stay good enough to “win now” by rolling the dice with McNabb…unfortunately, sometimes the dice come up snake eyes, and you walk away with nothing. McNabb proved this year that it was more than just him and the Shanahans not seeing eye-to-eye last year, as he was every bit of a bust in Vikings purple as he was in burgundy and gold the year before. That’s little solace for fans of a team that have seen this script play out far too many times over the last 2 decades though, and it may end up serving as the legacy of the Mike Shanahan Redskins era in the end. All we (as fans) ask for is the illusion of hope at this point…something we probably won’t feel again until next year.

Hoodie Time

Christmas’ and birthdays kind of take on a new meaning the older you get. It’s cliché to say, but at a certain point the pleasure you get from giving really does outweigh that of the getting. It’s gotten to the point where I almost don’t care if I get a single present on those days…well, “almost.” I mean, what kind of sad pathetic loser would I be if I didn’t get 1 Christmas present, right? Anyway, as you get older you seem to go through different phases in terms of the gifts that you get from people. I think this is partially because as we get older we all get increasingly harder to shop for, which lumps everyone’s gift-giving ideas into 1 or 2 distinct areas. When you’re 5, you are so easy to shop for. Toys, video games, and anything with a Ninja Turtle on it are all gold, but those days can’t last forever.

Bam!

For example, there was one Christmas when I was 11 or 12 where I got like 4 duffel bags from various people. It’s a smart present for a kid who was playing on a million sports teams and needed something to haul around all his junk back and forth to different practices and games, but 4 from 1 Christmas? For the record, I think my parents forgot to coordinate on that particular gift that year (thus both getting me one), and I think I got 1 each from an aunt and I think maybe my Grandma as well. Once I hit puberty, aftershave seemed to be the gift de jour from my aunts, uncles, and more distant relatives that I only saw a couple times a year. As a 14 year old, I had enough aftershave products on top of the dresser in my room that you would have thought you just walked into a Macy’s or something.

At some point, hooded sweatshirts became the go-to gift idea for me. This was perfectly fine because I love hoodies. During high school and college, I can hardly ever remember wearing actual “jackets,” as when the weather turned cool enough I would just start whipping through my hoodie rotation. When I was working my way through college for the Rec Sports Department, I think I had a different UMBC hoodie for every day of the week. This “gift phase” started when I was about 15 or 16, and it ended…well, actually it’s still going in some ways. For example, I probably haven’t gotten a hoodie from my parents since I was a teenager, but I can think of occasions where my siblings, Krissy’s parents, and her brothers have all bought me hoodies over the last few years. (Even Krissy has bought me a few despite knowing I have a closet full of them. This is as much because she loves shopping for athletic apparel as anything else.) And why wouldn’t they? They are affordable (even the relatively expensive ones), sensible (they know I go to the gym and play sports), and it’s just about all anyone sees me where when I’m not at work.

If they're good enough for the president of the motherf****** USA, they're good enough for me.

This has become a double-edged sword…take a look at our appartment’s coat closet and it is lined wall to wall with hooded sweatshirts. Including fleeces and zipper-downs, by my count as of yesterday I owned 17 hoodie-like things. Krissy’s side of the closet has at least that many as well. The problem is that we all eventually have to become grownups, and you only get to wear a hoodie so many days of the week when that happens. It was time to do a little bit of spring cleaning on that closet…but where do you begin?

To start, I decided that it would be stupid to get rid of my favorites, which included a hand-me-down black UMBC hoodie that Pat left in his office after he stopped working there (I ended up getting his job and, consequently, the sweatshirt), a grey Nike zipper-down, and a blue Old Navy fleece. I also couldn’t bring myself to get rid of an older white Adidas hoodie that Krissy had gotten me as a gift (even though there is some kind of stain on the sleeve that no amount of bleach can get out). Similarly, I decided against things I had gotten as recent gifts, like a couple of Under Armor hoodies, a Caldwell College hoodie, a blue and red Nike zipper-down, and a black Jordan hoodie. These are the sweatshirts that I had gotten most recently, but for the most part hadn’t even gotten a chance to wear much yet…thus the reason for this hoodie purge in the 1st place. I also didn’t allow myself to get rid of an old gray Under Armor UMBC hoodie. This was partially because it is Under Armor, partially because it is about as comfortable as any article of clothing I own, and partially for sentimental value…the hoodie was a gift from my old UMBC boss, and it kind of reminds me of a simpler time when what I didn’t make in money I made up for in free clothes, shaving cream, and other swag.

There were a couple of others mixed in there as well, but that didn’t leave a lot of options for what I could get rid of. 2 were pretty easy choices: a nondescript blue fleece and an equally nondescript blue hoodie that I think I had gotten as gifts from my Grandma and Krissy’s Grandma, respectively. After that it got tougher…a gray Quiksilver sweatshirt that I wore the heck out of during high school and college, a darker gray Old Navy fleece that I also wore a ton in college (mostly because it did a good job of covering up my neck-acne…sigh), and a size XL gray Adidas UMBC hoodie that I only wore a couple times ever because it was ginormous on me (it was another work gift though and a really nice sweatshirt…if only I had been given a “shmedium”).

So, there you have it: originally 17 sweatshirts cut down to 12. That’s still a lot of hoodie and hoodie-like articles of clothing, but I reduced my sweatshirt count by about 30%, which freed up some much needed closet space. It also consequently will allow me to have less of an aneurism when I need to pick out a sweatshirt to wear since I have fewer things to choose from in the 1st place. And yet this all has the smell of futility to it…odds are that people will continue to buy my hoodies, and those unused hangers will have new sweatshirts on them in no time. I guess there are worse things to complain about though. Here’s to never growing up!

Just When You Think Things Are Going Well...

As much as I have written about sprained ankles and knees, pulled hamstrings, and things like that, I’m convinced that the worst possible sports injury on this level is any type of lower back injury. When you hurt your back, the pain and limitations are not just restricted to that area. It's just as difficult to bend over and pick something up as it is to get your legs to move where you want them to go or to reach up to grab something from a shelf. If there is any truth in back pain being hereditary, I probably have the bad back gene. I have heard all the stories of my Dad and his brothers comparing notes on their bad backs over the years, and every once in a while my brother and I have suffered back spasms as well. Of course, this might have more to do with the fact that we all have participated in athletics and some degree of manual labor of the years than genetics, but either way it is a common trait that we all share.

One of the great things about being a kid is that all kids are basically rubber band men. Your body seems fully elastic, and can contort in ways that don’t even seem humanly possible as an adult. Rolled ankles and twisted knees have no effect. You can play all day long, come back the next day without any muscle soreness or stiffness, and do it all over again. I remember suffering my 1st “back spasm” when I was 12 or 13 years old. I was on a travel basketball team, and we had a weekend tournament where games were taking place at multiple sites across a particular county. That weekend was the 1st time that I had to come to grips with the fact that I wasn’t an “invincible” kid anymore. I was in fact human. We had been scheduled to play 3 games that day: 1 in the morning, 1 around noon, and the last 1 later in the afternoon. During the 2nd game, I must have done something to tweak my lower back, but being the impervious to pain kid that I was I couldn’t pinpoint an exact instance when it happened. Nevertheless, riding in the car on the way to game 3 of the day caused my back to tighten up, and so I had suffered my 1st sports-related back injury.

The worst back injury I ever had happened during my freshman year in high school. During a basketball game against DeMatha, I stupidly stood in to take a charge in the 4th quarter when we were already down by 20 points. I got the call, but as I hit the floor I immediately felt my back tighten up. That game was only about midway through the season, but the injury lingered for another 2 months or so until the season was finished. There were many days I would miss practice to give my back an extra day of rest in order to be ready on game days, my teammates and coaches nicknamed me “Charles Barkley” (and not for the way I played), and for the rest of the year I wore 1 of those back braces/supports that you usually only see middle-aged dads and guys moving furniture for a living wear.

The uniform of the 45 year old man.

Since then, I have suffered slight back spasms every once in a while, but nothing as severe as that high school injury, but this weekend I felt a slight pull in my lower back after catching a pass near the goal line, and trying (unsuccessfully) to tight-rope walk my way into the end zone. I had some tightness in my back the rest of that day, but it didn’t prevent me from playing basketball the next morning (albeit not going full-bore). Fast forward to this morning when I felt a shooting pain in my lower back as I was sitting at my desk at work...once again, sitting seems to be the worst thing you can possible do if you are having back spasms. The pain was so sharp, that I actually started to sweat, and as I’m writing this I have to position myself in a way that looks like a Louisville slugger has been shoved up my keister. So anyway, count me out from the gym for at least a day or 2 as I hope to avoid any further setbacks. Back pain…such a pain in the ass.

Danger!

Roll Tide

I have become less and less of a college football fan over the years. Part of this is because I’m a grownup now, and I don’t really have the luxury of spending all of Saturday AND Sunday plopped on the couch from 12pm-11pm. Part of it is that I didn’t go to 1 of those big state schools with a powerhouse football program. I know a lot of people that went to schools like Florida, Ohio St., or Penn St., and the traditions of college football like homecoming weekend and tailgating are as engrained in their lives as Christmas trees or Thanksgiving turkeys. I went to a school with no football program at all, so I don’t have nor will probably ever have that kind of connection to the sport. Similarly, I grew up in Maryland, an area that was Redskins territory and Redskins territory only at the time. No college football program in the area was really big enough to compete for the population’s attention. If I had grown up or had family from an area where college football is a birthright, it may have been a different story.

Enter into the conversation my gym buddy, Scott. Scott’s family is from Alabama, where you basically have to decide whether you are an Auburn or Alabama fan by the time you get baptized. That being said, Scott would tell you that he bleeds crimson. Every once in a while, I like to rile Scott up by talking about a very sore subject for him: Boise St. Most fans of SEC teams share the same superiority complex that Scott has. They have good reason to feel superior too. While I’m too lazy to look up the actual stats now, I know for a fact that the SEC has won more national titles than any other conference since the BCS’s inception, and throughout any given year the top 10 ranked teams in the country from week to week could be littered with 4 or 5 SEC teams. SEC teams pass the eye test too, as the quality of the athletes and the speed of the games doesn’t even compare to that of other conferences as a whole.

This is where fans of SEC teams like Alabama, Florida, and LSU (and other big time non-SEC football schools for that matter too like Ohio St., Oklahoma, and Texas) get in trouble in my opinion though. No one would argue that Boise St.’s conference (the Mountain West I believe) is as good as the SEC, the Big 12, or the Big 10. No one would argue that even though Boise has had a pretty good recent string of success that their history, pedigree, and resources can’t match up with a school like Alabama. Alabama is likely to have a top 5 recruiting class every year until the end of time…the kids that Boise recruits aren’t slouches, but they are not on Alabama’s level in that way.

Because of this, even seeing a team like Boise creep up into the top 5 of the rankings is enough to cause Scott’s blood to boil. They have no business being ranked that high. They wouldn’t even go through an SEC regular season above 0.500. These are the types of things Scott will say arguing against Boise. These kinds of things aren’t even really worth arguing…heck, most of the really good SEC schools don’t even make it through their respective seasons unscathed. You can use a 1-loss Florida team and a 2-loss LSU team that each won the national championship in different seasons a few years back.

If you bring up points in favor of Boise St., Scott will shoot down all of them. If you say that they can only play who they are scheduled to play, he would say that they need to try to schedule some better teams. If you say that they have tried to and point to playing at Georgia and what basically amounted to a road game against Virginia Tech the year before, he would say that’s not enough. If you say that they won both those games (the game against SEC opponent Georgia handily), he will say both those teams didn’t happen to be “that” good anyway at the time. If you say that they try to schedule those kinds of games all the time, but don’t get any takers because most big time schools don’t want to suffer the possible embarrassment of losing to Boise St., Scott would say they need to switch to a different conference. If you bring up the fact that a school of similar stature, Utah, smacked Alabama in a bowl game a few years ago, and Boise beat another traditional football powerhouse, Oklahoma, a few years ago in a bowl game as well, these points are scoffed at and poopoo-ed as flukes.

These arguments are all just in fun, as for all I know Scott is right, and Boise St. would lose by 4 touchdowns if they played Alabama or LSU. That’s all well and good, and besides I should know by now that trying to convince a fan of a team from a power football conference that Boise St. or TCU belongs in the same conversation as them is like trying to convince a fanatical religious nut that evolution really exists. Still, what really got me riled up is when Scott tried to argue that the general public would rather see a LSU-Alabama rematch in the BCS title game this year than have to watch the winner of that game face Boise St. (hypothetically assuming that things would workout so that would be the matchup). This is the typical elitist attitude that fans of teams like Bama and LSU have…the fact is that Alabama and LSU (just to pick out 2 teams) are not as important to the rest of the sports viewing world as they are to fans and alumni of those schools. And besides that, Boise St. vs. [insert powerhouse football team] would draw in much more attention than Bama-LSU, round 2. 1st, the loser of that game won’t even make it to their conference title game, and therefore should be eliminated from contention right there. 2nd, people get tired of seeing the same thing, especially after the 2 week lead-in to the 1st game between those 2 teams, and the constant blubbering about it being jammed down our throats by ESPN and every other sports news organization. 3rd (and most importantly), Boise-Bama or Boise-LSU would essentially be the plot of every great sports movie of the last 50 years playing out in real life. I’m sorry, but “Hoosiers” wasn’t about 1 great basketball team beating another…it was the classic underdog story. Guys like Scott and I are fans of the game. We are going to watch no matter who plays...but non-football fans aren’t going to watch LSU-Alabama, the sequel. Doesn’t anyone remember the Butler-Duke NCAA title game from a couple years ago? It only got the highest TV rating of any NCAA game since 1997. The “little team that could” vs. the “unstoppable juggernaut team”…now, there’s a story. By the way, did I mention the LSU-Alabama game was a disappointing 9-6 snoozefest? I’m all for great defense, but I don’t think it exactly lived up to the hype, and I don’t think the masses will be clamoring to see it again.

The problem with the whole “Boise doesn’t belong” attitude dismisses the whole premise of sports in general. It’s about competing, and champions aren’t determined on paper or in preseason rankings. Sure, if sports was a beauty pageant, the Alabama’s, Oklahoma’s, and LSU’s of the world would win every year…but sports doesn’t work that way. It has to be proven on the field or on the court. And I concede that guys who think like Scott could be right…if Alabama and Boise played 10 times, the Tide might win 9 of those games. In sports where champions are determined by playing a series of games, that would definitely hurt Boise’s chances. But that’s the thing about this situation…they only need to win once. And that might make elitist college football fans angry, but that is in fact what sports are all about.