About three minutes ago, the Chicago Bears beat the Arizona Cardinals 24-23 despite scoring no offensive TDs and turning the ball over to Arizona 6 times. The Cardinals led 23-3 with 5 seconds to play in the third quarter; they were coasting along to a win over the previously undefeated and heavily favored Bears. As Tony Kornheiser said with the Bears finally leading in the game with just under 3 minutes left to play, if you are writing about this game, it is difficult not to use the word "choke" in the same sentence with the words "Arizona Cardinals". I'm not writing this at home so I don't have access to Roget's Thesaurus, so the only words I can think of to replace "choke" would be "gag" or "regurgitate" or "fold". None of them are honorifics in this context and no honorifics belong to the Arizona Cardinals tonight - or for the past 50 years for that matter. They dominated this game; they had the game in hand and needed only not to fumble it away or give up a huge punt return for a TD. But they did all of that in a short period of time and now face a 1-5 record with little if any hope for redemption this year.
When Dennis Green was fired in Minnesota, he said that you could always find him "on the high road". Well, if he's up there on the high road, he can glance down and see his Cardinal team there on the low road. Remember according to song, when you take the low road, you'll get to Scotland more quickly and that's about where the Cardinals need to go to escape the ridicule they will deservedly get for this abominable loss on national TV. Just a few observations from the game…
The Cardinals ran 80 plays and the Bears only ran 53. Six of those plays by the Bears turned the ball over to the Cardinals. That stat by itself almost assures that the Bears cannot have won this game.
Edgerrin James got what he was griping about for a few weeks now; he got to carry the ball a lot and to carry it in the 4th quarter in an attempt to seal the Cardinals' victory. Not only did he get the ball stripped from his hands to produce the second of the Bears' defensive TDs, his total output for the night was 36 carries for 55 yards. That is ever so slightly over 1.5 yards per carry. I sure hope James is investing his signing bonus money wisely, because he's not going to get any incentive clauses from his stats for this season.
Can we delay the induction ceremony for Rex Grossman to the Hall of Fame for just a little while longer? 14-37 and 148 yards with zero TDs and 4 INTs is not a stat line for the ages. I don't know how to calculate QB ratings so I can't give you the number here, but if that stat line comes to anything higher than 50, I'll be shocked.
Neil Rackers missed the winning field goal with about a minute left to play. He missed a game tying field goal on the final play of the game last week. Last year, Rackers was 40-42 in field goal tries and both misses came from more than 50 yards. He had missed 3 field goals this year and again all were from outside 50 yards. He missed another long one early in the game and then missed a 41-yard attempt with the game on the line.
Matt Leinart played a good game here but never had to make any really difficult throws. Why the Cardinals stopped using their spread formation and quick passes after they worked so well in the first three possessions is a question for the Arizona "braintrust" to provide spin control for.
I mentioned Tony Kornheiser above. On October 22, his program on ESPN, Pardon the Interruption, will be five years old. I find that program interesting, entertaining and informative when I have the opportunity to watch it. Would that more of ESPN's original entertainment programming would be as good as PTI.
Speaking of ESPN programming that ought to aspire to the level of interest, entertainment and information achieved by PTI, the other end of the spectrum has to be Cold Pizza. I watch this program only under duress; it has been horrific on the best days I've seen. I read somewhere that this show had a poll question the day after Cory Lidle died in the plane crash to the effect of "Should baseball consider postponing the playoffs in light of the accident?" Excuse me? This is not the assassination of a President; this is not a terrorist attack; this is not an earthquake that renders the game venue unsafe. I don't want to trivialize Cory Lidle's death; the loss of human life is rarely something to be celebrated. But if the thought of postponing the playoff games ever crossed the mind of anyone in the MLB front office, that person needs to get out of the game and take up competitive yoga as his life's calling…
Sticking with baseball for the moment, there is something going on there that reminds me of Alice in Wonderland; all is not what it seems; not everything makes sense. The Yankees lose in the playoffs and consider firing the manager who took them to the playoffs for the ninth straight year and who won four World Series with the team. They didn't actually go through with the firing, but they thought about it. Meanwhile about 200 miles to the south on Interstate-95, the Baltimore Orioles' owner is looking at a team with nine consecutive losing seasons and is telling everyone that what the Orioles are doing is precisely the correct set of things to do. And out in Oakland, the A's have fired their manager, Ken Macha, after he took the team to the ALCS. That's the first time in a long, long time that the A's have made it beyond the first round of the playoffs, but still Macha was fired. If you can understand all of that, you're a better person than I am.
The rumor is that Lou Piniella will take the job managing the Cubs. I hope that's right because that will mean that he won't be doing any more games for FOX. On TV, Piniella is tough to take. Meanwhile, departed Cubs' manager, Dusty Baker, is doing studio analysis for ESPN during the playoffs. Please, help Dusty find a job in baseball because he is brutal on the ear-pans on ESPN. On top of that, his next bit of insight will the first that he has revealed.
I have liked Gary Matthews Jr. as a studio analyst during the MLB playoffs. The various networks carrying MLB ought to try to keep him around.
Finally, when Indiana Pacer, Stephen Jackson, was arrested for "discharging a gun" outside a nightclub during an altercation where someone also tried to run him down with a car, he was with teammates who also were "packing". All were licensed to have the guns and no one was hurt so I guess the situation turned out about as well as one could hope under the circumstances. However, here is Scott Ostler's take on this matter in the San Francisco Chronicle:
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"As a country, we've got to decrease our dependence on foreign heat, so I'm calling on the Indiana Pacers to help. When Pacer Stephen Jackson was arrested for shooting his gun into the air, two teammates with him also had handguns in their cars. That's just wasteful. They're teammates, why can't they share and conserve ammo? NBA teams must take the lead in pistol-pooling."
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