As my father often said about successful child-raising: “There’s a lot to be said for neglect.” As for the NFL, neglect is still causing serious growing pains in a child now 31 years old.
Last Sunday the totally unintended use/misuse of replay rules — its overwhelming use from its start has been totally unintended — made an NFL-asked-for-it mess of the Patriots-Jets game, determining its outcome after a long delay led to startling word that the Jets not only hadn’t scored a TD, the ball belonged to the Pats via a touchback.
That was a big story through Monday, as it should have been. Then, all gone!
Sunday, Sunday night and Monday night, despite the relative merits of teams, at least one NFL game, and perhaps all of them, will be determined to some degree by the unintended use/misuse of the replay rule to try to adjudicate what never was at popular issue among fans, coaches and players.
If eyewitness experiences tell us that the significant, game-changing but totally unintended use of replay is not good for the game — in fact, it turns games into protracted microscopic, freeze-framed folly in the unachievable pursuit of “getting it right” — we’d have acted to fix that, or at least limit it, right?
After all, the NFL soared in national popularity before the populist call for replay reviews. And that outcry was only in response to infrequent but highly publicized egregiously incorrect calls, not the way it has mostly been applied since 1986.
It debuted as it remains: an impossible dream, the utopian pursuit of “get it right” perfection through highly subjective second opinions, which few wanted and football never needed.
Yet, the game-wrecking, escalating lunacy persists. FOX, in its NFL pregame show Sunday, should’ve seized the tape of last week’s reversed-possession Jets “TD” — among dozens of gripe-free, reasonable TD calls that would have went unchallenged and uninspected prior to replay — to allow Mike Pereira, former head of NFL officiating and now a FOX replay inspector, to provide some practical sense and history to the senseless impracticality of replay rules.
That last Sunday’s colossal reversal changed the entire season for both teams, extent yet unknown, makes a grand example of a rule born of reactionary impulse as opposed to foresight. And the disease, though treatable, remains epidemic.
Pereira, a candid, good-humored man now with no NFL ties that bind, could tell us how the NFL systematized the ridiculous, how he worked with ex-Giants GM George Young on the NFL Competition Committee as the replay rule grew to become Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, turning on its master.
Pereira once recalled for us that Young, who died in 2001, saw it all coming, that he kept replay-rule proposals and revisions in a file he marked, “The Monster Grows.”
That monster remains at-large, ready to pounce on and disembowel NFL games here, there and everywhere. Just don’t do something, stand there!
Kustok a slam dunk in first Nets telecast
The problem with women sportscasters isn’t with the women, it’s with the men who hire and assign them.
The women are presented as evidence of inclusion and diversity when too often their presence is designed for publicity and tokenism. Then there are those hired and paraded — and often dressed — to attract the “young male demographic” as “hot babes” when the Internet now serves to satisfy prurient interests on demand.
Beth Mowins was assigned by ESPN to call an NFL game in September. And that, as intended, made a lot of noise and news.
That she’s a cliché’ churner and panderer — last year on a college football telecast she addressed the Baylor football gang rape and sexual assault scandals only with, “Of course, the off-field issues continue to swirl around the Bears as they try and move forward” — made her as run-of-the-mill as any male play-by-player.
But even after one regular-season game, it seems Sarah Kustok, YES’ new Nets analyst and former sideline reporter, seems in place for all and only the right reasons.
In poker, they’re called “tells,” and throughout Wednesday’s Nets-Pacers, one could tell.
That Kustok played the game — at DePaul — doesn’t mean she knows, sees and speaks it well. But she went 3-for-3.
In the first quarter, when the Nets’ Allen Crabbe was called for charging while driving toward the basket, Kustok quickly and confidently said it was a case of Crabbe, at 6-foot-6, trying to indiscriminately assert his height advantage against Cory Joseph, who’s 6-3.
The replay showed exactly that. There was more where that came from.
It’s early, I know, but it seems likely that Kustok, as Howie Rose says of himself, is not just another pretty face.
Watching without seeing
That national TV expert analysts know less about the teams in front of them than viewers remains a steady strain on the nerves.
During the ALCS, FOX’s John Smoltz noted it’s tough on relievers because they’re brought in to pitch with runners on base.
That was the case when he became a reliever — back when the game made sense. That’s no longer the case. Managers, including Joe Girardi and the Astros’ A.J. Hinch, now have “designated inning” relievers, brought in to start one inning and no more, regardless of how effectively they pitch.
Reggie Miller, early in Thursday’s Knicks-Thunder on TNT, also seemed the last to know.
When Carmelo Anthony hit a 3, to make it 3-0 — he followed with his charming three-to-the-head street rub-out gesture — Miller said, “To me, he’s going to be like Team USA, Carmelo Anthony, with this Thunder — he’s just going to focus on scoring.”
Team USA? That’s what he did with the Knicks the past seven seasons.
So, Giants defensive back Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie quit then came back? Reader Scott Wolinitz: “Isn’t there an episode of ‘Seinfeld’ when George quits, only returns to work after the weekend, pretending it never happened?”
Mike Francesa’s Lost Tapes Lock of the Week was Denver, 10-point home favorite, over the 0-5 Giants, who he claimed would win the NFC East until they began 0-5, at which time he said he knew from the start they’d stink. He just missed, again; Giants won by 13.
After Gary Sanchez homered in Game 5 of the ALCS, FOX and Joe Buck went with the latest irrelevant stat graphic: The ball’s “exit velocity” was 110 mph. Reader Bill Fariello: “Buck failed to mention that Sanchez’s exit velocity from the batter’s box was 1 mph.” No matter the stakes, some refuse to learn.
CBS’ Tony Romo last Sunday noted the importance of “gap discipline,” which he explained as the importance of tackling beyond the line of scrimmage. What a development!