Entries Tagged 'Football' ↓

The BCS has been considering a four team playoff to determine the college football champion. But decided not to after all.

You know how in “King Lear,” he walks out at the end holding the body of his daughter, and we’re at the “no worst, there is none” moment, and just at the saddest point, Lear, mad with grief, thinks that he sees her breathing after all, and how that injection of false hope right then just makes it EVEN WORSE, breaking Lear’s heart and making him die? So goes this column by Michael Wilbon, who writes a noble elegy for Bret Favre upon his retirement, only to inject at the very end the possibility that he might be back!

Brett Favre Set to Retire After 17 Years.

He went out on a brilliant season. But his last play was an interception. Surely, we all hoped, that would be enough to bring him back. But, alas, no.

OK, churches can go back to having Superbowl parties again:

NFL Reverses Call On Church Parties

What a game. Though I was for the Giants, it’s a little sad to see perfection marred. As for the other aspects of the spectacle: I have always liked Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, but I don’t see what their mini-concert had to do with the Superbowl. And commercials or other enterprises that try too hard lose their effect.

I invited the Patrick Henry College students from Wisconsin over to our place for Johnsonville brats and to watch the Packers play the Giants for a slot in the Super Bowl. We had to console each other after a suspenseful, nerve-wracking game. But, as I have observed, when someone loses the Super Bowl, it’s almost better not to be in the thing, such is the disappointment, and I don’t think anyone can defeat the Patriots. I could be wrong.

. . .for their wild, snowy playoff victory over Seattle. (P.S.: All Packers fans are very grateful to the New York Giants.)

HT: Pastor Esget

Why can’t the Oklahoma Sooners, one of my alma maters, win a post-season bowl game? Last night’s lost to West Virginia in the Fiesta Bowl–sorry, the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl–was the fourth in four years. And in each of those games the Sooners were, to coin a term, the overdogs.

It isn’t computers but the human factor that is messing up the final BCS football rankings. To the human attention span, old losses do not count as much as recent losses. Poor Missouri was number 1 just a few days ago, but after losing to Oklahoma, they plummeted to number 6 and are completely out of all of the BCS bowls. Yes, they have two losses, but those were both to the same team! Meanwhile, arguably lesser teams with two worse losses got into the big bowls.

Can there be a playoff? These players are all college students, though it is easy to forget, and we have to consider finals, Christmas break, etc., etc., so the argument goes. But here is my solution: Make a shorter season to have room for a series of playoff bowls. This can be done by getting rid of the pre-conference powderpuff games at the beginning of the season. Play only the teams in your conference. Then have the winners of each conference play each other in a tournament set-up until only two are standing, to end it all on New Year’s Day. (With most teams ending their season in November, this would give most players much more time for finals!)

As one of the lucky few whose satellite package happened to include the NFL network, I stayed up late last night watching the epic confrontation between the Green Bay Packers (my team) and the Dallas Cowboys (America’s team). Though the Packers lost, 37-27, it was a thrilling game, and I realize I may have witnessed a historic turning point. Brett Favre, the Cal Ripken of football, went down with an arm injury early in the game. But his back-up, Aaron Rodgers, came on the field and did a brilliant job, throwing 11 straight pass completions including a touch-down and moving his team up and down the field with alacrity. The Packers came within two idiotic pass interference penalties (from injured Charles Woodson’s backup) from possibly winning the game. Though I hope very much that Favre comes back for the next game to keep his games-played streak alive and to take the Packers to the Superbowl and beyond, the torch may have been passed. And Rodgers didn’t drop it, bringing hope to the Packer nation.

Kansas lost to Missouri on Saturday, marring their undefeated season and shot at the national title. But still, that the Kansas Jayhawks came out of nowhere–being completely unranked at the beginning of the season–to having had a legitimate shot at the national championship is a testimony to coach Mark Mangino.

The massively obese coach is a football genius, just as the massively obese Nero Wolfe is a detection genius. Mangino has specialized in raising teams from the dead. He helped turn even Kansas State into a good football team while he was on the coaching staff. Then he served as the Offensive Coordinator for the Oklahoma Sooners. Back in the 1990s, the Sooners, gutted by NCAA program and recruitment penalties, were mired in mediocrity. They went through several hapless coaches before bringing on today’s Bob Stoops. He, in turn, brought in Mangino, and in 2000, the Sooners–pretty much unheralded until they crushed a powerful Texas team–won the national championship.

Now Mangino is the head coach at the University of Kansas, and he again worked his magic. (Nebraska should be taking up collections from school children to lure him there.) You have to remember that teams like Kansas do not have the benefit of all of those blue-ribbon recruits that the powerhouses do.

“He is doing what Bill Snyder did,” said [Mark] Stallard, who wrote “Tales From the Jayhawks Gridiron.” “Take three-star players and coach them into four- or five-star players that Texas A&M or Texas overlooked.”

COACH them into five-star players! Taking someone of modest ability and TEACHING him to be great! That is the sign of a first-rate coach, a vocation that, we sometimes forget, is a subset of the TEACHER.

This morning, as I write this, I am watching the recording we made of the Packer game before the power went out. When I called my brother last night, he let slip that the Packers won, and today’s paper told me that this victory over Detroit was another career highlight for Brett Favre, who completed 20 straight passes, setting a team record, and tying his career record with seven 300-yard games in a season.

As I watch this game, knowing how it will end, Favre’s first quarter fumble didn’t bother me. Nor did the way Detroit dominated the first quarter. I am enjoying it in a different way, free of anxiety.

This is the way life should be for Christians. We know how all of this ends. We have a happy ending ahead of us. We should not be paralyzed with worry or defeated by our troubles. From the aspect of eternity, our problems are not going to mean all that much.

True, this is not the best way to view football, since a big part of the fun is the suspense, tension, and agonizing, all of which accentuate the hope, the relief, and the joy that we also experience in the game as it unfolds in time. And this too speaks to us of life and why we go through what we do.