My Sh*tty Super Bowl Sunday: Part 4

As someone who has been known on more than one occasion to rudely interrupt and say "please get to the point," I've certainly taken the long route in getting to mine which was originally that I hate the Patriots and therefore Super Bowl Sunday sucked. All of that other crap I wrote about was just normal day to day bullshit but, when you look back on it through the prism of the Patriots historic comeback victory, it rises to a higher level of suckiness.

It wasn't just that the Patriots won of course, it was the way they won. It's the way they so often win by taking advantage of their opponent going completely fucking brain dead with the game on the line. Whether it be Billy Cundiff missing a 32 yard field goal in the AFC Championship Game, the Eagles basically running the clock out on themselves in Super Bowl XXXIX or the Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX throwing the ball into the middle of the field on second and goal from the one yard line with one of the best short yardage running backs and most mobile quarterbacks in the game. I'm not going to call the Patriots lucky because that's loser talk but let's just say that they've benefited from a few generous opponents. Cue the Falcons.

Wouldn't be the FGR
without this either.

No need to waste our collective time on all of the plays the Falcons had to botch to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Lord knows they've been dissected and discussed enough this week but I do want to look at one aspect of the Falcons' collapse that hasn't really gotten the attention it deserves. We'll also throw-in a couple of personal anecdotes as it wouldn't really be the FGR without those. For the sake of keeping this in order and so I don't have to think of words to connect my paragraphs, we're going timeline style and switching to the present tense - let's pick it up in the second quarter:

Second Quarter

2:21 - Tom Brady throws an interception that Atlanta's Robert Alford returns 82 yards for a touchdown. During the return, Brady makes what appears to be an attempt to tackle Alford and ends-up face down on the ground in a pose of defeat. Who knew that the Falcons would later rob us from the joy of seeing that image in perpetuity? At this point, my friend who hates the Patriots but loves gin begins tearing into my friend from Massachusetts via group text (yes I have two friends). Years of Patriots loathing was just coursing through the phones of everyone involved. Unfortunately, he wasn't just touching the money. He was cupping its balls. I remember getting a sudden chill as I envisioned Satan's dumb nephew Roger Goodell handing the trophy to God's spoiled grandson Robert Kraft.     

0:23 - The Patriots are driving for their first score of the game and call timeout. It's around this time that Yellow Tail proves their mettle as a major player in the cheap wine market with what I assume is their first Super Bowl ad. Look, as far as I know there are three kinds of wine: (1) good wine, (2) cheap drinkable win and (3) swill. I've had Yellow Tail and I can tell you that it rates near the bottom of category (3) which is why I tweeted the following:

Note to those just getting into wine. Yellow Tail tastes like kangaroo piss strained through a skunk's ass. #SuperBowlAds #yellowtailguy

— J.S. Elliott (@FantasyGolfRep) February 6, 2017

(I assume quoting your own tweet is bad form but fuck it, I cracked myself up with that one). If we're good at nothing else here at the FGR, it's killing potential sponsor opportunities.
  
Third Quarter

Here's where we get to the underrated part of the Falcons' incompetence. 

12:57 - The Falcons are up 21-3 and they just declined an offensive pass interference penalty to make it 3rd and 12 for the Patriots from the New England 47 yard line. At this point, they decide to use their FIRST TIMEOUT. Huh? The third quarter just freakin' started. Half of America doesn't even know the game is back on yet. It's either going to be 2nd and 22 if you accept the penalty or 3rd and 12 if you decline it. Pretty sure you're running the same or very similar defenses under either scenario. Not to mention, no one calls timeout on defense unless they're trying to stop the clock at the end of the game (well, no one except the Browns). Can someone please get a note to Coach Quinn that second half timeouts are like gold?

0:59 - On 2nd and 1 at the New England 32 yard line, Tevin Coleman is tackled for a one yard loss and Jake "The Strangler" Matthews is called for holding. So now it's 2nd and 11 from the New England 42 yard line and the Falcons call their SECOND TIMEOUT. You were the highest scoring team in the league and you don't have a 2nd and 11 play cued-up on the turntable? Here's an idea. Throw it to Julio Jones. Or hand it to one of your running backs who are averaging five yards per carry. Oh wait I forgot. You've got a 19 point lead with just over a quarter to play so you're trying to make the game last longer? I guess you want to savor it like a glass of 2017 Yellow Tail Merlot. Hey Coach Quinn, just a heads-up that you now have more nostrils than timeouts. 

Fourth Quarter  

3:56 - I need two quick paragraphs about the play that probably cost the Falcons the game. They have the ball 2nd and 11 at the New England 23 yard line which would be a 40 yard field goal for their kicker who made 37 out of 40 this year. The entire mission of the Patriots' defense at that point (other than creating a turnover) is to move the line of scrimmage back 10-15 yards to make the kick harder. The entire mission of the Falcons offense is to (a) not have the line of scrimmage move back and (b) run the clock down so, if they do kick the field goal, Tom Brady has less time to score twice.

So what do they do? They start with Matt Ryan five yards behind the line of scrimmage in the shotgun. Then he takes the snap and drops back seven more yards. THAT'S THE DIRECTION THE OTHER TEAM WANTS YOU TO GO YOU MORONS!!! I defy you to come-up with a worse play call in the history of championship games in any sport. The only comparable scenario I can think of from another sport would be a baseball team in the bottom of the 9th in a tie game with no one out and the bases load playing the infield back for the double play thereby conceding the winning run.

Time to start getting our damn
priorities back in order.

3:50 - Now the Falcons are on the 35 yard line - still well within, but at about the limit of, field goal range for a good NFL kicker like Matt Bryant. Whatever you do Atlanta . . . don't go backwards again. Cue Jake "The Strangler" Matthews for his second holding penalty. You know what happens next. Incomplete pass . . . punt . . . Brady . . . shit. 

2:28 - This is the Edelman catch which was unbelievable but what was lost in the hoopla that surrounded it was that the Falcons challenged the call even though the first replay showed it was obviously a catch. They lost the challenge and with it, their THIRD AND FINAL TIMEOUT. In that situation, you almost hope that Quinn didn't know he was jeopardizing his last timeout when he threw the challenge flag because that would be more defensible than flushing it. 

0:52 - Matt Ryan gets the ball back at his own 11 yard line with 52 seconds left. If he has timeouts left, he can throw the ball in the middle of the field and get the chunks of yardage he needs to get into field goal range but, without them, he has to waste a down with a spike and his last pass was a weak incompletion to the sideline. They didn't even manage that right as they gave the ball back to the Patriots in time for them to run one last play.

Overtime

When they did the coin flip for overtime, one quarterback was at the middle of the field while the other one was on the bench, presumably using the time to get ready. I'll let you guess which was which. And in the final cruel irony, each team gets two timeouts to start overtime. As Brady shredded an exhausted Falcons defense which would end-up being on the field for 93 plays (compared to 46 for the Patriots defense), guess what Coach Quinn did with his two timeouts. Yup. He sat on them. Maybe he wanted to keep them as souvenirs.

The fucking end.

Email the Fantasy Golf Report at fgr@fantasygolfreport.com and follow us on Twitter at @FantasyGolfRep.

My Sh*tty Super Bowl Sunday: Part 3

Before I continue with what has now officially become a saga, I feel that I should acknowledge the fact that I live a charmed life and I really don't have any legitimate complaints especially when it's February and I played golf in shorts yesterday and it looks like I might do it again on Saturday. However, writing about over embellished faux misery is a lot more fun than writing about the alternative whatever that is. Not to mention, people seem to like reading about angst. Johnny Carson was right when he said that the thing about your problems is that 90% of the people don't care about them and the other 10% are glad you have them. So on that note, let's get back to the kvetching. 

I had decided on Saturday night that I was going to get out in front of a very hectic Sunday by setting my alarm for 6:15 a.m., dragging my salty ass out of bed and going to the pool for a lengthy swim. I attempt this periodically on the weekends and it usually results in me shutting-off the alarm and sleeping until around 10:00 a.m. Then I try to make-up the slack by heading to the pool later in the day but, by then, much of the mojo is gone and the pool has been inundated with people barely making progress while moving their arms and legs in a manner that would indicate that each limb is receiving instructions from a different competing source. 

Anyway, on this particular morning I pulled it off and rolled into the parking lot of my local YMCA at 6:30 a.m., an hour after it opened. Or so I thought. Turns-out I misread the schedule and was an hour and half early. It doesn't open until 8:00 a.m.?!?! What ever happened to "the early bird gets the worm?"  I WANT MY FUCKING WORM!!! 

I made the best of it by heading back home and riding the stationary bike in the basement which burns slightly more calories than rearranging your sock drawer. That was followed by the typical bullshit push-ups, curls and crunches that are usually associated with a home workout. I was basically one pair of tube socks and a terry cloth headband away from crossing the space time continuum to a Gold's Gym in 1979.

Before we started believing
everything on the internet, we
believed in stuff like this.

After that I dragged the least zombified of my two ill sons to his futsal* game because we needed him to have enough players and dammit, nobody forfeits in this fucking house! "Funny" thing was that when it came time for the game to start, we were still a couple players short so we played five on three until our other two teenage prima donnas sauntered into the gym. Actually saunter might not be the right word as it implies some kind of purposeful movement. I'm thinking about starting a company that turns parents' basements into apartments. Feels like a growth industry. Anyway, we managed to beat a team that was even more half-assed than ours. Sunday was looking up. 

And then it started looking-up some more when my daughter's #8 seeded basketball team beat the #9 seed in the dreaded play-in game that you're supposed to win because the other team hasn't won a game all year. Being the favorite doesn't mean much when luck is about 83% of the determining factor on every shot. In this case, it took awhile for luck to smile on either team as we both entered the 4th quarter in the low single digits before the closest thing our team has to Vinnie "The Microwave" Johnson** caught fire and literally hit four shots in a row to put the game out of reach.  

That win earned us a shot at the #1 seed two hours later which was going to be fun because we really had nothing to lose right? Wrong. The following factors made this game matter way more than it should have (to me):

(1) I don't know how your area rec leagues pick their teams but ours has a mini scouting combine followed by a draft which would be fine if (a) parent coaches weren't assholes by (b) telling the best players not to show-up for the combine so that they can (c) stack their teams for (d) the purpose of winning a 4th-5th grade rec league championship. (Note: It probably would've helped if I had gone to the combine and put some effort into the GM role instead of just drafting the midgets from my daughter's soccer team);

(2) The league was making us play a doubleheader so it was US AGAINST THEM!!!

(3) We had played the same team the previous weekend and gave them a serious run leading 14-10 at halftime before falling 29-22. After the game, the other coach said "you had us nervous there for a minute" and I responded "FUUUUUUCCCCCKKKKKK YOOOOOUUUU!!!!" (Not really but the words were right there ready to come out).

So we took the court giving-up somewhere between six inches and a foot at every position against an older team. As had become tradition before every game this season, the referee felt compelled to say "I always forget how short your team is" and I laughed because you have to laugh at referee jokes or they will definitely go full Russian judge on you and half of your team will foul out by the third quarter.

"No more turnovers . . . EVER!!!"

Long painful story short. We outplayed them but lost 12-9. We had more shots, rebounds and steals. They, however, had more baskets and more instances of banshee like screaming from their coach who had the inside voice of Honey Bunny from Pulp Fiction and the mellow temperament of Joan Crawford from Mommie Dearest. It wasn't a total loss, however, as I gave one of my best postseason speeches ever and I think I convinced all of the girls they could be astronauts one day. Then I got ripped on the internet for being a feminist. Whuddya gonna do?   

Hey look at that. 4,000+ words into the this goddamn neverending story and I'm finally almost to the fucking kick-off. See you back here for Part 4. 

Footnotes

* Futsal is five on five soccer on a basketball court and it is totally awesome. The fact that it didn't become popular in the United States until recently pisses me off because I will reiterate that it is awesome and I would have played it every day as a kid if I could. Even if you don't like soccer, you'd like futsal because there's a shot every ten seconds and goals are actually scored with regularity as opposed to being handed-out like pieces of a Hershey bar on a life raft.   

** One of the greatest and most well-earned nicknames in sports history. Vinnie "The Microwave" Johnson was a 6'2" shooting guard (built more like a running back) for the back-to-back championship Detroit Pistons teams. He got his nickname because he would come-off the bench and start pouring in points using every conceivable type of shot to overcome the fact that he was always shorter than the guy trying to guard him. Case in point, this performance in game 3 of the 1989 Finals when he hit his first six shots of the 4th quarter as follows: rebound dunk, floater, driving lay-up, leaning jump shot, fade away jump shot and finally a straight-up jump shot with a hand right in his face. And he did that kind of shit all the time. Everyone loved The Microwave. Even those who hated the Pistons (a/k/a everyone).     

My Sh*tty Super Bowl Sunday: Part 2

Did I mention that 60% of the people who live in my house have been sick for over a fortnight and are still sick now? Well they are. One good definition of feeling sorry for yourself would be to think that you are suffering more than the sick people in your house by virtue of having to be in the presence of their unrelenting sickness. On multiple occasions I've had to stop myself from asking an immediate family member who was in the middle of a coughing fit to show some courtesy and leave the room until they got their shit together (not my wife, just the kids . . . I'm shallow and unfeeling but I'm not insane). 

And so with my house still in a state of Dickensian* misery, it came to pass on Shitty Super Bowl Sunday Eve that I spent my day doing the following: (a) Sitting alone in my basement watching my beloved Terps gag away a home win against Purdue, arguably the most annoying and unattractive team in college basketball, (b) coaching my daughter's (a/k/a my healthy child) 4th-5th grade basketball team to a stirring 13-4 win that involved two ties (if you count 0-0) and two lead changes (if you count 2-0), and (c) going to the golf course at 4:00 p.m. on a 35 degree February day just to be somewhere that didn't sound like the field hospital from every war movie ever made.

"Honey! I'm home!"

The golf course was blissful, tranquil and serene. You could almost say that it was serenely tranquil in its blissfulness or tranquilly blissful in its serenity or blissfully serene in its tranquility. I walked nine holes in about an hour which you can do when you're only making pars and birdies (**Douche Alert**) and, as I hit the turn, I heard the siren's call of the back nine but I only had about 45 minutes of daylight left and I envisioned myself freezing to death and/or getting eaten by a wolf on the 15th fairway. After weighing the likelihood of one of those outcomes against what awaited me at home, I decided to call it a day and return to the set of Contagion.*

I honestly have no idea what happened the rest of Saturday night. I think I made spaghetti and meatballs, drank some cheap red wine and passed-out. Knowing that I had a huge Sunday on tap I may have simply switched-off. This is what starts to happen when you reach a certain age. At first you blame the blackouts on the booze. Next thing you know, you're sitting there on a Thursday trying to remember what happened on a dry uneventful Tuesday. Whatever. The whole point of this thing was supposed to be about Sunday anyway so let's put a lid on Part 2 and get on with it in Part 3 tomorrow.

Footnotes

* There's like a 50% chance I just used that word right . . . and only a 40% chance of that.

** If you want to see a movie where a big-name actor who you might hate in real life (based on her attempts to connect with common people despite her total detachment from common people) dies early and in horrific fashion, check-out Contagion.     

My Sh*tty Super Bowl Sunday: Part 1

You had to figure this was coming from the guy who wrote something last week called Things I Used to Hate More Than the Patriots. What I didn't count on was it blowing-up into a multi-part bitch/moan session but sometimes these things take on a life of their own. As you will see momentarily, I have pretty much become the cow caught in the tornado, hopelessly mooing as I spin around in circles with no clue as to where I'm going to land.    

The hell that was my Super Bowl Sunday actually started last Wednesday when they drew the numbers for my office pool and for one of my blocks I drew a "5" for the Patriots and for the other block I drew a . . . hey look at that, a fucking "5" for the Falcons. Well that was $20 well spent. Enjoy your goddamn dinner on me at the Olive Garden Margaret from accounting. I hope you choke on whatever they're passing-off as calamari.

I'll let you decide
which three.

The irony is that, despite my traditional distaste for and borderline fear of odd numbers*, I generally have positive feelings towards the number "5." High fives are great when not attempted by golfers and their caddies. The Jackson 5 were awesome. The kids show Hi-5 was surprisingly watchable as an adult due in part to three of it's cast members being sneaky hot and especially when measured against that little whiny Canadian asshole Caillou.** And finally, I used to pick "5" for my summer league lacrosse number because my high school (private of course) only offered double digit jerseys (went out of my way to make that sound as douchy as possible . . . how'd I do?). 

When it comes to football block pools, however, fuck the number 5. Seriously, it shouldn't even be eligible. In the fifty-one Super Bowls, guess how many times one team has finished the game with a score that ended with a 5? FIVE!!! That's less than 5% and, if you expanded that analysis to each quarter, you know the percentage go down because think about how long you have to play and how many fucked-up things have to happen to end-up with a 5. Just look at this nonsense (in reverse chronological order):

Super Bowl XLV: The Steelers score a touchdown in the 4th quarter to pull within five points of the Packers. Then they go for two and make it to end-up with 25 points. So they only hit 25 points because this scenario unfolded (a) at the end of the game and (b) when they were down by five (there's that fucking number again). Then they had to convert it and not score again. It figures that the Steelers would be responsible for two of these asshole cosmic obscurities.    

Super Bowl XXXI:The Packers ended the game with 35 points and you figure that's normal because they scored five touchdowns. WRONG! They got to 27 points in the third quarter and then scored a touchdown to put them up by 12 so they went for two and made it. Then they had to go a whole quarter plus without scoring again. (Yeah but that means they also had a "5 "at the end of the third quarter). Next question!

Super Bowl XXIV: The 49ers ended the game with 55 points thanks to eight touchdowns and a missed extra point. Considering that's the only game in NFL history where a team scored a total of 55 points, I rest my case. (This may or may not be a fact but really, who cares anymore?)  

Super Bowl XIII: Pittsburgh scored 35 points on five touchdowns. That's a fairly conventional path to a "5" and, in science, we call that the exception we ignore to prove the rule.

"Moo?"

Super Bowl I: Dammit. Another five touchdown game. Screw-you number 5. I'll see you in hell.

That tangent took much longer than expected and we haven't even gotten to the weekend yet so let's clip Part 1 right there. At this rate, we're looking at a five part series. Like I said . . . cow in a tornado.         

Footnote

* I actually don't just have a distaste for odd numbers, I flee from them. The volume and temperature controls in my car are always set to even numbers even if that means the sound and comfort levels aren't exactly where I want them. In the gym, all sets are performed in even numbered reps and all cardio workouts are completed in even numbered minutes. When I make my delicious and highly nutritional kale, banana and almond butter smoothies in the NutriBullet, I always stop the blending on 48, 52 or 54 seconds (but never 46 or 56 because "6" is the odd numbers' deranged step-brother). I'm pretty confident most people think same way. At least that's what I tell myself. And my therapist.  

** I'm sorry but if you actually watched Caillou and then knowingly let your kids watch Caillou, you owe society an explanation and an apology.  

Email the Fantasy Golf Report at fgr@fantasygolfreport.com and follow us on Twitter at @fantasygolfrep.