Weekend Football Highlights

This week, the NY Jets edged the San Diego Chargers in the only close game of this week's playoffs, and subsequently was the only road team to get a win. This was partially due to a very aggressive Jets Defense, along with some good solid play late in the game on the offensive side of the ball, including a 53 yard TD run by the rookie out of Iowa, Shonn Greene. It didn't help San Diego that their star kicker, former Iowa Hawkeye, Nate Kaeding blew 3 field goal attempts over the course of the game. That's unheard of from such a great kicker like him.

The Indianapolis Colts simply outplayed the Baltimore Ravens. The New Orleans Saints just blasted the Arizona Cardinals 45-14, and after one really vicious hit, has Kurt Warner seriously thinking about retiring from the NFL before he gets killed.

Then you had the Minnesota Vikings and Brett Favre sealing the Dallas Cowboys fate of missing yet another Super Bowl. This game had my interest more than any of the others. Not that I'm a fan of either team. First I loathe the Dallas Cowboys with a passion you can't even comprehend. Then on the other side is Brett Favre... who I have loathed with the same ferocity, ever since his days with Green Bay. His 2 consecutive retirements and unretirements left me even less impressed with the guy.

However, I find myself today in the difficult position of having to defend Favre and The Minnesota Vikings team (the difficulty is in having to defend Favre, not the Vikings).

As time was winding down, and the Vikings held a more than comfortable 27-3 lead over the Cowboys, Dallas gave up the ball on downs in their own territory. A couple plays later, Favre throws his 4th touchdown pass of the game with just 1:55 remaining in the game.

This stoked some emotion from Cowboys linebacker Keith Brooking, who called the move "classless", and Coach Wade Phillips accused the Vikings of running up the score.

"I thought it was classless," Brooking said. "I thought it was B.S. Granted, we get paid to stop them, but we had zero timeouts left. I didn't think there was any call for that."

I believe part one of his second sentence here pretty much sums up the problem. The Dallas defense is paid to stop the scoring. And not just paid, but paid far better for a single game than I'll make in a year. If you can't do it, quit whining. Suck it up and be a man. Besides that, the Cowboys whipped up on Philadelphia in the last game of the regular season and again last week in the first round of playoffs. No one was complaining then of a running up of the scores.

Ever since we were little, those of us who played football in school were told to play every play until the whistle blows, and every game until the last second has ticked off the clock at the end of the fourth quarter. The only way an offense scores is if the defense lets them. Dallas chose to let Minnesota into the end zone repeatedly. It isn't the Vikings fault for playing with the kind of intensity they are supposed to play with. And for Favre (I can't believe I'm touting him here..someone shoot me!), at the age of 40, throwing 4 TDs against a supposedly good team? That's just plain friggin incredible. The way the Vikings played yesterday showed that they deserve to be in the NFC Championship game next week. Dallas on the other hand, is just putting pressure on owner Jerry Jones to fire yet another head coach who couldn't get him to the Big Game.

Of course none of this should surprise me, the Dallas Cowboys always were a bunch of whiners. Not that Favre isn't a whiner as well, just not this week.

Halloween Weekend- The good and the bad

So this Halloween brought a mixture of good and bad in a variety of areas. So, let's take a look at them.

College Football

Good: The Iowa Hawkeyes made an amazing comeback in the 4th quarter to win and maintain their perfect season, allowing them to stay at #4 in the BCS ratings

Bad: Oklahoma State couldn't take down the powerful Texas program, that would've allowed Iowa to move up, and whittle down potential national championship pairings.


NFL

Good: The Green Bay Packers lost (I've hated the team for years!)
Bad: Brett Favre won (I've hated him just as much as the Packers, his old team, for years)

Good: My 49ers broke Peyton Manning's streak of games in which he throws a touchdown pass
Bad: Indy still won, because their RUNNING BACK threw the go ahead/winning touchdown pass.

Work

Bad: I had to work a 12 hour shift. A 12 hour shift that was actually 13 hours long, because of the time changing back to standard time. I only get paid for 12.

Good: I didn't have a single disturbance or alarm to screw up my night the entire time, so it was a peaceful shift.

Trick-or-treating

Good: Kids went out for candy here on Friday night, and Sac City at my folks on Saturday night. I reap the rewards without the work, two times! Josh went as Darth Vader, Buggy as Storm Shadow from G.I. Joe (not sure about the kung fu grip on this occasion!)

Bad: No one around to amuse me on Saturday or Sunday. Realization that for the best treat-fare, I have to get access to the small town, and not just down the street.

Friends' Adoption Fundraising

Good: They raised some good cash towards their goal, along with help from friends and family. See here for more information on how that went.

Bad: No one showed up with an extra $5-10,000 to boost their efforts over the top. Oh well.

Did I mention that I hate Brett Favre?

Oh, Sunday was a day of a very good high, and an even lower low. This past weekend, my beloved San Francisco 49ers visited the Minnesota Vikings for a showdown of unbeatens. During the season, week in and week out, here in Iowa, I can pretty much count on seeing a Vikings' game on netowrk television. Of course the one week, in which my team actually shows up to Minnesota, network tv will NOT cover the Vikings.

We were forced to see either the routing of the Chiefs by Philadelphia, followed by a Denver/Oakland Game, or we could watch the Rams get smacked down by Green Bay. Obviously the networks weren't too excited about the Detroit Lions game being televised, although they did pull out a win over the Washington Redskins for their first victory in about 21 months with a score of 19-14. Ironically, the two untelevised games being played in the Midwest were the only two games that could be considered competitive. So, my following of the SanFran-Minnesota game was by watching the score updates in the upper right hand corner of the screen. I kept seeing a back and forth game all afternoon. But then I saw the update that showed the 49ers up by 4 points with 1:41 to go in the game. At 0:41 left, I saw the same score, and again at 0:14. I was convinced that me not being able to watch the 49ers playing on tv would be alleviated by them beating down the Vikings, along with the 4th quarter comeback quarterback, Mr FAVRAY himself. Then it happened, the update comes around again...with :02 left on the clock, Minnesota had scored a touchdown, from 33 yards out. I didn't really think I had a heart, until it broke at that very moment. And I'm sure one certain Professor Scott from Maine, one of those silly Vikings' fans, will have something to say in the comments section once he reads this...

It's not like I had any illusions of my 49ers having a perfect season (that would take an even greater miracle than was the Lions having a perfectly winless season last year). But I really wanted the Indecisive One, also known as Brett Favre, be dealt his first loss with Minnesota, while simultaneously securing the 49ers the top spot in their division. I can however thank the Chicago Bears and Indianapolis Colts for beating Seattle and Arizona, respectively, and making the division standings in my favor.

I can only hope that Coach Singletary drills it through the heads of the defensive backs that even a friggin 5 inch margin in the very back of the end zone is way too much room to be giving up, especially with an old codger like Favre that apparently still has enough talent to pull those kinds of stunts off. (On a scale of 1-100, my HATE-Favre-ometer clocked in at a whopping 134.6) Not to mention the incredible acrobatics of the Vikings wideout, Greg Lewis, to not only make a fingertip catch and drag the second foot barely inbounds.

Although, there were a couple good signs shown in this game. The star running back, Frank Gore, left the game with an ankle injury. The 49ers adjusted, and still, with the exception of the last play, just simply outplayed the Vikings, without the "main threat". QB Shaun Hill and TE Vernon Davis hooked up for 2 touchdowns. With Davis showing he is in fact a tough receiver who can be a playmaker, it will open up the wideouts for more plays throughout the season. I just hope that when Gore is out, and Coffee is in for him, that he is a good enough runner to keep the passing game an open and viable threat, to maintain a potent offense that few of us 49er fans remember from the good old days.

To All My Friends Who Are Bears Fans...Sorry?

To all my friends who like the Chicago Bears...sorry, but I have to write this down.

Your team went and got rid of Rex Grossman. Probably the smartest thing the organization could have ever done in their history. The boy, while great at the college level, just never matured to the point of being a great Pro quarterback.

The year that the Bears managed to get to the Superbowl was purely on the backs of a stellar defensive squad. In fact, during the NFC Championship game that year, it was the efforts of the defense that managed to win the game against the New Orleans Saints. And it wasn't enough to win the SuperBowl. The only thing consistent about Grossman's playing was its inconsistency. One half, or one game he'd be great, and then as quickly as the next game he'd put on one of the most mediocre performances ever.

Now you have Jay Cutler. The Green Bay defense hassled him all the first half and he threw 3 interceptions, and they only scored a measly safety for 2 points, thanks to their stellar defensive efforts. Then, in the 2nd half, he showed more poise, completing more passes and avoiding turnovers. He managed to throw a touchdown pass to Devin Hester to make it a competitive game. Brian Urlacher and a couple other defensemen were out of the game due to injuries at this point, and Green Bay's Aaron Rogers took full advantage of this, running a slightly smoother offense and allowing them to win the game. Green Bay's defense kept up and managed to cause Cutler to go back to his uncertainty in the first half mode.

Now, many of you know I'm an avid 49ers fan. And it's been a few years since I've really been able to follow football with my work schedule. so you're asking yourself, "how in the world could Mookie even know what the heck he's talking about?" A- I'm a football nut, who knows a lot about the sport, and B- its mostly common sense.

We 49er fans were spoiled with the combination of Joe Montana and Steve Young over the years. Two of the leagues most prolific quarterbacks over the history of the NFL. And since Steve Young's departure, we have had a litany of QB's come and go, and none of them were really worth a damn. We kept bringing in promising defensive backs, who by the time we trained them up to a level considered more than adequate, we'd trade them to teams who would then beat us with great secondary players we'd developed for them. It's pretty bad to go from being a football dynasty to the farm team for the league we have been for almost a decade now. Part of it was coaching. Most coaches came to San Francisco thinking they could ride the wave of greatness, only to lose a lot of the old team members wo helped make the 49ers a great team. And those coaches weren't good enough to produce the same greatness out of a bunch of 'nobodies.' Luckily for us, Mike Singletary, the legendary Bears defensive player from the 80s is our new coach. He is a no nonsense, high caliber personality when it comes to performing in games and his expectations of players. He isn't going to put up with prima donnas, and allow that kind of drama to take away from our efforts to field a competitive team, so hopefully, our win over the defending NFC Champs, the Arizona Cardinals, will be a sign of whats to come. Albeit, we'd like more than 30 yards rushing per game out of Frank Gore.

So now, the Bears, while they basically have the defense down pretty well, really need to learn to put together an offense to boot. And that starts with the quarterback. Trading for QB's who came from teams with an odd assortment of palymakers to help him, isn't going to be the answer. Otherwise, you'll just end up seeing the repeat of Rex Grossman, over and over and over.

Which brings me to Bret Favre (I pronounce it FAV-RAY because that's how its spelled dammit!) Favre is a great quarterback, no doubt about it. All this retiring and unretiring has dominated the sports news the past couple of years. And it really is tiring to listen too. I've never liked Favre, and part of that is that his Packers kept beating up my 49ers, and I've never been a Packers fan anyways (I lump this hatred as being equal to that of my hatred for the Dallas Cowboys- is there a rule that both can lose the game when playing each other?). The one thing Bret had to add to his great performances were playmakers for running backs and receivers. And he has good leadership qualities about him, to help them out in return. He will be a Hall of Famer, no doubt about it. When he went to the Jets, though, their offense was pretty much all about Favre. His supporting cast wasn't strong enough to get him anywhere significant.
Now he is with the Vikings. They looked okay on Sunday. Running back Adrian Peterson was clearly the star of that game however, and made Favre's efforts and leadership seem that more imposing. It could be that Favre has added his experience to improve the Vikings, or the skill of enough Viking players that will add to Favre's status. Either way, they should have a decent team. Far better than the Bears season is looking, if Week 1 was any indicator. The NFC North Division will be between Green Bay and Minnesota, with the Bears and Lions competing for 3rd place in the division.

A bit on Announcers

I think that John Madden, ever in love with Bret Favre, should be forced to unretire himself since Favre did. Their careers with the football world should (if they weren't to a degree already) be inextricably linked. That way we can here drooling commentary from Madden, over Favre's play, abilities, talents, liekability, etc. Also, more teleprompter drawings accompanying "BOOM, and BAM" (John Madden is the audio equivalent of the old Batman flare words), and other exclamation being used while pointing out generally obvious things to anyone who actually knows anything about football.

And if he wasn't so old, and set in his ways, I'd love to see Mr. Whoa Nellie himself, Keith Jackson, back on the announcing scoop. In my mind he is the best sports commentator ever. Not too much chit-chat during the lulls of the game, and he had a way of really ratcheting up the history and importance of certain games, venues, rivalries, along with the right amount of excitement when necessary. He is truly missed by the old school true fans of sports, not unlike myself. His style is a lost art. He coined University of Michigan's stadium "The Big House", and most viewers of college football knew that if Keith Jackson was announcing the game, it was the big game for that week. You know, back when all the network television stations actually showed you games from all around the country. Then Cable stations stole Americans right to watch all those football games and left them with dumb games like Notre Dame Vs anybody. Ahh, the era of good days gone by...kind of like the Bears Football program.