Season’s greetings! The end of the World Series brings the start of a somewhat new but now well-acknowledged season: the NFL Tanking Season.
This is when unthinking, repeat-anything fans are encouraged by unthinking, repeat-anything media to believe that four-to-eight losing teams should seriously consider “tanking” the rest of this season to ensure improved draft-pick status.
How such “tanking” would work is left unexplored thus unexplained, yet its advocates annually call for a reality that is more based in fantasy than Aaron Boone’s scripted game plans.
Head coaches: How do they tank? Choose to diminish their reputations and future employment opportunities by plotting to lose the remainder of their games on behalf of team owners who will fire them for losing?
Or perhaps the coach can work a deal like in Mel Brooks’ “Producers,” when profit was tied to an intentionally bad product.
How does a GM tank? Ensure his exit and rotten legacy by eliminating or diminishing his team’s best active players?
How do the front office types convey the tanking goal to their players? Yeah, go out there and give it your all, you expendable mounds of flesh. We’ll be busy in our air-conditioned suites trying to make sure we lose.
Do the suits who engineer the tanking cheer when their team drops passes? Would they prefer someone intentionally fumbling? Would they reward someone with a big bonus on their next contract if they commit penalties on purpose, get a flag for their team?
Besides, tanking — as an intentional, planned way to keep losing — is often no longer necessary in the “modern” NFL as players who are about to score stylishly surrender the ball inches from the goal line or beg post-play misconduct penalties for acting as if they’re invested in losing.
In fact, what rookie Jets WR Malachi Corley did on Thursday night — dropping the ball before crossing the goal line in a premature celebration — should’ve been the first and last episode of its kind, rather than the latest.
Corley must have missed it, but something similar almost happened to Falcons tight end Kyle Pitts last weekend. As Pitts was rambling toward a long TD, he let up approaching the end zone, not realizing — or not caring — that Tampa Bay’s Antoine Winfield Jr. was in chase. Winfield swiped the ball from Pitts’ flimsy grip right as they got to the goal line.
The play was reviewed, but there was no definitive camera showing if the ball came out before or after crossing the plane of the end zone, so the touchdown call on the field stood. But a lesson had been taught, for anyone who was paying attention. Apparently that did not include Corley.
Just par for the course in a league partnered with TV networks that mindlessly reward and instill risky immodest conduct over winning skills. The NFL is often pointed backward.
Sure, tank! Have the players gather at midfield to read aloud the highlights from their exit interviews and wish the franchise good luck next season, when they’ve been cut but the team has an improved draft position.
Costas wasn’t perfect, but his approach will be missed
All those childishly snarky “social” media and sports radio put-down artists taking shots at Bob Costas upon his departure as a national baseball play-by-play man don’t yet realize that in Costas they had an honest voice, the kind who, when shove comes to cliff, will be deeply missed.
At great personal and professional risk, and a sense of noblesse oblige, Costas defied his network bosses to give accurate first-pitch times, became among the very first to publicly suggest that there’s something drug-rotten going on among sudden MLB sluggers, and even refused to narrate gambling ads as he rejected the opportunity to be party to an industry reliant on young fools losing their dough to bogus come-ons.
Did he always do the righteous thing? No. But I sense that he hated being a “plausibly live” NBC Olympics shill and that NBC Sports, under Dick Ebersol, had become a distribution center for Vince McMahon’s twisted plans and products, both leading to Costas’s gradual detachment from NBC.
He wanted — and still wants — to be thought of as a thoughtful and now concerned observer of what sports are, were and are becoming.
And his metronome-measured delivery, that could create an intellectual wall between he and audiences, was ill-advised yet served him as a naturally formed defense mechanism — as he was sensitive to ad hominem criticism from those he tried to best serve, thus he could never overcome his, or our, human condition.
Regardless of everything and everyone, Costas was on your side. Still is.
The only thing worse than a guy on TV who claims we just saw something that clearly didn’t happen is when, during a replay, he again claims that we’re again watching what never happened.
Though never a fan of how check-me-out Juan Soto plays baseball, he ran very hard to score in the sixth in Game 5 of the World Series on Wednesday to make it 6-5, Yankees. Yet John Smoltz took a reckless swing at him.
After Soto scored on a sacrifice fly to center, Fox’s Smoltz, easily ignored, made himself heard when he said Soto was lucky the runner advancing to second wasn’t thrown out for the third out before Soto scored, as Soto didn’t bust it home from third.
A replay then appeared showing Soto running hard all the way. Yet Smoltz next said we could see him initially taking his time. That’s called bad faith, similar to a falsehood, first cousin to a lie.
Steelers honor ‘dirty’ Porter
Monday night’s Giants-Steelers on ABC/ESPN began with a loud in-house tribute to ex-Steelers LB Joey Porter, despite his extensive arrest record, league-wide status as “all-time dirty player” and the “Joey Porter Rule,” named in his dishonor. As a Pittsburgh assistant coach, he went on the field to exacerbate a fight during that prison yard brawl of a playoff disgrace against the Bengals in January 2016.
Among his NFL violations was an ejection for spitting on an opponent. Once retired, he was also ejected, with police assistance, from his son’s high school football game for misconduct.
So how much of the above was heard Monday from ESPN’s Joe Buck and Troy Aikman when Porter was saluted? Not a peep. Naturally.
Sunday night’s Cowboys-49ers on NBC had an interesting, state-of-the-NFL open:
As Mike Tirico explained, skill shortages forced the Cowboys to start fading RBs Ezekiel Elliott and Dalvin Cook. Tirico did not say that Elliott and Cook are police magnets since college, with physical abuse of women charges and suspensions during their NFL careers.
Still, as late TV pitchman Billy Mays piped, “But wait, there’s more!” Tiricio completed a Sunday night trifecta. Well before joining NBC as its lead sports host, Tirico was suspended by ESPN for sexually harassing and stalking a female colleague.
Tiricio was hired by NBC at about the same time NBC fired news host Matt Lauer for sexually inappropriate conduct.
Very disappointing to watch and listen to a fellow as likable and engaging as ex-Devils and Islanders goalie Cory Schneider on the set of the NHL Network touting bets for an NHL-partnered gambling site predicated on fans losing their money.
The NFL’s new “Dynamic Kickoffs” are as dynamic as MLB’s automatic intentional passes. But the NFL always makes it up as it goes along.
Bad teams continue to receive the best starting times: Commanders at Giants, 1 p.m., Fox. Chris Myers, Mark Sanchez and shots of fans banging their hands against the lower deck padding near the end zones.