NFL football is
absolutely the best sport in the world to watch, even if you’re not a die-hard
fan of the teams playing.
But it is also the
most frustrating sport to watch if you are.
Why? Because too often
it does not come down to who’s the better team, or who performs best on a given
Sunday, or who has the stronger will to win (or any of those phrases
commentators like to throw out).
No, too often it comes
down to dumb luck.
In Sunday’s second Eagles-Cowboys
matchup of the season in Philadelphia, the former division-leading team and
their fast-paced (no, strike-quickly) offence desperately wanted the ball
first, so they could put points on the board as soon as possible (and duplicate
what they did on Thanksgiving in Dallas) and thus put the Boys in desperate
mode right of the bat.
Lucky them, they won
the opening coin toss (a 50-50 flip of which there is no more direct embodiment
of luck in sports). They chose to take the ball (as opposed to deferring, which
has become a very curious trend in the NFL, but a topic for another day).
But that good luck flipped
completely around when the ball, kicked short, didn’t bounce forward as
expected and Josh Huff was unable to get to it and Dallas was able to recover
in what was essentially a successfully unintentional onside kick (something I
don’t recall ever seeing before).
Please, please, please
don’t try to argue that it was a great play by Dallas, or that it was what they
planned, or that they saw some flaw in the way the Eagles lined up for the kick.
The ball took a lucky bounce, and Dallas was lucky to land on it (just like is
the case pretty much ANY time a fumble occurs).
It was dumb luck that
the Cowboys got the ball first in the Eagles’ red zone and scored, just as it
was dumb luck that late in the game after the Eagles had more than gotten back
into the game and Brent Celek made a nice catch and fought for a first down,
that when the ball was punched out of his arm while he was lying horizontally
on top of a defender who was lying horizontally on the ground, that no part of
his body that is deemed to be the part of a body that causes a player to be
ruled down by contact whence touching the ground was not actually itself
touching the ground. (A little wordy, yeah, but all that to say that even when logic should dictate you're down, a whole bunch of lucky or unlucky factors come into play.)
I’d even argue that it
is lucky that the referees called pass interferences penalties that allowed
Dallas to extend drives and score TDs on their first three, while they missed
others (I’m not saying the referees were biased or that the calls went more the
Cowboys’ way, just that pass interference – which may be the most frustrating
thing about watching the NFL – is not always a fair representation of what is
actually happening on the field and more about the exact angle of where the
referee happens to be standing on a given play. Ie. Referee calls = luck.
It’s also bad luck for
the Eagles that Nick Foles, who started the season 5-2 behind a patchwork
offensive line, broke his collarbone and that his replacement Mark Sanchez, who
had an offensive line restored with Pro Bowlers, went 3-3 in his starts and was
unable to keep his team in first place, just as it was bad luck for Cardinals
that Carson Palmer blew out his knee when his team was looking in such good
shape for a big post-season run (déjà vu for him going back to his Bengals
days). Arizona actually clinched a playoff spot with the Eagles-Cowboys result,
but does anyone really think they have a shot at becoming the first team to win
the Super Bowl at home this February as they head into their matchup with the
Seahawks with the 3rd-stringer and possibly 4th-string quarterback preparing to
go under centre?
As a poker player, I
know that “luck” is part of the game if you’re talking about any given turn of
the card. But if you play long enough, the luck evens out and it becomes all
about the skill.
That’s just a
mathematical fact, but the trouble is, in a sport where the season is just 16
games, it’s often not enough for the luck to balance out. Luck plays too high a
role, and it’s hard to swallow.
Now, as an Eagles fan,
it’s perhaps ironic that I’m hoping for another type of “Luck” to play in our
favour next week, when the Colts visit Dallas. I need their star QB Andrew Luck
to lead Indianapolis to a win, and then for the Eagles to NOT get unlucky against
two inferior teams in Washington and New York.
Then maybe I can
return to the excruciating practice of watching my team try to land on the
right side of luck in the one-and-done post-season of the NFL.
Oh, to be a football fan.
