Holy shit somebody who didn’t believe logged in as me and posted i never lost faith skol!
LOL
We’ll get them next week. After all, the Vikes need to play outdoors. Kicker needs to study the wind charts.
I’m in MN, but I am from Wisconsin and live ~3 miles from there. I grew up < 30 miles from GB and to the extent that I am football fan at all I am a Packers fan.
Being near the border there is an interesting mixture (some MN fans in WI, some GB fans in MN)
Anyhow, I’d be a lot more happy if the Vikings went all the way if it wasn’t for how insufferable some Vikings fans are going to be if they win it all.
(and certainly some GB fans can be that way)
Whatever - again I’m not that big a fan.
Brian
Most amazing finish to an NFL game ever. Wow.
And a classic example of why I have complained for years about defensive players who think that “tackling” means trying to knock a guy down with their shoulder.
I hope all the young defensemen learn that you tackle by grabbing the player while you hit them with your shoulder pads and not by trying to knock them down. That Saints safety (or corner back) looked ridiculous.
ETA Ninjaed.
Cheauxke Saints! That defender will never have a worse play if he plays for 20 more years. Most pointless extra point ever, why bother? Good on the Vikes for taking the knee on an absolutely unnecessary play.
That was the worst play by a defensive back I have ever seen in my entire life.
Because it’s the rules. Pretty much every team does that when required to attempt the try after the game is over.
The Saints weren’t a dislikable team until after 2005, when they started to use dirty hits and have spiteful fans. Sean Payton becoming their coach played a big part of it as well. Gregg Williams was a factor, too.
Yup. I wonder if he had money on the Vikings.
The rule is there for two reasons:
(a) If the scoring team is ahead by 1 or 2, there is still a chance the defense can run back the extra point for 2 and win/tie the game - note that the NCAA rules do say that they don’t run the PAT if the margin is 3 or more at that point, which is what the NFL rules should be;
(b) The rule is meant for the regular season, where how many points you score could come into play in a playoff tiebreaker. High School, where the defense can’t score on a PAT, allows for the PAT in leagues where points scored are a tiebreaker (e.g. if A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A, the tiebreaker might be combined margins of victory in the head-to-head games).
(There’s also (c) because it might affect fantasy football results, but you didn’t hear that from me.)
Why, yes, neither of those reasons applies in the postseason, does it?
Looked like he was trying to avoid an interference penalty, not going for a tackle at all.
Which is why they take a knee; there’s far less chance of a fumble/block/runback.
It apparently helped the people who bet the under. It was right on the margin for most bettors.
(Goddammit, just stay out of this…you haven’t been a football fan since Elway, fer chrissake…everyone here has a BA’s worth of knowledge on you, minimum…this will only end in aggravation and tears, you fricking know this…)
Just saw the ending of Vikings-Saints and…I’m kinda torn.
See, one of the things that really got me into sports, heck, pretty much the only reason I still watch at all, is that nothing is preordained and a massive shakeup can happen at any moment. Ever hear the saying “Records are made to be broken”? That goes tenfold for convention. There was a time when doing a high jump backwards was considered ridiculous…then some random weirdo perfects it and utterly obliterates records left and right. There was a time when it looked like neither Danica Patrick nor Michelle Wie would ever get win #1…and then they did. There was a time when the America’s Cup was slightly more competitive than a typical Harlem Globetrotters “game”…and then Dennis Connor went full on Chernobyl, and ever since it’s been a glorious free-for-all, including one year where landlocked Switzerland completely wiped the quarterdeck with freaking New Zealand. There was a time when our women’s gymnastics squads had a slightly better chance of seeing a gold medal than Eric Cartman…and then the '16 squad kicked everyone’s butts so hard, Nadia Comaneci’s ancestors felt it. All great moments in athletic history.
On the other hand, I don’t like it when a contest, particularly one that’s prestigious and/or has great important, turns on a crazy fluke. Wrecking on the very last turn on the very last lap in the Indy 500. Refusing to kneel down on the final play of the game, then turning a routine handoff into a Three Stooges skit and the opposition running it back all the way for the winning touchdown. Losing out on the gold after hideously bungling a snowboarding trick that, while admittedly unnecessary, ranked somewhere between “wave to the crowd” and “wave to the crowd like you mean it” on the difficulty scale. It’s especially harsh in football because there’s only one game at each step. All the other big team sports play to seven games, so one fluke result doesn’t decide the match and a clearly inferior team will lose in the end. (Occasionally there’s a whole bunch of ridiculous flukes…the '01 World Series comes to mind…but these tend to be more or less evenly divided, and it can be pretty entertaining in its own right.)
So let’s see who’s left in the NFL playoffs:
New England Patriots - Had the opportunity to make history with a 19-0 season and simultaneously shut up one of the most obnoxious albatrosses in NFL history and force ESPN to find something flippin’ else to talk about. They come up one win short, ensuring that we’ll be hearing about the '72 Dolphins for the next 5,000 years…and then get back to the Super Bowl and win it, making it four teams that have won 5 Super Bowls, after the Seattle Seahawks, who were flat-out robbed in the first attempt (just admit it already, guys…), fall victim to the one of the stupidest coaching decisions in the history of coaching. In other words, given the opportunity to shatter an ironclad status quo in the manner as epic as the Cubs winning the goddam World Series, they reinforced it further, and later DID THE SAME TO TWO OTHERS.
Minnesota Vikings - One of just two teams to lose four Super Bowls, and it would’ve been five if their kicker hadn’t stuck the coffin nail into his foot and allowed the Falcons to steal the last AFC Championship game they were ever in. That Fred Flintstone-esque missed tackle which recently gave them the win over New Orleans was a classic example of the kind of insane fluke that makes hash out of brackets and any kind of reasoned prediction impossible. And now the catchphrase-throwing has begun, which means that the fans really believe that this is their time. Huh…look, I’d love for this franchise to get the frost giant off its back, but the NFL has some of the most durable, impenetrable, impregnable, indestructible status quos I’ve ever seen (see: Patriots, New England), and I just can’t get any sort of hopes up until it happens.
Jacksonville Jaguars - Entering the league during the not-short-enough Black 'n Teal Era along with the Carolina Panthers and immediately given, to quote one writer, “enough material for an atomic bomb”, which certainly had more than a few Buccaneers fans fuming. Make some noise, fall back to earth, don’t achieve anything meaningful for a while, and now finally get a shot at the gold. In the AFC Championship after winning a shootout, which is football’s equivalent of throwing several hundred cards in the air and seeing whether more of them land face-up or face-down. Oh, and it happened after at least several Steelers looked ahead to the Patriots. Barf. I’m pretty sure there’s a reason to root for this squad, but for the life of me I can’t imagine what.
Philadelphia Eagles - One of those second-tier franchises that’s always drafts smart, always has good coaching, puts up a good or at least non-embarrassing record every season, frequently makes the playoffs, and has absolutely jack-all nil zippo bupkis chance of winning the championship. Ever. I remember the triumphs and struggles with Randall Cunningham, enjoying all the clutch plays he made but never getting the sense that he could carry this team to the Super Bowl, and never realizing that that’s was as good as it was going to get for a long, long time. Remember this as the team that always eventually gets its butt kicked by the Cowboys, or occasionally the Redskins, but I don’t recall why. Nickel-and-dimed their way to the NFC Championship, and I have the feeling that they’re going to need some insurance to beat the Vikings, if you know what I mean.
So it looks like, barring a miracle, the most despised, loathed, spat-upon, rage-inducing franchise in the history of the NFL is going to win it all again and leave the Cowboys, Steelers, and 49ers in the dust. Look, I don’t like the rich getting richer any more than you, but how’s anyone going to stop them? Deflategate fizzled out faster than Johnny Manziel. All the suspensions and other punishments have been served in full, and given all the bad calls I’m hearing about, it looks like the Patriots’ enemies are just plain tired of fighting the system. The team flat-out dominated the Titans on both sides of the ball, and I haven’t heard of any big injuries. Seriously, I’d love to be wrong, but right now the chances of something fun happening in the Super Bowl don’t look very good.
But was it a catch?
Well then he did an excellent job!
I think the only person who knows what Marcus Williams was thinking/trying on that play is Marcus Williams, and given the result (not the end result of a TD, but rather the physical action he took), I’m not even certain he knows that. But it was a perfect tri-fecta of awful: he missed the tackle, as a result he wasn’t able to stop the receiver, and in the process, he took out the only other DB with a chance at the receiver. It’s almost Larry, Curly and Moe comical in its effect.
I feel badly for him. Well, except for the bit about how a properly trained and functioning DB knows how to wrap a receiver up…
That’s just it though - it didn’t look to me like he tried to tackle and missed. I wouldn’t be surprised if the coaches were emphasizing avoiding interference, because that’s the only thing that can really hurt you on a play like that. Normally :).