Archive for football
Michigan-Ohio State TWICE In Football? Never!
Posted by: | CommentsSome things are simply meant to be done once per year.
Thanksgiving. Christmas. Cleaning out the garage. Flossing.
And Michigan playing Ohio State in football.
What’s this I hear about the Big Ten/Twelve?
What’s this I hear that thanks to the new divisional alignment, Michigan and Ohio State have been separated, playing in two different divisions? What’s this I hear that because of this heresy, Michigan and Ohio State may sometimes play twice—once at the end of the year, as usual, and again the following week in the Big Ten/Twelve Championship Game?
U-M/OSU, Part II—after a one-week intermission?
Say it ain’t so, Jim!
Jim is Jim Delany, the commissioner of the Big Ten/Twelve. He’s the screwball who is presiding over this trampling of tradition.
Delany says he was afraid that, by keeping Michigan and Ohio State in the same division, the two schools would never get a chance to play for the conference championship.
Two words for you, Jim.
OK, I can’t use those two, so I’ll use these: WHO CARES?
Let’s get something straight about Wolverines and Buckeyes clashing on a gridiron.
It’s almost less about winning than it is about peeing in the other team’s Wheaties.
In Michigan-Ohio State, the loser feels worse than the winner feels good. For 364 days, the losing team has its insides gnarled. It’s 51 weeks and six days of cloudy skies and wind and rain. Your team loses and it’ll be a year, at least, until you’re able to crack a grin.
There’s nothing worse than being the loser of Michigan-Ohio State on the last football weekend in November. So you can imagine how the Wolverines fans are doing nowadays, their team unable to beat the Buckeyes more than once over the past nine years.
I submit that when you win a Michigan-Ohio State game, you feel little more than relief and satisfaction. When you lose, you feel like you just swallowed lye.
So what could be sweeter than to have Michigan and Ohio State in the same division, if for no other reason than to give one school the chance to ruin the season for the other?
That’s what Michigan-Ohio State has often been about—pouring sugar in the other team’s gas tank.
Nothing can do that better than to play the other guys with a chance to knock them out of contention for the Big Ten/Twelve title.
Let’s face it: The scales have tipped in the conference. It’s no longer the Big Two/Little Eight anymore. Ohio State is still elite, but Michigan is scuffling.
So the chances of Michigan and Ohio State meeting as divisional champs seem to be dwindling, though it could still occur on occasion—setting up the scenario where the schools would play twice in one season.
Doesn’t matter. There should NEVER be a scenario where Michigan and Ohio State play twice in the same year, much less on successive weeks. Let the loser feel lousy for a year!
On the other hand, there should ALWAYS be the possibility that Michigan or Ohio State could ruin the other’s chances of being divisional champion, thus knocking them out of a conference championship contest.
I get the winner-take-all camp, who desires to see The Game still have a chance at being a conference decider. But under the new alignment, that would necessitate there being TWO The Games.
For whatever reason, Delany and others looked at the tradition of having Michigan playing Ohio State on the season’s last weekend as being an “either or” thing. In other words, “You can have your ‘The Game’ on the last week, but only if we split the teams into separate divisions.’”
Huh?
Why not have both?
Why not keep the schools in the same division, AND keep The Game on the final weekend?
So Michigan will never play Ohio State for the conference championship under that scenario.
Once again, WHO CARES?
Either school will savor a Big Ten/Twelve Championship whether it comes against Iowa or Purdue or Nebraska. It would be the scrumptious dessert after a meal of Wolverine or Buckeye the week prior.
And if a scuffling Michigan or Ohio State is able to derail the other’s championship dream for that season?
Oo-la-la!!
Look, I know that ALL conference games count in the conference standings, regardless if they’re played against divisional rivals or not. And yes, that means that a team can still rain on another’s parade from the other division.
But how about when both Michigan and Ohio State end up on even footing—and yes, it will happen again. When that happens, if they’re both in the same division, things are likely to come down to the winner of Michigan-Ohio State being division champs, and moving on to the conference title game.
Loser gets those gnarled insides. As tradition dictates.
You’d have Michigan play Ohio State from separate divisions, and the loser getting another crack at it a week later?
It should never work that way.
Did Nixon get another try at Kennedy a week after the 1960 presidential election? Did they hold another Daytime Emmy Awards ceremony a week later so Susan Lucci could have another shot?
Hey, did MLB allow the Red Sox to play the Yankees again after Bucky Dent broke the Beantowners’ hearts?
Michigan should play Ohio State once, and once only, in football every year.
The winner can move on. The loser can bounce off the walls for a year, for all I care.
You win that game, you feel great. You lose it, your world comes to an end for 364 days.
That’s what Michigan-Ohio State football is all about. It’s “See ya next year,” not “See ya next week.”
You can’t have a proper Michigan-Ohio State football rivalry if the loser gets to feel better about themselves in 168 hours.
Delany coughed up the football on this one, I’m sorry.
Hanson Proves Lions Can At Least Be Consistent At One Position
Posted by: | CommentsHe showed up 18 years ago from Washington State University with his right leg and not much else. He didn’t even have a name.
For his first few weeks in town, at Lions training camp, all we knew him as was “the kid who’s replacing Eddie Murray.”
Jason Something-or-Other.
HANSON, we were reminded by the Lions media liaisons.
Kickers in pro football have two kinds of lives, it seems: cameo, or Methuselah.
The 40-year-old kicker is far from an anomaly. If you can survive the first couple of years, you have a good shot at staying in the NFL for a couple of decades.
Morten Anderson, the pride of Michigan State, swatted footballs with his left foot with the reliability of the sunrise. He did it until he was 47 years old. He tried retiring a couple of times, but on each occasion he was asked back. On each occasion he said yes—because being a kicker in the NFL is a pretty good gig. It’s like having a desk job for the Mafia.
Funny thing is, Anderson’s 25-year career started this way: he twisted his ankle on his very first NFL kickoff, way back in 1982. Twisted his ankle on a kickoff?
You betcha. Twisted it good; he missed eight weeks.
He recovered, and kicked for a quarter century longer.
The Lions’ Jason Hanson is 40. He’s been losing his hair for years. Every training camp he shows up and his hairline has receded a couple centimeters. But he plays for the Lions, a franchise that has led the league in hair loss for its coaches and fan base for decades. So what do you expect?
Besides, Hanson doesn’t kick with his hair.
Hanson survived those first couple of seasons as Murray’s replacement, and then we blinked and Hanson is entering his 19th NFL season. One more year and he qualifies for a gold watch.
The man he replaced, Murray, was thought to be old. Murray kicked for the Lions from 1980-91—12 seasons. Then the Lions thought he was losing his power on kickoffs and the field goal accuracy was waning. So they released him, having drafted the kid Hanson.
Murray, by the way, left the Lions and kicked for nine more seasons, retiring in 2000 as a 44-year-old. Eddie even won a Super Bowl, with the 1993 Cowboys. Just like Errol Mann.
Errol Mann—there’s a name from the past. Mann was cut by the Lions in 1975 after kicking for them for years and he ended up with the 1976 Oakland Raiders—and Mann won a Super Bowl with them.
Funny how players win Super Bowls before and after playing for the Lions, but not while.
So it’s another training camp and Hanson is again entrenched as the Lions kicker, despite nursing an injury to his left, non-kicking leg. Last summer in camp he nursed an injury to his right, kicking leg.
Yet Hanson isn’t like some NFL players, who lose their jobs due to injury. Hanson is the Lions kicker even when he can’t kick. He’s had more job security than a Supreme Court Justice.
Which means Hanson will likely retire from pro football as a Lion. Not that there haven’t been some grumblings the past couple of seasons, when Hanson has had the audacity to actually, you know, miss a field goal attempt.
He missed several last year, but he didn’t miss them by much. It wasn’t like he was hooking them like a bad tee shot. Still, the footballs Hanson kicked last season didn’t find their way through the uprights and above the crossbar with the success rate we’ve been used to seeing from No. 4. The injury he suffered in training camp was presumed to be the culprit.
No matter. Hanson is back, as usual, and he’s the kicker, despite undergoing surgery earlier this month on his left leg.
The Lions brought in someone named Aaron Pettrey this year to handle kicking duties while Hanson recuperates. The Lions have brought in a number of kickers over the years, usually rookie free agents. They’ve done so as if they were trying to satisfy some sort of NFL Equal Opportunity Employer provision.
“Each team shall have two kickers in training camp.”
Pettrey’s chances of being the Lions kicker are off the board. Vegas wouldn’t touch it. He’s only with the Lions because they have to have someone kick during the exhibition games.
Every young kicker the Lions have invited to camp has come with the primary objective of hooking on with another NFL team. Hanson’s job has been as untouchable as Elliott Ness.
But a good, reliable kicker is hard to find—like a good, honest car mechanic. And when you find one, you don’t let him go. You don’t even look around for alternatives, almost for fear of jinxing what you have.
Murray became vilified in Detroit for missing the biggest kick of his career—the 1983 playoff game in San Francisco, when his 43-yarder at the final gun started wide right and stayed wide right. Had he connected, the Lions would have advanced to the NFC Championship Game.
Murray kicked for the Lions for eight more seasons, but never did he truly live down that miss against the 49ers.
Hanson hasn’t been in such a monumental situation in his 18 years with the Lions, mainly because the past nine of those have been spent in football purgatory.
Hanson would probably give his non-kicking leg to be in a position to miss a big kick.
But he shows up every year, on time, and with a smile on his face. Hanson has been through seven head coaches, a slew of special teams coaches, and more losses than you can shake a stick at. But he’s a Lion, always will be, and has never shown an inclination to jump ship.
He’s 40 years old and it’s becoming less and less possible to imagine any other skinny guy swinging his leg at held footballs in a Lions uniform.
Hanson has been a morsel of comfort food for a fan base that has had to choke down hospital grade cuisine for the past nine years.
But is the end near? Nobody can kick forever—not even Morten Anderson or Jan Stenerud or John Kasay—who’s still doing it for the Carolina Panthers, two months shy of his 41st birthday, the only kicker the Panthers franchise has ever employed.
All I know is that Hanson, just two seasons ago at age 38, went 21-for-22 in field goal attempts, including making a 56-yarder. Over his 18 seasons, he’s connected at a success rate of 81.8.
I have a hunch that last year’s 21-for-28 was an aberration, and that we’ll see a reliable, accurate Hanson once again in 2010. And we may see that for several more years.
Jason Hanson just has to keep kicking for the Lions. I was married one week after his first game with the team in 1992. He’s the only Lions kicker my marriage has ever known.
If he retires, I’ll have to start treating Mrs. Eno a whole lot nicer.
Retro Tuesday: Charles Rogers
Posted by: | CommentsI’ve been ranting in this space for over five years, having started “Out of Bounds” in April, 2005.
So I thought it would be kind of fun to step into the vault every Tuesday and drag out a delectable morsel from the past.
So “Retro Tuesday” will appear here every week—a blog post culled from the last five-plus years.
Today’s piece comes from August 2, 2006. The troubled Lions receiver Charles Rogers was struggling to make the team in his fourth season.
Enjoy!!
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(from August 2, 2006)
Rogers’ Career As A Lion On Life Support
Chuck Long. 1986’s #1 draft pick, a stud QB out of Iowa. A can’t miss kid, they said. Just you wait and see. We waited. We waited some more. Then the Lions could wait no longer, and drafted Rodney Peete out of USC.
Reggie Rogers. 1987’s #1 draft pick — a fleet-footed defensive end who could chase down running backs, sideline-to-sideline. But Reggie was involved in a car accident in which a person was killed, and in which Reggie himself was badly injured. There was a trial. Vehicular manslaughter. End of career.
Andre Ware. 1990’s #1 draft pick — a record-setting arm at the University of Houston. Drafted into the frenetic, ADD-like offense of the run-n-shoot that the Lions were playing around with. But Ware lacked one significant ingredient to being a serviceable NFL quarterback: the ability to throw the ball anywhere near an intended receiver. The poster boy of all bad Lions’ draft picks.
Juan Roque, 1996’s #1 draft pick — a six-foot-eight, 330 pound tackle out of Arizona State. Supposed to be a pillar of the offensive line for years to come. He ended up being simply a pillar — the inanimate kind. Career over in short order.
Stockar McDougle, 2000’s #1 draft pick — a six-foot-six tackle out of Oklahoma. If Wayne Fontes was still here, he would have said McDougle could “block out the sun.” Turns out Stockar couldn’t block his way out of a paper bag — parchment paper, even.
And now….
Charles Rogers, 2003’s #1 draft pick — an amazingly talented receiver out of Michigan State.
Rogers is perilously close to being lumped into the above group.
Already, training camp just six days old, there’s talk that Charlie Rogers is having trouble grasping the convoluted offensive schemes of new coordinator Mike Martz. He didn’t participate in one single play yesterday, the scuttlebutt is. Whispers are floating around questioning Rogers’ cranial capacity. Well, at least that’s different; they used to question his commitment, his work ethic, his durability.
Charles Rogers: not smart enough to play in the NFL?
Now they wonder whether Charlie Rogers has the smarts to be a competent NFL receiver.
If I had some dough to toss away on a gamble, I’d place some cash that says Rogers will no longer be a Lion when the regular season begins next month against the Seattle Seahawks at Ford Field. Not traded, not placed on injured reserve, or the PUP list. Just … cut.
Rogers and 2005’s #1 pick, Mike Williams, were mentioned as the two players who had to have perhaps the two best training camps on the entire team. Both are under the microscope of doubt and skepticism.
Neither is impressing, by all accounts, and it’s certainly fathomable that one of the two — doubtful both of them — will be released by the Lions within the month. My bet is on Rogers, because he’s had a couple more seasons in Detroit than Williams. Yes, the Lions would have to chow down on Rogers’ contract if they cut him, but as team president Matt Millen said last week, the club wouldn’t hesitate to do that if it was for the betterment of the program.
Rogers’ latest setback is yet another in a series. There was the freakish broken collarbone suffered midway through his rookie year in 2003, followed by the freakish broken collarbone suffered during the first series of the opening game in Chicago in 2004. Last year, Rogers was suspended for four games by the league for violating its substance abuse policy. Now the “he’s not very smart, after all” training camp.
Too much to overcome? Certainly too much to blame the Lions, should they cut him.
Time is running out for Charles Rogers in Detroit. Odds are.
After Just One Season, Delmas Best Lions DB In Years
Posted by: | CommentsThe words still rattle around in my noggin, some 20 years after they were spouted for public consumption by the hard-hitting, boisterous free safety for the Detroit Lions.
“Come out to see me on Monday Night Football,” Bennie Blades said into the camera, “and watch me hit Bo Jackson in the mouth!”
In my prior life as a producer and director for local cable television, part of my charge was to rustle up guests for our weekly sports talk show. I had no budget with which to work to secure such guests—just my charm and my wit. So you can imagine where that left us.
But I had spotted Blades at Fishbone’s in Greektown. It was St. Patrick’s Day, 1990. He had just finished his second season as the Lions’ paid assassin of the secondary—a member of Jimmy Johnson’s wild bunch at the University of Miami until being drafted by the Lions in 1988.
Fueled by some of the evening’s libations, I approached Blades, business card in hand, and asked him if he’d like to do our show sometime. He was gracious and willing.
Late in the summer, Blades graced our studios. The Lions’ schedule for 1990 had been released. There was a Monday night game slated for December against the (then) Los Angeles Raiders.
Bo Jackson was in his heyday of being the quintessential two-sport athlete—slugging homers for the Kansas City Royals in the summer and running over would-be tacklers for the Raiders in the fall.
It must have presented a quandary for the Kansas City sports fan, because the Chiefs were longtime, bitter rivals of their baseball superstar’s football team.
The NFL schedule would have Jackson and the Raiders invading the Pontiac Silverdome on national TV late in the 1990 season. Blades couldn’t wait.
So he made the pronouncement on our show, before the football season even started.
“Come out to see me on Monday Night Football and watch me hit Bo Jackson in the mouth!”
The Lions would lose that game to the Raiders—a wild, high-scoring affair. The Lions’ Barry Sanders, no slouch of a runner himself, scored early and often. Jackson and the Raiders countered. Back and forth it went, until the Lions collapsed into defeat in the fourth quarter. Typical.
Blades might have gotten a few hits in on Jackson that night. But the Lions lost anyway.
Bennie Blades was the last of a dying breed: that of the Lions defensive back who could change game plans and inject fear into opposing pass receivers.
Blades wanted to hit people, very badly. He played free safety as if the pass catchers had broken into his house.
Blades’ lineage as a Lions defensive back started in the 1950s, when Dick “Night Train” Lane patrolled the secondary and rarely made a tackle below the jaw line.
The Lions rosters of the 1950s and ‘60s were filled with top notch DBs.
There was Lane and Jimmy David and Yale Lary and Jack Christiansen and Dick LeBeau and Bruce Maher and Lem Barney and Wayne Rasmussen and Tommy Vaughn.
The 1970s and ‘80s saw Jimmy Allen and (still) Barney and James Hunter and Bruce McNorton. They weren’t all Hall of Famers or Pro Bowlers, but they were capable.
It was into this line that Bennie Blades fell when he was drafted by the Lions out of Miami in 1988.
When Blades left the Lions after the 1996 season (he retired after one season in Seattle), that lineage of capable defensive backs ended. The Lions have tried mightily since, but they haven’t been able to find “that guy” in the secondary.
Until now.
Louis Delmas is only a second-year player but he squawks and carries himself like a 10-year veteran. He played college ball at Western Michigan, which is about as known for pumping out All-Pro safeties as Yale is for quarterbacks.
Yet Delmas has become, after just one measly season, the best Lions’ defensive back since Bennie Blades. Says me.
“We have to play defense with personality, and (Delmas) provides that,” Lions coach Jim Schwartz told the media wonks earlier this week as training camp droned on.
Delmas was the topic du jour because he’s been little more than an anxious, chomping-at-the-bit observer during camp, thanks to a tender groin.
Forgive me, but he’s been like a caged Lion.
The Lions have had Delmas for just one season and already they and their fan base shudder to think of life without him. When news broke that Delmas’s groin injury might require season-ending surgery, the social networks and blogs were filled with mass hysteria.
I can see why.
Louis Delmas is the best thing to come down the pike in the Lions secondary in this century. He’s smart, physical, leads by example, and spices things up in the personality department. He makes plays. He helps give the Lions defense an identity.
The Lions, I suspect, are building around Delmas defensively just as they are around Matthew Stafford offensively. With all due respect to rookie DT Ndamukong Suh, Delmas is the quarterback of the defense. Suh is Delmas’s Calvin Johnson.
For all of the Lions’ inadequacies during the Matt “The Villain” Millen era, the defense has been the 400-lb. gorilla in the room. The Lions have been easier to score on than a Scrabble board. Opponents moved the ball down the field as if they were on a Sunday stroll.
Delmas, by himself, didn’t do a whole lot to stem that tide last season. But he plays a high-profile position in a high-throttle manner. He has no off switch. He should be the Lions’ free safety for years to come. He could be our Ronnie Lott, or at least the next Bennie Blades.
The Lions have tried aging veterans, supposed hot-shots, alleged big hitters (Kenoy Kennedy anyone?), and unheralded kids from the draft, all in an attempt over the years to ply together a secondary that at least achieves the level of respectable.
It’s all failed—a total, unmitigated disaster.
Bennie Blades was eventually joined by William White, Ray Crockett and Melvin Jenkins as the Lions’ secondary became better than average in the early-to-mid 1990s.
Louis Delmas is the new best thing back there—a player around whom to add more pieces, as the Lions did for Blades.
So come out to watch Delmas hit some people in the mouth!
Bradshaw Forgets Own Legacy in His Rebuke of Clausen
Posted by: | CommentsThe irony drips like a faucet with a bad washer.
The speaker was Terry Bradshaw, Hall of Fame quarterback—he of the four Super Bowl rings won with the Pittsburgh Steelers. And he was offering his opinions on some of the young gun QBs in the NFL currently.
After damning the Lions’ Matthew Stafford with praise, Bradshaw turned venomous when it came to Carolina rookie Jimmy Clausen, the Panthers’ second-round pick out of Notre Dame.
“Let me say what I said before earlier up to the (NFL) draft,” Bradshaw began about Clausen. “I didn’t like him in college and I don’t like him now. I never did like him. I don’t like his delivery. I don’t like his motion. I think he’s too slow. “Physically, the way he threw the football, I just didn’t like him. (There’s) way too much shoulder action. (He’s) just another guy as far as I’m concerned.”
About that irony…
Bradshaw was drafted first overall by the Steelers in 1970, out of Louisiana Tech. Before long, most of the city would have chipped in for a one-way plane ticket out of town for their young QB.
Bradshaw didn’t possess the classic skills of a top-flight NFL quarterback, as it turned out. He didn’t have a very strong arm. He was slow. He wasn’t all that accurate.
On top of that, Terry Bradshaw was portrayed as not having the brains to be a pro quarterback.
Bradshaw was a country bumpkin who didn’t sound like anyone from the Steel City would embrace. He opened his mouth and southern twanged words dropped out. He was a hick, trying to win over the blue collars of Pittsburgh.
The Steelers were coming off a 1-13 season when they drafted Bradshaw. If this is our savior, the Steelers fans said, then we’re living down below where it’s burning all the time.
Bradshaw wasn’t a premier quarterback. He really wasn’t. He rose to the level of adequate just in time for the Steelers to add pieces like Lynn Swann, John Stallworth, and Franco Harris. Oh, and the best defense of the 1970s.
Bradshaw’s career numbers don’t leap out at you. They don’t even blink. If they were in a window, they’d be the last item chosen by the shoppers—with CLEARANCE labels slapped over it.
But Bradshaw won four Super Bowls, armed with a running game, Pro Bowl receivers, and one of the stingiest defenses ever fielded.
It’s reminiscent of what baseball manager Leo Durocher once said about one of his players, Eddie “The Brat” Stanky.
“He can’t run, he can’t hit, he can’t field,” Durocher said. “All he does is beat you.”
Bradshaw couldn’t throw, couldn’t run, couldn’t elude. He was less than smart.
But he’s in the Hall of Fame with those four rings.
So I had to chuckle when I read Bradshaw’s rebuke of the young Clausen, who has yet to throw his first NFL pass.
Very similar dreck was spewed about Bradshaw, back in the day. To Steelers fans, Bradshaw wasn’t a quarterback—he was a criminal sentence that had been levied on them.
Until the organization surrounded him with fellow Hall of Famers, on both sides of the ball.
Bradshaw ought to know better than to offer such stinging criticism of a young quarterback before his career has really gotten going.
Forty years ago, Bradshaw arrived in Pittsburgh—a country bumpkin with precious few brains. Thirteen years after that, he retired as an under-talented legend.
Now he’s burying Jimmy Clausen before the kid is even in the starting gate.
Maybe Terry isn’t so bright, after all.
Hall of Famer Spielman Was Born Too Late
Posted by: | CommentsWe did it all wrong, the way we watched Chris Spielman play football for the Detroit Lions.
How dare we enjoy Spielman’s eight seasons with the Lions under a Teflon roof with climate control!
How dare we have him play the game on phony grass, without a snowball’s chance in Hell of even a raindrop splatting onto his helmet?
How could we watch him in the lap of the Silverdome’s luxury, an ice-cold drink in one hand and a red hot in the other?
Spielman should have been crunching ball carriers and blockers on a muddy field under a sheet of rain, wearing a leather helmet and shoulder pads made of the latest Sears catalogues.
He should have been wearing a jersey made of wool, and shoes that went over his ankles. The football should have been more rounded.
The other team should have been from Canton, not Tampa.
The on-field officials should have been wearing all white with floppy hats, not stripes and baseball caps. They shouldn’t have been armed with penalty flags—just whistles.
The playing field should have literally been a gridiron, sans hash marks. The goalposts should have formed an “H.”
There shouldn’t have been an ambulance on standby. Instead, just a megaphone and a call for “Is there a doctor in the house?”
The fans should have worn fur coats and twirled noisemakers. And they should have gotten there by horse and buggy, or at least not until hand-cranking their automobile engine started. All the men should have been wearing hats, many smoking cigars.
There should have been no facemasks or elbow pads. The forward pass should have been considered radical. The drop kick should have been part of the playbook.
The games should have been heard on radio, not seen on television. The accounts should have been read from a newspaper, not the Internet.
The players should have played both offense and defense. There should have been one coach per team.
Red Grange should have been around for advice. Jim Thorpe, too.
Chris Spielman was born too late. Like by about 50 years. To say he was a throwback isn’t enough. Spielman wasn’t a throwback; he was a pro football player from the 1920s and ‘30s who somehow was transported to our time. Robert Zemeckis ought to give him a call for the next “Back to the Future” treatment.
It’s a good thing something called football was invented, because without it, I’m not sure what Chris Spielman would have done with himself. Maybe strap on a hard hat and ram himself into a brick wall.
Spielman played football as if it was his duty. He treated the sport with respect and was mindful of its history and tradition.
One time, he scored a touchdown at the Silverdome and rolled into the end zone, pounding the football into the turf, like they did when FDR was president.
Touch. Down.
They put Spielman, the great former linebacker from the Ohio State University, into the College Football Hall of Fame last week.
Considering Spielman last played a down of college ball 23 years ago, I’d say someone was asleep at the switch on this one.
He’s finally in, but damn them for being late, because Stefanie Spielman wasn’t around to enjoy it.
Spielman got everything he wanted on the football field by willing it to happen. Everything except an NFL Championship, that is.
But aside from that, Spielman cracked heads every Saturday, then every Sunday, with behemoths from the other side. If there was a problem, he’d take care of it on the field.
Then his wife Stefanie got sick with cancer.
Spielman quit pro football in 1996 to take care of her. No word on who took care of him, however. It had to kill him, to be so helpless for the first time ever.
“People say, ‘It’s a great thing that you’re doing,’ ” Chris Spielman said at the time.”I always say it would be a terrible thing if I didn’t.”
This was one opponent Spielman couldn’t beat into submission, but Stefanie proved to be as tough, if not more so, than her husband.
She gave breast cancer all it could handle. She was Joe Frazier and the cancer was Muhammad Ali. She’d win a round, and then cancer would take a few. It would land a big blow to the head, and Stefanie would counter with a jab to the face.
On and on it went for years.
Four times the cancer came and went. When she lost her hair to radiation, Chris Spielman shaved his head, too, in an act of solidarity and love.
But when it came back for the fifth time—cancer is as stubborn as the day is long—Stefanie didn’t have any more counter-punching left in her. She died last November, at age 42.
She had started an awareness group and became a spokesperson. The Spielmans became a sports couple to be admired and by whom to be inspired.
Her husband went back to the grind of pro football, but he didn’t last long. Chris Spielman retired in 1999 as a Cleveland Brown, his back and neck no longer in proper condition to withstand the head-on collisions that occurred every week.
So Stefanie wasn’t at last week’s ceremony in South Bend, Ind. At least, not physically.
Spielman was a Buckeye, and then he went to the Lions, which was like being plucked from the crystal waters of the Caribbean and being dunked into the swill of a swamp.
The losing killed him in Detroit. But there was just enough winning, eventually, to keep his hopes up. The Lions would make the playoffs, and then get drummed out in the first round, usually convincingly.
The last straw was the 58-37 thumping in Philadelphia in the first round in 1995—after the Lions had won their last seven games in a row to make the playoffs.
Spielman was 30 and he had had enough. He went to four Pro Bowls and led the Lions in tackles in all eight seasons he played for them, but after the playoff disaster in Philly, Spielman said the Lions were “spinning their wheels.”
He went to the Buffalo Bills for the 1996 season, and about a year after that, Stefanie was diagnosed.
Spielman probably won’t go into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. The collegiate honor will have to suffice.
Ironic, really, because Spielman was an old soul, more in tune with the players who were in the NFL during its inception than those he played with and against.
We had him for eight years in Detroit. We watched him play on plastic grass in perpetual 72-degree weather that was dry and sans wind.
That was just plain wrong.
Lions Play Scared When it Comes to Haynesworth
Posted by: | CommentsAt the climax of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, as the Soviet ships turned around and headed home, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk uttered the famous words that bottom-lined what just happened, when the world was led to the brink of nuclear war but averted it at the 12th hour.
“We just went eyeball-to-eyeball with the Soviets,” Rusk said, “and they blinked.”
The Soviets didn’t have the temerity to push any further.
The Detroit Lions, some 47 years and change later, went eyeball-to-eyeball with the prospects of acquiring defensive tackle Albert Haynesworth. And the Lions blinked.
The official team colors for the Lions are Honolulu Blue and Silver. You’d better add yellow to the scheme.
The Lions, according to a source identified by NFL.com, are no longer interested in the huge talent and sometimes headache Haynesworth, who the Washington Redskins might be willing to trade.
The source says that Lions GM Martin Mayhew acknowledges Haynesworth’s abilities and that those abilities could work wonders with No. 2 overall draft pick Ndamukong Suh on the Lions’ interior defensive front.
But, the source added, “(The Lions) don’t want any negative influences around” Suh.
Yellow management. A chicken excrement way of doing things.
The Lions, still talent deficient despite another draft and a busy off-season, looked at the potentially dominant Haynesworth and shook their head no—all because they’re afraid.
I’ve supported Mayhew from Day One, when he fleeced Jerry Jones and the Dallas Cowboys out of a No. 1 draft choice for WR Roy Williams way back in October 2008. He’s been bold, aggressive, and has exhibited personnel savvy that defies his being an underling to Matt Millen for so many years.
But not this time. I can’t go with Mayhew on this one. Mayhew regressed, playing try-not-to-lose poker instead of the trying-to-win kind.
An upper echelon team, one that’s elite, can maybe afford to pass on a guy like Haynesworth and cite his track record of being a prima donna. They can afford to be a tad more picky.
The Lions don’t have that luxury. They need talented football players, first and foremost. First you get them here, then you figure out how to deal with them.
I thought that the history Haynesworth has with Lions head coach Jim Schwartz from the pair’s days in Tennessee would provide the final push over the hump, and that the Lions would actively pursue a trade for big Albert.
But I was wrong. The Lions not only blinked, they lost their nerve. They kept their chips and folded.
The Lions have won 33 games in the past nine years. If it wasn’t so painstakingly sad, it would be frighfully funny.
Thirty-three wins in nine years, and they’re going to pass on acquiring a player who could make their front four one of the best in pro football?
They’re cowards.
This is pro sports, not college. Losing isn’t tolerated in pro sports. This is America, where losing is despicable. And in no other sport is losing as horrible as it is in professional football.
All the planning, all the film sessions. All the strategy, all the practicing. For six days this goes on every week. Coaches work 20-hour days. Players work themselves into a rabid froth from Monday thru Saturday. On Sunday (or Monday) there is an accounting.
You play 60 minutes and when it’s over and you’re on the wrong end of the score, it’s damn near disgusting.
Nothing is better than winning a pro football game, and nothing is worse than losing one.
The Lions are bottom feeders, and that means needing the intestinal fortitude to take risks in order to return to respectability.
By taking themselves out of the bidding for Haynesworth, they’re handing out indictments all over the team.
They’re saying that Sc hwartz can’t handle a sometimes-headache player—one that he’s coached before, no less. They’re saying that Suh, so praised for his maturity and for being a quote-unquote good kid, is easily manipulated. And they’re saying that the teammate support structure is broken.
They’re afraid of bringing in Albert Haynesworth.
Guess what? They don’t have that option.
You can’t win 33 games in nine years and play scared when it comes to improving your roster.
The Oakland Raiders—the old version, not this New Coke recipe that plays at being Raiders today—made a mint and won some Super Bowls by signing and trading for some of the league’s most notorious miscreants.
If you needed a career resuscitated, if you were a player who was being figuratively blackballed, you told your agent to give the Raiders a call.
The Raiders of the 1970s and most of the 1980s were a bunch of vagabonds. They were a snarling team made up largely of men who played with chips on their shoulders and with hate and vengeance on their minds and encircling their hearts.
They were like the team of prisoners in “The Longest Yard” and all their opponents were the prison guards.
The Raiders could only have been owned by Al Davis—before he started losing it upstairs. Davis prowled the field before the game with his sunglasses and slicked back hair and bling and he wore black and you were tempted to ask him where they buried Jimmy Hoffa.
His players were of that image—irreverant, sneering, distasteful.
Just win, baby.
That’s what the Raiders did, with their miscreants and cast-offs and has-beens.
Jim Plunkett won not one, but two Super Bowls with the Raiders, and he did it on bad legs and with a passing arm that needed two throws to make it 50 yards. Plunkett was a two-time NFL loser, with the Patriots and the 49ers, when the Raiders got their dirty mitts on him. Then look what happened.
The Lions could have had Haynesworth at a relatively decent price, since the Redskins would be picking up most of the tab. They could have added a guy who, combined with Suh, might have made Detroit go crazy.
Haynesworth and Suh, together, could own Detroit.
What do they think, he’s going to come here and act like a goofball on principle?
Elite teams can afford to think like that.
Bottom feeders like the Lions need good football players, not good people.
Sometimes the two are mutually exclusive, unfortunately. I will grant you that.
I want a team that wants to win—not one that’s afraid to lose.
The Lions passed on Albert Haynesworth.
They lost their nerve. Shame on them.
Tasers Not Needed When Curtis Was on Duty
Posted by: | CommentsOf all the cheap gin joints in the NFL, that drunken buffoon had to run onto Mike Curtis’s.
I think of Curtis, the half-man, half-linebacker, half-Tasmanian Devil of the NFL from 1965-78, whenever I read or hear of some loony who runs onto the field of play in pro sports.
Yeah, I know I assigned three halves to Curtis. If anyone was one-and-a-half of anything, it was Mike Curtis, who flattened an alcohol-soaked moron into a pancake in Baltimore back in 1971.
Curtis came to mind as I read of that lovely cesspool of rotten fans, Philadelphia, which was in the news this week. On successive nights, the baseball field at Citizens Bank Park was littered with two loose cannons who rushed the diamond.
Some controversy ensued on the first night, when the perp was a 17-year-old who was tasered by Philly’s finest, in front of some 30,000 witnesses.
He’s lucky he wasn’t Curtised.
Mike Curtis was a linebacker for the Baltimore Colts from 1965-75, for the Seattle Seahawks in 1976, and for the Washington Redskins in 1977-78.
Correction: Curtis wasn’t a linebacker; he was a tsunami.
People make a big deal about Dick Butkus, and that’s OK. But Curtis entered the league the same year as Butkus of the Chicago Bears and he was every bit as nasty, mean and demented as old No. 51.
Curtis wasn’t for his team—he was against the other.
He had the temperament of a bear rousted early from hibernation. If you played for the other side, Curtis hated you. If you played on his side, he tolerated you. He didn’t even get along with Johnny Unitas. Curtis once said so himself.
Curtis played 14 seasons in the NFL in a pissy mood. He was drafted as a fullback, believe it or not, but didn’t have the skill or the patience for the position. So they moved him to linebacker, where he could waylay opponents and save a bundle of cash on anger management classes.
“I play football,” Curtis once said, “because it’s the only place you can hit people and get away with it.”
1971 was an especially bad year to get on Curtis’s bad side—which for him meant crossing his path.
The Colts were defending Super Bowl champions, and you’d think that would make a guy who played for them at least a little pleasant.
Not Curtis.
The Colts’ win over the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl V only made him madder.
Curtis, you see, still wasn’t over his team’s upset loss at the hands of Joe Namath and the New York Jets in Super Bowl III.
Curtis wrote about it in his autobiography, Keep off My Turf, one of the more appropriately-named pieces of literature since they started binding books.
The Jets, who were 18-point underdogs, “were lucky that day,” Curtis wrote. “We were twice as good as the Jets,” he added.
I saw Curtis being interviewed by NFL Films some 12 years after that day in Miami, when Namath led the Jets to a stunning 16-7 upset of the 13-1 Colts.
Curtis was still pissed off.
“We should have been champions twice,” he growled.
So winning the Super Bowl in 1971 didn’t make Mike Curtis happy or relieved or satiated. It only served to re-open some wounds.
Such was the back story when Curtis and the Colts were taking on the Miami Dolphins at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium.
In between plays, here comes the bozo onto the field, soused and delirious with soused happiness.
The fool grabs the football from the turf.
He’d have been better off sticking his head inside a lion’s mouth at feeding time.
Curtis wasted no time. He motored to the poor fool and slammed him into the Memorial Stadium turf with a vicious hit normally reserved for running backs and scrambling quarterbacks.
You may have seen the footage. The guy is so wasted that even after Curtis leveled him, he was still laughing hysterically. Being drunk probably saved him a world of pain.
Curtis acted instinctively, as wildlife tends to do.
For those instinctive actions, Mike Curtis became a hero to football fans. He did what a whole lot of others would have paid money to do.
As expected, Curtis was unapologetic about his recourse.
“The way I see it, he was invading my place of business,” Curtis said.
Teammate Bubba Smith, no Dale Carnegie himself, told Curtis on the field that he shouldn’t have hit the guy so hard.
“He shouldn’t have been on the field,” Curtis told Bubba—and the world, in subsequent interviews.
The use of the taser on the teenager in Philadelphia has drawn some criticism.
Too harsh! Overkill! He’s just a kid!
Bull-oney.
Nothing good can come from a nut invading the field or court or rink of play. I don’t care how old or young he or she is.
At best, it’s a needless delay in the proceedings. At worst, well…we haven’t seen the worst yet, and that’s what is terrifying.
Need I bring up Monica Seles?
You remember it when Seles, the tennis player, was stabbed in the back during a match by a crazed fan/stalker.
In 2002, Kansas City Royals First Base Coach Tom Gamboa was brutally attacked by a father-and-son act in Chicago. A knife was found on the ground near where Gamboa lay when the police and players rushed to Gamboa’s defense.
You still think it’s cute and harmless when some wacko runs onto the field?
It’s amazing that we haven’t seen something worse occur.
And we won’t, if extreme measures of incapacitation, like tasers, are continued to be used by stadium security.
I’m all for it.
When Henry Aaron finally clobbered home run No. 715, passing Babe Ruth, capping a run that saw everything from hate mail and death threats targeting Aaron as well as kidnapping threats against his daughter, his wife Billye’s heart leapt to her throat.
As her husband rounded the base paths, two overzealous fans had joined him. They wanted to offer nothing more than congratulations—to immerse themselves in history. But no one really knew that at the time—especially Billye Aaron.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God, they’re going to get him now, as he’s running around the bases,’” Billye said about that briefly terrifying moment. “They’re going to get him NOW.”
They didn’t, of course.
But they could have.
We can’t have Mike Curtis at every stadium or arena, but we can have tasers.
I’m all for it.
Playoff Hockey without Shanahan Not the Norm in the NHL
Posted by: | CommentsBrendan Shanahan played 21 physical, angry seasons in the NHL yet he could walk into a Hollywood producer’s office tomorrow morning and be cast as the male lead.
Shanahan, 41, still has his looks; most old hockey players have faces that are zippered on and are the texture of corduroy.
Shanahan is still the best looking man in most rooms these days, plus among the smartest and most charming, and it’s enough to make guys like me sick.
I’m not telling you anything the ladies don’t already know.
He sat behind a desk in an office inside the Kennedy Ice Center in Trenton Saturday and spoke eloquently on a number of subjects, including his involvement in a fascinating story involving two local high school teams from 1999. But more about that later.
This used to be Shanahan’s time—right now. Spring hockey. The playoffs going on. Lose four games within a seven-game window and you’re on the golf course tomorrow.
Shanahan loves golf and he’s very good at it. But he never loved it enough to choose it over playoff hockey.
“I miss playing at the elite level. I miss the highest level of competition,” Shanahan told me. “I miss playing for the Stanley Cup.”
Shanahan isn’t in the playoffs this year for the first time in 14 years, because he retired last fall. That’s the only way you could keep him out of the post-season; Shanny played 21 seasons in the NHL, and he made the playoffs in 19 of them.
The last time he missed the post-season, it was in 1996 and it was because he was playing for the awful Hartford Whalers. Shanahan scored 44 goals in the 1995-96 season and those were ten more than the wins the Whalers had.
Shanahan, at that point, had played nine NHL seasons and his teams’ playoff runs lasted about as long as a 4th of July sparkler.
The Red Wings in 1996 were elite. They’d just set an NHL record with 62 wins, but were blasted out of the Western Conference Finals by the hated Colorado Avalanche.
In the early throes of the ’96-97 season, Shanahan got himself some ideas.
“(The trade to Detroit) took about two weeks to come together,” he said. “It wasn’t a phone call that said, ‘You’re traded.’”
Shanahan, unhappy with the tenuous Whalers, who would soon relocate to Carolina, looked at the Red Wings and saw an opportunity.
“They were an Original Six team, they were on the cusp of winning, and I thought I could help,” he said, adding a gross understatement at the end of that sentence.
The Red Wings had been manhandled by the Avs in the ’96 Final Four. They were humiliated by guys like Claude Lemieux and mocked by goalie Patrick Roy. The Red Wings’ overall team toughness was seriously questioned.
The Stanley Cup drought in Detroit had reached 41 years. And counting.
And here’s 44-goal scorer Brendan Shanahan, annually garnering triple digits in penalty minutes, a tough Irish guy who was as lethal with his gloves off as with them on, and he thinks he “could help”?
Yet not everyone agreed with him that Detroit would be an ideal destination.
“The players’ union tried to get me to go to Washington,” Shanahan told me. He nearly rolled his eyes when he said it. “There were others who tried to convince me that there were better places for me to go [than Detroit].”
But Shanahan wanted to make Shanny-to-the-Red Wings a reality.
I asked him about that first night as a Red Wing—when he was introduced at the team’s home opener, having rushed into town after the deal was finally done, to a mighty ovation. Thunderous, was more like it.
“When I stepped onto that ice, it was like, ‘OK, it’s official now. It’s all worth it.’”
Eight months later, the Red Wings exorcised their Stanley Cup demons. They won the thing 42 years after Lindsay and Howe and Sawchuk skated the Cup around the ice.
Shanahan played in all 20 of the team’s playoff games and scored nine goals, seemingly every one of them big—and was whistled for 43 penalty minutes. Natch.
The Red Wings weren’t soft any longer. Shanahan “helped” in that department, big time.
He’s helping in a different way now.
Shanahan, working with the folks at Gatorade, will serve as honorary coach for the 1999 Trenton Trojans high school reunion team who will take on the 1999 Detroit Catholic Central Shamrocks to settle some unfinished business. Those hockey powerhouses, fierce rivals, played to a 4-4 tie in a game at Trenton that was suspended following the horrific injury suffered to Trojan Kurt LaTarte, whose throat was slashed by a skate.
It’s all part of a TV series called REPLAY, where high school teams are reassembled to replay games that ended without a winner. The Trenton-CC game was selected for replay among over 2,000 applicants.
The CC honorary coach is Scotty Bowman. Yes, THAT Scotty Bowman.
“I want to win,” Shanahan said of the May 9 game. “I want to win at checkers. It should be an intense game. These players are blessed. They have a chance, 11 years later, to settle the score.”
Shanahan knows intense. He played hockey with a fierceness and fearlessness that I hadn’t seen in Detroit from a player of his talent prior to his arrival.
The playoffs, especially, were Shanahan’s time. He played in 184 post-season games and scored 60 goals. He racked up 279 penalty minutes. He helped import the term “power forward” from basketball’s lexicon.
And he won three Stanley Cups.
Shanahan scored, and he fought. He also increased the interest in hockey among the females. Often all in the same game. The Brendan Shanahan Hat Trick was a goal, a fight, a swoon.
I wanted to know what this time of the year meant to an old NHL warrior like him.
“You close yourself off to all other things,” he said. “Eating wasn’t enjoying food—it was just adding more fuel to your body. Sleeping wasn’t rest, it was something you needed. Everything was done for the next game. You sequestered yourself in the hotel with your teammates and you got blinders on.”
And the payoff?
“That’s what I liked most about it. When the final horn sounded and you were the winner and the season was over, that’s when you sort of pulled the blinders off and really took a look around you. You were on a mission. You were focused entirely on winning, and that was a lot of fun.”
Saturday was just the third time Shanahan had been on skates since he announced his retirement last fall. And don’t expect him to join any men’s leagues or appear in any old-timers games.
“Once you’ve climbed Mount Everest,” he said, “why step up a hill?”
Mayhew Commits Yet Another Robbery at NFL Draft
Posted by: | CommentsNFL general managers, beware: you can’t stop Martin Mayhew, you can only hope to contain him.
Mayhew, the Lions’ football brainiac, reminds me of those chess experts who can play multiple opponents at once, because he’s staying one move ahead of his brethren.
His latest heist was the trade he made last night during the first round of the NFL Draft, when everyone thought Mayhew’s work was done with the selection of Nebraska DT Ndamukong Suh with the second overall pick.
Mayhew’s never done. You can’t drop your guard for one second with this guy. He’ll fleece you in broad daylight—in front of your family, your friends, your fans. He doesn’t bother to wear a mask. None of the great bandits did—just the amateurs who are afraid of being caught.
Mayhew obviously couldn’t care less who sees his face. He’s Jesse James, Clyde Barrow and John Dillinger, all rolled into one.
Mayhew picked Suh, as pretty much expected, then he went back to his chess board.
Later in the evening, the announcement came: the Lions had swapped with the Minnesota Vikings—a division rival, mind you—so that the Detroiters could get themselves a second first round pick. They bumped themselves up four picks, from 34th to 30th, and nabbed California running back Jahvid Best.
Mayhew is leaving a trail of victims in his wake.
It all started in October 2008, when Mayhew was on the job only a few weeks, when he played coy and gave misdirection about wanting to trade WR Roy Williams at the upcoming trade deadline.
His patience and savvy fooled Jerry Jones into surrendering a first round pick for the underachieving Williams.
It was then that I thought the Lions might have something special with this Martin Mayhew guy.
And it wasn’t beginner’s luck. Mayhew first perfected the art of the low-risk, high yield move. Now he’s flat out picking other GM’s pockets in full view of everyone.
In between there was his fine 2009 draft, from which the Lions got several starters.
I get the feeeling that Mayhew loves this stuff. Some executives become intoxicated by the art of the deal. Pistons GM Jack McCloskey comes to mind.
But Mayhew isn’t making trades and signing free agents just for the sake of it. His every crime has designs. He’s his own, one-man Mafia.
The impressive thing is that Mayhew seems to have this knack for making the other teams see things through his prism. I don’t know how he does it—charm, guile, intimidation—but he gets what he wants because he brainwashes the other guy into thinking that it’s for his own good, too.
Mayhew is the mugger who convinces you that you didn’t need all that cash and jewelry after all.
And the NFL’s GMs have to still suffer through a couple more days with Mayhew at the draft. They’d better watch their wallets—not that it would do them any good.
They say 40 is the new 30. Mayhew is the new Joe Dumars.
Remember when we gushed about Dumars? I was guilty of it. I was hardly alone.
Dumars is out; Mayhew is all the rage now.
Someone mentioned to Mayhew recently that he and the Lions have had a pretty good off-season.
“You don’t know if you have a good off-season until you play the season,” Mayhew said he responded.
Gee, all that and he has common sense and wisdom, too?
And to think that he served under Matt Millen for all those years. Millen was the goose who laid the Golden Egg (Mayhew) and no one knew it until the goose was run out of town.
The Lions had a good draft yesterday. Already. They’re Barry Sanders with two carries for 80 yards and 55 minutes still to play.
Pity the rest of the league.