Turkey Day: Rehashing Mistakes and Memories

GM has taken the week off, and I came close. That's what I'm thankful for.

My Thanksgiving visit to my parents has left me with no quick Internet access, so don’t expect any links. The same visit, however (picture George Costanza hanging out with parents Frank and Estelle), has brought some holiday memories back into focus, and I’ll get to those later.

It’s a shame when college and NFL coaches make decisions so irrational that we’re forced to post about them, but if our irritation powers this blog (and it does), then we have to take our fuel where we can get it. Saturday afternoon, I watched my virtual wallet shrink (LSU got 4 ½ points at Ole Miss!) as Les Miles deprived his team of a chance to win outright—the outcome I depended upon. Sure, the fact that he tried to spike the ball in less than one second of clock time on the road was ludicrous, but others have already made that point. Also, there’s the obvious curiosity one would have about why he waited so long to call timeout before the 4th-and-forever conversion. There are a few more complaints on this stakeholder’s end, though:

1. You don’t try an onside kick with 6 minutes left in the first half after you just went up 8 thanks to a stadium-deflating 50-yard field goal. Really! When Ole Miss got the ball with incredible field position, the card-carrying Klan members at Vaught-Hemingway were somewhere between confused and uninterested. It wasn’t until the Rebels scored the ensuing touchdown that anyone cheered! Now that’s a deflated crowd.

2. You don’t give your sack-loving, slowest-fit-black-man-alive, ankle-hampered quarterback a chance to take a sack on second down when you’re already in field-goal range. I’m not saying don’t pass, but don’t let him drop back.

3. You don’t follow up the sack with a slow-developing play in the flat.

4. You don’t call the fade when going for two to tie it. I hate the fade when you’re inside the 10! Hate it. And thanks to a penalty the first time, he tried it twice.

5. Finally, I’ve watched an embarrassing amount of football at levels below NCAA Division I. Those teams are completely capable of switching out the offense for the field-goal unit in the time LSU was given. So… you don’t tell the CBS sideline reporter that you didn’t think you had time to do it. Some of us know better.

How’s this for a pro-style blunder? Down by 2 with more than 2 minutes remaining against the best team in the conference, Ravens coach John Harbaugh called a timeout so he could consider whether or not he wanted to challenge what was clearly and absolutely a correct first-down spot for the Colts. He then challenged and, of course, lost a second timeout—his last. When Baltimore got the ball back, Ed Reed turned it over on the punt return, but better clock management (or understanding of the rules) would have given them close to 2 minutes! You don’t call a timeout and then challenge—ever! Have I mentioned that it bothers me that guys who get paid heftily to make intelligent decisions can’t do so late in games?

Now for some Thanksgiving memories. This won’t take long because it was the same every year. My parents, brother, sister, and I would drive down to Ripley, Mississippi (population: our maternal extended family). If we were lucky, we wouldn’t beat the Lions’ kickoff there. We’d see Aunt Sarah (pronounced SAY-ruh ‘round those parts), the lady of the house, in the kitchen preparing the driest turkey you’ve ever had in your life. Then we’d pass a couple dozen people who looked familiar but whose names we couldn’t come up with even if everyone promised to quit walking in front of the TV. My brother and I could typically find ways to identify people. There were the blonde-haired brothers with mullets, the woman with Victorian-style/1970s glasses, the diabetic guy who clucks, the woman who wore the same pair of white Keds and a tacky Christmas sweater every year, the guy with the beard who didn’t like football, the chain-smoking couple with massive noses, the resentful teenage girl, the fat conspiracy theorist, and the guy who was obsessed with the newest television/speaker technology. We were related to every last one of these people, but if they came to my brother’s wedding, he sure didn’t know how they got there. After a remarkably cold potluck meal in which everything had the texture of Jell-O, we would avoid the crowd by making our way upstairs and inevitably digging into the 1974 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records.

“Can you believe this? A guy walked 27 miles while balancing a full milk bottle on his nose!”

“Cluck,” remarked the gentleman to my right.

-JW