This Is Pretty Wonderful

The football world was rocked yesterday by the announcement that Randy Moss was announcing his retirement, which sparked the reaction from most of "he was still playing?" and the reaction from me of "What will NBC do during the Triple Crown now?"

I kid.

Randy Moss was the most physically gifted receiver I ever saw -- and maybe in the history of the game -- so seeing him walk off into the sunset is a) a bit strange and b) a sign that I'm getting older. Anyone who remembers how much he lit up the NFL during his rookie season in 1998 could not possibly forget what it was like to watch a phenomenon like that, and over the course of his career he put together a first-ballot Hall of Fame resume that included both his record-breaking 23-touchdown season in 2007 and some of his lesser, but hilarious moments as you can see to the right.

Also, he had some great hair.

But in one of the bizarre aspects of the modern game (and also to help make the segue to what I really wanted to write about today) Randy Moss hit up several stops in his career even though he will primarily be associated with Minnesota and to a lesser extent New England. Moss was a Viking, a Raider, a Patriot, a Viking again for four weeks and a Titan. If you forgot that he was a Titan and a Raider, it's ok. So did he apparently. What's interesting to note in all of this however, is that Randy Moss had three different numbers in his career, 84, 18 and 81, a peculiarity because as my old college roommate Pat Dorsey has noted on ESPN.com, taking your uniform number with you at whatever cost is a time honored tradition in the NFL, with numerous players cutting lucrative deals to give their number up when a star who wants it arrives in town.

Moss, who must not have been interested in dealing with the petulant Jerry Porter, didn't do this, but yesterday his former team got in the mix in one of the best, most fun videos I've ever seen between two professional athletes, as Vikings punter/rock star/total nerd Chris Kluwe made an official deal with new quarterback Donovan McNabb to surrender over his No. 5 jersey.

Now, I have made fun of Donovan McNabb before, a casualty of his epic, underappreciated career with the Eagles, and his inability to know basic NFL rules, but he generally comes across as an affable, dedicated, talented, professional quarterback with a pretty good sense of humor. But given his relative star power and track record, it's a safe bet he would want his No. 5, and Kluwe knew it, so pre-empting any controversy, he laid out his terms on twitter.

What this led to was an impromptu press conference yesterday that was posted on Vikings.com in which the pair forged an agreement on how to transfer the digit. In the end the two hammered out a three pronged deal that will benefit both parties involved and help out some of the less fortunate on the side. And lest you think this could be broken by either party, think again. There's a very real official seal on the agreement.

The terms essentially broke down as such: Chris Kluwe gives his No. 5 to Donovan McNabb and in exchange McNabb makes good on the following requirements:

1) McNabb must mention Kluwe's band Tripping Icarus in five non-consecutive press conferences
2) McNabb must donate $5,000 to Kick For A Cure, a charity that benefits Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy
3) McNabb must buy Kluwe an ice cream cone

And he will really enjoy that ice cream cone.



This is amazing. Why, you ask? Well it's pretty simple. McNabb gets his number, money goes to charity, and both Kluwe and McNabb get to showcase their senses of humor. Plus, you really can't underestimate the value of that ice cream cone, though given my recent travels to Europe I'd be more on board with gelato. In any event, I have nothing else to add to this because the humor and greatness speaks for itself, but it seems pretty clear to me that the world would be better off with more sports celebrities that have the sense of humor and self promotion of Kluwe. Besides, it's a way better number transaction than when Plaxico Burress paid to build Jeff Feagles an outdoor kitchen and then stiffed him on the bill.

On this one, everybody's happy.

Good Thing I Didn't Buy That Ticket To Minnesota

At the beginning of every NFL season I take a look at the schedule to see what trips I might be interested in taking around the country. Because the Giants only visit teams in the AFC once every eight years, those, clearly, are at a premium. Look no further than last season's trip to Kansas City, this season's trip to Indianapolis or next year's planned jaunt to New England for evidence of that. NFC trips I still like to make, but there is far less urgency, and it might be for that reason that I opted not to go to Minnesota this season for the Giants' Week 14 showdown with the Vikings.

Given that I have a good friend at the University of Minnesota and I have a soft spot for the upper midwest, it was certainly a consideration, but boy am I lucky I opted to pass on that trip this year. For those of you who haven't seen, a blizzard hammered Minneapolis this weekend, which despite the Giants' best efforts to beat the snow to the punch -- they left 3.5 hours earlier than scheduled -- the weather was so bad New York was actually diverted to Kansas City for the night. There were serious concerns Saturday night over the fairness of holding a noon CT game Sunday afternoon that would require the Giants to leave Kansas City at 7 a.m. for a game five hours later, and while the Vikings pushed for the game to stay on schedule -- with the inherent competitive advantage, who could blame them -- the logistical nightmare of mobilizing an entire football team at such short notice finally pushed the NFL to postpone the game until tonight, still to be played at the Metrodome.

At this point, with Monday and Tuesday off from work at ticket prices dropping precipitously in Minneapolis due to the scheduling change, I once again began looking up plane flights, and very nearly purchased one that, because it was cheap, was nonrefundable.

Good thing I chose to wait a few hours. While most of us were sleeping, God intervened.



Yeah, that's right. The inflatable roof of the Metrodome collapsed and tore open in the middle of the night, pouring tons of snow on the field and, clearly, making the building unusable for the forseeable future.

With the structural challenge of holding a game in Minnesota the NFL was left to scramble for an alternative venue, with places such as the University of Minnesota's TCF Bank Stadium and New Orleans' Superdome discussed, before the NFL finally decided to truck their entire operation to Detroit and hold the game at Ford Field. Ironically, it will be the first Monday Night Football game at the home of the Detroit Lions, who will not be playing.

While this is, undoubtedly a bizarre situation, it is not without some precedent, particularly for the New York Giants. Famously, a Giants-Saints game was relocated to Giants Stadium in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina had decimated the Superdome and the Saints were left entirely in limbo for the course of a season. Less well-remembered is a Chargers-Dolphins game that was shifted to Tempe, Ariz., due to wild fires in the San Diego area in 2003.

This may be one of the more bizarre and unexpected game relocations in recent memory, however, and with a crowd of nebulous rooting interests awaiting -- tickets were free to the Detroit public and disappeared in 90 minutes -- no one is quite sure what to expect. The Vikings, however, may be disappointed with a lack of anticipated fan support. The only Viking who may be happy is Brett Favre, who just may get to keep his vaunted streak alive with the delay.

And the rest of the world very much is disappointed with that possibility.

In other news, before I sign off, something bizarre happened in hockey that I'm sure none of you are aware of -- nor can you find in today's excellent Blackhawks-Avalanche preview -- that is pretty wild. In a showdown between Minnesota and Anaheim, the Wild's Mikko Koivu stole the Ducks' Bobby Ryan's stick right out of his hands after losing his own. And the result? Bobby Ryan picked up Koivu's stick and scored a goal. Of course. The craziest part? Koivu's stick curved in the wrong direction for the right-handed Ryan. Check it out for yourself.



You may have to watch it a few times to grasp the whole exchange, but boy is it bizarre. If nothing else, I'm convinced that karma, at least in hockey, exists.

As for whether or not it exists in football, well, we might find out tonight in Detroit, though really, aside from how bizarre the situation is, I'm not really sure of anything with this game -- least of all whom might be favored by that karma. All I can do is watch.

Sure, Let's Make Overtime Confusing

A few years ago, my brother told me that a coworker had brought his New York Giants Super Bowl XLII Championship DVD into the office and was playing it all day. Elliott, ever the cineaste, said he admired the way the movie had been edited and were watching football games actually like the way NFL Films presented it, he might actually watch them once in a while.

So you can probably tell from this that my brother does not particularly like football.

Given that, you can imagine my surprise, when it was him of all people who broke the news to me that the NFL had voted to change its playoff overtime rules. Now, I wasn't completely oblivious. I knew it was being voted on, I just hadn't heard that the changes went through. Evidently some other major vote had been stealing headlines from it all week.

But here we are, and I suppose, with the new rule passing yesterday by a vote of 28-4, I should first explain what, exactly, the changes are. Previously, NFL overtime in both the regular season and postseason was straight forward sudden death. Flip a coin, kick off, whomever scores first wins. Period. The new rules muddy up the picture a little bit.

Now if a postseason game goes to overtime, the team that receives the opening kickoff will end the game only if they score a touchdown on their first possession. If all they can muster is a field goal, the other team will have an opportunity to respond. If the second team scores a touchdown, they win, if the second team doesn't score at all, they lose, and if the second team scores a field goal the game then moves to sudden death.


My brother and a few other friends had been asking me what my take on it was, no doubt expecting some massively informed and passionate response, but my initial reaction was..... "meh". The changes didn't bother me, but I hardly felt they were necessary. My take on NFL overtime had always been that it was fine for two reasons.

1) Every time an NFL game went to overtime during my childhood, the broadcast would post a statistic claiming that the winner of the coin toss won overtime games 48% of the time. If winning the coin toss didn't even translate to a victory half the time, I couldn't see what statistical advantage it provided.

2) Defense is half of the game too, isn't it? If you want to beat someone, don't let them score.

That right there was more or less my take on it, but after the rule passed yesterday I decided to do some research and my only assumption can be that apparently the NFL broadcasters have been lying to me. It turns out the chances of winning the game after winning the toss were 46.8% from 1974-1993. According to most statistics I've found now, however, the probability of winning a sudden death overtime game with the toss -- since the overtime rule was instituted in 1974 -- was actually around 52%. The chances of losing were 44% and the remaining 4% represents ties. While this is more than 48% it still isn't that significant, and so, I felt, the need to change the rules was somewhat overblown.

However, a closer look points out that two factors -- the NFL's decision to move kickoffs back from the 35-yardline to the 30-yardline in 1994, and the vast improvement of place kickers from a range of over 50 yards -- have dramatically changed the odds. In the first five years of overtime, NFL place kickers hit 61 % of their field goals. In the last five years that has absolutely exploded. Improved field conditions, better kicking training and improved footballs now have kickers converting field goals from longer range and at an overall rate of 82%. As a result, over the last six years a team's chances of winning after winning the overtime coin toss has been reported to be as high as 61%. The odds of winning on the opening drive were as high as nearly 40%. In fact, from 1998-2002 your chances of winning overtime after taking the opening coin toss was up to 64.6%.

Is it possible this is a statistical anomaly? Sure. But that hardly seems likely.

You get the idea that something needs to change. As Competition Committee co-chairman and Falcons President Rich McKay put it, with the improved ability of kickers, defenses were forced to keep a team from gaining 20-30 yards to win a game instead of 60-70. The numbers show a clear disadvantage. And if that's the case, well, I suppose the rules change was a worthwhile move. After all, the entire point of a coin toss is that, in theory, it provides no bias. If it is giving an edge that is that dramatic to the winning team, fairness is thrown out the window.

No one really knows how the new rules will play, though one analysis I've read pins the odds of winning the game along with the coin toss at roughly 56%, which is not great, but still an improvement.

While I have no doubt that these changes have been under discussion for years, many have opined that they were finally pushed to the fore after the New Orleans Saints won the NFC Championship this year with a field goal on the opening drive of overtime. Interestingly, the victim of that win, the Minnesota Vikings, were one of four teams to vote against the change, which may put the kibosh on that theory.

Either way, however, it's important not to get too crazy about this because, frankly, it isn't going to make a dramatic impact. Remember, this change is just for the playoffs, not the regular season, and we haven't exactly had a rash of postseason overtime games. In fact, as Peter King notes, we've only had an average of 1.2 overtime games a year in the playoffs, so this isn't exactly something that will come into play every day.

In fact, the last time an NFL playoff game was decided in overtime by a field goal on the opening drive before this year's NFC Championship was in 2002, when the Patriots knocked off the Raiders in the famous "tuck rule game". And given that Adam Vinatieri kicked the game-winning field goal in a blizzard, it wasn't exactly unearned. To give you some perspective on how long ago that was, the Patriots had yet to win a Super Bowl and we all thought their stirring run to a first title was adorable and heart-warming.

Ha. My how times change.

Since then, there have been seven postseason games in a span of eight years. All of one of them, this year's NFC title game, were won on a first-possession field goal. So really, the impact of this rule change seems far overblown if it doesn't take effect during the regular season as well. That may eventually happen, but for now it seems the effect will be minimal at best, just so long as we don't have Phil Luckett officiating the toss. That generally doesn't work out for the best.



At the very least, we can probably assume that all this overtime talk has reassured Donovan McNabb at long last that there won't be a tie in the Super Bowl.

The SI Cover Jinx Lives

I think it's hard to be surprised by the fact that the Saints and Colts will be facing off in the Super Bowl. And no, that's not because both the Jets and Vikings were on the cover of Sports Illustrated in their respective regions this week -- though I wouldn't entirely discount that I suppose.

New Orleans and Indianapolis were simply the best teams in the league for most of the year, even if both slowed down near the end of the season. Regardless, I do have some sympathy for the Jets, who, after they had taken a 17-6 lead late in the first half, I really started to believe they were going to win the game. But in an eerie similarity to their last AFC Championship appearance in 1998, one big pass play by a future Hall of Fame quarterback turned the tide for good.

As for the NFC, this was a great game marred by a drawn-out, booth-review and penalty-flag filled overtime that was fairly unsatisfying. For me, however, the highlight -- beyond Brett Favre throwing another pick on a potential conference-winning drive -- was when Joe Buck pointed out that the Vikings hadn't won an NFC Championship Game since their last Super Bowl appearance.

Keen insight.

So who's going to win Super Bowl XLIV? Hell, I don't know. Give me 13 days to think about it.

In the meantime, I hope you all can stand the wait. I'll have a full-fledged story up for you all tomorrow.

It's Championship Sunday

As the Jets and Colts battle for AFC Supremacy, and the Saints and Vikings do likewise in the NFC, it is important that we remember and honor something that football simply wouldn't be the same without.

That's right.

Today is the 75th anniversary of the beer can. Few things have changed humanity quite so profoundly.

Oh, and I'm taking the Jets and the Saints. Everyone enjoy your football.