Have you hugged an offensive lineman today?
Thursday night’s Cowboys-Vikings wasn’t a good game, hardly. Dallas won, 17-15, in kind of a drag. Thirteen punts as prefaces to commercials.
But it was a remarkable game in that, for no expected reason, it remained close, thus confused with and perhaps even enjoyed as a competitive game.
Late in the first half, NBC/NFL Network, posted a significant graphic, thus should’ve appeared near the top. It showed that 11 different offensive linemen, through the Vikings’ first 11 games, have been forced to play at least one of the five O-line positions.
Cris Collinsworth then sounded like an aunt going through photos in a 25-year-old wedding album, identifying those no longer with us.
“Matt Kalil, Jake Long, both former first-round draft picks, Andre Smith, a first-round draft pick — they’re all gone. Mike Harris was their starting right guard in every game last season. Gone.”
By “gone,” he meant for the season.
And though we got the point, veteran center/guard Joe Berger, after 88 straight starts, also was out, with a concussion.
The graphic suggested it could be worse: The Dolphins and Jaguars each have had to play 12 offensive linemen this season. Eleven games into the season and just three NFL teams have had 35 different offensive linemen!
NBC didn’t take it further, thus it was left for us to conclude that football, at its highest level, has become tough to reconcile as a sport due to its carnage — is this game out of its mind? — while, as each season progresses, the quality of the product regresses. The more unskilled the worker the lesser the goods — especially spread over 32 teams.
And all running backs, receivers and quarterbacks depend on offensive linemen for success. That is why so many linemen are first-round picks.
In other words, the likelihood of what we would identify as “good games” becomes a matter of diminishing returns. Gamblers excluded, NFL fans, this time of season, should not anticipate good games but rather hope for close ones.
Small wonder that the Vikings spent Thursday night kicking — three field goals, seven punts.
But to have expected better would have been unrealistic. This nationally televised game had no reasonable shot to be a good game before it began, thus we got the next best: a close one.
Baptist school takes Liberty of hiring disgraced AD
There’s the old gag about the player who crosses himself as he steps to the foul line.
“Does that help?” a man asks a priest in the stands.
“It does,” says the priest, “if he can shoot free throws.”
Religion and sports seem an uncomfortable fit. I prefer the separation of church and fate. After all, we never have seen a player kiss his fingers, pound his heart, then point heavenward after striking out.
But some folks have far better connections than the rest of us. Virginia’s Christian fundamentalist Liberty University — founded by Jerry Falwell, TV evangelist and theocratic political commentator who specializes in knowing and preaching right from wrong — last week hired Ian McCaw as Liberty’s new athletic director.
In May, McCaw was forced to resign as Baylor’s athletic director — its football team, already with two players convicted of rape, facing many more accusations of sexual assault, gang rape and domestic violence, with attendant claims that Baylor’s athletic department wasn’t much interested in what the alleged victims claimed.
In fact, one of the convicted rapists, defensive end Sam Ukwuachu — he assaulted a Baylor student — was recruited to Baylor, the nation’s largest Baptist college, on McCaw’s watch after Boise State tossed him — though Boise school officials they said it was not because his then-girlfriend, a track-and-field athlete, accused him of violently assaulting her.
McCaw arrived at Baylor just after its basketball program was left in disgrace by a feel-the-spirit Elmer Gantry-type coach, Dave Bliss, who recruited — and was allowed to recruit — anyone who could help him and Baylor win, including a player who shot dead a teammate.
And so here was McCaw, available to Liberty for only the worst of reasons, accepting Falwell’s call as what McCaw said is a mission “to develop champions for Christ.”
Then Falwell’s son, Liberty president Jerry Jr., said this of McCaw in assigning him to lead the co-educational college’s athletics:
“Ian’s success really speaks for itself. You look at what Baylor was able to do during his tenure, it fits perfectly with where we see our sports programs going.”
As John McEnroe hollered while looking up, but apparently no higher than the umpire’s chair, “You can’t be serious!”
Delaware State hits the road … again and again
If Trump University had been subjected to NCAA basketball inspections instead of those of the N.Y. Attorney General’s Office, Trump U. would be playing Electoral College on ESPN2 tonight, right after the Colgate-Palmolive game.
What we lately know about Delaware State basketball is that it’s a Division I team that last week, at 1-5, came here and beat St. John’s by seven, as seen on FOX Sports 2.
Not that St. John’s, the higher educational institution, serves as much better than a front for its basketball program, but when play-by-player Rich Ackerman said Delaware State is in the midst of “an eight-game road trip,” he had to have misspoken.
What college team goes on an eight-game road trip?
Answer: Delaware State.
At a time when less and less surprises us about the twisted condition of college sports, this one stands out as the latest impossible attachment to any college that holds a charter as one:
When the Dover, Del., taxpayer-funded school played at St. John’s, it already had played at Maryland-Baltimore County, at Louisiana-Lafayette, at Rice (in Houston), then at Montana State.
After St. John’s, Delaware State returned to Delaware, but to play at the University of Delaware, then it’s back to Texas to play at SMU, then at North Texas. Next, after two home games, it will be off to play at Binghamton (N.Y.), at Indiana, at Iowa then into the Pacific to play Hawaii.
DSU had a similar itinerary last season, starting 0-13, with road games at Nebraska, Fresno State, Michigan, Utah and TCU.
Despite its unplanned win at St. John’s, Delaware State is one of those willing NCAA schedule-fillers and record-padders, paid a cut of the gate to travel anywhere — an NCAA version of the Washington Generals, engaged to be beaten by the Globetrotters here, there and everywhere.
School? When? In the players’ spare time? Where? Hotel lobbies? And with players recruited from Serbia, Russia and Nigeria, in what language would classes be taught?
What happens to these young men when they’re done playing for, if not at, Delaware State? Does it even matter? If it does, maybe they can go to college.