What’s It All Mean In 2013?

            This whole year is merely 17 full days and change old, and already your humble narrator finds himself in mid-season Vince Lombardi mode:

            

            The same people who want Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and company strung by their ears from power lines and forced to pay the $22 for the full walking tour of Cooperstown, featuring Ty Cobb’s razor spikes and Gaylord Perry’s Vaseline tub, will tell you to your face they still love Lance Armstrong and they’re glad he stuck it to those Communist French bastards. You tell them France’s government is actually much like ours, but they do not care. You tell them there’s no earthly way any human could have mustered the energy and tenacity to achieve such athletic excellence, primarily since all his competitors were similarly elite and convicted of cheating as brazenly the East German swim team in the ’88 Olympics. They care not. These are the True Believers in the Church of LiveStrong: the very same people who couldn’t spell EPO if you spotted them the E and the P.

            They are some of the same people who insist Notre Dame has again arisen to national prominence (this time for keeps, they promise) on the backs of a speedy but mildly undersized linebacker and a coach with no regard to onrushing potential weather disasters. The athletic director tells us things like “Manti was innocent” and “Manti was duped”, even though it’s impossible based on any rational definition of reality for a man to claim he met a woman in Hawaii, then claim he never met her, then for journalists not to ask if he was lying then or if he is lying now, and either way, why?

            They also insist that this somehow had something to do with how Eddie Lacey and T.J. Yeldon ran over, around, and right through the heart of the once-vaunted Notre Dame defensive front. They reacted quickly, insisting the fraudulent ghost of Lennay Kekua somehow abandoned the Golden Dome when they needed her most. These people need to be reminded that if God and the dead don’t directly impact football games, then fake Twitter girlfriends perpetrated as national hoaxes certainly don’t, either.

            Other, professionally-paid gentlemen played football in other places, few with the scrutiny held over the somewhat painted cow pasture in Landover, MD where the Redskins call home. Robert Griffin the Third, drafted after Dan Snyder mortgaged the franchise by sending a bevy of draft picks to St. Louis, was forced to run around all day on a partially shredded knee ligament so serious that Doc Andrews was flown in from Alabama just so they could ignore his advice in person on FOX. I say all day in jest, because by the outset of the 4^th quarter the wet, busted sod that had roughly the same amount of grass as a Michael W. Smith concert finally finished off Griffin before anyone even laid a glove on him. Out for the game, and possibly longer barring an MVPeterson-like comeback this summer/fall, ‘Skins fans still haven’t gotten a decent explanation from head coach Mike Shanahan for his dubious decision to leave a one-legged franchise savior on the field for any reason at all, even after it became obvious that playing a hobbled Griffin wasn’t the best route to victory. This is also where it should be mentioned that Shanahan never won anything without John Elway handing off to Terrell Davis. Players win championships, for those of you who had forgotten.

            Chip Kelly was gone to the NFL, then he was back, since Phil Knight stepped in, rolled out a checkbook the size of Singapore, and had Kelly on lockdown at Oregon for keeps, or at least for the foreseeable future. Then, just a few days later he was off to Philadelphia to find out once and for all if Nick Foles is an effective NFL quarterback, or if Michael Vick remains one. The back-and-forth was, yes, a little nauseating. But whatever one wants to surmise about the man who, outside of Boise State, would’ve benefitted most historically from the upcoming 4-team Division I playoff, it’s hard to ignore Kelly’s deserved reputation as an offensive mastermind. The Blur Offense has already edged its way into the New England Patriots’ potent attack, with Brady & Co. running 16% more plays than they managed during their historic 2007 season where they scored an NFL-record 589 points. When Bill Belichick does something (legal), unfortunately for the rest of the AFC East and beyond, that makes it correct.   

       

           Another element of Kelly’s offense involves the elusive read option, where the QB lines up in the backfield with one RB and “reads” the defensive end, determining whether to hand off or keep the ball himself and either try to beat the defense to the edge of the formation or to turn upfield as quickly as possible, whichever will result in maximum yardage and the least body-crushing hit. Letting young quarterbacks such as Colin Kaepernick, Russell Wilson, and RGIII make these split-second decisions would’ve given offensive coordinators migraines as recently as five years ago, when the conventional wisdom dictated that guys like Ben Roethlisberger, Joe Flacco, and Mark Sanchez manage games and make as few independent offensive decisions as possible.

If any vestiges of this outmoded thinking were left, they were shattered when Kaepernick got around the edge for a 56-yard touchdown on 2^nd-and-4 after the Packers’ Brad Jones (#59, if you feel like watching the film) gets horribly fooled on the fake handoff to Frank Gore. The Nevada alum then managed to further accelerate 15-20 yards downfield, leaving the secondary in his wake. The Packers would never recover, and now GMs across the league have to decide if Geno Smith is a better value than Matt Barkley because of his mobility and experience running the spread under Bill Stewart and Dana Holgerson at West Virginia.

When two QBs from teams who went a combined 14-12 are both pored over as potential NFL saviors, we know we’re in for one wacky year. Just try and keep them away from Twitter, stationary bikes, human growth hormone, and Belichick's cameramen, and we'll all come out aces.