Extra Points: Week 13

ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?
What’s the deal with the contagion of boneheaded decisions and abject mistakes by head coaches? The aversion to reading the rule book? The game-squandering play-calling? The abysmal clock management? The verbal meltdowns?

This past week alone, there was the Joe Gibbs fiasco, Sean Payton’s ruinous reverse and Jon Gruden seething that ESPN’s iconic Chris Mortensen “doesn’t have a [bleeping] idea what he’s talking about.” Every Sunday’s storylines, it seems, include such coaching calamities.

We have a theory: that the job has become virtually impossible to do well, at least relative to bygone eras, and at least over a reasonable period of time.

For one thing, the NFL game is unmistakably becoming less and less enjoyable for the principals. No wonder. It’s evolved into a complexity beyond comprehension. The financials are staggering. Media scrutiny is suffocating. (An aside: There’s a video up on YouTube of Kentucky basketball player Patrick Patterson at his bench excavating a booger and eating it — now THAT’S media scrutiny.) Petty thieves have more job security than coaches. Injuries are too prevalent and severe — with players facing far worse in their golden years. And if those players are too big, too fast and too jacked to play an increasingly violent and high-stakes sport with a reasonable assurance of wellbeing, too many are also too rich, too egotistical, too pampered, too immature, too testosterony and at times too amoral to be suitably trained and supervised by their superiors.

Gibbs has been accused of being a dinosaur. Maybe so, but calling two successive timeouts and being unaware that his defensive coordinator started the game with 10 men on the field doesn’t make him an idiot. At worst, he’s a monolithic brontosaurus in a zoo teeming with crazed raptors. And he’s not alone in his inability to keep all the kittens in the box at any given time. Most head coaches patrolling the sidelines look more primed to burst into flames than your average Spinal Tap drummer. (We posit that even Bill Belichick, the presumptive paradigm, wears that ridiculous forehead-warmer just to keep brain matter from oozing out of his ears.)

We’re not here to feel sorry for anyone or to be an apologist; the “if you can’t stand the heat” adage clearly applies. Rather, we simply offer a construct for what might be an impending implosion in the NFL on several levels — one of global warming proportions in its gradual insidiousness. We wonder sometimes if the bloating of the game — the exhaustive dissection of its every nuance, the quest for the player as the perfect football automaton, the feverish exportation of the league into global markets, the astonishing economic stakes for all involved, and a rising touchstone set for coaches that cannot plausibly be attained — are signs of the sport’s apocalypse. Not imminently, perhaps, but sooner than we’d like to think.

At least Brad Childress has finally figured out that Adrian Peterson should be in the starting lineup.

BUMP AND RUN
Extra Points’ recurring installment of slapdash observation and imprudent opinion:

The Raiders’ win was their 400th in franchise history. Only 101 of them have come since the same date 14 years ago.

It’s going to be hard for Tom Brady not to break Steve DeBerg’s single-season record for TD-to-interception ratio. If he maintains his rate of pass attempts and scoring throws, he’d have to be picked as many times (five) in his last four games as he has in his first 12.

Speaking of paces...Kellen Winslow Jr. is 10 catches ahead of his dad’s after his first 30 NFL games.

QUOTABLE
”It is probably best that you cut off all the guys you grew up with and not say another word to them. It is probably the right thing to do. But what do you do when you pick up that toothbrush, and you are alone in the mirror, and you remember that guy’s mom fed you when you had nothing?” — Michael Irvin, reflecting on the Sean Taylor tragedy.

“You can’t be scared of death. When that time comes, it comes.” — Taylor in a September radio interview.

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