Saturday, January 05, 2008

Football Follies

The sports writers in today's paper are swooning over the Charger's record in the last six games. They fail to consider who the opponents for those games have been. Only one has had a winning season, Tennessee at 10-6, and the cumulative record for all six is a whopping 37-59, for a 38% winning average. The last five games for those teams is even worse, 9-21 for 30% average. It really doesn't take a stunning effort to defeat teams that only win 30% of their games.

Nick Canepa waxed rhapsodic about the Chargers defense in those six games. Well, the highest ranked offense that the Chargers have faced is Denver, ranked 11th in the NFL. The others that this "awesome defense" has stopped are ranked 19th, 21st, 25th, 22nd and 31st for an average of 25th. I am somewhat less dazzled than Nick by this performance.

Norv Turner raves about the performance of Philip Rivers, citing that the bottom line is that he has won games. With a couple of games where his rating was in the 30's and several in the low 60's, I don't see much to rave about; and Norv doesn't mention the fumbles, interceptions, and really bad decisions. Does Norv not think that a running back wearing the number 21 had something to do with those wins?

Methinks there is a little bit of wishful thinking going on here. The team and the writers cannot talk themselves into a win over Tennessee tomorrow, the team is going to have to shut the hell up and perform. This team has a tendency to start believing their own hype and expecting that the opponent will simply faint when they come on the field. Unfortunately, that seldom happens. Actually, we're still waiting for it to happen.

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