Professional Football? (updt Monday)

I swear to heaven, the lack of ability on the part of NFL players to tackle ball carriers is absolutely astonishing. I watched four NFL games this weekend, eight teams, and not one of them had the tackling ability of a decent high school team. More than once a defender made a clean miss on a ball carrier that was standing flat footed; just plain whiffed on a stationary target. And these are the playoff teams. Utterly ridiculous.

Update: A comment at another thread pointed out that it took longer to explain the new overtime rules than it did to actually play the overtime. True, but at eleven seconds of playing time, the damned coin toss took longer than the actual overtime did.

Monday thoughts: When you get really bad service in a dining establishment, a 2¢ tip is a more insulting message than leaving no tip at all. Those two points scored by the Falcons was sort of like that 2¢ tip.

Phil Simms ia an idiot. At one point he commented "This is what Denver does, they throw the ball down the field." Actually, vast numbers of writers and fans have been harshly critical of Tim Tebow for not throwing the ball down the field, and I was one of probably several million viewers who were astonished that he was actually doing it in that game. Then he wondered why Big Ben was not being used in shotgun formation more often, apparently not having heard dozens of sports figures discuss how ineffective Ben is from the shotgun and how much more accurately he throws when taking the snap from under center. He also apparently had not noticed Ben taking the snap from shotgun more than half the time before he said that. If Simms had a brain I would wonder if his mouth was connected to it.

The officials at Mile High Sports Authority Field need to quit checking out the cheerleaders' asses and watch what is happening on the field. The Steelers were grabbing Tebow's face mask every time they tackled him and it was never called, and that was clearly a backward pass.

I have to admit, it was sort of fun watching Denver beat the vaunted Steel Curtain. That was a fun game to watch; best of the weekend.