Uhm...you could at least pretend to review that incomplete pass by Warner to determine that the officials completely fucked it up and it was not, in fact, anything that even remotely resembled a fumble?
None of which excuses the Cardinals' reversion to the defense that couldn't possibly have gotten them into the Super Bowl. But still, dood. I mean, you could just maybe sort of act like you didn't feel some compulsion to hand the game to those Yinzer fucks?
Holy crap.
7 comments:
Uhh, that was a fumble. Not for nothing, at that point I was rooting for a tie and overtime, but there it was.
Nothing about the hella great game? Just bitching about the refs. Typical self-indulgent bullshit.
Oh, wait, my bad. :)
nisho!
You jest, yes? A hella great game involving the Yinzers and the Buzzsaw? I mean, yes, in closeness terms, on a technical level, sure, whatthefuckever. Who the fuck cares? Both teams are reprehensible. I thought the game really detracted from the commercials, which were themselves substandard.
The Buzzsaw got jobbed. It is well within the range of possibility--actually, it's probable--that they did not get jobbed out of the game, and as I clearly acknowledged, they helped by jobbing themselves, not least by giving up a 100-yard prick six to a guy who later should've been thrown out of the game, and probably most by forgetting about Santonio Holmes on the Yinzers' last drive.
But you're dead, dead, dead wrong about the fumble. Warner's arm was moving forward. The ball went forward. Totally not a fumble. I'm not suggesting nefariousness; I'm suggesting incompetence. NFL referees have been randomly fucking up that call all season. The nanosecond's worth of review they put into it was completely inappropriate, almost as if the booth decided they'd embarrassed the guys on the field enough for one night. And while it's not at all likely they'd have succeeded, the blown call deprived the Buzzsaw of a chance to toss it up and let Fitzgerald make a catch--a thing at which he excels, and a more fitting end to what you describe as a hella game than what actually happened.
And given a 4-point deficit, unless the NFL suddenly decided to give out extra points on figgies (and to your credit, who knows how any given NFL crew will decide to apply the rules in a given game?), a tie and overtime wasn't happening, after the Buzzsaw defense failed to track in on Santonio's taint for two of the last three minutes.
In short? Bite me.
What's important is that Kurt Warner lost the game and we don't have to spend this next week hearing him talk about Chesus Jrist.
I would, however, pay someone to ask Warner and air Warner's answer on why Chesus Jrist put blinders on the eyes of NFL Mr Hats who allowed an incomplete pass to be ruled a fumble.
Huh, Chesus? Huh?
Dear PurpleState,
You were apparently blinded by the sight of Bruce Springsteen's package flying toward you and the camera. Your astonishment must have caused confustation that persisted throughout the remainder of the game. I hope you get over the majesty and recover your sight soon.
Sasha
(IT WAS A FORWARD PASS. HOW ELSE DID THE BALL FLY FORWARD???)
And how come only Arizona got the porn version?
http://deadspin.com/5144207/update-bonus-comcast-super-bowl-coverage-porn?skyline=true&s=x
Whether it was a fumble or not, IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN REVIEWED!
And the NFL owed Cardinals fans a lot better explanation than what they've given so far.
You may think whining about refereeing isn't cool, but the officiating in the NFL has gotten godawful this season. That was the worst-officiated Super Bowl I've ever seen. And it wasn't close.
They had James Harrison punching (more than one punch) a Cardinal player on the ground...and they didn't eject him?
There were so many bad calls it was pathetic. And yes, I know "Turnstile" Gandy held about 25 times in the game to keep James Harrison at bay and was only called three times, so I'm not arguing that the Cardinals were screwed by the refs here. But the refereeing was godawful, and it's unfathomable how they could leave the dubious game-ending called unreviewed.
Let's just say it was far from obvious that it was a fumble. For it to be a fumble, the defender had to hit the ball loose before Warner's arm started moving at all. That's not what I saw.
And while it was a close game, it wasn't a particularly well-played game. While the media are jumping on the notion that Harrison's pick six was a triumph of LeBeau's scheme (huh???), what I saw was Kurt Warner forget where the NFL DEFENSIVE PLAYER OF THE YEAR was, and then throw the ball right to him. (And the tackling on the run back was non-existent, though I've been assured that the Steelers committed at least one uncalled clip on that return.)
Warner threw more than one horrible pass. Roethlisberger threw any number of bad passes. Stupid penalties were committed by both sides.
There were about five-ten people who looked like they deserved to be in a Super Bowl: Larry Fitzgerald (who should have been the MVP), James Harrison (in spite of being a punk who should have been thrown out of the game), the other Cardinal skill players on offense (even Edge had a good game), and most of the Steeler defense.
Bizarrely, the Steelers could not run on one of the worst run defenses in the NFL.
The coaching was bad: for some reason the Cardinals didn't go into a no-huddle offense until the 4th quarter, at which point they moved the ball with ease.
I watched a game where I thought the winner was as weak as any Super Bowl champion I'd seen in quite some time (though I didn't watch the Steelers beat the Seahawks three years ago). Any of the Pats' champions or the 2006 Colts or the Vermeil Rams or the Broncos with Elway + Davis would have beaten the crap out of either of these two teams. But since they only have to play each other, the game looks "competitive".
If this were golf, there would have been a playoff between two guys who were each 5 strokes over par. Just awful.
One more thing - Santonio Holmes had a nice final drive, but Fitzgerald really should have been the MVP. Why is there an obsession with picking the MVP from the winning team? Did Holmes have a better game than Fitz? No. Yes, he had one spectacular TD pass, but Fitz had two.
I've tried to figure out what exactly happened on the last drive, and I think it came down to Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie giving way too much cushion to Holmes on play after play. He got away with that once early in the game, when he had enough speed to catch up to an underthrown pass, but his defense on the final drive was god-awful.
Holmes is a nice receiver, but he didn't morph into Fitzgerald or Randy Moss or Andre Johnson or Steve Smith or Terrell Owens yesterday. He prospered because the defense sucked. Hopefully he'll follow the path of Deion Branch and parlay this game into a contract that overpays him, before his next employer realizes "Um, maybe he really isn't that good after all."
(And hopefully the Cardinals will blame the loss on Rodgers-Cromartie and give up on him, letting him go to the Pats. I am hard on DCR here, but it is very hard to excel as a rookie CB in the NFL. Ty Law didn't. Champ Bailey didn't. Deion Sanders didn't. NFL offenses are just way too complex for rookie CBs to "get" in one season.)
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