Cellar Playoff Methods and the Underdog

Only 6 weeks to go for the Moldy Carpet.

Week 13 will be the beginning of the ELIMINATION ROUNDS, when teams no longer have a mathematical chance of taking the Moldy Carpet. They will be eliminated from the standings.

As each succeeding week unfolds, teams that can't hang with the real pros at getting your lunch handed to you week after week (and what DOES that phrase mean, anyway? Somebody punched you in the gut, you throw up, and then they HAND it to you?) will be kicked upstairs into the blinding light of contention. OR at least, dubious mediocrity.

This season of close scrutiny of the underbelly of the NFL has taught me a couple of things. One is it's really hard to execute well on any sort of high percentage in football. It's not as hard as hockey, but let's face it, in hockey you've got football players playing basketball on ice, so good luck with that. Most NFL teams are working really hard just to be OK. I have a renewed appreciation for the difficulty of pulling off a play 100%. If you interviewed coaches/off/def co-ordinators around the league, I wonder what percentage of success they would give you. 30%? 20%? Having a game turn out 13-10 is really not an embarrassment. It may not be entertaining, but we get very skewed memories about great teams of the past. the 49ers are 5-0 in Super Bowls, but if you look at regular season games of the Joe Montana era, there are many many low scoring games that were not pretty. Around here, in San Francisco, you'd think Joe threw for 400 yards every game.

Also, some of our beloved bottom dwelling teams are bad almost by accident, and some are bad by design. The Raiders are bad by design. It's been carefully crafted. The Lions were made REALLY bad by design in the last 5 years because they had Matt Millen guiding the team carefully into the abyss. I remember 10 years ago, it seemed like the Browns were building a great franchise with many front office people snatched from the 49ers, but it all went south, and they have, I think, been shocked by what has happened to them.

If the Browns OR the Lions started winning, I think I'd become rabidly involved, now that I'm following them closely. When I first moved to San Francisco, in 1976, the 49ers were TERRIBLE. They were Kings of the Bonehead Forest. I had never lived in a town with an NFL team, and though the Raiders were faves, too, I followed the Niners, especially since they had the extremely amusing Lon Simmons at the mike for radio- a man who could take a one sided blow-out and turn it into a absurdist romp through non-sequiter free form Ken Nordine style thinking, exiting the horrors of the game completely. The man knew when the pain of the game was too great, and radios were going off all over. Fellow Cellar members DTRocks and Walkfish attended the Buffalo-Niners game at the end of the '80 season with me, when Montana and company began to show flashes of talent. The game seemed completely lost, but somehow at the end the Niners were right there, hurling passes into the end zone on the final play (though losing still). The next year, they won the Super Bowl. Their odds were something like 200-1. I had moved to Seattle, for one year, at the time, and almost went insane because I couldn't be in SF for the playoff run. I can't explain the joy I felt- but if you've ever lived through the interminable losing, when suddenly the team wins- at all- it's all good. And many times the games you really love are the 13-7 affairs, where they play like crap but WIN ANYWAY. That's football at it's finest, really. You fight to win the game.

So, with all our celebration of the competition for the Moldy Carpet, I give thanks to these teams that have my attention, because one of these days one of them is going to rise up, and snatch the crown at the other end of the tunnel, and there will be joy in Mudville. Even if it isn't my hometown. Toss the coin, you bums, you never know what's going to happen.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving.