I feel a little guilty about liking football, because it's by now very clear that the players are harming themselves and their prospects for a long, slow slide into senescence such as is enjoyed by their socioeconomic peers. But what a game yesterday! It would have been awful to care who won, but now that the Patriots didn't, I'm reminding myself that their owner and their quarterback are sort of chummy with Trump, whereas the Eagles as a team voted beforehand not to go to the White House in the event they should win.
Speaking of the Patriots' quarterback: if, before the game, you could have known what his passing line was going to be--28 completions on 48 attempts, 505 [sic] yards, 3 touchdowns, no interceptions--how much money would you have bet on his team to win?
I have a tendency to get all obsessive over in-game strategy. Everyone is talking about the end of the first half, when the Eagles went for it on 4th down at the Patriots' 1-yard line and scored the TD on a pass to the quarterback out of a reverse. Hard to forget that one. But something sort of interesting happened toward the end of the game that went uncommented upon so far as I know. After the Eagles retook the lead, 38-33, on the reviewed touchdown pass to their tight end, the Patriots got the ball back with just over two minutes to play, a timeout left to use, and me and a gazillion other people feeling sure everything was aligned for Brady to be the hero again. That's when the Eagles forced him to fumble and recovered it well within field goal range. On first down, they ran for around a 3-yard gain. The Patriots immediately burned their last timeout, stopping the clock with 2:03 to play. Wasn't that a mistake? They should have let 3 more seconds run off and saved their timeout for after the two-minute warning. A first down by the Eagles would have effectively ended the game, but they weren't going to risk a pass, because an incompletion would be like handing Brady another 30 or 40 seconds--lots of extra snaps. But by calling a timeout with 2:03 left, the Patriots opened Philadelphia's play book: the Eagles could have--and, I think, should have--passed on 2nd-and-7. A completion for a first down (or for a touchdown) would have clinched the win, and an incompletion wouldn't have hurt them, since thanks to the Patriots' ill-advised timeout the clock was now going to stop for the two-minute warning anyway. With 2:03 to play, an incomplete pass kills as much time as an off tackle slant.
The Eagles, however, ran on second down and again on third, did not get a first down, kicked a field goal, and gave Brady another chance. That last hail-Mary: it seemed to take the batted ball about a minute and a half to fall to the ground, and there were a couple of Patriots in the vicinity. My impression is that the chance of scoring a touchdown on a long high heave into the end zone is somewhat higher than people imagine.
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