LINE OF DOODIE
HAVE you hugged an offensive lineman today?
Thursday night’s Cowboys-Vikings wasn’t a good game, hardly. Dallas won, 17-15, in kind of a drag. Thirteen punts as prefaces to commercials.
But it was a remarkable game in that, for no expected reason, it remained close, thus confused and perhaps even enjoyed as a competitive game.
Late in the first half, NBC/NFL Network, posted a significant graphic, thus should’ve appeared near the top. It showed that 11 different offensive linemen, through the Vikings’ first 11 games, have been forced to play at least one of the five O-line positions.
Cris Collinsworth then sounded like an aunt going through photos in a 25-year-old wedding album, identifying those no longer with us.
“Matt Kalil, Jake Long, both former first-round draft picks, Andre Smith, a first-round draft pick — they’re all gone. Mike Harris was their starting right guard in every game last season. Gone.”
By “gone,” he meant for the season.
And though we got the point, veteran center/guard Joe Berger, after 88 straight starts, also was out, with a concussion.
The graphic suggested it could be worse: The Dolphins and Jaguars each have had to play 12 offensive linemen this season. Eleven games into the season and just three NFL teams have had 35 different offensive linemen!
NBC didn’t take it further, thus it was left for us to conclude that football, at its highest level, has become tough to reconcile as a sport due to its carnage — is this game out of its mind? — while, as each season progresses, the quality of the product regresses. The more unskilled the worker the lesser the goods — especially spread over 32 teams.
And all running backs, receiv- ers and quarterbacks depend on offensive linemen for success. That is why so many linemen are first-round picks.
In other words, the likelihood of what we would identify as “good games” becomes a matter of diminishing returns. Gamblers excluded, NFL fans, this time of season, should not anticipate good games but rather hope for close ones.
Small wonder that the Vikings spent Thursday night kicking — three field goals, seven punts.
But to have expected better would have been unrealistic. This nationally televised game had no reasonable shot to be a good game before it began, thus we got the next best: a close one.