And you wonder why games are unwatchable
There is something about bad football. Well, wait. There are different kinds of bad football. There is the kind of bad football practised by the AFC South, where Tennessee and Indianapolis and Jacksonville and Houston make up some sort of hellfire quadrangle that blends football’s version of the cultural cachet of Jacksonville, the zoning anarchy of Houston, the excitement of Indianapolis, and the variety of Nashville’s country music scene. Indianapolis was stolen from Baltimore, Tennessee was moved away from Houston, Houston is a longform expansion team, and Google still classifies articles from the Jaguars website as satire. Damn them all.
Then there is football so bad you have to watch it. Sunday night, Arizona (which won 13 games last year!) and Seattle (double-digit wins the last four years, two Super Bowl appearances, one victory) played a game that felt like football hell. It was just so . . . bad. Four field goals, one overtime, great defences. Seattle spent more time on the field than any team in NFL history without surrendering a touchdown. Good for them. Bad for us, but good for them.
See, that game travelled beyond the usual crap-game-what-else-ison bad. It was heroically bad. As the kickers traded missed field goals, it became the kind of thing that makes you question your life choices, like watching the Oscars hosted by James Franco and Anne Hathaway. What am I doing? Why am I here? Why am I not on a flight somewhere, anywhere, to start a new life somewhere? Budapest, maybe. Or New Zealand. Somewhere far away, where everything is new.
Look, every week people talk about how prime-time TV ratings are crashing, and that game was held up as an example. The problem is, most bad prime-time football is merely bad, not so epically crappy you call your friends.
It’s funny: Quarterbacks are collectively producing the highest completion percentage in history, the most yards per game in history, the lowest interception rate in history, and the highest QB ratings ever. That seems . . . good?
None of that seems to reach prime time, though. Besides, the NFL’s storylines are lousy, because the teams aren’t great. Instead, teams are mostly weird. There are five teams with truly great defences and bad offences, based on Football Outsiders’ DVOA, which compares every play to the league average: Philadelphia (first in defensive DVOA, 24th in offence); Seattle (third, 20th), Denver (fifth, 17th); Minnesota (second, 23rd), and Arizona (fourth, 25th).
And, the flip side: The top eight offensive teams are Dallas (20th in defensive DVOA), Atlanta (26th), New England (18th), New Orleans (29th), Oakland (28th), Cincinnati (23rd), Buffalo (16th), and Pittsburgh (25th).
There are two teams with both offence and defence in the DVOA top 10: San Diego (ninth in offence, eighth in defence, 3-4 on the year) and Green Bay (10th and seventh, despite the fact that Aaron Rodgers is suddenly blah). Plus, a mess of mediocrity. It’s like they ran out of enough good football players to make both sides of the ball worth watching.
Plus, Football Outsiders says rela- tive to the past, the great offences of 2016 aren’t that great, though the defences are. Whether it’s injuries, college development, safety changes, practice limits, or just a cyclical thing, unless you get two all-offence teams, a lot of games stink. Suddenly, when there aren’t sensory-overload red-zone and fantasy results rolling in, people are realizing: wait, when Chicago or Houston or Miami or Indianapolis or Jacksonville or Tennessee or the Rams or the Jets are involved, football can be pretty bad. What else is on? Last week this space went 8-7, but remains something which, like so much of society, should be treated with skepticism. As always, all lines could change.