Time to take it one cliche at a time
His Presence Felt, In The Discussion, Trust The Process, Bowl Eligible, Clicking On All Cylinders (is that even good?), Dumpster Fire, Check All The Boxes, Compete Level, Pin Their Ears Back, Don’t Sleep On (the sidewalk?), He’s Dialed In, Style Points, Knock The Rust Off, He’d Be The First To Tell You (no he wouldn’t), The Moment Wasn’t Too Big For Him, The Coaching Carousel, Next Man Up, Letting Them Hang Around, Sat Down In The Zone, Left Some Plays Out There, Forward Progress (there’s no backward progress), Maintenance Day.
Now please put all devices on airplane mode while we introduce our finalists, and remember that if, for any reason, the Trite Trophy winner cannot fulfill its duties, a replacement will be chosen from among the finalists by the NCAA Men’s Basketball Committee because it’s just so darned good at such things.
Our third runner-up: Run Pass Option. Ladies and gentlemen the first cliché ever to go from unmentioned in the previous year’s column to a finalist According To Elias, Run Pass Option ( RPO on second reference and sometimes on first) blanketed the football wordscape in 2017. Used to describe the new age offensive gambit of having the quarterback wait until the play starts, Put It In His Belly, and then determine whether to leave it there or pull it away and throw it. It only failed to Win It All because I don’t especially hate it.
Our second runner-up: Behind The Chains. Too clever by half, third-and-20 apparently needed a linguistic makeover, and Behind The Chains has Risen To The Occasion. I hate it.
Our first runner-up: The Line To Make. Formerly called “a first down,” ball-carriers and receivers now more commonly come up short of The Line To Make, and more often shy of the Line To Make. Rule Of Thumb: If you look at those people whose chains you’re behind, the guy holding the stick farther from you? That’s The Line To Make.
And now, the moment dozens who have requested anonymity have waited for, the 2017 Trite Trophy winner is . . . High-Point The Football.
Oh yes that’s one great Trite champion, an awful cliché that fills the three notorious criteria — shocking ubiquity, essential uselessness, and I have to really, really hate it. High-Point The Football is that glib thing the analysts blurt when a pass catcher leaps high to snag a football, allegedly at its highest point, which is generally wrong and mostly impossible. To cite just one example, the pass Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers threw last December at Detroit, the gamewinning missile that traveled 61-yards in the air to the Lions’ endzone, reached a height of 78 feet. You Don’t Have To Be A Rocket Scientist to calculate that (although it helps), but to High Point The (Rodgers’) Football, you’d pretty much have to be a rocket. Talk about Verticality. You’d have to be Playing At A Very High Level. Futher, I notice that no one who ever flops on a fumble is ever said to have low pointed the football.
Have a safe and blessed (albeit cliché-ridden) 2018 everybody.