The NFL season has begun.\u00a0\u00a0 The strangest NFL season of my lifetime, maybe of anyone’s lifetime.\u00a0 Teams playing in empty stadiums, to the sound of piped-in crowd noise.<\/p>\n
The empty stadiums are a necessity in the midst of our pandemic, of course.\u00a0\u00a0 That needs to continue to keep everyone safe.<\/p>\n
I could live without the fake crowd sounds, however.\u00a0\u00a0 The whole cool thing about playing before a crowd is the reactions of the fans… the roars that greet a good play by the home team, the groans and curses that greet a bad play, or a good one by the visiting team, the boos that rain down from time to time.\u00a0 Trying to replace that with some guy in a booth twisting dials just adds an element phoniness we do not need.\u00a0\u00a0 Let them play in the quiet.<\/p>\n
The Jets played on Sunday… and lost to the Buffalo Bills, 27-17.<\/p>\n
The Giants played on Monday night… and lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers, 26-16.<\/p>\n
But scores can be deceptive.\u00a0\u00a0 The Jets game was not nearly as close as the score would indicate.\u00a0\u00a0 The Giants game was much closer than the score would indicate.\u00a0\u00a0 The Jets were never in their game, not for a second.\u00a0 The Bills beat them every way a team could be beaten.\u00a0\u00a0 Gang Green’s offense was terrible and their defense was worse.\u00a0\u00a0 You kind of had to expect the D to stink, since they traded away their best player (Jamal Adams) for some magic beans.\u00a0 You hoped the O would be better, since this was the third year for Sam Darnold, who was drafted third overall and thought by many to be the best QB coming out of that year’s class.\u00a0\u00a0 Clearly he is not.\u00a0\u00a0 The Bills Josh Allen outplayed him from start to finish, and down in Baltimore Lamar Jackson is setting the league on fire.\u00a0\u00a0 The Jets could have had either, but chose Darnold instead.\u00a0 More and more, that is looking like a bad decision.\u00a0\u00a0 An even worse decision was hiring Adam Gase as coach.\u00a0 The team was not ready to play.\u00a0\u00a0 You can blame the coronovirus and the lack of a pre-season, sure, except the Bills had the same handicaps, and they looked just fine.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Jets may need to clean house AGAIN.<\/p>\n
The Giants, on the other hand, were right in the thick of the things from opening kickoff to the moment Dan Jones threw that awful interception in the end zone.\u00a0 Aside from his two INTs, however, Danny Dimes looked very good.\u00a0\u00a0 Way way better than Darnold, though he has been in the league only half as long.\u00a0\u00a0 Big Blue’s defense impressed as well.\u00a0\u00a0 They came hard after Big Ben all night, hit hard, hung tough.\u00a0 Pittsburgh stacked the line to shut down Sasquan Barclay and New York’s run game, daring Jones to beat them… and he almost did.\u00a0\u00a0 That 19-play drive was a thing of beauty till the end, and the bomb to Slayton was lovely to watch as well.\u00a0\u00a0 This was the first outing for new head coach Joe Judge… and a definite upgrade over what we saw under Pat Shurmur.\u00a0\u00a0 I don’t know how many games the Giants can win this year, but I see hope.<\/p>\n
A loss is a loss is a loss, of course… but some losses are better than others.<\/p>\n
A few wins down the win, in these bleak and bitter times, would do wonders.<\/p>\n
((Comments allowed here, but ONLY about NFL football.\u00a0\u00a0 ALL OFF TOPIC COMMENTS WILL BE TRASHED)).<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The NFL season has begun.\u00a0\u00a0 The strangest NFL season of my lifetime, maybe of anyone’s lifetime.\u00a0 Teams playing in empty stadiums, to the sound of piped-in crowd noise. The empty stadiums are a necessity in the midst of our pandemic, of course.\u00a0\u00a0 That needs to continue to keep everyone safe. I could live without the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[24],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6509"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6509"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6547,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6509\/revisions\/6547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}