Uglier than the Third Olson Twin...

We can start with what I like to call the bad. The oh so bad. Of the bad, which there was a plenty, the most horrible offenders this Sunday were the coaches. I am not one to really rip coaches; the belief here is that the level of incompetence has to be sky high in order to really sabotage an entire game. The idea is that even a coaching gaff can be overcome by good quality football squads. This game had a bucketful of bad decisions and just had me scratching my head in confusion for quite some time. So for those of you who missed this gem of a game here is my recap of the coaching genius at work yesterday.

1) Giving the ball to the fullback on the one yard line, who generally doesn’t get many (read: none) carries, and he proceeds to cough up a pig inches from the goal line. The general point of football is to breach the “goal” line. It is the “goal”, hence the name.

2) Halfback passes. Halfback passes are stupid. They don’t work (ask Herm Edwards) and they do not belong in the game if you are a good team. Why are we reduced to trick plays against the bottom dwelling Raiders?

3) Now this one really gets the acid reflux boiling. I can taste the bile. I still can’t believe that this actually took place and as I am still seething about it, I know it really did happen. We line up for a field goal, motion a lineman attempting to draw some laundry from the officials. Even the morons in Silver and Black don’t fall for this so we fry a timeout. Fine with me we can just move on now. Kick the ball, punt the ball whatever, just move on. Move on. We come out of the timeout, line up in field goal formation and miss the freakin’ kick. If we were going to kick it all along, why not just kick it the first time? Instead, we successfully managed to "ice" our own kicker. Awesome.

4) Throwing the ball once again very near the “goal” line to an offensive lineman. Let me get this straight just so I understand what happened here. We have arguably the best running back in the league and we decide to throw the ball to an offensive lineman? Said ball proceeds to clank off of Old Roman’s hands. Just so we are clear, do you think there is a reason Roman plays offensive line? Do you think that if he had any better than a Bree Walker’s chance at that ball he might be playing receiver? Obviously, Roman’s catching prowess has diminished somewhat during his career.

I am done with the coaches. Putting all of that behind me we come to the players performances from yesterday. This is what I like to call “the ugly” portion of the post. Ugly like the girls you met in college at 2 a.m. after “bladder buster” fifty cent beer night. This was the poorest game of the season as far as execution is concerned. We were terrible on offense. Just terrible. We were up to all of our old tricks, incompletions, fumbles, scorching timeouts, just plain awful. Combined with the fact that we were playing so poorly right after the bye week making this game all the more hideous. We escaped with victory this weekend which is nice, but we can’t play that brand of football anymore. That was complete utter useless garbage and we should have lost that game. Fortunately the Raiders and their fans are very, very bad and they couldn’t take advantage of some opportunities. Of course this is all their own fault as they employ players that do incredible things like trying to date rape themselves.

Finally, the “good” portion of the post. We did some things right, and in no particular order:

1) The Defense. The defense was okay. Not great, not horrible. Nice hit on Jerry Porter by a missile that looked like Mr. Foley. That hit had Porter in tears as he had forgotton who he played for. When they informed him that he was indeed on the Raiders and that they were God awful, he broke down and then asked Mr. Foley to hit him again, only harder so that he would forget all of that horror again.

2) Miraculously, we scored more points than them. And thanks to a really bad block in the back call, and a receiver with a case of Roman Oben’s shared malady with a certain newscaster we escaped. The final score was a pretty sight in a day long sea of horse pooh.

3) The 4:17 victory shot prediction came true. Exactly. 4:17 on the nose. I am officially awesome. Officially.