Random Monday Brainwaves

Tim Tebow just keeps winning. While everyone has been busy beating him black and blue over his less-than-stellar numbers, he has quietly compiled a season QB rating of 80.5. That's only half bad considering for his first two starts his coach supplied him with game plans seemingly designed to fail, and also considering his wide receivers drop passes left and right. He just needs more time to get assimilated. Anyone who has a hobby that requires one to keep a distracting checklist in one's head knows that it takes practice, practice, practice, practice, and practice to get to the point where even a little change in one's approach becomes second nature. Given a few more weeks, Tebow will have gotten to the point where he can do some of the alterations to his mechanics without thinking about them too hard. That will allow him to focus less on his mechanics and more on completing his passes.

Then there's Ndamukong Suh. Analysts have started to build him into even more of an NFL bad-boy since his incident on Thanksgiving. Granted, hitting a guy's head into the turf repeatedly and kicking (or stomping, depending on whom you ask) his arm on the way by is dirty. He should have been suspended, and he was. But. He has been painted as a dirty player almost since Day 1 of his career. Now people are even claiming that he has been a problem since high school. (Terry Bradshaw on FOX, to give an example.) Not so. While we don't know what he was like in high school, he was not a dirty player at Nebraska. He had something like nine personal foul penalties in his last two years as a Husker, but the vast majority of them were cheap calls. Yes, we're Husker fans and therefore biased. But even the national TV commentators said that some of the calls were not deserved. Additionally, Suh has never hurt anyone in the NFL. Maybe his by-the-neck throwdowns are a bit extreme for tackles. However, he hasn't put anyone in the hospital. Considering his strength, he could easily have done so if that was what he wanted.

Finally, the Packers just inched closer to winning the Super Bowl again this year. They took out a desperate New York Giants team in New York yesterday, barely escaping overtime with a last-second field goal. Granted, it's the Giants. They're 0-4 in the second half of this season, taking their annual swan dive. (One of us is heart-broken. The other is cold-hearted and doesn't care.) But the Packers proved that they can rise to a challenge. However, they need to work on their defense a little more if they expect to go back-to-back. Giving up over thirty points to anyone, much less the Giants, is a problem. Also, they might have to lose a game in the regular season in order to win it all. It takes a very, very special team to go 19-0. The Patriots were that team a few years ago, but they happened to 1) run into the only team that had even a shot at beating them, and 2) drop an interception that would essentially have won the game. The Packers aren't the caliber of team that the Patriots were, so they will likely not go undefeated all the way. The only question is when their first loss will come: The regular season or the post season?

Hydra
6-4-3 double play... Ballgame over! Yankees win! Theeeeeee Yankees win!