Don't Feel Sorry for Captain Comeback

First appeared on September 25th, 2013
in The Lebanon Reporter

The San Francisco 49ers have gone from their SuperBowl appearance to preseason favorites to win the NFC West to a team racked with desperation after a 1-2 start. In the throes of Sunday’s 27-7 win, euphoric Colts fans became strangely conflicted over images of a lonely man on the sidelines. The one sporting the black turtleneck, sharpie clipped to his neck hole. A laconic face forced to look on helplessly, anguishing over every play, staring at his team in disbelief. That’s not the Jim Harbaugh we remember.

Sunday Indy was flawless. The defense reacting from perfect position, tackling with textbook precision. And in a league fawning over the pass, the Colts jettisoned one of the best defenses in the NFL by promptly running the ball down their throat in the Fourth Quarter. So with four minutes remaining and their team leading, a long forgotten part of every Colts fan began thinking comeback.
For, Colin Kaepernick voodoo doll or not, the tide simply had to turn at some point. This is completely understandable considering Captain Comeback himself was at the helm of the enemy ship.
But in the end Harbaugh came up short again.

Alas, don’t feel sorry for the man and don’t offer a hand up. The sons of football coaches line their bird cages with “Get Well Soon” cards. Besides, Harbaugh’s Midas touch from last year only meant his clipper ship was bound to hit rough waters some time. That’s Murphy’s Law and nobody’s exempt from it except apparently Bashar Al-Assad and the Chicago Cubs.

And while they exchanged a quick handshake at midfield, perhaps Chuck Pagano owed his opponent more. After all Harbaugh’s prints are all over Pagano’s team and the franchise. From his Captain Comeback days to the grooming of Andrew Luck at Stanford to helping Colts Offensive Coordinator Pep Hamilton author a ball control running style that, at least on Sunday, looks very promising, this latest incarnation of the Indianapolis Colts were built following a blueprint Harbaugh authored.

To Colts Fans Harbaugh remains a hero whose fate is tied to one play. One that again saw their quarterback scrambling for his life trying to avoid one of the 36 sacks he survived that season. One play from David, clutching a well worn copy of Football for Dummies, the chapter on ‘Winning Football’ still bookmarked with a Mayflower packing slip, versus the Goliath that was the Pittsburgh Steelers defense.

One play, one Hail Mary that would determine the AFC representative in the SuperBowl. One wobbly pass that seemed to hang in the frigid Pittsburgh air for an entire season, pulling Colts fans one and all from their couches in unison only to watch as it ricocheted off players like Oswald’s magic bullet before falling to the cold, hard, Three Rivers turf.

We recognized Harbaugh’s steely stare, his fiery bravado. But by Sunday’s Fourth Quarter, the stare was blank and the Colts had doused the bravado, if only temporarily. There was no better time for Indianapolis to play their best game. Falling to 1-2 after a disappointing home loss the week before and the earth-shaking trade it prompted would have been bad. And by bad, we’re talking a “Jim Irsay lobbying Twitter for more than 140 characters” kind of bad.

So many are quick to credit Peyton Manning with creating a football culture in Indiana. But history tells us it was more likely the run the Colts made in 1995, primarily under Harbaugh’s guidance, that first planted the seed. A magical season that saw Captain Comeback, and a once hapless franchise, come one play away from the SuperBowl.

© 2013 Eric Walker Williams

Johnny Football and the Case of the Missing Paycheck

First appeared on September 13, 2013
in The Lebanon Reporter

So Johnny Football put his Johnny Hancock on a few footballs and a stray mini-helmet or two and the world loses its mind. Meanwhile Syria continues to eat itself from the top down and Senator Dianne Feinstein goes on television to talk about intervention vowing to vote against her constituents because “quite simply, they don’t know what I know”. What a wonderful world indeed.

Though the same can’t be said for Senators, it used to be Heisman Trophy winners conducted themselves with class. They’d score their parents a luxury apartment on a “friend of the programs” dime and arrive at award shows via limousine, or in other cases flush a Hollywood career down the toilet after being accused of killing their ex-wife.

So Johnny Football sells some autographs, gets booted from a summer camp and does the same thing 97% of college students do with regularity anyway and suddenly he’s public enemy number two behind Bashar al-Assad. If History’s any guide, we should cut the kid some slack. After all, those who’ve come before haven’t exactly been ripped from a Rockwell painting.

For many years the argument for paying college athletes has welled up like a great reservoir of greed, equality, compassion, righteousness and justice (the last two we recognize as distant possibilities) behind a dam that is the NCAA. And here comes Johnny Football, full head of steam, shoulder lowered, charging towards an already much assaulted, aging and crumbling dam.
And what should be a dislocated shoulder becomes instead an earth-shaking moment as, with the power of ESPN and the rest of the college football media behind him, young Johnny hits the dam with all the force of a Ram Pick Up.

So as the torrents rage from behind the dam, we pause on our long journey down the road towards equality to take a long look in the mirror. Is this about making things right with college athletes or making things right with ourselves? We know full well college athletics are dirty and there’s obviously little the NCAA can do about it. This means, in order for us to keep cheering our favorite teams on in good conscience, we’re suddenly fine with athletes being paid.

When everything’s “over the table” we somehow feel as if we still hold some control over the six headed monster we refuse to believe busted its chains and left the reservation a long time ago. Putting everything “over the table” supposedly eliminates “friends of the program “and those greedy ambulance chasers lurking in the shadows. It levels the playing field and makes the SEC an actual entity of the NCAA instead of Minor League Football.

Putting everything “over the table” makes college athletics the Frankenstein to our Gene Wilder. And we stand alongside beaming with pride at how we’ve tamed this gruesome beast using a crude brain transplant machine, a hunchbacked assistant and a fortuitous bolt of lightning. The audience claps and cheers with happy amazement until the stage lights begin exploding and Dr. Frank-un-schteen loses complete control of his great experiment.

As with most things in the real world there are no simple answers. Simple answers exist only on The Brady Bunch or in Third Grade. The NCAA will react in the way we’ve become so accustomed to seeing the NCAA react as the problem continues to grow uglier and faster than a malignant tumor. One thing’s for sure, we don’t have to worry about Washington mucking this deal up anytime soon. It appears they’re far too busy tossing the old political football around out on the Mall to worry about little Johnny Football.

© 2013 Eric Walker Williams

Andrew Luck: This is Your Life

First appeared on August 30th, 2013
in The Lebanon Reporter

Dear Annoying Person whose life is so important you don’t have time to push your shopping cart to the corral and choose instead to abandon it in the empty parking spot one good stiff breeze away from my previously unscratched door, you annoy me. You remain the only effective argument for tougher gun laws and something tells me if your life was really so important that you couldn’t spare thirty seconds to push your cart an extra twenty feet, you probably wouldn’t have been in the Kroger parking lot to begin with.

If I had to guess, the brain trust at ESPN is comprised of highly decorated scholars in well pressed suits who can quote to the line the current value of their stock options. Men who rake in obscene amounts of money and wear crooked smirks that squeal “We control half the media world”. Still as polished and accomplished as these men are, at the end of the day, they remain the same ones who leave their cart unattended next to your car in the Kroger parking lot.

ESPN thinks if they beat you over the head with something long enough (A ROD, Brett Favre, Johnny Football) you will eventually come around to caring about it. They cater to the sensationalized and stories relevant to major television markets. For years the Colts dominated the NFL regular season and yet were rarely the lead story on SportsCenter.

Peyton Manning shredded defenses and shattered records as the little franchise that could went on to win double figure games in 12 out of 14 years. Meanwhile the talking heads in Bristol yawned. Manning tosses nine touchdowns (including one to himself) in a 35 point come from behind win and SportsCenter grants it token coverage before inundating us with updates about Tom Brady’s hangnail or the bad plate of sushi he had in New York.

I suppose this milk has long since spoiled and the proper thing to do is tell Andrew Luck that no matter what he does, as long as Robert Griffin the III is upright and able to strap a helmet on, the backseat is a place young Andrew should learn his way around.
Welcome to your life Andrew Luck. You take a 2 win team to the playoffs, throw for more touchdowns and a thousand more yards than the NFL Rookie of the Year and ESPN responds by spending millions on the production of “RG3: The Will to Win” and promotes it relentlessly. It didn’t matter the Colts won more games despite a strength of schedule that ranked them ten places higher than Washington last year, ESPN’s response is to say the Colts are overrated and will take a major step backward this season.

Don’t let ESPN’s fear of covering Midwestern teams scare you young Andrew, there are plenty of hayseeds left out here in the sticks willing to climb down off our horses long enough to pat you on the back and tell you what a great job you’re doing. Take your big city money and go buy yourself a nice log cabin near Lucas Oil Stadium (I’ve got a cousin willing to clear the land if you need it).

The first lesson of playing professional sports in the Midwest is understanding the spotlight of the big media will only reach you when every team east of the Appalachians has closed its doors or global warming has become a reality and flooded the eastern seaboard. Meanwhile get to know the people who leave their carts unattended for one day they shall inherit the Earth from the ESPN brass.

© 2013 Eric Walker Williams