With the rest of this off week between the Conference Championships and the Super Bowl, I'll be taking a look back at the playoffs (today) and the season at large (Thursday and Friday) before diving back into Super Bowl coverage next Monday. Today, I want to take a step back and look at how the reputation and perception of playoff participants have changed over the course of these past three weeks. That's right: It's time for a Playoff Stock Watch. Let's start with the players who have seen their stock skyrocket during January and work our way down to the players who've crashed and burned.
My sister finds an apartment and a roommate and moves out of my house the morning of the last Bengals game of the season. It takes maybe 30 minutes to ferry her boxes out of my office and up the driveway to a U-Haul and then another 45 to rebuild the box-fort against the wall of the living room in her new place. L.A. treats us to T-shirt weather for the occasion, and we get it all done in cheerful silence.
It's one more chance for me to pretend to be more selfless and heroic than I actually am. Piotr Nikolaievitch Rasputin, rescuing my sister by lifting heavy things. Spasiba, little snowflake. I think the pose is starting to wear out, though. I think we both feel it. This whole living situation was born of necessity and duress and now that the pressure's off, I think she and I need to not hang out for a while. Extended proximity isn't something my family's historically great at. We're cave-dwellers, hoarders of personal space, boundary aficionados, closers of bedroom doors. Or maybe that's just me, and I want to think everyone else in my family is that way so I can feel OK about being a misanthrope.
In case you were busy coming up with a fun portmanteau to describe your post-holiday diet, here's what you missed in sports last weekend:
The Seattle Seahawks came back from an early 14-0 deficit with 24 unanswered points to eliminate the Washington Redskins, 24-14, at FedEx Field. Seahawks coach Pete Carroll was his typical subdued self in the postgame press conference, shouting, "YEEEEEEHAWWWWWW WOOOO WOOO WOOO PETE CARROLL PETE CARROLL PETE CARROLL!" before running around the room until he tired himself out and took a nap under the podium.
In what could have been Ray Lewis's last game, the Baltimore Ravens used a strong second half to beat the Indianapolis Colts, 24-9. The turning point came at halftime when Baltimore head coach John Harbaugh decided to stop "sucking for Luck" when he learned that strategy had been a tactic teams used to jockey for draft position last season, and not a way to exploit Indianapolis quarterback Andrew Luck's tendency to feel bad and take it easy on inferior opponents.
The Houston Texans topped the Cincinnati Bengals, 19-13, and will advance to face the New England Patriots in the AFC Divisional round. Tom Brady appeared to provide some bulletin board material for the Texans, saying he was pleased with the matchup, but went on to explain he was only happy to avoid a matchup with the Bengals, who bring with them the smell of Cincinnati, a mix of bad chili and stagnant river water, that clings to his puffier garments for weeks.
In part 1 of 2, Cousin Sal and Chad Millman join Bill to review the Week 17 action and look forward to the matchups on wild-card weekend. In part 2, Mike Lombardi offers his analysis of the NFL playoff matchups, and Joe House celebrates the Redskins' big win over the Cowboys.
To listen to this podcast, you can download it on iTunes here or go to the ESPN.com PodCenter for part 1 and part 2.
The modern NFL is a game of matchups. Since the salary cap and the spread of strategic concepts throughout the league prevent a team from dominating the way that the 1980s Niners or the early-'90s Cowboys did, just about every team in football has one or two weaknesses that can be exploited by a well-timed opponent. That doesn't necessarily mean that the team in question will lose to that otherwise-inferior opposition because the matchup is poor, just as a team with a weakness being exploited by the opponent can still win by pressing its advantage in other areas. But a team that's a bad fit for a specific superior opposition can have a higher chance of causing an upset if they find some weakness ready to be manipulated and attacked.
That is precisely where it pays to look at this year's upcoming playoffs. With three teams assured of at least one home playoff game in the AFC, and three teams guaranteed a playoff berth (with two guaranteed a likely home playoff game) in the NFC, it's useful to look ahead and identify the possible bad matchups for those teams. Obviously, a great team is always going to be the toughest matchup for another dominant squad, but I'm thinking more about the still-competing playoff contenders and whether there's a team that each member of the league's royalty would prefer were sitting out this January.
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Erwin Schrödinger's in town, so we meet at Ye Rustic on Thursday night. The Bengals are playing the Eagles, and for some reason this historic contest of champions is being broadcast in prime time. Schrödinger and I are, respectively, the third and fourth people who show up to watch it unfold. We could have gone somewhere cooler and done something better, but I want him to see how I actually live, and while I'm not totally comfortable with what this says about me, this really is a pretty significant part of how I live these days — in the back of Ye Rustic with a notebook open, half-watching pro football and contemplating what I hope to gain by doing so. Besides, Schrödinger's taste in surroundings is even worse than mine, so he grasps the charms of the place immediately — the wood paneling, the aquarium-glow lighting, the on-point and prodigiously inked-up wait staff. "They look like retired Suicide Girls," he observes, which is totally true.
On Sunday my sister drives me to the bar so I can watch the Bengals play the Dallas Cowboys. "Well, I hope they win," she says. "But I also hope they lose, so you'll have something new to write about."
I don't say anything. She's just trying to be positive, and she's also the reason I'm not riding a bicycle. But in my head I curse her for hexing Cincinnati, who have won four games straight, who could pass the Steelers in the race for an AFC wild-card slot if they win this week, who are In the Hunt. I am now a person who thinks things like this. I am now a person who throws around the phrase "in the hunt," which is a stupid phrase and also maybe not grammatically correct. Why isn't it "on the hunt"? When in doubt on vexing usage questions, I'm with Ronnie Van Zant.
I have maybe lost perspective, a little bit. These are still the Cincinnati Bengals we're talking about. I have been warned and warned about investing my emotional capital here.
"WheelsUp ... Back to Cali on a business trip," the Cincinnati Bengals' Vontaze Burfict (born in Los Angeles in 1990) tells his 4,862 Twitter followers on Thursday. Between "WheelsUp" and "Back to Cali," he types three little Emoji airplanes, like a 15-year-old girl, but still: This is a pretty casually badass way to refer to a road game against the Chargers. There is, suddenly and improbably, something badass about the Bengals. They land in California having won three straight. Perhaps they walk through the San Diego airport in slow motion, wearing sunglasses, Battles Without Honor or Humanity looping in their heads, pulling rollie suitcases full of newfound purpose and confidence.
As for me, I head into Sunday badly in need of another win. It has rained for — this is a rough estimate — 97 days in a row. Hello, seasonal affective disorder, my old friend. Every day I listen to Randy Newman's "I Think It's Going to Rain Today," and it does. Randy is a prophet. Randy understands me. My entire existence in Los Angeles has been trackable on the Randy Newman spectrum. First I was all *, and then I was all **. I walk around my house (which, like all houses in Los Angeles constructed before 1996, is made entirely of drafts and spiders) wearing a Lebowski sweater unironically and eating peanut butter out of the jar like a raccoon. Even though you automatically fail at the Internet the minute you read the comments on anything, I read the comments on last week's football column and passive-aggressively favorite the ones that question my qualifications as a writer and a husband and the veracity of my professed emotional investment in the ups and downs of the Cincinnati Bengals.
Our oven at home is the size of a P.O. box, so we go to the desert for Thanksgiving. I drive my wife and my daughter out. My mom flies down from San Francisco and drives in with my sister. We get a dinner reservation for Thursday at one of the fancy hotels out here — nobody's going to have to scrub cranberry-sauce crust off the good forks, it'll be great — and a budget-baller house with a pool and a hot tub. You can see some real high-definition mountains when you look up from the pool.
Eighty degrees by mid-morning. It's our first real cold-weatherish holiday in Southern California and we're steering into the weirdness of it.
That's Tuesday. We wake up on Wednesday and my wife's brother calls from the doorstep of our house in Los Angeles. He's supposed to be feeding the cats from now until Saturday. He calls to say he's found the hide-a-key box but we've forgotten to hide a key in it. Somebody has to drive all the way back to L.A. and drop a key off.
I agree to take the bullet. It's barely a bullet, though. I am a 35-year-old man with a learner's permit and I am in love with driving.
The Bengals beat the Chiefs 28-6 on Sunday. That's two in a row. E-mail from my dad, Sunday evening: "You have altered Bengals reality." No further message.
There are probably other explanations, but I accept that one. By observing the Bengals' situation in order to mock it, I've changed it. Basic quantum mechanics at work.
We'll come back to this in a minute. Or maybe we won't. Instead of going to the bar this weekend, I watch football at Werner Heisenberg's house. Werner Heisenberg promises to put the Bengals game on one of the TVs if it gets close, but it never does. I follow the Bengals' neat dismantling of the Chiefs on my phone while ping-ponging my eyes back and forth between Packers-Lions and Jets-Rams and eating everything in a bag of Jack Link's that is not explicitly labeled DO NOT EAT. The life of kings.
The Bengals win and increasingly I don't know who I am anymore. Afterward I shoot free throws in the yard and I'm almost relieved to learn that I still suck at basketball.
A few hours after the Bengals beat the Giants, I'm in the passenger seat of a blue rental car with Colorado plates, driving to Pasadena with my friend Enrico Fermi, half-listening to the Latin pop hits of yesterday and hoy on Exitos 93.9 FM.
I've known Fermi for 14 years. We've lived in a lot of the same cities — Boston, San Francisco — but almost never at the same time. You know that person you've known forever with whom you're able to instantly dial back in every time you see him, as if no time has passed, even though for whatever logistical reason he hasn't been part of your day-to-day life for years in between? That's Enrico Fermi.
I pretty much owe him everything. Literally — he was the first person to pay me to write something, which means that if there's a parallel timeline out there in which I’m a bitter B2B copywriter with a WordPress blog (no shots, bitter B2B copywriters; I respect the hustle), it's probably because that version of me never met Enrico Fermi. But I also owe him in a million harder-to-quantify ways. He introduced me to Teena Marie and Solaris and stayed friends with not one but two of my ex-girlfriends.
Bye Week for the Bengals. With the NFL trade deadline approaching (look at me, I'm a sportswriter now), it's a time for stock-taking, for an honest look at how we got here and what we could be doing better.
So here's what happened: I went to Vegas at the end of September, and ever since I got back I haven't been quite right.
I promise not to dwell on this. I went to Vegas, and sat in a seminar room listening to creative people talk about creating comics and movies, about the how and why of Making Things, and instead of coming back fired up to Make Things myself, I came back convinced that it was too late for me, that I'd allowed part of me that could once have Made Things to atrophy and die. But the specifics aren't that important. It was a slump, and every slump has the same arc. I wrote nothing of consequence and tortured myself about it. I starved myself of human contact — with my wife, with my friends, with the guy the landlord pays to come around and frown at the grass — because How's it going? was a question I didn't want to answer. I kept whatever was wrong with me to myself, like the guy who waits until the end of the gunfight to reveal that he's been gut-shot the whole time.
Holiday-obsessed movie director Tim Burton, on growing up in Burbank: "The only way you'd know it was a new season is if you'd walk into Sav-On or Thrifty's and walk down the aisle and see Halloween decorations or Christmas decorations … The weather certainly didn't do it for you."
This is both true and not true. Los Angeles, I'm discovering six months into living here, does have seasons — you just have to dial into them a little. You have to learn to read the signs. A slight uptick in the dead-palm-fronds-in-the-street count, a tang in the air.
Or this: There's this homeless guy we see all the time in our neighborhood who looks exactly like Tom Hanks in Cast Away, minus the volleyball. L.A. has the most disturbingly vital-looking homeless people on the planet, and Cast Away is the most disturbingly vital-looking homeless person in L.A. — a white guy so tan you can barely see his tattoos, muscled like a piece of jerky. Cast Away walks up and down Sunset Boulevard all day — as far west as Sunset Junction, as far east as the Rite Aid in Echo Park — naked except for a pair of the most ragged jean shorts in the history of jean shorts. We're not talking normal cumulative jortwear here; Cast Away's pants look like the pants of someone who has recently been in an explosion or been turned back into a person after being the Hulk. Or both.
