Ladies and gentlemen, this year’s BQBL Bowl is over. It wasn't the BQBL points scored in the Jets-Cardinals game that made it special. There's no way to appropriately quantify this brand of failure, no stat that captures how terrified each quarterback was, and no metric for embarrassment to measure what happened in New Jersey on Sunday. There is just the film. Let’s go to the tape.
Jets (Sanchize and Greg McElroy) 84 points, and Cardinals (Ryan Lindley) 65 points
In anticipation of this column, I rewatched this entire game. I had my eye on it and everything Sunday, but when a game like this is played in front of cameras and microphones, and it's your job to bask in the ineptitude of quarterbacking failure, you would be a fool not to savor these performances. Also, as I mentioned, there's no number that can capture the experience of watching these men attempt to move the football forward. The most dynamic part of this adventure from kickoff to final kneel-down was tracking the tortured reactions of both the play-by-play team of Thom Brennaman and Brian Billick and the Jets fans in the stadium. I now present to you a running diary, of sorts, of the 2012 BQBL Bowl. No lie — I might go back and watch it again.
For most of his time in San Diego, Philip Rivers hasn’t exactly been flush with weapons. This year — with Vincent Jackson’s bolt to Tampa Bay, one more year removed from losing Darren Sproles, and Ryan Mathews’s perpetual spot on the injury report — it seemed Rivers might have as tough a time as ever. And that was before the Chargers lost Vincent Brown. The second-year wide receiver broke his ankle on a touchdown catch against the Cowboys on Sunday, brutal news for a player whom one Chargers veteran described as “our best receiver.”
Originally thought to be lost for the season, reports are now saying that Brown could be back in as little as eight weeks, and the Chargers plan to keep him on the roster. Still, this leaves Rivers with one less target on the outside, and although the word out of Chargers training camp is that Antonio Gates looks as good as he has in years, there’s no doubt that this was a break San Diego could ill afford.
I don’t have any sort of confirmation, but rumor has it this is the video Leslie Frazier showed in the defensive meeting room before today’s practice. See, Adrian Peterson — eight months removed from tearing his ACL — is back, but the Vikings coach isn’t thrilled about the idea of anybody getting near him.
"The rules are simple," safety Jamarca Sanford said, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "Do not touch 28. If you touch him, you're cut."
Don’t buy into the hype. Week 15 wasn’t shocking. It wasn’t crazy. It wasn’t weird. It was normal. It is completely modus operandi in the NFL for good teams to lose (Green Bay Packers), bad teams to win (Indianapolis Colts), and the greatest quarterback in the history of the NFL (Joe Webb) to not even get a chance to engineer a miraculous comeback. Do you know what was strange Sunday? The fact that Caleb Hanie started at quarterback in the National Football League. It wasn’t just bad quarterbacking from Hanie, it was performance art, it was interpretive dancing, it was desperation, it was emotion, it was terrible. Hanie’s start against the Seattle Seahawks was like an SNL sketch with the same punch line over and over. The punch line was “interception.”
Every movement has a defining moment. The American Revolution had the Boston Tea Party. The hippies had Woodstock. Occupy Wall Street has … well, regardless, the BQBL’s defining moment occurred on October 23, 2011, in Week 7 of the NFL schedule. For generations to come, on the morning of October 23, families clad in Carson Palmer, Curtis Painter, and A.J. Feeley jerseys will grab a football, head to the backyard, and throw errant passes to each other in recognition of this glorious day.
Keeping with BQBL Day tradition, the elder generations will describe the events of Week 7 in 2011 to the young'uns while aimlessly scrambling around the yard and throwing passes 30 feet over their heads. They will tell of the mythical Matt Hasselbeck and his 104 passing yards against the Texans. They will repeat the story of Palmer, who helped solidify a scoreless afternoon for his Raiders and — keeping with BQBL Day tradition — they will don a long blond wig and detail exactly how Painter, on national television, willed his team to lose by 55 points. Then, BQBL Day will culminate with the whole family around the dinner table, poised to dive into their traditional BQBL Day feast of nachos, buffalo wings, and HGH flakes, and they will first all take turns telling the tale of the Miami Miracle. The day that it was revealed to the world that Timothy Richard Tebow was not only the greatest quarterback to ever play the game of football, but the greatest man to ever walk the earth. I can’t wait until next year. I think I am going to adopt a son right now.
