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Monday, January 18. 2010

No Joy in San Diego Today

Damn Chargers … Damn Packers …

At least the Cowboys lost … to those damn Minnesota Vikings. There’s no joy in Mudville tonight. Okay, that’s a baseball reference, but one can imagine the fans of the Toledo Mudhens are football fans too. Not to mention, there is a Mudville Flats here in San Diego. Well, it’s a vacation rental place.

So, neither the Packers nor the Chargers are in the playoffs. How can both teams lose playoff games at home? Life’s tough for sports fans. Your team struggles for an entire season, makes it to one playoff game and then — poof — they lose to a team that wasn’t supposed to make the playoffs in the first place.

There was a program on ESPN the other night about how the Atlanta Falcons won the NFC Championship game and went on to the Super Bowl — only to lose to the Denver Broncos.

The Falcons played the Minnesota Vikings for the NFC championship and what was so striking about that program was a comment from one of the Vikings players. On his team losing to the Falcons, after winning all but one game during that season (1998 the Falcons lost two games), the Vikings player said the better team didn’t win that day. Now that’s audacity.

It was a close game for sure, went into overtime, but at the end of the day the best team wins the game and on that day, the best team was the Atlanta Falcons.

Then there is Cowboys linebacker Keith Brooking. At the end of their game with the Minnesota Vikings, with only two minutes left and the Vikings leading by 24 points, Brett Favre threw an 11-yard touchdown pass to Visanthe Shiancoe, bringing the score (with the PAT) to 34-3.

Brooking went storming over to the Vikings sideline screaming about running up the score. After the game he vented (again) to the media about Favre and the Vikings running up the score. “I thought it was totally classless and disrespectful. This is the NFL, that's not what this is about,” adding that the Vikings would have to face the Cowboys next year.

Yeah, Brooking is in the NFL, a professional sports league where, as Brooking pointed out in his media rant, he is paid to stop the Vikings from scoring. If the Cowboys didn’t want the Vikings to score, then they should have done their jobs and stopped the Vikings from scoring.

As Chris Chase said in his Yahoo sports blog, just because the Cowboys quit playing before the final whistle doesn’t mean the Vikings had to quit playing as well.

Yep, everyone will remember that incident come next season — as all the networks play and replay the touchdown and Brooking’s crybaby rant, over and over and over again. I won’t use the text message shorthand, I’ll just write: Shut The Fuck Up!

Until Sunday, the San Diego Chargers were the second best team in the AFC, behind only the Baltimore Colts … err, the Indianapolis Colts. That should be edited, the Colts have been in Indianapolis for more than 25 years, but the way the team left Baltimore in 1984 (owned by Robert Irsay at the time) reminds everyone that football is first and foremost an entertainment business. It’s all about the money.

Sunday, the best team on the field in Qualcomm Stadium was the New York Jets. The Chargers 13-3 regular season record doesn’t matter. The fact that they were eight point favorites before the game doesn’t matter. They couldn’t win this game and that made their opponents the best team.

Every year Chargers fans say the same thing the fans of 30 other teams say right around this time of year: “Next season.”

The next season rolls around and … in the case of the Chargers the team starts out like it’s going to end the season with a losing record. This season the Chargers won their last 11 games. It gave hope to all the fans that this was the year, that their team — our team — would only have to beat those hated Indianapolis Colts and win the Super Bowl.

It was not to be.

I’m still a Green Bay Packers fan, but having lived in San Diego all these years and watched the Chargers, with players like Junior Seau, Natrone Means, Darren Sproles, LaDanian Tomlison, Philip Rivers and Stan Humphries, the Chargers have grown on me. Well, the team and their dance squad! The Packers don’t have a dance squad.

Stan Humphries … everyone, almost universally, agrees Dan Fouts is the greatest quarterback to ever lead the Chargers. Well, his stats and induction into the NFL Hall of Fame would actually confirm that, but there can and should be a lot said for Stan Humphries being the best QB to ever take a snap for the Chargers.

Tough, intelligent and occasionally mobile — often by necessity — he didn’t have the “talent” of Dan Fouts, but Humphries had the heart, making him resilient to a fault, as witnessed when he had to retire in 1997 after receiving and playing with too many brain concussions. Stan Humphries should be in the Hall of Fame. He has the numbers, but more than that, Stan Humphries is one of those rare players who rose above expectations and carried his team to championships. Can’t imagine anyone would dispute that.

Who can forget the Chargers beating the Pittsburgh Steelers, in Three Rivers Stadium, rallying from a 13-3 deficit to win the 1994 AFC Championship? One of the greatest upsets in NFL history. Then, as every Chargers fan remembers, they lost Super Bowl XXIX to the San Francisco 49’s, with an abysmal score of 49-26.

This was going to be the year, like the 2006 season, and why dredge up that horror. Did that less than a month ago anyway. Now the question is, will coach Norv Turner be back, as well as the greatest running back in Chargers history, LaDanian Tomlinson? Not to mention Shawne Merriman. With his checkered off-field life, it’s not likely the All-Pro linebacker will be playing in San Diego come August.

But, like all NFL fans everywhere, I (we) have hope for the future. I’m still a Packers fan to be sure, but after nearly 20 years in San Diego I’m a more of a Chargers fan. It’s the truth. Winning, punctuated by adversity, has a way of making one a fan.

Maybe next season.
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On a sad NFL note: Former Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Chicago Bears defensive lineman Gaines Adams died at 26 from a heart attack in South Carolina. Apparently he had an enlarged heart, a condition all too common among big, beefy football players. There’s always a price for striving for one’s dreams and in the case of sports, it can be the ultimate price.

Football is a dangerous business.

Posted by Tim Forkes in Sports at 06:01 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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