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Posts concerning football

Heartbreaker in New Orleans

23:38 03 Feb 2013. Updated: 00:41 04 Feb 2013

When I moved to Ireland from the US as a kid, I had never gone to a football game. I don’t really remember watching any football on television either, and was mostly aware of the sport via playing it—the two-hand touch version—on the street[1]. As a result of this, I had no defined pro football allegiance[2].

I was still attracted to the game as a spectator, and was able to see short snippets of it on Channel Four, a British television station that did a weekly hour-long highlight show covering the NFL. In the absence of regional holds on my loyalty, I gravitated towards teams for stylistic reasons. This was the MontanaRice era, and I completely fell for the precision passing attack of the San Francisco 49ers. They’ve been my favorite football team since.
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Giants Versus Patriots II: Better Lucky Than Good?

20:44 05 Feb 2012

Since moving back to the US, I’ve only missed one Super Bowl: XLII in 2008. I was quite down at the time, didn’t have much faith in the Giants, and couldn’t stand the thought of witnessing a Patriots win and their subsequent enshrinement as the best team in history[1].

Oops. I missed one of the biggest upsets in Super Bowl history, and one of the most dramatic game-winning drives.
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49ers Defeat Saints in Classic

15:47 15 Jan 2012. Updated: 10:55 17 Jan 2012

Football is a very complicated game. I can’t think of another sport as demanding for participants on an intellectual level. Soccer, basketball, and many other team sports often involve specific philosophies or systems that players need to learn, but none involve the level of complexity of football.
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49ers Clinch NFC West

22:18 04 Dec 2011. Updated: 10:15 06 Dec 2011

I’ve been a 49ers fan since about 1986, just before their late 80s period of dominance. They were already an excellent team, and although I didn’t become a Jerry Rice fan until later, it’s probably not a coincidence that I liked their offensive style so much shortly after Rice’s arrival in 1985. I was in Ireland at the time, and watched them have success after success from afar. From 1983 to 1998, they had 16 consecutive winning seasons.

In 1999, I moved to California, and coincidentally the 49ers went 4–12; Steve Young (another favorite player of mine) also retired that year.
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NCAA Inanity">More NCAA Inanity

22:04 06 Jun 2011

The University of Southern California football team has been stripped of its 2004 season national championship, because their star running back Reggie Bush was receiving “improper benefits” while he played for them.

What this story is really about, however, is trying to ensure that the players receive as little as possible of the vast revenues accumulated by the colleges, the leagues, and the BCS cartel.
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Good Moves or Terrible Tackling?

23:22 14 Jan 2011

First up, Marshawn Lynch’s ridiculous run that sealed the crazy Seahawks upset of the Saints last weekend—with sound effects that, frankly, make the run more realistic to me than the version without them.


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Jerry Rice: #1 All-Time

23:38 12 Nov 2010. Updated: 01:00 13 Nov 2010

Jerry Rice has been my favorite football player for a long time, and I’m happy to see that the NFL Network has put him in the top spot of their Top 100 all-time players.

Rice was elusive, precise, determined, resilient, and, perhaps above all else, hard-working. His work ethic and habits were legendary in a league full of extraordinary athletes, and he never seemed to ease up.

To understand just how good he was, consider not the numbers themselves, which may be meaningless to people who don’t follow the game quite closely, but rather the numbers expressed in terms of the how the second- and third-place players compare:
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Racist American Pro Sports Team Names

23:58 04 Nov 2010. Updated: 15:53 13 Oct 2013

I’m perennially surprised at the names of the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians, which are outrageous and somehow still haven’t changed.

I wondered which of the teams had the more racist name, and whether or not they were the most racist pro sports names in the US.
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NFL Passer Rating

12:22 12 Jan 2010

In 1973 the NFL adopted a new way of measuring statistical passer performance. The passer rating system attempts to combine various aspects of the passing game into one metric.
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Cardinals 51, Packers 45

11:43 11 Jan 2010

I don’t write about football that often, but wow, that was some game.

96 total points, an NFL postseason record. 62 total first downs, an NFL postseason record. 1024 combined yards, tied for third in NFL postseason history.

Kurt Warner’s line: 29 of 33 passes, 379 yards passing, 11.5 yards per pass, 5 touchdowns, 0 interceptions, 154.1 passer rating.

Aaron Rodgers’ line: 28 of 42 passes, 422 yards passing, 10.0 yards per pass, 4 touchdowns, 1 interception, 121.3 passer rating.
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Super Bowl XL

21:37 05 Feb 2006. Updated: 23:59 06 Feb 2006

I found this Super Bowl fairly disappointing. I didn’t feel a lot of support for either team. I would probably have preferred a Seahawk victory since it would have been their first, but I didn’t really mind a Steeler win either, and was happy for Ben Roethlisberger to take the “youngest ever QB to win” record (because he was taking it from Tom Brady).
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Super Bowl XXXVI

00:00 02 Feb 2002. Updated: 22:06 23 Jun 2013
My thoughts on a disappointing upset.
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