I spent yesterday furniture shopping. That’s right. A Sunday in the middle of November walking the vast aisles of cherry wood and leather that is the new Homemakers Furniture Super Center in Urbandale Iowa. I forwent NFL week 11 to look for dining room tables and area rugs for my new place, and help my roommate find a new mattress*
* Which led to the inevitable “two straight guys lying in the same bed on a showroom making sexual position jokes” which led to the inevitable, “two straight guys nearly getting kicked out of the new Homemakers Furniture Super Center for lying in the same bed on a showroom making sexual position jokes.”
I was not watching football, no sir. I was lost in the intoxicating madness of zero-percent interest for 24 months and pre-holiday shopping madness. I didn’t even realize that football was going on until I walked past the HDTV department and saw Brett Favre laughing on the sidelines at the end of the Vikings game (he’s like a kid out there!!), at which point, I decided to open up my cell phone, and see how hard the Chiefs got spanked.
The next two minutes went like this: “Wait…what?? That’s gotta be a misprint. Overtime?!?!” I called my dad and he regaled me with like play-by-play beginning with Jovan Belcher’s tackle of Mendenhall on third down. I shrieked so excitedly when Succop kicked the game-winner, that I got more stares than when I was demonstrating the superiority of the Sealy Posturepedic to the Simmons Beautyrest re: the doggystyle position.
So what’s there to say?? How can I possibly analyze a game that I didn’t even have a vested enough interest in to watch?? Well I can’t…really. Alls I know is from looking at highlights and statistics, which tell the story of a team that got lucky to the tune of a 97-yard kickoff return and a 94-yard interception return. But, they still won the game.
I like to view sports thru a statistical lens. Don’t tell me how much “poise” a QB has, or how much “heart” a defense plays with. Those are made-up things that manifest themselves by way of sportswriters who can’t think of anything better to write. Give me something concrete that I can sink my teeth into.
By that rationale, it doesn’t seem like the Chiefs are getting any better. Sure they won, but statistically they got their asses handed to them. They can’t win week-in, week-out with the group of flunkies they keep trotting out. We already know this. The stats say so.
But, there was one thing that I saw in the highlights this week that made me go, “Hmmm.” It was something that was beyond the boxscore, beyond the statistics, and something that I think the Chiefs can truly build on. At the end of the game, Succop’s field goal sailed thru the uprights, about a dozen Chief’s players immediately went to Todd Haley to give him a bearhug.
So much as been said about Haley being an asshole*, and most of it is probably true. Thing is, when the Chiefs do succeed, it seems as if they gravitate toward him. And it doesn’t seem as if it is being done in a sarcastic, “we won despite you being a jackass,” sort of a way. It seems as if it’s being done in a, “I know you drive us hard, but man, that makes the payoff that much more sweet,” sort of way. And on top of that, it looked like he actually enjoyed it!! When Dwayne Bowe dropped a bucket of Gatorade on his dome after his first win in DC, he looked like Haley was about to rip his head off.. .
* Seriously. Googlefish ‘Todd Haley is.’ The only thing that pre-populates is ‘a jerk.’
And I hate writing stuff like that, because it is not statistical. It’s not concrete. There is no smile/frown ratio to reference when making that point.
Still, if a miracle win against a team that thoroughly destroyed you in every was is what is needed for a team to trust their hard-driving head coach, than so be it.
Hell, he’s even got Jason Whitlock convinced…though I don’t know if that’s just because Whitty’s too exhausted from writing three whole columns in the past week to write anything else…too bad there’s not a stat for that.