NFL: Week seven & breaking away // MLB: LC Races, an update.
For more analysis, go to Mile High Sports Radio AM1510 or FM93.7, and to Denver
“SPORTS NOTEBOOK” will continue to post its columns Tuesday and Friday of each week---Ed. & Publ., Marvin Leibstone.
NFL: THE NFL season is almost half over for most of the league’s competing franchises. Moving toward another Super Bowl, some franchises are thinking collectively, “Have we broken the sound barrier?” That would be ahead-of-the-curve teams like the Atlanta Falcons, Baltimore Ravens, Houston Texans and the San Francisco
Winning speeds things up; losing can slow everything down.
Few humans know about how fast or slow time can seem better than professional athletes, coaches, team owners, staff and fans, which brings us to that notion, “You gotta stop to smell the roses,” or, as many in professional sports might say, “Gotta stop to smell the money.”
Anyway, forget roses and greenbacks, instead stop to ask, “Where the heck are we?”
As of today, there’s only one NFL team that hasn’t lost a game, the 6-0 Falcons, and two that are at 5-1, the Ravens and the Texans; and, there’s one team that’s 5-2, the 49ers. Six franchises have won four games so far, and there are 11 3-3/.500 teams, plus six that have won but two games, and six with only one win. Of the NFL’s 32 franchises, 20 are at or above .500, and 12 below .500. In other words, the league isn’t sick, as a whole it’s mostly above the line that separates winners from losers.
Though the Ravens and the Texans are tied at 5-1 for numero uno of the NFL’s American Football Conference, and are also leaders of their divisions (AFC North and South, respectively), it isn’t necessarily a 6-0 or 5-1 record that positions a team as leader of any of the NFL’s eight divisions. Two of the AFC’s four divisions are leading from 3-3 records, the Denver Broncos (AFC West) and the New York Jets (AFC East). Yet the Buffalo Bills, a 3-3 franchise (AFC East), is in last place of the AFC East, and the Saint Louis Rams, another 3-3 team, is last in the National Football Conference West. Still, going into Week Eight a 3-3/.500 franchise is post-season capable (an existing fluke of the season is that all four teams within the AFC East are at 3-3/.500, subject to change dramatically during Weeks Eight and Nine).
While the NFC’s leading team, the Falcons, are obviously atop the NFC South, leading the NFC’s other divisions are the 5-2 49ers (NFC West), the 4-2 N.Y. Giants (last season’s Super Bowl winner/NFC East), and the 5-1 Chicago Bears (NFC North).
Teams that will be struggling during Weeks Eight and Nine to reach .500 and then hope to rise up further are those of a 2-3 cluster---the Pittsburgh Steelers (AFC North), the Indianapolis Colts (AFC South) the Dallas Cowboys (NFC East), the Detroit Lions (NFC North), and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (NFC South).
Way back and down are the 1-4 Oakland Raiders (AFC West), the 1-5 Kansas City Chiefs (AFC West), the 1-5 Cleveland Browns (AFC North), the 1-4 Jacksonville Jaguars (AFC South), the 1-4 Saints (NFC South), and the 1-4 Panthers (NFC South).
*~*~*
MLB --- IT’s easy to marvel and applaud the N.Y. Yankees when they win a pennant, such is homage to a team that has led in number of won pennant races throughout baseball history, a reason why it’s easy NOT to experience sadness and pity when the Yankees lose a pennant race, as they did on Thursday, swept by the Detroit Tigers. After all, the N.Y. team has “been there” more than 35 times since 1921, including six times since 1998.
To be appreciated is that the Tigers achieved four knockouts in a row without any kind of vengeful determination to prove that they are a better ball club than the Yankees (which they are), but to play the best baseball that they could under a constraint that ironically remained the freedom that empowered the pennant win, specifically Detroit manager Jim Leyland’s noticable insistence on match-up rostering and a four-man starter rotation that he kept buddying up with the right relievers and closers, also Leyland knowing exactly when to "green light" his long ball and strategic hitters for out of the park RBI-home runs and extra-base hits. It’s what the Tigers will be bringing to the World Series against either the St. Louis Cardinals or the San Francisco Giants.
The Cardinals are ahead of the Giants in games, 3-1, so tonight’s contest could be the clincher for the Cards, or it could establish a 3-2 NL-LC standing and the possibility of a sixth, maybe seventh game deciding the year’s NL champion.
It is this page’s thinking that yesterday’s 8-1 Detroit win over N.Y. showed clearly how both the NL and AL post-season games can turn quickly and forcefully from the good or bad actions of only one or two players in a single inning, e.g., in the fourth inning N.Y. hurler C.C. Sabathia giving up two 2-run homers, one each to Detroit’s Miguel Cabrera and to Jhonny Peralta, leaving Detroit’s manager to select field defense and tight relief pitching/closing as a follow-on win imperative.
END/ml
No comments:
Post a Comment