Musical coaches – and quarterbacks?

January 15, 2015

The NFL postseason is upon us: Let the game of musical coaches begin.

Actually, it already has. The Buffalo Bills have hired Rex Ryan, late of the Jets, who’ve hired Todd Bowles. (It’s interesting that one team’s discard is another’s great hope.)

But the big story may be out of Denver, where John Fox got the boot from the Broncos after failing to win a Super Bowl with Peyton Manning, who looked flat against Andrew Luck and the Indianapolis Colts last weekend in a bid for the AFC championship game. (Peyton had quad issues, but he’s not a mobile quarterback anyway.)

The 411 is that Peyton – who just won the Bart Starr Award for character and leadership on and off the field – is angling to make Broncos’ offensive coordinator Adam Gase a head coach – but of which team? Gase was said to be headed to the San Francisco 49ers. Which begged the question: Would Peyton go there? ...

The closer: Aaron Rodgers

January 13, 2015

So many story lines in this past weekend’s playoff games:

*The Seattle Seahawks’ Russell Wilson and the Indianapolis Colts’ Andrew Luck emerging as the class of their generation. This is not a rap against the Washington Redskins’ Robert Griffin III, the Carolina Panthers’ Cam Newton and, my favorite, the San Francisco 49ers’ Colin Kaepernick. But they seem at this point to lack a poise, a maturity that Luck and Wilson have, which may be why Wilson and his team are moving on to the NFC championship game while Luck and his go on to the AFC game.

*Luck, of course, found himself involved in another storyline as the Colts defeated Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos, 24-13. Manning was once the Colts’ man. They let him go when Luck came aboard. So you had the past/present going up against the present/future, and the present/future won. Whither Peyton? He might come back next year. But he and his team looked almost as flat-footed as they did in last year’s disastrous Super Bowl appearance. Meanwhile, the Colts will take on Tom Brady and the New England Patriots next weekend. Though I hate to admit, Brady – Manning’s contemporary – appears to be aging better in the job. Go Colts. ...

Chris Christie’s Cowboy love

January 11, 2015

The reemergence of the Dallas Cowboys – who play the Green Bay Packers today for the right to move on to the NFC Championship game next weekend – created some unforeseen levity once viewers spied Gov. Chris Christie hugging Cowboys’ owner Jerry Jones after the team’s victory over the Detroit Lions.

“Spied” might be the wrong word. Gov. Krispy Kreme was sporting an orange sweater for the occasion, and let’s just say that orange isn’t always the new black. Indeed, though Christie described himself as a high school athlete at the time of Bridge-gate – to distinguish himself, I guess, from those “loser” henchmen who took the fall for the George Washington traffic scandal – his moment with Jones resembled nothing so much as the chubby kid trying to hang with the cool jocks. Altogether now singsong “Awk-ward.”

Christie – who has taken a lot of heat for his Cowboys’ allegiance – has been characteristically unbowed, leading the puckish New York Times columnist Gail Collins to remark that it’s “certainly the tough-talking, self-assured Chris Christie that all of us have come to know and, um, know.”

The real problem here is not that a New Jersey governor likes a Dallas team – that would hardly matter in a national election – but that the Cowboys own a company that was recently awarded a contract at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, overseen by Christie and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. ...

Stand and deliver

January 8, 2015

The big news for us Colin Kaepernick fans is that he’s spending the off-season in Phoenix, Ariz. – working on his quarterbacking skills with Kurt Warner, two-time NFL MVP and Super Bowl champ for the St. Louis Rams and Arizona Cardinals.

So it’s all good, right? Someone who’s talented wants to improve on that. We should be cheering him on, no?

No: Let the hating begin.

“Warner should teach him how to bag groceries” is among the milder thoughts in the blogosphere. The rap is that Colin is a running quarterback who will never be a traditional pocket passer. And that may – or may not – be true.

For the uninitiated, and I must confess that Yours Truly counts herself among them, a pocket passer, like the Broncos’ Peyton Manning or the Patriots’ Tom Brady, stands and delivers, that is he stands in the “pocket” – presumably protected by his great offensive line, or O-line – to throw the ball to various teammates whose locations on the field he quickly “reads” under great pressure.

Then there is the new breed of running quarterback – led by Colin, the Redskins’ Robert Griffin III (known as RG III) and the Panthers’ Cam Newton – all of whom have struggled this season. The exception is their contemporary, the Seahawks’ Russell Wilson, who, though a running quarterback, can deliver from the pocket and read the field. He is considered more of a hybrid like the Colts’ Andrew Luck, another contemporary, and the Packers’ Aaron Rodgers, an established superstar. The thinking is that though it’s fine to be able to scramble, you have to be able first and foremost to stand and deliver in the NFL, unlike in college ball.

All this is fascinating and serves as a great subtext in my novel “The Penalty for Holding,” about a gay, biracial quarterback’s search for acceptance in the NFL. My protagonist, Quinn Novak, is more of a hybrid like a Wilson, Rodgers or Luck – what former Niners’ star Steve Young, a great running quarterback who became a great pocket passer – would call a multi-threat.

Sports as spice

January 7, 2015

I had to laugh when I saw the title of Richard Sandomir’s essay in the Jan. 4 edition of The New York Times: “The Best Sports Films Often Are Not.”

One of the things people ask about my upcoming novel “The Penalty for Holding” – once they absorb that it’s about a gay, biracial quarterback’s search for identity, acceptance, success and love amid the brutal beauty of the NFL – is, How much football is there? Trust me, they’re not hoping that the answer is “a whole lot.”

And that’s as it should be. For a sports story to succeed, sports have to secondary to the story. There’s a practical reason for this. No specialty tale – which is what any sports story is – can rely on sports fans alone. It must also engage those who are mildly intrigued, those who’d enjoy any good story but don’t necessarily know a lot about sports. And to do that the story can’t be too much inside baseball. Sports are the spice. The narrative is the meat. ...

Just say “No More”

January 5, 2015

The NFL, deep into playoffs after a regular season of scandal, is also deep into its commitment to public service announcements against domestic violence and sexual assault.

The P.S.A.s feature current and former stars like the New York Football Giants’ quarterback and good guy Eli Manning saying “No More” – to such dangerous platitudes as “But he’s such a nice guy,” “She was asking for it,” “He just has a temper” or “We don’t talk about that.”

You may remember similar spots featuring actors Amy Poehler and Courtney Cox and fashion guru Tim Gunn. They’re the brainchild of No More, a five-year-old coalition against domestic violence and sexual assault working with actor Mariska Hargitay’s Joyful Heart organization. ...

The beast in the NFL jungle

January 1, 2015

Well, we’ve heard more from San Francisco 49ers’ owner Jed York and general manager Trent Baalke about why they parted ways with coach Jim Harbaugh. Which is not the same as saying we’ve learned more about what happened.

There was talk at the Dec. 29 press conference about “philosophical discussions,” which usually refer to differences on the field. Here, however, those differences seemed to have centered on what happened off it.

The Niners had six men who were arrested 10 times – six men, 10 times. Here’s York on that – sort of:

“The NFL is made up of players that have mixtures of personality. We need to find a way to get to the guys that are potentially on the edge, that have the ability to really be good guys . . . And that's when you get to the teacher to make sure that you find a way to reach those guys instead of going to the other side, keeping them on the side of the road that fits with our core values."

Uh-huh. What does this mean? ...