Wrapping things up

It's been a Helluva season in the NFL this year.

Gonna start with my beloved Patriots.

They lost a lot this season. They lost their quarterback, their safety, their signal-calling-linebacking leader, their running back, and a slew of supporting characters. And, ultimately, they lost in their bid for a playoff spot.

I'm not going to complain about the Chargers making it. Teams play the hand they're dealt, and the AFC East was tough this season. The West wasn't. Complaining about the Chargers making it would be hypocritical and disingenuous of me, given the blasting I gave "Hammering" Hank Steinbrenner over his whining about the Dodgers making it, in spite of the Yankees having a better record.

The Pats had plenty of chances to take care of business during the season and fell short - they were blown out of the water by a high school formation being run by the Dolphins in September; they had a three point loss to the Colts with a chance to tie it up late, only to get a personal foul that killed a potential game tying or winning drive; the defense failed to stop Brett Favre on a third and fifteen in overtime.

Win anyone of those and the Pats aren't looking for help Sunday, they win the division outright.

I'm not going to spend anymore time on that. What I will dwell on are the positives.

The Patriots found a guy that has potential to be a franchise quarterback. They saw strong performances from defensive rookies Jonathan Wilhite and Jerrod Mayo. Mayo started strong and Wilhite finished strong. The team began generating a pass rush late in the season with increased playing time for Mike Wright, Jarvis Green, and LeKevin Smith. The team found their running game, rushing for 628 yards over their last three contests. Before the injury, Pierre Woods looked more solid than he had ever been, and Gary Guyton looked like a keeper.

A lot of this gets the team a lot younger on the defensive side of the ball, and gives them a lot of flexibility in regards to what they want to do on that side of the ball going into next season.

When I've really had an opportunity to digest the Patriots' season, I will go over how I see the team going forward...now for the rest of the league...

Crush and burn...

This season has been a long, strange trip in which we learned a lot about a lot of teams - we learned who had heart, who was heartless, who was horrible, and who just plain didn't have balls.

Let's start with those who crashed and burned...

The Cowboys, Jets, Broncos, Redskins, Bills, and Buccaneers all were thought to be locks for the playoffs, or to at the very least challenge for them, at one time or another during the season. At the beginning of the season all the pundits thought that the Cowboys were the most talented team in the NFC East. Six games into the season the Bills were thought to be a lock, running away from the the AFC East before crashing hard to earth; later the Jets were the best team in the division before Brett Favre became color blind, throwing more completions to the guys in the other jerseys than he did touchdowns. In one game the Buccaneers defense aged before our eyes and never recovered, the Broncos showed us they were ready to be sold to the glue factory and the to say the Redskins became one-dimensional once Clinton Portis was injured would be generous.

We learned that Tony Romo might be the most over-hyped quarterback in the NFL, that Brett Favre wasn't the answer, and that all of those teams were soft and lacked heart when it was needed most.

Props to the Detroit Lions who completed only the second perfect 16 game regular season - their record will live in infamy and as a standard against which football futility will be measured. The team has now lost 17 straight going back to last season, putting them nine games behind the Buccaneers 26 game losing streak spanning the 1976 and 77 seasons. Of course, the Bucs were an expansion team. The Lions just suck. Even if they win a game within the first nine next season to avoid tying or beating the Bucs mark of futility, all they have to do is lose the first game to have the distinction of being the only team to have a losing streak span three consecutive seasons.

Then there was the just plain bad - and that covered a lot of teams. The Browns were a mess, as were the Bengals, Jaguars, Raiders, Chiefs, Seahawks, and Rams. These teams struggled as much with injuries (Seahawks, Chiefs, Jags, Bengals, Browns) and bad coaching (Rams, Raiders), as they did with boneheaded front offices (Raiders, Browns).

Just above them were the teams that fought their way to mediocrity, or underachieved into the same - the 49ers, Bears, Packers, Saints and Texans all ended up there usually due to some shortcoming on the team such as the Packers and Saints poor defense, or the Bears erratic offense.

Later I will hit on the playoff teams and the recent baseball developments.

Signs your team is headed in the wrong direction

• When ESPN promotes your game, they announce, "watch the Bears led by returner Devin Hester take on..." Let's face it, if the biggest star/most exciting player on the team you root for is the kick/punt returner, your team is in trouble.
• Matt Millen is the general manager of the team you root for. This needs no further explanation.
• Your general manager decides, in spite of all the other glaring weaknesses on the team, to let the team's leading wide receiver go in free-agency, and replaces him in the draft with a an injured kick returner that's not projected to be a number one receiver in the league. To make it worse, the GM let's him go to a division rival.
• Pundits struggle to justify why your team took a third-down back with a top five pick over a defensive end with nine-and-a-half sacks in his second year...and continue to claim that they still would have taken that running back over the defensive end if they re-did the 2006 draft today.
• The best excuse your defense can come up with for why they lost a game is that the refs were against them. Not that their own coordinator called a time-out, not that they killed themselves with obvious and blatant penalties - no, it has to be the refs' faults.
• Your franchise quarterback cops a guilty plea to a federal offense, players publicly feud with your new head coach on the sideline, and then said coach bails on the team 13 games into his contract. Quality judgement there by that front office.
• The best thing that can be said about a team's season is that they got their first win before the Dolphins.

Let's see - that would be, in succession: Chicago, Detroit, Miami, New Orleans, Baltimore, Atlanta, and St. Louis. Combined, those teams have a 29-69 record (aided greatly by the Saint's 7-7 record, and overall a rip-roaring .296 winning percentage). Are there other teams with problems? You bet. Are all of these teams heading in the wrong direction? You bet.

On a different note...

Over Thanksgiving, my brother-in-law noted some guy in the press bitching about the way Belichick dressed. If it bother people, fine. Is it Belichick probably thumbing his nose at the deal the NFL has with Reebok? Yeah, it probably is.

However...

Here's the funny thing - my wife was scanning the Patriots on-line store, presumably for a Christmas gift for me. While there, she noted something interesting - the Pats are marketing a Belichick hoodie as well as a Belichick throw. For the hoodie they're charging $75.00 and $45.00 for the throw.

What other team is able to market clothing under the name of the coach? Sure, you'll see the "like the polo worn on the sidelines by Mike Holmgren," or one of the other coaches, but you won't see it listed as "Holmgren Sideline Polo," it will be listed as, "Coach's Sideline Polo."

Welcome to Patriot Nation. It love's its coach.

Scraping the bottom

Sometimes in professional sports, scraping bottom isn't about finishing last. Sometimes its about the fact that the franchise is run into the ground for so long that employees feel like they go to work in a cave somewhere far below the level of the rest of the respective league - bad drafting, bad coaching, bad free agent signings, bad executive decisions (budget, contracts, etc.).

Some teams are so bad in a given season that they become a benchmark against which other teams are measured - the 1962 New York Mets won only 40 games; in the team's first season the Buccaneers lost all 14 regular season games, becoming the first NFL team to do so in the Super Bowl era; the 1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers won nine while losing 73.

Sometimes, as I said, it's less about the single season then it is about sustained periods of putrescence. Some teams just historically have issues - the Cubs, Browns, and Clippers have been the sad sacks of their respective leagues for years.

But who are the teams scraping bottom now?

Let's start with the worst of the worst -

The New York Knicks - The Isiah Years. Not including the partial season of 2003 - 2004 that Isiah Thomas has presided over this team as team president/GM and/or coach, and not including this season's sterling start, Isiah Thomas has managed to pad his resume with the following facts -

• The team has an aggregate record of 89 -157. Currently the team is on pace for roughly a 25 win season.
• Thomas himself has been embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal, found guilty by a jury of his peers.
• He has put together a team of individuals with the highest payroll in the league, but has never been able to get the team to .500.
• He has publicly feuded with his team's biggest star, Stephon Marbury, who claims he has the goods on Thomas and also admitted to sleeping with a team intern.
• Owner James Dolan has publicly supported Thomas, going as far as to say that he believed that Thomas was doing a good job and had the team headed in the right direction.

Sure, there are other teams that have finished below the Knicks in the standings (last year's Celtics for one), but none have had the combination of futility on the court, in front office, and in the court rooms as the Knicks have had.

The Knicks were, at one point, one the NBA's most storied franchises. Now they're the punchline.

A close second? The Matt Millen Detroit Lions - Like the Dolan owned Knicks, the ownership of the Lions is in serious denial about their general manager, Matt Millen. Millen has drafted poorly, made poor hirings of coaches, and has played the free-agent market like a neophyte stock broker on Wall Street. Like the Knicks, there have been teams that finished behind them, but no other team has been as consistently bad.

To wit, under Millen,

• Detroit had an assistant coach arrested for indecent exposure. Said coach faced no significant consequences from the team.
• The team has set a record for futility with six straight seasons of double digit losses, and are sitting at 6-6 this season after a four game losing streak (no general manager in NFL history has presided over any team with as many 10+ losses per season). With games remaining against Dallas, San Diego, Kansas City, and Green Bay, a seventh straight season isn't out of the question.
• Has gone through at least three head coaches.
• Repeatedly drafted wide receivers with a top ten pick when the team had glaring needs at other places like offensive and defensive line.

Number three is, of course, the Miami Dolphins - Since 1998, this might be a team with some of the worst personnel decisions in the NFL. Consider that starters tend to hit their stride in their third or fourth year - particularly the later round picks.

And the result of their drafting futility?

• In the six drafts from 1998 to 2003, Miami had 59 choices. It exercised 46 of those picks and used 13 other choices in trades to acquire veteran players. Only Ricky Williams, acquired in a draft day deal as one of those 13 other choices, is on the current Dolphins roster (with thanks to Peter King for these numbers).
• They weathered the Nick Saban experiment.
• And while the jury is out, picking a glorified and injured kick returner with their first rounder just goes against conventional wisdom from a personnel standpoint.

Amazing for a team that once was a perennial power in the AFC East.

Pittsburgh Pirates, Tampa Bay Devil Rays, and the Baltimore Orioles - Sure, I'm grouping these three together because these three teams prove that it doesn't matter how big or small a team's budget is when ownership has no idea what it's doing. Continuing a recent history of futility, the Pirates and Devil Rays have become nothing more than glorified triple A teams cultivating talent for the rest of the league. The Orioles and George Steinbrenner wannabe, Peter Angelos has shown that a team can go out and spend money and still suck.

Were it not for the fact that the Marlins have established a pattern of binging and purging in order to win championships, they would make this list as well.

NY Nuggets

In a season during which things seem to fall apart for the Yankees just when they seem like they might turn the corner, or at least get some sort of season highlight, it has happened again. On the night that Clemens gets his 350th career win, the Bombers' best offensive player injures himself and is likely headed to the disabled list.

For those out there that don't think Alex Rodriguez has been the best player at the plate for the Yanks this year, you're either blind or stupid. For the next two weeks, the Yankees are likely to be without the guy who has produced 80 of the team's 315 RBI's from the (current regular) starting nine. That's 25.4 percent of the team's RBI's. They lose the guy who hit 28 home runs of the starting nine's 68 homers, 41.18 percent. He has hit more than three times the number of home runs than the next most on the team (Posada, 9), and of the current line-up, to even come close to matching his home run production, it would take Posada, Matsui (8), Jeter (5), and Abreu (5) - in essence, half the line-up.

Call it a hunch, but this is going to be a long two weeks for the Yanks if A-Rod's hamstring is bad enough to be put on the DL. Add that to the fact that a hamstring injury makes A-Rod a less tradeable commodity if the Yanks wanted to try to replenish the farm system. Hamstrings are notoriously tricky and can have an adverse affect on a player's power numbers.

Yankees fans take note...
Yankees ownership feels that you are less important than the players. At least that is what the message seems to be when they allow Cynthia Rodriguez, A-Rod's wife, to wear a shirt that tells the fan base what it can do with itself.

Any fan would have been escorted to the gate, or at the very least, asked to cover the rude and inappropriate message on the shirt.

This is not going to help A-Rod endear himself to the New York fans.

Farnsworth on way out the door?
According to reports, after the blow-up between Joe Torre and pitcher Kyle Farnsworth, Farnsworth has been unavailable for the last two games due to what Torre told reporters was a sore or stiff back. When approached by reporters, Farnsworth said his back was fine and that he would have been able to pitch in either of the last two games if needed.

This sounds like someone who has seriously fallen out of favor with his manager, and might be suited to a change of scenery.

The hard truth...
The hard truth for Yankees fans is that their team through 79 games has won only 38. Sure, they're only about 8.5 games back in the wild card race, but the wild car leading Tigers are on pace to win 95 games. Seattle, Minnesota, Oakland, and Toronto are all between the Yankees and the Tigers and all are playing better baseball than the Yankees.

For the Yankees to get to that magic number of 95, the Yankees will have to go 57-26 for the remainder of the season.

It's time for New York to write off this season, trade some veterans for whatever they can get (and let's face it, Abreu isn't worth much, A-Rod is injured, decreasing their return on him, Giambi isn't worth anything to anyone, and a broken down Damon isn't going to draw much interest). But if they can get even three prospects that are even close to major league ready, that would be quite an accomplishment.

Let's look at one last hard truth. Brian Cashman isn't that great a general manager. He was not the architect of the World Series winners in the 1990's. Gene Michael and Bob Watson were. Watson and Michael built the farm system that produced Derek Jeter, Andy Pettitte, were smart enough to not trade away Jorge Posada, and generally had more power than what Cashman has been granted through the years.

Cashman has pretty much just had more that he could spend on the top free-agents than anyone else. This year he tried to put together a team on something of a budget and failed miserably.