Karma and Fate in the Motor City

I don’t really know if I believe in stuff like karma or fate. If you want to throw all caution to the wind and say this will happen because it is supposed to, like you have no sense of free will, feel free.

But I wonder sometimes since things can even themselves out over time and twists can sort out if you let them. And when I think about the Detroit Lions, I think about if karma and fate are really a thing.

The Lions have long been a pretty awful team. I can remember watching a Thanksgiving game played in Detroit a few years ago where the most interesting thing was when security chased a guy with a “FIRE MILLEN” sign around the stadium. I remember that fan popping up two, maybe three different times in different places at Ford Field.

Meanwhile, what was happening on the field became secondary. I don’t suspect this is an unusual circumstance in Detroit.

A lot has been written this year about a renaissance of sorts in Detroit recently. One-time resident and author Jeffrey Eugenides recently praised the city and said he’s trying to convince his wife to move back to the city with him. There’s that Chrysler ad you’ve probably seen, too.

More recently there’s a story in Sportsnet Magazine about the success of the Lions and Tigers this fall; one of whiom got off to a hot start and the other finished the season strong. Justin Verlander’s not only a likely Cy Young winner, but is getting serious MVP talk, too. And the Lions won their first five games in row too, their best start since 1956.

Things have not gone quite as good in the interim, though.

The Tigers fell apart in the championship series, losing in six games. They dropped three of the first four and lost game six 15 to five. In four postseason appearances, Verlander’s ERA jumped to 5.31 and his WHIP to 1.45, both much worse than his regular season numbers. His first start now seems like an omen: a game in the pouring rain, delayed after an inning until the next day.

In so many words, the Tigers ran aground against one of, and maybe the, best teams in baseball. This isn’t meant to disparage what they did. It’s more of a “hey, things even out sometimes.”

The Lions are doing their own evening out, too. Since a 5-0 start, they’ve dropped two games in a row: a surprising loss to San Francisco and a more maddening one to Atlanta.

Granted, the Niners are their own good story. It used to be a given that whatever NFL preview magazine I picked up would always ask “IS THIS THE YEAR THE NINERS PUT IT ALL TOGETHER” in breathless hyperbole and big, bold letters and every year the answer was usually no, it wasn’t. They haven’t had a winning season or made the playoffs since 2002. Remember, Seattle won the NFC West last year with just seven wins.

So it was inevitable that when two good stories met, one would stop being so good. That’s fine; the Niners were the better team that day. Sunday, it was a more traditional loss: the Falcons got to Matthew Stafford, sacking him three times, picking him off once and generally banging him up.

That Falcons defence shut down the Lions. Atlanta held the ball for nearly 10 minutes more and picked up nearly twice as many first downs. No Detroit running back picked up more than 50 yards or scored. Indeed, Detroit was one-for-12 when it came to third downs. Later, Lions tackle Ndamukong Suh is said to have taunted and mocked Matt Ryan after the Falcons quarterback went down hard, kicking his feet and saying stuff like “get the cart.”

Admittedly, it’s pretty tame stuff (I’d be surprised if this wasn’t said all the time, really). But Yahoo Sports’ Mike Silver put it best: “If you believe in karma, you are cringing as you read this.”

Any football fan will remember that Stafford is pretty fragile, as far as athletes go. He’s never played more than 10 games in a season. He’s hurt his knee and both shoulders in his three-season career. And he’s got hurt against Atlanta, too, limping off the field as the game ended. A MRI was negative, but still, this is someone with a history.

Ultimately, the two losses make me wonder about the Lions’ hot start. Stats like Simple Rating System or Point Differential suggest they’re one of the better teams in the NFL, not just the NFC. They’re there largely from a great passing game (Calvin Johnson’s season is an underreported story, I’d argue) and a good passing defence (10 picks, 17 sacks and about 204 passing yards allowed per game).

But last year, I thought they looked like a good team. And after injuries to key players they finished with six wins. It could easily happen again this year. It could happen any year, really.

I don’t know if I believe in karma. I don’t know if ALCS was more about the Tigers settling down than it was about powerful hitting by the Rangers. I don’t know if a few taunts led to a MRI on Monday. I don’t think they did and they probably didn’t. I just know that if I was a Detroit fan, I wouldn’t want to chance fate

The ying and yang of the Blue Bombers and Alouettes

Last Saturday, Montreal went into the fourth quarter of their game against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers up 25 to 10. When the game ended, the Alouettes lost by a single point, 26-25.

Winnipeg roared back into the game in the fourth on 16 unanswered points: two majors and a field goal. Blue Bombers quarterback Buck Pierce completed 9 of 13 pass attempts for 97 yards. Chris Garrett ran for two scores. Most importantly, the Bombers defence shut down Montreal: Anthony Calvillo was picked off three times in the game. In the fourth, he was limited to four completed passes. Five, if one counts the one intercepted by Winnipeg's Jonathan Hefney.

How complete was the shutdown? Montreal picked up just two first downs in the final quarter.

The loss wasn't just a blown lead. It was a complete collapse. And it's happened before. About a month ago, Montreal nearly blew another game to the Bombers: a Montreal lead of 19 points was whittled away to just six. The game ended with Winnipeg on Montreal's one-yard line after two failed quarterback sneaks.

That's two games where the Blue Bombers have taken it to Montreal late in the game. That's twice their meetings have ended with the two tied for the Eastern Division lead. The funny thing is, it shouldn't have been that way.

The Alouettes have been good in recent memory. They've led the division for the last three consecutive years. This season, they have the best home record and a quarterback leading the CFL in passing yards, touchdowns and passer rating.

Earlier this season, Calvillo set the all-time record for total passing yards. Not the CFL record. The record for all of professional football. He even made the leap to the US, getting a profile story in Grantland. It's not unfair to call Montreal the class of the CFL; in an offence-driven league, they've amassed the most points and set the standard.

But the Bombers are also good: they have an identical record as the Alouettes, 10 wins, five losses. They've taken Montreal right to the brink twice in the last month. And it came despite losing two running backs and questionable quarterbacking.

Their starting running back, Chris Garrett - the guy who scored two fourth-quarter touchdowns on Saturday - was released by the team after training camp and was only resigned in August. He only got onto the field after two Bombers running backs had season-ending knee injuries against Toronto.

Winnipeg quarterback Buck Pierce has not has a good year, either. He's right in the bottom of CFL quarterbacks, with only Toronto's two starters below him in passing yards. He's thrown for just 14 scores (again, only above Toronto's two quarterbacks) and his 17 interceptions are the most in the CFL. He is not their Calvillo.

So with a QB who has passing issues and a running back that wasn't even on the team for most of the season, how are the Bombers tied for first in the east? Well, for the same reason why they've been such trouble for the East's other good team: defence.

On Saturday, the Blue Bombers defence kept the Alouettes at bay. Not just in the fourth, but throughout the game. Calvillo was picked off three times, sacked six times and held to just 199 yards and zero touchdown passes. It was one of the worst games of the season for the CFL's best passer. But this game was no outlier: the Blue Bombers defence has allowed the fewest points in their division.

Two Blue Bombers - Odell Willis and Jason Vega - are among the CFL leaders in sicks; together, they've picked up 22 sacks. And there's three Winnipeg players among the top six in interceptions, too. As a team, they have 24 picks. This is not a defence to sleep on.

The Bombers had some luck, too: a call that went their way led to the league firing an official. And weak teams in Toronto and Hamilton hasn't hurt their season, either: they've posted a CFL-best 7-2 record division record.

And they've had surprises, too: in only four games, Garrett's ran for 353 yards, 13th in the CFL. And his 88 yards per game is highest in the league. Who expected that from a player so deep in the team’s depth chart?

There are issues. As said above, Pierce is not an ideal quarterback and Garrett's far from proven. Their offensive line's had troubles, too: in their victory over Montreal, Pierce was sacked three times; this season, . There's special team problems too: their kicker missed twice on Satuday; this season he's hit just over 72 per cent of his kicks, one of the worst percentages among the CFL's kickers.

Still, Winnipeg and Montreal feel like the two sides of the same coin: where one has the league's best offence, the other has the best defence. Their last two matchups have not only gone down to the wire, but have played a role in the division's lead. With two games left in the regular season, each has a chance to clinch a bye-week. Montreal's facing Calgary and BC, two teams who have clinched postseason spots but are still competing for a bye week. Winnipeg is also facing Calgary but they play Toronto, a team that's living in the CFL's cellar.

What that means is either team can still win the division. And while it's no given that the two will face each other in the postseason, it feels like they will. If it's been anything like their last two meeting have been, look out: the team that shouldn't be there on paper could be the one that makes it out.

There'll never be another like Al Davis

The Raiders press release called Al Davis a maverick. If there ever was an understatement, this was it. Davis was a maverick of the old school, from when the word wasn’t a political cliché or a fighter pilot. He was unpredictable, cunning and a hell of a lot of fun to have around.

Al Davis was a lot of things, including a progressive. He hired the first black coach in the modern era, the first Hispanic coach and quarterback and hired the NFL’s first woman CEO. He gave many of his players a chance to play pro football when nobody else would – just think of how many people he picked up off the scrap heap.

He was a champion of the rights of owners, challenging the NFL’s monopoly and asserting the right to move his team as he saw fit. He was the person whom so many clichés originally described: a maverick that did things his own way and just won, baby.

There are less fun details. He shuttled his team up and down the California coast, twice leaving behind a vibrant community of fans. He gave off the sense of a paranoiac, especially in dealings with coaches and the media. And he was a constant thorn in the side of former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle; one biography of Rozelle all but blames Davis for the commissioner’s health problems and early retirement.

Everybody sees the Raiders are Davis’ team. But his contributions to pro football far outweigh just one team. As commissioner of the AFL, Davis led a drive to sign away NFL talent, a move that all but pushed the competing leagues together and ushered in the modern era of pro football.

But by 1970, when the two leagues merged, Davis had long since returned to the Raiders as part owner and head of football operations. The teams he built in that decade are some of the NFL’s most infamous and talented, with players like John Matuszak, Kenny Stabler and Fred Biletnikoff. In the golden years of the Raiders, they were good on the field and wild off of it.

When Stabler’s biography details on training camp with the Raiders, it reads like a Hunter Thompson story: all-day practices and all-night parties, fuelled by pills and booze (Matuszak was partial to Crown Royal and Quaaludes). Indeed, Hunter Thompson once described the Raiders as the flakiest team in pro football and compared Davis to Sonny Barger.

In his seminal book on football, Paul Zimmerman was more blunt: he called Davis a “master spy, master trader wheeler-dealer and rogue.” He detailed the tricks Davis used to pull: changing visiting team’s practice spots at the last minute, have his grounds crew unroll tarps while the visiting team is still practicing and the time he snuck workers into Shea Stadium on the eve of an AFL championship game to build an illegal heating tent on the Raiders bench. Davis cultivated an aura of pushing things to their breaking point, doing everything he could to give his team the advantage.

Every obituary on Davis makes one point crystal clear: Davis personified the Raiders like no other owner, coach or manager ever has or will. The Raiders were his baby, right from the get-go. Everything, from team colours to management went through Davis. As the recent years have shown, he was a control freak. He’d fire coaches with little warning and even less pretext, once burning through three in five years. When the move to Los Angeles gave the Raiders ownership of luxury suites, the Raiders started charging rent to the stadium’s other users.

And culturally, it’s hard to think of another football team that mattered more than the Raiders. When asked why NWA wore Raiders colours, Ice Cube said “it’s a thing where you looked right, it felt right.”

One is tempted to define him on the above, with a glance to his long-term successes: the Raiders once went from 1968 through 1978 without a losing season. They won three Super Bowls with Davis around and went to another in the 2002 season. Doing this misses the point.

I didn’t know Davis, but it’s pretty easy to say he was complex man. A story that paints him as a colorful rogue(“His clothes seemed to matter more than half the players he ever drafted”) looks past how he helped former players. Another that suggests maybe he overdid it (he “often pushed the boundaries of what some people thought was acceptable”), never mentions how often he won when challenging the NFL.

It’s foolish to think about Davis and the Raiders without addressing everything the man did for pro football. What he did with the team almost never happens in culture, especially in so short a time. The Raiders almost exist outside of pro football. Their black and silver are iconic, representing not just a team, but also an attitude.

It cannot be said enough: no owner will ever mean as much and make the same impact on professional sports as Davis did with the Raiders. And that's a shame.

Words from the worst sports city in the world

Grantland, presented by Subway, published a story on Wednesday calling Toronto the worst sports city in all the world. This is a unique distinction which, if I understand it correctly, makes it a worse place to be fan than Tehran, home of Azadi Stadium; worse than Pyongyang, where all soccer is played under the guidance of Fatherly Leader and his invisible cell phones; worse than Yangon, Burma or Freetown, Sierra Leone.

How did it get to be such a bad place? Because the teams lose, mostly. Most of the time, anyway.

After all, it's horrors beyond horrors that Toronto hasn't won anything since 1993 (unless you count the Argos, which Marche doesn't do until it suits his hypotheses). I wake up in the middle of the night with a jolt, sweat-drenched, angry beyond words about Tie Domi on a semi-regular basis. But it also isn't that big of a deal: so what if the Leafs lose every year. The Cubs haven't won a World Series since 1908 and life has gone on there ever since. The Jays lost tonight. C'est la vie.

It's worth noting that in his slam on Toronto, Marche gets a few little things wrong. Like who owns the Blue Jays (Rogers, not MLSE), the Argos record, the idea the Leafs haven't purchased any players despite a vast riches (never mind that the NHL operates on a salary cap) or that Toronto never took to Mats Sundin (never mind the ovation he got as a Vancouver Canuck). And it's Marche's opinion that the Leafs best chance at winning a cup was in 2001, but don't forget they made it deeper in the playoffs the next year.

To me, the biggest question about the whole piece is why. Why does he think Toronto is so bad for fans? It certainly doesn't bother me that the Jays are missing the postseason since I'm not the guy from Big Fan. Toronto teams lose; every city has losing teams. When Marche calls out the Leafs for not making the playoffs in six years, one wonders why that's some violation of his fandom. The Pittsburgh Pirates haven't made the playoffs recently either and nobody proposes the "inverted statue" for their owners. And nevermind that Marche doesn't mention the Leafs were a two points - one NHL win - away from the playoffs in 2007.

There's a kernal of truth when he says the city loves scrappy overachiever; the mundane player who shows up on time, all the time. John MacDonald was beloved here and the Jays went as far as to honor Kelly Gruber's number. Every Leaf fan I've ever known - myself included - has adored Wendel Clark, who - lets face it - was a not a strong first-overall pick.

But find me a city where this doesn't happen. Boston, recently named the best sports city in the world, idolized the Lunch Pail Gang teams of the late 1970s. Find me a media market that didn't award David Eckstein the title "scrappy."

He only focuses on the minor teams when they fail, too. The Argos are underwhelming right now, but they won the Grey Cup in 2004. He ignores every season of Toronto FC except their first, when they were an expansion team. Even the Toronto Raptors get shortchanged: they're mentioned twice and their postseasons - 2008 and 2007 - go unnoticed.

If Toronto sports are failing you so completely, Marche, maybe it's time you took a break to one of the world's better sports towns. I hear Pyongyang is nice this time of year. And they have a good soccer program, too.