Week 3: Defeat the Undefeated

The best thing about Week 3 of this NFL season was that only two teams emerged with still-unblemished records; and, that those two teams, the Bears and the Chiefs, are not going to go a whole season undefeated. I got tired of the undefeated talk of the last few seasons, the will-this-team-do-what-no-other-has-done stuff. It distracts from the focus on pure football, in search instead of some storyline that will generate more breathless media-babble. GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) talk is generally fairly silly, given that the majority of people doing the talking are extrapolating from a completely unrepresentative sampling (how many modern writers/commentators have actually seen Jim Brown play, or Johnny Unitas, or Red Grange, or Dick Butkus?). Instead of focusing on whether someone is "the greatest", I'm more interested in hearing descriptive analyses of what constitutes the fact that an individual player is deemed "great".

For example, an article about the nuances of the cornerback position that appeared in Sports Illustrated last year. One of the cornerbacks interviewed talked about the difficulty of defending Randy Moss. Not that Moss was tall, or fast, or has good hands, blah-blah-blah. What the cornerback described was Moss's level of physical control: namely, that when a ball is coming Randy's way, his eyes don't track it, his expression doesn't change, so that there's no obvious "tell" in his eyes or face that lets the cornerback know it's time to turn around and defend the ball that's headed his way. That's the kind of insight that genuinely increases my enjoyment of the game.

So anyway, my thanks to all the Week 3 smashers of undefeated dreams. Legacies shmegacies; let the '72 Dolphins crack open their case of champagne early this year.

Final note: Thursday is a bit late to be writing about the previous week's games, obviously. I am realizing I need to make more time for this blog than I thought I'd need to. So, starting next week, I'll be posting summaries of the weekend's action on Tuesdays, and will find time during the rest of the week to publish a post or two with some kind of special focus. All posts, of course, will feature an unabashed enthusiasm for this excellent, American game we call football. Football!