Wide Right: Tuesday Wide Right Thread

Wide right.

Wide right wide right wide right; wide right wide right!

Wide Right wide right, wide right Wide Right. Wide right wide right- wide RIGHT.

Wide.

Right.

Seriously though- it’s a fair cop, guv. A flawed and beat-up team got Got by another flawed and beat-up team with a better coach. It sucks that it came down to Tyler Bass-o-matic, and it sucks that the method of our execution fit The Narrative so well. But hey.

I am so tired I can’t even be disappointed, let alone sad or mad. Those things take emotional energy and investment. Hope is exhausting for a person like me, because it doesn’t come naturally.

I love football. But I needed it to be over.

I am the type of person for whom Spoon Theory provides a really really accurate and useful metaphor, although “fucks to give” has some currency as well. The concept is that each “task” during the day requires you to expend at least one spoon. For many people, you start every day with a finite number of spoons- big ones, small ones, fancy special-purpose ones, etc.

The game is to try to accomplish all the essential tasks (and as many additional tasks as possible) with your spoons. Each day, depending on things like illness, tiredness, etc., you may wake up with a different number of spoons, or a different mix. Today, for example, I have very few spoons and most are these:

Even things that are wonderful and great and soul-nourishing still require a spoon, potentially many spoons.

I have two wonderful, high-energy goblin children (one of whom only sleeps in three hour increments at best). I have a wife with a high intensity career and a complete inability to put things in the same spot twice. I have a job that… well, let’s go with “I have a job for which I am thankful they pay me more than my worth to society would dictate, but requires a large portion of my soul.”

That’s a lot of spoons spoken for already, often accounting for all my useful spoons. For self-care, I end up using one of those tiny wooden paddles that you get in the finest kind of ice-cream-in-a-paper-cup.

So it goes.

Against this backdrop, I really tried to get reinvested in the Bills as they pulled their shit together to run the table after the bye week. I was proud of them. But trying to find a spoon- any spoon- to devote to a deep post-season run was such a fucking struggle that the effort required its own spoon. To escape this recursive spoon-loop, loss or death were the only options. So I am glad Sean McDermott is a fucking pansy who got outcoached yet again.

Bad fan? Maybe. But I’m getting old. I don’t owe the team or anyone else shit with regard to my rooting interests.

Someone asked what I would do if Buffalo shitcanned McDermott and hired Belichick, clearly excited for me to squirm under the cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy of rooting for the Bills after they signed a deal with the devil. But I surprised myself (and them) by saying, without hesitation, that I would find another team.

Ten years ago I agonized about Jon Bon Jovi or (gasp) Donald Trump potentially holding sway over my childhood team, committing unspeakable acts to my cherished memories. Not any more. No more emotional sunk-cost fallacy.

I am broken, and in breaking, I am free.

NFL News:

-Carolina has promoted former franchise icon Dan Morgan to general manager. Morgan was assistant GM under the prior administration, and this decision (along with the continued coaching candidacy of defensive coordinator Ejiro Evero) is kind of weird given David Tepper’s “and piss on the ashes” approach to change management.

-Brian Johnson is the latest staff member to be jettisoned by Nick Sirianni in an effort to save himself.

Now, I’m not going to pound the table and yell about the injustice here: when a team makes this big of a shit sandwich, everybody gets to take a bite. The offense was not the unstoppable juggernaut from last year- while yardage and points were still Good, turnovers were way up. The defense was consistently putting them in worse positions than last year, and (from midseason on) they were not rising to the occasion.

Still, it feels a bit like scapegoating for Offensive SuperGenius Nick Sirianni to toss Johnson overboard in this circumstance.

-DonT’s Magnificent Tits may get a little more magnificent, with an alleged near-hiring of Brian Callahan from the Bengals. Being young (39) and tangentially connected to Sean McVay (through head coach Zac Taylor) make this an exciting hire. The fact that he didn’t call plays and his offense was blah-to-bad without Healthy Joe Burrow is…less exciting, given that Will Levis is very much not Joe Burrow. Also less than exciting: he’s another Nepo Baby, springing from the cursed loins of former Raiders/Cornhuskers coach Bill Callahan. Not everyone can say their daddy killed a historically-dominant college football program. As always, we’ll see what kind of staff he puts together, but I don’t hate the hire.

-The Raiders are hiring Tom Telesco, late of the Chargers, as their new GM. Telesco built and maintained a Talent Monster in San Diego/LA, and never seemed to put an obvious foot wrong- except for 1. signing JC Jackson, and 2. whatever role he had in selecting coaches. Given the decision to retain Antonio Pierce has already been made, and that Jackson is New England’s problem again, this looks like a Really Good Move. Weird.

-Jim Harbaugh is rumored to be signing on for the Big Spanos Experience. As I wrote previously, the Chargers are about as good a coaching situation as you could hope to parachute into, with two exceptions:

1. You have to work for the Spanos family, and

2. You have no home games.

Given that Harbaugh previously worked for Jed York and is secretly reviled even in Michigan, I’m not surprised he’s willing to blow through those stop signs. As Pete Carroll showed, running back to the NFL just ahead of sanctions is a Winning Move. This is better for Justin Herbert than many other options, but I still weep for my gentle long-haired introvert when Coach Maximum Intensity comes to town.

FINALLY: A note for Sean McDermott, Mike McCarthy and Nick Sirianni-