On Randy Moss

Randy Moss is the greatest football player I've ever seen in person. Back in 1997, I lived in Northeast Ohio, and a friend and I drove over to Kent State to watch Moss and Chad Pennington when they both played for Marshall. I'd never seen anything like it--Moss could break open whenever he wanted; he leapt over people, ran past them, and then ran around them. It was the closest thing I'd ever seen to a video game come to life.*

In retrospect, it seems absurd that Moss slipped to 21st in the NFL draft. Here was the extent of his moral transgressions up to then: A high-school fight that appeared to have been sparked by racist taunts, and a positive test for marijuana. I'm not sure why either of those things were enough to scare people away. My guess it was something more than that. My guess is that teams were scared away from Randy Moss because as with a lot of truly transcendent athletic talents, he's a pretty complicated figure.

I don't know Randy Moss. I've never spoken to him, and I've only heard him speak at length a few times, so everything that follows is pure dime-store speculation. But I find him fascinating, and not just because he may be (along with LeBron James) the greatest pure athlete of his generation. I find him fascinating because he seems to have an incredibly twisted relationship with authority. His whole existence is a John Mellencamp song; much of the time, he seems to be at war with his own psyche, which is what makes those past couple of press conferences so fascinating--there is nothing more intriguing than watching a man conduct a public disagreement with himself.

In 2002, Moss allegedly bumped a police officer with his car because he wanted to make a turn he couldn't make. In retrospect, that seems like a fitting metaphor. He was never consumed by vanity like Terrell Owens; he was never a self-promotional goofball like Chad Johnson. He didn't seem particularly violent, even after charges of domestic violence emerged. Moss has always seemed more interested in testing people, in pushing boundaries with the people in charge: Coaches, executives, media members. Maybe what he wants to see is how much they push back. Clearly, that's what he was doing with Brad Childress, who might have handled the whole problem with a single conversation, but who might have lost Moss's respect before Moss even landed in that locker room, given the way he's subjugated himself to his own quarterback.

And this, of course, is what's so extraordinary about Moss's time in New England, because Bill Belichick is a man who manages to earn his players' respect while at the same time making them fully aware that they are simply cogs in a much larger machine. But I think New England worked for Randy Moss because he is not simply guided by his own hubris. I think New England worked for Randy Moss because, while he may have been such a great athlete for such a long time that he has no concept of ordinary reality, he does understand that most of the people who guide his fate do see him as a cog in a machine. And maybe there's a certain peace in knowing that, rather than having it smoothed over, rather than having authority figures either subjugate themselves to him or overreact to relatively minor transgressions. Maybe the irony in this is that all Randy Moss needs to be happy is to feel he's being treated like an adult.

*At least until I watched Oregon's offense this season.

On Belichick

What follows is utter speculation, as is every bit of angst and schadenfreude spilling from the sporting corners of these here Internets today. Nobody really knows what Bill Belichick was thinking when he made the decision to go for broke against the Colts last night, and we probably never will know. The Patriots are as sealed and secretive a franchise as we've ever seen in the modern age, having adapted the pathologically competitive nature of their coach; therefore, it is up to us to guess, and to argue, and in this way, Belichick has done us a favor: He has given us perhaps the single-most interesting regular-season NFL game of the decade, another watershed moment in what has now become the aughts equivalent of Lakers-Celtics.

For that alone, it is hard not to offer Belichick a little bit of credit, even if you hate his guts. We spend our lives calling on coaches to take chances, to defy conventional wisdom, to do something interesting, for once, rather than falling back on the somnolent principles of Tresselball. Well, Belichick did something so interesting that I still kind of can't believe it actually happened in the NFL. It essentially reinforced his own stereotype (as an arrogant jerk) while simultaneously questioning everything we think we know about football. The backlash, of course, will be unrelenting, because people outside of New England have developed an irrational hate of Belichick (for reasons both justified and idiotic), and because it's always difficult to grasp something that seemingly defies logic, but is, in fact, utterly rational. And yes, this was a rational decision, according the simple calculations made by a dude named Brian over at a blog called Advanced NFL Stats. Read it; the numbers make sense. There is a better chance of the Patriots converting on a 4th-and-2 then there is of the Patriots stopping Peyton Manning on a protracted drive with two minutes to play.

So yes, I think Belichick made the right call. In fact, if he made any mistake at all, it was A.) Stupidly (and uncharacteristically) wasting his time-outs, and B.) Not taking his counterintuitive logic far enough. For by making this decision, he was essentially admitting that his defense could not stop Peyton Manning on a 70-yard drive. How, then, could he imagine his offense might stop Manning on a 30-yard drive? At that point, once the Patriots failed to convert on that fourth down, New England had no time outs left. They had no choice. They should have let the Colts score. By that, I mean bring the house on a blitz. If you get to Manning, then fine; if you don't get to him, then Indianapolis scores quick, goes up by a point, and you still have a minute left with an offense that had already driven the length of several Northeastern states. There is no question in my mind, if the Patriots had gotten the ball back with one minute to play and one time-out remaining, they could have set up for a field goal to win the game. Hell, the way this one was going, Moss might have even scored six.

Still, it's almost better that the Patriots failed. It adds another layer to depth of this rivalry, it adds another layer of drama when these teams inevitably meet again in the playoffs,* and it means that the oft-stodgy pastime of professional football has proven that it can be even more intriguing than the college game, if only for a single play.

*And clearly, the Patriots could afford to take a chance, because they are going to win their division, they could still get a first-round bye, and they have obviously proven that they can beat Indy on the road.