In the 1970s especially, the NFL was about running the football and tough defense and not giving up big plays when it came to winning championships, and, in a lot of cases, just winning, period. The very good teams in the 1970s like the LA Rams were defensive and run-oriented partly because the rules until 1978 heavily favored defensive football and that is what you see in this game, a Rams team with a great defense and running game taking apart a finesse-oriented passing team like the Cardinals.
Roger Goodell and company may want to try to outlaw defense in the National Football League and try to make the NFL look like flag football, where perhaps even tackling may soon become illegal, because they believe offense makes money and defense holds down profits, turning the NFL into the AAML or the All About Money League instead of the NFL. They are trying to get non-traditional football fans who are really only interested in celebrity culture and so-called reality TV, and perhaps are casual football fans at best, because they think some of the players are awesome or whatever. Defense still wins championships and it always will.
As Phil Clark said on his blog, you don’t need a great defense to win the Super Bowl but you can’t have the worst defense. And the only thing I would add to that is you can’t have a bad defense either. You need to at least have a good defense. A defense that gets stops, meaning consistently, prevents the other team from scoring. It doesn’t get run over in the running game on a regular basis and doesn’t consistently give up big plays in the passing game because it has a weak secondary or a weak pass rush, or a combination of the two.
If you look at all of the Super Bowl Champions, all 48 of them had defenses that were in the top 10 or near that and didn’t give up a lot of points either. You can’t say that about the Super Bowl runner ups, because several of them were toward either the bottom of the NFL or in the low twenties when it came to yardage and points given up. The 1984 Miami Dolphins come to mind very quickly and so do the 2007 New England Patriots, which were 18-0 going into Super Bowl 42 before they were upset by the New York Giants and did have one of the top defenses in the NFL that year.
There also have been explosive, high-scoring and yardage Super Bowl runner ups that were ranked pretty well in defense the year or years they went to the Super Bowl but not only lost the Super Bowl but lost it badly. The Buffalo Bills of the early 1990s come to mind very quickly, where they gave up a total of 140 points in their 4 losses, 30 or more in the 3 blowout losses, not because they had a bad defense but because they had an undersized defense going up against big physical teams with great running games: New York Giants in 1990, Redskins in 1991 Dallas Cowboys in 1992 and 1993.
And again the casual NFL fan who may only be interested in offensive football may say, well, what about the St. Louis Rams on 1999 or the Green Bay Packers of 2010 or the San Francisco 49ers of the 1980s or the Redskins of the 1980s. They were all very offensive-oriented teams that all racked up a lot of yards and scored a lot of points. True, but all of these teams, and the 49ers and Redskins specifically, were all consistently ranked high on defense in the top 10. I mean, the 1991 Redskins Super Bowl Championships team scored over 500 points, over 30 points a game, but they gave up only14 points a game and won a lot of blowouts.
The record and evidence are very clear, that if you are think about building a Super Bowl winner and you think you are going to put together a great offense and see how many points you can score that season or in that era, make sure you also invest well in your defense so you are not giving up nearly as many points and yards against your opponents as well, because when the playoffs come around, chances are you’ll face at least one good defensive team that can move the ball and score points as well that may match up well with you. And you may need to get a lot of stops in that game to have a good chance at winning, as the 2007 Patriots found out the hard way in Super Bowl 42.
As much as Roger Goodell and company may want to change this, football still has three sides of it and the NFL is not arena ball, where it is mostly about offense. You still need to play good defense and have a good special team as well, no matter how many points you score and yards you put up. Breaking offensive records doesn’t lead to championships but to having a good balanced team that scores, defends, covers kicks, kicks the ball, blocks and tackles, and so forth, which is still what it takes to win the Super Bowl.
I agree with Representative Steve Cohen that marijuana prohibition is definitely a joke and overwhelmingly hurts ethnic and racial minorities compared with Anglos and Caucasians. It is a war on freedom to criminalize what people do to themselves, especially when we are talking about a drug that can’t kill you immediately, unlike heroin or cocaine. We are really talking about a drug as it relates to health aspects like alcohol. It is actually far less dangerous than tobacco, which is legal.
A couple of things irritate me about the far left in the Democratic Party (social democrats or even socialists, as I call them) when it comes to their political analysis. One is that they believe Democrats and Republicans are the same and that therefore American elections do not matter. As the great socialist philosopher Noam Chomsky said, we don’t have a two-party system but a one-party system, a business party that contains both Democratic and Republican factions. The other irritating thing is that the Democratic Party is not far enough to the left for them, or as I would put it, the DP is not a social democratic party. Well, we are the Democratic Party, which has a social democratic faction, which is very different from, let’s say, Britain, where the socialists are the major faction in the Labour Party.
But I give social democratic writer Michelle Goldberg credit when she says the job of what she calls the left and I call the far left, is to support the best person on the left who can actually get elected, what she would probably call a moderate Democrat, to prevent a right-wing Republican from winning a House or Senate or State office seat, or the presidency, especially if Republicans control at least one of the legislative chambers, whatever the level is.
And then Michelle Goldberg goes on to say, and I paraphrase, that before the elections you should work hard to get the furthest left Democrats with the most in common with you ideologically elected, or at least winning the Democratic primary, so you don’t have to settle for the establishment moderate in the fall. That is where I agree with the Michelle Goldberg clones on the far left, in other words, if you don’t like what is on the menu, then work to change the menu or find another place to eat, or another political party.
My point is that if social democrats are unhappy with the Democratic Party, they have a couple of options. One is to change the Democratic Party, but not wait until the last few weeks or months of election campaigning to do that. They should get to work during the off-year of the election to encourage more people who ideologically represent them to either be active in the Party or run for office and help those people get the resources to become competitive. Or they should leave the Party to form that social democratic party they want, or the Green Party, or the Democratic Socialist Party, instead.
The reason the Bullets left Baltimore in 1973, I believe, for Washington is the same reason Baltimore doesn’t have an NBA franchise now of their own: their arena. They didn’t have a modern major league sports arena even by early 1970s standards and certainly do not have one right now. And if they ever want their own NBA franchise again they are going to have to build that modern downtown 18,000-seat arena with sky-boxes so an NBA franchise can be successful there.
Back in the day, before, lets say, the Religious Right era, the Republican Party was essentially a classically conservative, if not conservative, libertarian party that used phrases like “Get big government out of my wallet, bedrooms, classrooms, and boardrooms, to paraphrase Barry Goldwater, and former U.S. Senate Leader Bob Dole believed in that as well, despite his effort to appeal to Christian Conservatives in his 1996 presidential campaign.
But up until the late 1980s or so, the Republican Party not only had this conservative tradition but also a progressive faction that voted for parts of the safety net from the New Deal and Great Society but would never go along with a massive Scandinavian socialist welfare state, although it approved of a modest safety net for those who needed it. The party also voted for and supported the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and 1960s and was really the Party of Lincoln up until the late 1980s or so.
By the 1970s, with the Goldwater Conservatives and the Nixon Federalists now in control of the Republican Party, they still believed in many of these things, especially as they related to the safety net, but they were Federalists who believed social policy is best handled by the State and local governments and that the Federal safety net in a lot of cases would be best managed at those levels where they would be more efficient.
By 1980 or so, what is today called the religious and neo-right was now part of the Republican Party, and the party cannot win in the short term without them, especially since they aren’t doing much to bring in non-traditional Republicans, who aren’t nearly as far to the Right as the predominantly Anglo-Protestant Southern voters, especially on social issues. The Republican Party has now become the party of the libertarian Mountain West, Bible Belt South, and rural America.
Much different from where they were just 50 years or so ago, when Republicans were expected to be able to win statewide in New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, California, and other places and when the Republican presidential nominee was expected to carry those States. The Conservative Libertarian faction is still alive and well and perhaps even growing in the Republican Party, but not big enough to govern the GOP by itself without the neo-right.
“Jim Hart hits Mel Gray with a controversial game tying TD vs the Redskins. The catch would become known as the “Phantom Catch” and the Redskin fans are still not happy about it.”
The Redskins probably would have made the NFC Playoffs in 1975 had they beaten the Cardinals in St. Louis, and perhaps even the NFC East as well. But instead they missed the NFC Playoffs in 1975 for the first time since 1970, because their offense was inconsistent (at best) struggling to put points on the board all season and putting too much pressure on their very good defense. But the Cardinals, who had been longtime losers, were very good in 1974 and 1975, winning back-to-back NFC East titles.
“Ron Paul and William F. Buckley discussing a Constitutional Republic and the necessary evils of government. In 1988, Ron Paul was running as a Libertarian Presidential Candidate…
Where Ron Paul loses me is when he comes out in favor of abolishing the CIA, an organization without which we would never have won the Cold War, because of all the information it provided about the Soviet Union.
The CIA was critical to America in winning the Cold War because it could give us information about the Russians and their allies that we weren’t able to get before.
As far as the income tax goes, it is now in the United States Constitution, thanks to the constitutional amendment process, and government has the constitutional and legal right to tax people in the because of it.
I read both sides of the political spectrum, all the way from the far left to the libertarian right to the far right, and of course the center left, where I am, as well as the center right and anything else I might not have mentioned, so please do not get dizzy from reading this. I’m sure people who read my blogs probably do not like that and perhaps wish I only read articles on the Left and probably wish I was a hell of a lot more partisan as a Democrat as well. I do this because I like to know what people are thinking, especially those who disagree with me, but it also helps me as a blogger to see what the rest of the political world is thinking about.
I mention this for a couple of reasons. I am very liberal and do not want government controlling people’s lives, and based on that, I see plenty of articles from the far left and far right about new ideas and proposals to control people. This year alone, I read three posts about Thom Hartmann wanting to repeal the Second Amendment, an article in the far left magazine Salon about nationalizing the news media because of the success of FOX News, and an article from the far right blog The American Thinker proposing to outlaw tobacco. I am sure alcohol is not that far away either.
In 2012 alone, there were proposals from the Mike Bloombergs of the world (former mayor of New York City) arguing in favor of outlawing junk food and soft drinks. The notion behind these proposals is that government (or a select few and elitist individuals) knows best how Americans should live, even Americans they’ve never met or heard of and know nothing about. These elitists know best because they are attended school in the Northeast or West Coast or Ivy League, and anyway, Americans are basically dumb and can’t make these decisions for themselves.
Left or Right big government is too much government because it is government trying to control people and protect them from themselves, whether by prohibition of alcohol, food, and tobacco on the far left or outlawing pornography, premarital sex, adultery, abortion, and homosexuality on the far right. Being human is the ability to live, and part of that is about making mistakes, because, of course, none of us is perfect. By then learning from those mistakes, we can do better the next time and not repeat them.
Personal freedom and responsibility as well as opportunity are what my politics and ideology are based on, and that means individuals have the freedom to control their own lives. That means that property rights extend to people’s own bodies and that we have the final say in what we do in life as adults as long as what we are doing is not hurting others. We are then held personally responsible, for good or bad, for our own decisions.
Wow, President Obama losing a vote on one of his executive nominations in a Democratic Senate with a clear 55-45 majority, where the minority can no longer block executive nominations by themselves. This loss has to do with the fact that the nominee defended a controversial Philadelphia defendant, Abu Gamal, I believe his name is, who was convicted of murdering a Philadelphia police officer. It also shows you that President Obama is fairly weak politically right now, with an approval rating of around 40 percent, and can’t get even his party to support his decisions.
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