Maddux Sports Blog

It sucks to be Matt Holliday right now. Last night’s Cards loss to the Dodgers is one of those rare cases where a loss can be pinned solely on one player. It’s as simple as this – if Holliday hadn’t bobbled the line drive that hit his gut instead of his glove then the Cards would be tied in the series instead of down by two games. Holliday probably feels like killing himself, but he shouldn’t beat himself up too much – the team only played as well as they did down the stretch because of the play of Holliday. He’s a good player who had a bad day. That’s all. It will be very interesting to see how he bounces back from this setback.

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An interesting stat I saw today – the three teams that fired their offensive coordinators right before the season (Bucs, Bills, and Chiefs), have combined to go just 1-11 so far, and that one win only came when two of them met (the Bills beat the Chiefs). That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement for making a change. Of course, it’s not likely that they would have been significantly better with the original OCs still in charge. We’ll have to wait longer to properly analyze this one.

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Well, I hadn’t been too excited about baseball for a while now, but that all changed yesterday afternoon. What a freaking ball game that was! It was like watching a boxing match – punch and counter-punch all night long. It’s been a long while since I have enjoyed a game so much. Now it will be interesting to see what happens tonight in New York. The Yankees have been handed tonight’s game on a silver platter – an emotionally and likely physically exhausted team with nasty travel and a depleted bullpen. They will be humiliated if they can’t take advantage of it.

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A little football, then a little baseball today:

First, the football. That was a very interesting game last night. I wasn’t particularly excited about it – fatigue over the Favre hype. In the end, though, it ended up being interesting for a number of reasons. First, and most troubling for Green Bay, that is one terrible offensive line they have there. Jared Allen is a nice player, but not nearly that nice. He absolutely decimated Aaron Rodgers and the Packers, and gave them little chance of success. The Packers were a team I was very keen on coming into the season, but they stand little chance of doing anything meaningful until they find a way to offer even a little bit of protection. That was pathetic. On the other side, Minnesota’s offensive line performance was very mixed. On one hand, Favre had all of the time in the world to do whatever he wanted, and he made the most of it. On the other hand, though, Adrian Peterson was contained in a very surprising and uncharacteristic way. The final piece of interest out of this game is the question of just how good they Vikings are. They are 4-0 and will be hyped up significantly after this high profile win, but I still don’t feel like we have seen them really be tested. The first two wins against the Browns and the Lions prove nothing. The San Francisco game probably should have been a loss if it wasn’t for the fluky last second pass. The Packers weren’t a particularly real test either given that offensive line. Next up is the Rams, too, so this team will be 5-0 without a true test. This team is good, but we won’t know how good until we see them play the Ravens in week six. In my eyes this is a very tough team to assess right now.

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I love how short people’s attention spans are and how fleeting their loyalty is. Coming into this season Tim Tebow was the golden child. He was headed to an almost certain national championship. the Heisman was his to lose, and he was being talked about as the best college player ever. He has a rough game against Tennessee, though, and all of a sudden articles pop up everywhere about his faults and how he has never really looked like a QB who could compete on the next level. One article I read even suggested that his NFL position could be safety. It’s all just funny – he’s the same QB now that he was before the season started, and he is stillbenefiting from the same system offense. What I do find interesting about it, though, is that the defensive coordinator who unleashed this latest wave of articles is Monte Kiffin. He’s a wily NFL veteran who coached defense in the NFL in one capacity or another non-stop from 1983 until this year. If he was able to giveTebow that much trouble with a new and reasonably depleted unit then you have to believe that NFL systems would eat him for lunch. Don’t worry, though -Tebow is just one good game away from being declared a god again.

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The Colts may have got a win to move to 2-0 tonight, but I’m sure not convinced by them yet. They got very lucky to win that one given that they barely had the ball on offense, and they weren’t always impressive when they did. If Miami had any ability at all to manage the clock down the stretch then both of these teams would have been 1-1. I didn’t think that the Colts were going to be elite this year before the season, and I haven’t seen anything yet to make me change my mind.

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It’s  my birthday today. I am older than Tom Brady, but much younger than Brett Favre. I am at that age when you really start to cringe when you hear about a guy who has retired because he can’t physically do it anymore, and then you realize that he is younger than you. I could be the father of a college freshman (physically, I mean. There is sadly one good reason why I am 100 percent sure that I am not, and it has everything to do with what it takes to make a baby – that just wasn’t happening back then), but putting him up for adoption probably would have been the right thing to do because I would have been too young to raise him. If I were an NFL coach or MLB GM I would still be young enough to be surprising, but by a lot of measures I’m starting to feel pretty old.

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The Blue Jays seem determined to rip every shred of decency out of this season. It seems impossible to believe, but they were actually competitive back in April, and people thought for a while that they may be able to keep their act together. Instead, they have been the pathetic laughing stock of the league. Last night they found a way to sink to a whole new low. They couldn’t just accept that they were beating up on the Yankees in New York behind their ace, Roy Halladay . Instead, they had to mar the win with an ugly brawl. The benches cleared twice, and the second time it got ugly – punches were thrown, players wrestled on the ground, and there was general chaos. A fittingly ugly chapter in one of the uglier seasons baseball has seen in a while. Never has a team needed a total, top-to-bottom house cleaning more than this one.

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Wow, was Michael Vick ever bad last night. 7 of 11 sounds good until you hear that it was only for 26 yards, and that he threw a pick. The ball was all over the place and he looked like, well, a guy who hasn’t played football in a couple of years. There’s another factor here, too – it’s going to take a while for Vick to get back to where he was, but remember that where he was wasn’t exactly at the top of the pile n terms of accuracy. The guy has never been much of a passer, so expecting miracles is probably a bit silly. My expectations for his week three return are very low – even if it is against the Chiefs so he will have all the time in the world to pass because that team is seemingly allergic to the pass rush.

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I was very, very disappointed to see the Vikings play last night. I’m so sick of Favre and his whole act that I was really hoping he’d continue to struggle. Hopefully that would lead him to going away faster. Unfortunately, he looked perfectly competent last night. In fact, he looked even a little better than than. He was comfortable and confident, and you could already tell that he was enjoying the concept of having an all-World running back for the first time. I don’t feel nearly as assured now of the ultimate failure of this experiment as I did a while ago, and that disappoints me.

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