Phil Mushnick
I figure I’ve paid attention to body language starting with birth. When I was born, I was so ugly the doctor slapped my mother. (I’ll be here all column!)
The Jets in recent years have emitted rotten body language beyond mere aroma. They’re sight gags that kinda make you gag on sight.
Two NFL preseasons ago I was left with bad body karma as CBS several times showed first-round Jets pick and No. 2 overall Zach Wilson enjoying a practice game he watched with friends and other injured teammates from a suite on the mezzanine level.
Seen in recreation mode during this game, it seemed that Wilson, about to start his first regular-season NFL game, could’ve put this time and place to far better use assiduously studying the game alongside a QB coach — as the starter, 13-year NFL veteran Joe Flacco, was in no further need of fundamental NFL tutoring and pre-snap recognition of defensive alignments.
But not only did Wilson waste this time and was allowed to waste this time, CBS conducted an in-game interview with Jets GM Joe Douglas, watching from a different booth.
Couldn’t shake those images. I took them as too-late cautionary body language, aka, neglect. I began to wonder if Wilson was devoted to becoming the best he could become, and whether the Jets, in exchange for their $35 million investment, were devoted to maximizing what made him the NFL’s No. 2 pick.
Same thing the year before, when the Jets, with their first draft pick — the NFL’s 11th overall — selected Mekhi Becton, a huge (overweight at as much as 370 pounds, often immobile as per being out of shape) offensive lineman, who has since proven chronically unreliable as both a lineman and one out with injuries, the latter perhaps caused or exacerbated by his weight.
The week he signed his $18.5 million deal, Becton said he celebrated by flying to Las Vegas to buy himself a $75,000 necklace that dangled his sparking, can’t-miss-it and perhaps telltale nickname, “Big Ticket.”
Thus, even before Becton began to prove that he would be more problem than solution, he provided body language that caused suspicion of his personal and professional values and devotion to his career. In addition to his big-ticket immodesty, these were not good omens, as I saw it, for Becton and the Jets.
It’s not a matter of hindsight as I wrote about the body language both Jets caused me the week they gave me reason for coming-your-way-soon doubt. Heck, had I been wrong I wouldn’t have written this.
Networks’ Madden deification is maddening
Kinda pathetic that both CBS and Fox on Thursday, with the NFL’s full cooperation, would produce telecasts in memory of and salute to John Madden’s regular-guy traveling Thanksgiving meal promotions.
For those who prefer truth to shallow pandering, Madden was a selfish, greedy, graceless, overly self-entitled, ungrateful man.
When Fox outbid CBS for NFL rights, Madden’s thanks to CBS having made him a star was zero — he left without a word of thanks to those “little people” he for years relied upon to do his pre- and postgame grunt work, from travel plans to special requests. Not a word of personal gratitude.
After signing with Fox, eventually for a then-staggering, record $6 million per (it’s still staggering for its senselessness), he demonstrated his loyalty and devotion by saying that he’d always entertained the thought of becoming ABC’s “Monday Night Football” lead analyst (provided the price was right).
I’d have fired him on the spot. He, too, could not make a single soul watch an NFL game. But Fox scrambled to placate him, to plug that leak. It didn’t work. Madden bolted for ABC. Pass the gravy.
Student-Athlete Games of the Week: Arkansas State women 95, Hendrix College (Ark.) 50. Ark. State played two starters 30 or more minutes, another 26 minutes — in case Hendrix arrived with a couple of hidden 30-point shots.
Then there was North Carolina Central’s women, who edged Mid-Atlantic Christian (N.C.) 132-22. Beat ’em by 110.
Another women’s game: South Carolina 101, Mississippi Valley State 19.
In high school football, Virginia’s Phoebus High was able to hold off Jamestown High by scoring a TD on a last-play pass TD to win 104-0.
Doesn’t matter how often it leads to mindless self-destruction, coaches and their players refuse to demand and/or choose logic and team-success over hollow, selfish and fleeting immodesty.
That’s why the Cowboys’ Rico Dowdle, in scoring the first points in Thursday’s game vs. Washington, held the ball out with one hand before entering the end zone.
And what did CBS’ assigned observers, Jim Nantz and Tony Romo, say about this continuing epidemic of style-first stupidity? Nothing.
As do most TV folks, they wait for the senseless, check-me-out risk-takers to leave their idiot marks before scolding them.
NYC sports lost a giant last week, with the death of Bert Levinson, for decades a nails-tough, PSAL championship-winning baseball and basketball coach at Staten Island’s Curtis High, then a supervisor of game officials and middle school principal. He was 91.
Among the future MLBers Levinson mentored were Terry Crowley and Frank Fernandez.
You can say anything! NFL doesn’t care!
So Giants rookie CB Deonte Banks volunteered a selfish, X-rated spew against the Commanders for having the nerve to not draft him, and what happens? Is he suspended? Publicly castigated by Roger Goodell’s crotch-grabbing, women objectifying, vulgar rapper-embracing NFL?
Nope. Apparently this is now acceptable, soon-to-be-standardized NFL player behavior. Your job is to smile through it while having multiple bets on every game.
Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni stood on the sideline last week swapping vulgar shouts with in-house Chiefs riffraff — already an NFL and TV-encouraged standard among live audiences — and, again, Goodell and the NFL do nothing to let the civilized public know that they’re aware of the growing garbage and plan to combat it.
No hope for ESPN. It simply has no sense of sports history, significant context or anything beyond the promotion of Disney/ABC/ESPN products.
Last week, after Marquette’s basketball team defeated Kansas, ESPN presented this:
“No. 4 Marquette becomes just the third team in the last 40 years to beat UCLA and Kansas in back-to-back games.”
Those with a decent grasp of sports would have first asked themselves how often colleges have scheduled UCLA and Kansas back-to-back. If I were a complete idiot, I’d pursue the answer.
Now that Shohei Ohtani has won his second MVP, the @BackAftaThis account on X reminds us what all-knowing, never-wrong expert Mike Francesa said before Ohtani won his first MVP:
“The Yankees are lucky they didn’t get Ohtani.”
Other Francesa MLB both-thumbs-down scouting touts include MVP runner-up Daniel Murphy (“He’ll never hit big league pitching”), MVP Dustin Pedroia (“He’s a nothing”) and MVP Jose Altuve (640 extra-base hits) as “just a singles hitter.”
Fastest Fools’ Award of the Week: Commanders RB Chris Rodriguez, after a short gain for a first down, rose to perform one of those how-great-I-art first-down gestures. On the next play he fumbled the ball, and most likely the game, to the Giants.
This post was originally posted by New York Post
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