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Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Could ‘85 Bears have wrangled Vick?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Once, during a three-game stretch for the ages, the Chicago Bears did the unfathomable. With a lot of grunting, growling and grinding along the way, they mauled Detroit, Dallas and Atlanta by a composite score of 104-3.
That was the Atlanta of David Archer, not of Michael Vick.
That also was the suffocating Bears defense of 1985, not of 2005.
Which begs the question: Two decades ago, when Chicago’s NFL franchise had the second among its notorious trio known as the Monsters of the Midway, how would the Fridge, Gary Fencik, Wild Eyes (you know, Mike Singletary), Otis Wilson and the rest have dealt with the Falcons’ No. 7?
The silence over the phone from The Loop on Tuesday was replaced by a sigh before Richard Dent said, “Well, I’ll tell you one thing: During the game, Michael Vick would be looking at me quite a bit. It’s my job to make sure that you see me. I don’t care how many people you’ve got blocking me. You’re going to see me.” There was more silence, and then came the hint of a chuckle from the old defensive end who lived to smack the will out of quarterbacks while charging from the right side of the Bears’ line.
Added Dent, the best defender of his generation that nobody ever talks about, “I especially liked going against left-handed quarterbacks, because they would come right in my direction.” Vick is left-handed, by the way. The thing is, when the Falcons visit Soldier Field Sunday night, Vick needn’t worry about getting knocked silly by the combination of those wintry winds of Lake Michigan and this tough guy with the tender heart.
For one, Dent now has 45-year-old legs during his ninth year in retirement. For another, he still flings energy around, but he does so in ways other than through his body that was a speed and power machine at 6-foot-5 and 253 pounds. He’s the founder and CEO of a Chicago-based company called RLD Resources, which helps clients reduce costs for everything from natural gas to telecommunications. He also is a philanthropist through his “Make a Dent” foundation that “tries to keep kids in school, start school and finish school,” said Dent, who nevertheless has these football moments. They involve how he’d make Vick just another one of those guys that his Bears used to blast toward oblivion while they were doing their Super Bowl Shuffle to a world championship.
Said Dent, the MVP of that Bears’ Super Bowl victory, “Yeah, I’ve studied (Vick) quite a bit, and I know how I could get a jump on him. The objective is to see how a quarterback comes from underneath the center. Dan Marino used to step up on his right foot, so when he did that, you knew the ball was getting ready to be snapped. Those things allow you to get off the ball quicker, and (Vick) kind of has something like that going on with is feet. I mean, the man has speed, but can he run a circle faster than I can a straight line?”
We’ll never know. This is what we do know: Although Brian Urlacher, Alex Brown, Adewale Ogunleye and the rest of the new Monsters of the Midway have the Bears as the NFL’s No. 1 ranked defense, Dent isn’t impressed. “I really don’t see any comparison between their defense and ours,” said Dent, preferring to ignore that both are similar regarding yards allowed (270 per game for this one; 258 for the other) and points allowed (11 for this one; 12 for the other). “Yeah, but until you win a Super Bowl and have people at minus yards at halftime like we did, you can’t really say much of anything.”
In case you didn’t know, Dent is an Atlanta native, with emotional roots to the early Falcons. He was Tommy Nobis and Claude Humphrey during a football career that spanned from Atlanta’s old Murphy High School to Humphrey’s alma mater Tennessee State to an eighth-round draft pick that lasted 14 NFL seasons.
So will Dent cheer Sunday for the Bears or the Falcons? He laughed. “The Falcons had a chance to recruit me (out of college), and they didn’t like my forearms, so they didn’t want me,” he said, still laughing. “Who to cheer for? That’s a real easy one.”
Permalink | Comments (16) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
Only NFL pre-empts Christmas bowl game
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Let me start this by telling you a little story. Understand, it goes back awhile, to the day when the NCAA had a conscience. It begins with Bill MacPhail, before he settled in Atlanta and became head of CNN Sports. He was sports director of the CBS network at this time in the mid-60’s and he had a brainstorm.
“I’m thinking about having a bowl game on Christmas Day in Atlanta, and we’ll call it the Santa Claus Bowl,” to be televised on CBS, of course. “Whatta you think?” he said.
Naturally, I thought positively, but first the game had to be cleared by the NCAA Committee on Post-Season Events, or whatever it was called then. The committee would be meeting in Chicago during the College All-Star Game week, and I agreed to join MacPhail and support him in his pitch.
My plane was late reaching Chicago and I was checking in at the hotel desk when I saw MacPhail coming off an elevator carrying a handbag. “Where are you going?” I asked.
“Back to New York,” he said, resignedly.
“What about the meeting?” I asked.
“It’s over. It didn’t take long,” he said. The committee was horrified, he said, at the idea of desecrating a holy holiday by playing a football game. How irreverent, how could CBS have even been so crass, or words to that effect.
So much for the Santa Claus Bowl. So much for this mad man from television, and so much for that exalted committee from the NCAA, all of whose members, I’d guess, are no longer with us. Otherwise, the NCAA’s stand on bowl games today would blow one of their gaskets or two.
We leap forward, say, 40 years. There is no Christmas Day bowl game this year, and that has nothing to do with keeping the holiday holy. It’s Sunday, and Sundays belong to the NFL. Oh, the colleges have played games on Christmas Day. I know, I covered two, the Peach Bowl in Atlanta, and the Aloha Bowl in Honolulu, the longest Christmas Day of my life. It began checking out of the hotel at 6:30 in the morning, then arriving in Atlanta the following morning at 8 o’clock.
The point here is that the NCAA has seen the light, hallelujah! The fiscal light. Fifty-six college teams will play 28 bowl (for lack of a better designation) games, beginning in Lafayette, La., on Dec. 20 and grinding to a conclusion on Jan. 4 in the Rose Bowl with a crashing of the till. Altogether, those 56 teams will be playing for over $190,000,000 in purses. That’s so institutions of higher learning, such as Texas, can afford to pay football coaches $3.6 million for the year, Mack Brown’s approximate salary. That’s so those schools may also be able to afford to pay a president $1,000,000, which is becoming the going rate at these sprawling academies.
Now, just for the record, the highest paid faculty member at University of Texas draws a salary of around $400,000, and Steven Weinberg has a Nobel Prize in physics, according to the syndicated columnist Froma Harrop. The question arises in the mind of Dr. Perry Snyder, executive director of the Phi Kappa Phi honor society, “Is Mack Brown worth nine times as much as a Nobel Prize winner?”
Of course he is, in the minds of the “Hook ‘Em Horns Society,” if there is one. Of course he is, if he takes them to the Rose Bowl, where the football team will get approximately $14 million just for showing up. These teams will keep showing up for whatever bowl, the Meineke, the MPC Computers, the Emerald, the Music City, or whatever. (And whatever became of the Weed-Eater, the Weiser Lock, the Carquest, and such old friends long forgotten?)
Don’t think any of us expects this to change. It’s just sort of an exercise in considering the evolution of college football from the purists who wouldn’t allow a bowl game on Christmas Day in the ‘60’s to the character of the school that’s more concerned about the number of players drafted by the pros than its graduation rate.
Permalink | Comments (17) | Categories: Furman Bisher, Tech / ACC, UGA / SEC
The Tuesday Countdown
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Quoting the press release: “The Miami Heat announced today that Stan Van Gundy has resigned as head coach due to personal and family reasons.� So why is everybody in an uproar? That’s accurate. If Van Gundy didn’t resign, he would have been fired and replaced by Pat Riley, anyway, thereby causing both him and his family public humiliation. So he resigned to avoid both.
Bad things happen to good people. This was one of them. Van Gundy deserves better and any NBA team looking for a head coach should look at him. This is all about Pat Riley and his ego and wanting to get back to the bench.
That said, Riley can coach. When I covered the Lakers in Los Angeles, many nationally viewed him as overrated because of the talent he had to work with (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic Johnson, Norm Nixon, Jamal Wilkes, James Worthy, et. al). In truth, he was underrated for the same reason. Few gave him credit. But this still stinks.
Anna Kournikova says she’s making a comeback on the tennis tour. She plays tennis?
Jim Mora said Michael Vick (sore ribs) is fine and will practice Wednesday and play at Chicago. I’ve certainly got no reason to doubt him when it comes to an injury report. Um, what did that press release say again?
I’m assuming Arthur Blank and Bob McNair don’t go to the same business seminars.
Blank didn’t like the power structure in the Falcons’ organization. Dan Reeves lost much of his power over personnel and eventually was fired as coach. McNair didn’t like the way things were going with in the Texans’ organization, so he has hired Reeves as a consultant. So I guess this means he’s not an idiot, anymore. Here’s wishing Reeves good luck. He deserved a better fate than he got here.
Went to temple the other night. During silent prayer, my daughter whispered, “Dear Santa, I would like…â€? We’re a confused household.
Does Dennis Felton get a bonus if he finishes with a better record than Paul Hewitt?
Michael Vick is now 3-0 on Monday night. Past Falcons quarterbacks: 6-18.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Jeff Schultz
One more win makes history, but not playoffs
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
They’re on the brink. No, not of the playoffs. On that front, there’s much work to be done and at least one team to catch. This brink involves something else. This achievement, should it come, would be at once less auspicious and more momentous. This achievement would have been 39 years in the making.
The Falcons are on the brink of consecutive winning seasons. In business since 1966, the Falcons have never had consecutive winning seasons.
One more victory will do it. Three regular-season games remain. You might think the Falcons would be a lock to win one, but nobody ever went broke underestimating this franchise. To win even once more, the Falcons will have to play better than they’ve played in a month. There are no gimmes left, and these Falcons have already proved that not even a gimme is a gimme.
They lost to 1-7 Green Bay last month, a failure that threw a wrench into the gears of progress. The Falcons have since been coughing and wheezing and trying to recalibrate themselves, and Monday night they showed John Madden and a nation of football-watchers that the process still has a ways to go. The Falcons played New Orleans, a team almost as lousy as Green Bay, and for 2 1/2 disjointed quarters they let the discombobulated Saints believe they had a chance.
The Falcons would make a play, and then they’d yield a play. They got a cheap touchdown after Joe Horn’s fumble. The Saints got a cheap touchdown after a tipped interception of a Michael Vick pass. Then the Falcons got another touchdown on a bewildering interpretation by the replay official. (Apparently you can score without the ball breaking the plane of the end zone, so long as a part of your body — Vick’s right hand, in this instance — passes over the pylon. There’s the Tom Brady Tuck Rule and now there’s the Michael Vick Pylon Bylaw.)
The Falcons got their third touchdown off a trick — Vick lined up wide and took a pitch from Warrick Dunn and threw long for Roddy White — that didn’t fool anybody but worked because White outmaneuvered the New Orleans safeties for the underthrown ball. That made it 21-10 inside the final two minutes of an interminable first half, but the Saints moved downfield against a backpedaling defense to cut the lead to four points 11 seconds before halftime.
A second Vick touchdown — same rule, different pylon — made it 28-17, and finally Antwan Lake’s sack/safety put the Saints down to stay. And here we pause to salute another Falcon feat. Entering this season, they held the worst record on Monday night of any NFL team. (They were 6-18, which is only slightly less awful than the Hawks on any night of the week.) They’re 3-0 on Monday this season, and here’s a sliver of perspective: In the ’80s and ’90s combined, this franchise won but one Monday-nighter.
If nothing else, these Falcons have made it safe to watch football on Monday again, and now they’re within a game of eradicating this organization’s most unsightly blemish. Trouble is, the Falcons’ last three games come against teams ahead of them in the standings, and the next two are on the road. If winning seasons are indeed to be stacked end to end, the final step won’t be a walkover. And now Vick has bruised ribs. Ouch.
Thirteen games in, the feeling persists that the Falcons haven’t reached peak capacity. The time is at hand. There are crags to be scaled. There’s a stigma to be cleansed. This franchise has worked four decades and has come close to the back-to-back thing only in the long-ago seasons of 1971 and ‘72. To fail now after drawing so near would be the biggest failure of all.
Permalink | Comments (147) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Mark Bradley
