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Sunday, November 18, 2007
Johnson squeezes drama out of Chase
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jeff Schultz
Homestead, Fla. — The idea was to create some drama. You call something “The Chase,” it suggests there will be some sense of a race. Or a thrill. Or some doubt.
Jimmie Johnson obliterated the plan.
He reduced Matt Kenseth, Sunday’s race winner, to an afterthought. He had NASCAR chairman Brian France scrambling to answer questions about whether there was a need to restructure the point system (again).
He had Jeff Gordon, one of the most dominant competitors this sport has ever seen, questioning himself and reevaluating his future.
The Chase for the Cup was supposed to create doubt about who would be champion — not doubt inside the cranium of an icon.
“I’m not getting any younger,” Gordon said Sunday. “I put up as good a numbers as I can possibly put up, and it wasn’t enough. That’s tough to take.”
Get used to it.
Gordon had the implausible task of knocking 86 points off of Johnson’s Nextel Cup point lead to win the championship. He fell 77 short. Imagine going from king of a sport to so unbelievably humbled.
Kenseth won Sunday’s Ford 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway, and it didn’t matter. Gordon ran as aggressively as he had in weeks, finished in fourth, had an average finish of 5.1 in the season’s 10 Chase races, and it wasn’t enough.
Jimmie Johnson obliterated the plan.
He finished seventh in the race, only because the idea was mere survival. Having led the first lap, it would’ve taken a finish of 20th or below to blow this title. Not going to happen.
It would’ve taken a blown engine.
Or an overzealous yahoo ramming him into the wall.
Or a meteor shower.
Instead, we got a relatively uneventful 267 laps around a 1 1/2-mile track, just as Johnson would’ve ordered and NASCAR surely dreaded when it first instituted its quasi-playoff system in 2004. The idea was for the last race to mean something. The idea wasn’t this.
“He’s having a run in the modern era that’s maybe unmatched,” said France, NASCAR’s CEO. “You can put in any format. But when Jimmy Johnson has done what he’s done, [the format] doesn’t matter. He’s at a different level.”
Johnson has won consecutive championships. He’s the 10th driver to do that. Owner Rick Hendrick has offered him and crew chief Chad Knaus “lifetime” contracts. It might not be a bad idea to put in a reincarnation clause.
Four straight wins leading up to Sunday had long since ended the suspense. Johnson won 10 races this season. He had 11 top-five finishes in the final 16 events.
“I can’t really believe it all,” he said.
How does he explain such dominance?
“I’m not really sure I can,’ he said. “But I really don’t care, either.”
He was better. His car was better. His crew was better. And in the end, Gordon said, Johnson took chances that he wouldn’t take, and they paid off.
“Trust me — I know everything that’s in that 48 car and how he’s driving,” Gordon said. “Honestly, I thought as aggressive as they were being, it was going to bite him. I guess I was too confident with the whole consistency thing.”
Gordon said he would “take a 5.1 average [finish] in the Chase for the rest of my career.”
Most would. But Johnson’s average was 5.0.
Driver and crew chief were in sync. Funny. It was in Miami two years ago when the Johnson/Knaus team almost dissolved. A blown tire and a wreck in the season-ending race caused Johnson to drop from second to fifth in the points standings. It capped a series of frustrations that led Johnson and Knaus to blame each other for failing to win a championship.
Johnson the other day recalled that it was the first time Hendrick “called us to the principal’s office.”
When he and Knaus arrived at Hendrick’s office, there were cookies and milk waiting for them.
“I said, ‘If you’re going to act like kids, we’re going to take a break and have milk and cookies,’ ” Hendrick said. “They laughed, and we got it all out on the table.”
Two seasons have followed. Two championships have followed.
NASCAR saw its drama end with cookies and milk.
“South Beach, here we come,” Johnson said, as he ended a post-race news conference.
It was already past 9 p.m. It would be the first time in a while he trailed the crowd.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Categories: Auto Racing, Jeff Schultz
Two wins and you’re out is curious strategy
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
Sunday afternoon I went to a Falcons game. But they didn’t show up. They were scheduled to play the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who haven’t been having the best of it themselves. This would turn out to be one of most dismal afternoons at the bedside of the Falcons since those dreary afternoons at old Atlanta Stadium. For that matter, even the officiating crew wasn’t having a good day themselves, but you can’t fire the zebras. I’ve never seen as much time spent trying to sort out calls since officials began wearing stripes. It took Walt Coleman and his crew 15 minutes to sort out one confusing play, and they still didn’t get it right.
First, get this: The Falcons had won two games in a row with Joey Harrington at quarterback. I know, the learned exponents of the game had ruled that the two teams they had beaten were “bad teams,” San Francisco and Carolina. I don’t care who you beat in the National Football League, if they’re in the league, you beat them, it counts.
This story all begins when early in the week Bobby Petrino, the Falcons coach, had said if Byron Leftwich was able to stand and take nourishment, Leftwich would be his quarterback this week. A coach is the coach, and this is his team, but what didn’t make sense was that this was a slap in the face of Joey Harrington, who had won two games in a row for him. This was a Bobby Petrino decision, a college coach working his first season in the league. But why?
If there were reasons to bench Harrington, let us know. He is no Michael Vick, true, and I will say as I walked into the Georgia Dome I saw a lot of No. 7 jerseys on the backs of die-hard Vick fans. Had they lost track with time? As for Leftwich, when Jack Del Rio decided he wasn’t the man for quarterbacking the Jaguars, it should have sent a message. I don’t propose to be a sports page coach, but was this unemployed fellow worth a $4 million investment?
This was a turn-the-corner game for the Falcons. They could move up in their division against the Bucs, and they needed to play their best hand. By the end of the second quarter, cries of “Joey! Joey!” were rising from the stands. When Leftwich returned to the field, waves of boos followed him. No coach has ever been influenced by booing, but finally, after it became painfully obvious that this $4 million investment wasn’t working out too well, Petrino finally bent. The thirsting crowd got Joey. Too late, not that Harrington would have made that much difference early on, but what were the grounds for ditching him until given the chance to play his way out? It seemed only fair.
Harrington did produce a touchdown, but it was meaningless. Across the line, there was Jeff Garcia, a journeyman with a knack for leading and being the glue that holds a team together. He has a track record that backs it up. He’s not Hall of Fame stuff. But he’s reliable, efficient, and puts winning numbers on the board. He completed just 10 of 20 passes against the Falcons, but he kept order on the offense, and ran his team like a good engineer. The Bucs saw value in him, which is why he is there.
As the game wound down, and Harrington produced the lone touchdown, Arthur Blank was on the sideline standing with the quality control director, and surely depressed at this dismal scene. His team is in serious trouble. It’s not the absence of Michael Vick — oh, by the way, did you notice that Matt Schaub returned from injury and won a game against New Orleans for the Texans on Sunday? — but it is an accumulation of sad decisions that find these Falcons as deep in disrepute as in the dreariest days of Marion Campbell, Dan Henning, Jerry Glanville and June Jones. And whoever even dreamed that those nightmares might return?
If that isn’t enough, this is a team at the bottom of the curve that will be the main course in the defending NFL champions’ Thanksgiving dinner. They play the Indianapolis Colts with four days of this to dwell upon. There’s no way out of it. They can’t call in sick.
Permalink | Comments (51) | Categories: Furman Bisher
Season on its way to disintegration
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse for this strikingly clueless bunch of Falcons, ranging from team officials to coaches to those in shoulder pads, along came Sunday at the Georgia Dome. They all spent four of the ugliest quarters in recent memory discovering that rock bottom actually has a basement.
Silly quarterback play.
Mindless penalties to negate possible huge switches in momentum.
Crazy strategy (pick one, but how about that toss sweep on fourth-and-1 that predictably failed?).
Dropped passes.
Another brutal outing by an invisible offensive line.
Matador defense (I mean, Earnest Graham, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ third-string running back, torched these guys for 102 yards rushing and a touchdown).
Even worse, those who bothered to show up to watch the Falcons’ plunge to 3-7 and counting spent much of the afternoon booing or chanting “Joey, Joey, Joey,” as in the overmatched quarterback who was replaced going into the game by Byron Leftwich, another overmatched quarterback, who was yanked for Harrington, still an overmatched quarterback.
So the present and the future are like this for the Falcons after their self-inflicted thrashing of 31-7 at the mediocre hands of Tampa Bay: Purgatory is wherever the Falcons are now in their 42nd year of existence, and hell is on the way.
“We didn’t come out with the mind-set to play hard for four quarters,” said running back Warrick Dunn, delivering the understatement of the year. Added Leftwich, referring to his wretched performance and that of the entire team, “To be honest with you, I’ve never been involved with something like this.”
Has anybody? You know, even when it comes to this franchise? “Ooh. Ooh,” said former Falcons great Gerald Riggs, easing into a chuckle, while squinting in the home locker room afterward as a local NFL television analyst. “Let’s just say this game took me back a long way. Really, I haven’t seen this type of performance from a Falcons team in a long time.”
Just so you know, during Riggs’ seven years as a prolific runner for the Falcons in the 1980s, they managed an average of five victories per season. That included a 3-12 finish in 1987 under the forgettable Marion Campbell. Riggs laughed, saying, “We were just bad. We didn’t have good choices with players, coaches, anything. We didn’t have the pieces, and I think they have the pieces to do well. My biggest concern with this team is injuries. They’re injuries away, but we were players away. I just think these coaches have to win these players over with what they’ve implemented.”
Not likely. Rightfully or wrongfully, large portions of the Falcons locker room weren’t pleased with either rookie NFL head coach Bobby Petrino or his schemes even before the season, and nothing has changed. Leaders of Iran and Israel communicate better than Falcons players with Petrino. Among other things, a stunned Harrington discovered he probably wasn’t starting this week from an AJC reporter.
Then there is Petrino’s decision-making that often comes straight from his successful years of running the University of Louisville. In other words, he often coaches as if he’s still in college. You have that Steve Spurrier thing, for instance, where college guys love to mix and match their quarterbacks throughout the season and during games. The thing is, NFL coaches don’t do that, but here is Petrino playing musical chairs between Leftwich and Harrington with no end in sight. Here is Petrino also contradicting himself on this cockamamie process.
At the end of last week, Petrino emphatically mentioned that he would decide whether Harrington or Leftwich would start against the Buccaneers. After Leftwich fumbled twice, threw a couple of interceptions, suffered three sacks and was booed out of the game by the Falcons’ increasingly angry home crowd, Petrino quickly said, “The staff made the decision to start [Leftwich].” As for the Falcons’ Thanksgiving Day game on Thursday against the Indianapolis Colts, Petrino said, “I cannot tell you when that decision is going to be made right now.”
There was no mention of Petrino making the decision by himself this time. Sounds like the blame game for the Falcons is in its infant stages, because it sounds like confusion reigns.
Permalink | Comments (142) | Categories: Terence Moore
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