By Michael Vallee

Sometimes the star of a game is an individual player.  Someone that steals the show with a singular effort.  Think Michael Jordan, sick with the flu, dropping 38 on the Utah Jazz in the NBA Finals.  Sometimes the star of a game is an entire team, one that collectively takes over with a transcendent performance.  The New England Patriots trailing 28-3 and winning the Super Bowl certainly qualifies.  And sometimes the star of a game is simply one play or one moment.  Ask Seattle Seahawks fans about this one, I have a feeling they might be able to come up with an example.

But in certain instances, the star of the game is the game itself or, more specifically, the league in which it resides.  In Sunday’s 27-24 Patriots victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers there were many standout performances and moments but the real star of the game was the National Football League and its total domination of our sports universe.

No other league can touch the anticipation factor of the NFL.  The Patriots vs. Steelers has been circled on the NFL calendar for weeks.  Everybody from Patriots and Steelers fans to network executives and beat writers were eagerly awaiting Sunday’s game which featured a stable of superstars and two future Hall Of Fame quarterbacks.  In a cluttered sports landscape it felt like the only game that really mattered.  What is the equivalent in other sports leagues?  Quick, what day do the Houston Rockets play the Golden State Warriors?  OK, how about what month?  Do you have any idea?  Me neither.

I guess the baseball equivalent would be Red Sox/Yankees but does the baseball world outside of Boston and New York really care about that series?  They might watch parts of a game or two but does it really matter to out-of-market fans?  And how do even Sox and Yankees fans get geeked up for a series that will be played six times in a season and have little functional impact in a 162-game schedule?  Pittsburgh vs. New England had urgency and desperation, the result of clear and tangible consequences for both teams regarding home-field advantage and first round byes.  Fans from coast-to-coast knew the stakes and, more so than any other sport, cared about the outcome.

A marquee matchup like Patriots/Steelers stirs interest across the entire football world.  When you are dealing with teams that have won as often as Pittsburgh and New England, odds are, you are either a fan of one of those two teams or absolutely despise everything about one or both of those teams but, either way, you are going to be watching.  Additionally, you might not love or hate either team but know your team has to deal with one or both of them if they want to win in January.  Or maybe you have no dog in the hunt but just love football and there is no way you’re missing a chance to watch arguably the two best teams in the NFL, two teams with a long history of mutual animosity, knock the hell out of each other for 60 minutes.  A hockey diehard could easily miss a Tampa Bay Lightning/L.A. Kings game and not think twice.  There is nobody that calls themselves a football fan that was missing Sunday’s game.

It’s appointment television.  It’s what people revolve their social calendars around.  It affects not only your schedule but the schedule of your family.  I am sure a lot of Christmas shopping was done on Saturday knowing that being in a mall at 4:25 Sunday was not an option.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the NFL’s cultural dominance even affected some drinking schedules.  How many guys do you think didn’t go out Saturday night, or went out and drank less, because they wanted to be at “full strength” for the big game on Sunday?  That might seem like a stretch, or even a little insane, but I bet that number is bigger than you think.  That is the reality of America’s obsession with football.  It’s like nothing else in sports.

And the ratings for this one more than backed that up.

The Patriots/Steelers did a 17 rating, making it the highest rated NFL game this year.  The game also did a 32 share which means one out of every three televisions that was turned on in America was watching this game, an unheard of number in the age of multiple choices and splintered audiences.  The game peaked in the final half hour with a 20.5 rating and 36 share.  There has been a lot of yapping this year about the NFL’s declining ratings and dubious future but you didn’t hear any of it on Sunday.

The NFL is also the only sport that consistently delivers in the regular season.  How often do we hear people say about hockey or basketball, “I’m just waiting for the playoffs”?  Which is understandable considering that the intensity level for the winter sports increases exponentially in the playoffs.  But anybody that watched the Steelers and Bengals two weeks ago beat the hell out of each other for four quarters knows that simply isn’t true about football.  The regular season can be every bit as intense and brutal as the postseason.

And this was abundantly true on Sunday.

The only thing better for the NFL’s dominance than a nationally hyped game is a nationally hyped game that delivers – and Sunday’s Patriots game delivered in a big way.  Patriots/Steelers was a three hour football explosion of big plays, big moments and big performances.  It had drama and suspense – heroes and goats – controversial calls and controversial decisions.  There were last second comebacks and botched final drives.  The outcome was always in doubt.  Literally every second mattered.  It was one of those games that reminds us why we watch sports.

Imagine switching over in the middle of that game to a baseball game.  It would be like going from the roller coaster to the merry-go-round.

All of this says nothing of the ancillary activities that are also crucial to the NFL’s dominance.  Throw out, for a minute, all the loyalties, passion and hatred that drives sports fans and just think of what Sunday’s game was like for the millions that bet on it.  Patriots -2.5, trailing by five, driving for the “winning” touchdown.  A crucial two-point conversion looming if they score.  Massive financial swings riding on every play.  Pittsburgh responding with a huge play and apparent game-winning touchdown.  The play reversed……the clock running…….both the point spread and under/over (52.5) are in play…….a gut-wrenching interception that simultaneously realized and dashed the hopes and dreams of gamblers everywhere from Pasadena to Peoria.  It was gambling tension at its finest.

Then there’s the office pools, football cards, pick four pools, pick five pools, underdog pools, big money winner-take-all suicide pools, futures bets (Patriots over/under wins was 12.5), any and all of it just adds layers to the cultural sports monopoly of the NFL.

And then there’s fantasy football.  We don’t do much fantasy talk on this blog as I don’t generally like to mix real football with pretend football but it’s impossible to ignore or deny the role of fantasy football in all of this.  Week 15, for most fantasy leagues, is the playoffs and Sunday’s games offered a bevy of highly productive offensive stars that can make or break a fantasy team.  While most probably tuned in for the football, don’t kid yourself, there were a lot of eyeballs on that game sweating out the production of the Bells, Bradys, Browns and Gronks.

Purists hate it, your girlfriend doesn’t understand it and those that don’t participate most likely find the whole thing absurd but there is no denying its impact.  Fantasy sports has grown from an obscure hobby to a multi-billion dollar industry, and the pseudo-monopoly held by the NFL is yet another linchpin of its dominance.

All that was before the emergence of daily fantasy sports, the high stakes game-changer that just recently exploded onto the sports world, and is, of course, dominated by the NFL.  This new phenomenon, which reduces players to mere numbers on a screen and can turn nobodys into millionaires, has allowed the NFL to capture a certain fringe geek element that might have otherwise been occupied with something else.  They might not love football but they are now engaged because they have found a way to link it to their computers and smartphones.  Yet another financial notch in the NFL’s belt.

It can still be argued that the NFL’s future is far from secure.  Audiences continue to fracture, youth football participation is down and the effects of CTE loom like a dark cloud on the horizon.  And the current product is not perfect.  The games are increasingly micro-managed and slowed down by confusing rules and an archaic replay system; and NFL leadership, from Jerry Jones to Roger Goodell, is often an embarrassment.

But on a day like last Sunday that all just seems like a bunch of white noise for talk show hosts and sports columnists to pontificate about.  It might not be perfect but there is no denying that the NFL is a cultural tour-de-force that is extensively ingrained throughout American society.  All ages and both sexes watch it, the president tweets about it, networks live and die by it, advertisers flock to it and the sports media can’t get enough of it.  In our sports solar system, the NFL is the sun and everything else is just rotating around it.  Mark Cuban once said about the NFL, “Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.  And they’re getting hoggy.”  Maybe, but if all the sports leagues are competing, that hog is miles ahead and the gap ain’t closing anytime soon.

Game Notes

-Amateur Hour:  Another Patriots’ opponent, another late-game meltdown.  It’s hard not to sound like a homer when you cite all the times New England’s opponents have puddled in the final minutes of a big game and you conclude that the Patriots are simply smarter and more composed than their counterparts.  But how often does something have to happen before opinion becomes fact.  Atlanta in the Super Bowl, Seattle in the Super Bowl, Baltimore in the AFC Championship, Pittsburgh on Sunday, and on and on it goes.  Someday we might look back on this historic run and conclude that the Patriots’ ability to handle situational football, and perhaps as important, their opponents complete and total lack of ability to handle situational football was the most crucial component to their success.

-Rah, rah, sis boom bah:  The more you watch him the more Tomlin looks less like a head coach and more like a glorified male cheerleader.  His handling of the final moments of Sunday’s loss and subsequent comments are doing little to dispel that notion.  For starters, the offensive “brain trust” of Tomlin, Roethlisberger and OC Todd Haley had three minutes and 20 seconds to formulate a plan of attack while the refs reviewed the Jesse James touchdown yet reportedly the Steelers spent the entire time playing grabass and assuming they had already won the game.  That’s more time than you get for an actual timeout yet they seemed wildly unprepared after the touchdown was overturned.

And this only gets worse.

According to Tomlin the reason they had no timeouts was because referee Tony Corrente mistakenly awarded them a timeout.  His reasoning is so dumb I can’t possibly do it justice so I’ll just let him do it, “I was looking at Ben. Ben was signaling timeout, but he wasn’t signaling at you (Corrente), he was signaling timeout at me, trying to get confirmation of what we wanted to do.”  So let me get this straight, following a 69-yard gain, which is a moment when most teams would call a timeout, your quarterback, who is on the field of play, signaled for a timeout but wasn’t actually signaling the refs that he wanted a timeout but was asking his coaches if they wanted a timeout and it’s all Corrente’s fault that he didn’t accurately read Roethlisberger’s mind to decipher his true intentions.  I think we’re starting to get a window into why Tomlin never learns from his mistakes – apparently he doesn’t think he makes any.

Oh, and we’re not done.

Tomlin, displaying a mindblowing level of ignorance, also asked Corrente this Mensa-level question, “Why did you award that timeout, the timeouts are supposed to come from the bench?”  What?  WHAT?!?  Timeouts only come from the bench?  Alright, Tomlin’s gotta just be fucking with us at this point.  How can that question come out of an NFL head coach’s mouth?  Are we actually supposed to believe that in his 16+ year NFL coaching career he has never seen a quarterback call a timeout?  That is so ridiculous on so many different levels when I first read it my brain had trouble processing it.  It feels like a quote from The Onion.

-Jedi Master:  Imagine Belichick giving that answer as to why his team didn’t have anymore timeouts.  Or try to picture Belichick, Brady and McDaniels standing around for over three-minutes at then end of a crucial game and doing absolutely nothing.  Belichick is the anti-Tomlin: No intense dramatic scowls, no excessive enthusiastic hand-clapping, no meandering aimlessly on the sideline; Belichick learns from his mistakes and has an actual working knowledge of the NFL rule book.  He knows rules that the refs don’t even know yet, Tomlin, who is on the NFL Competition Committee, doesn’t even know that quarterbacks, in the course of an NFL game, sometimes call timeouts.  When the Patriots face the Steelers, for Belichick, it must feel like he is playing chess against his grandson.

-What down is it again?:  Don’t think for a minute Roethlisberger is off the hook for that late-game debacle.  There is no excuse for a future Hall Of Fame quarterback to ever throw that pass.  None.  That is the type of pass you throw on 4th down or if your team is trailing by 4+ points.  On third down, with your team down by three, that ball has to go out of the back of the end zone.  Throw it away, kick the field goal and take your chances at home in overtime.  There are high school quarterbacks that understand that.  And Big Ben’s entire approach to the play was a hot mess.  If you’re not going to clock the ball, why not just take a deep breath, call out a play at the line-of-scrimmage and take a legit shot at the end one?  Instead Roethlisberger looked panicked, rushed to the line despite plenty of time, attempted some half-ass fake spike then threw the ball into triple-coverage.  Baffling.

-Revenge is a dish best served unhinged:  If you want to have a laugh, peruse Twitter and Youtube for reactions to the end of the Patriots game on Sunday.  Too many examples to cite them all here but think Seattle fans circa 2014 with the added twist of a controversial call.  In short, Steelers fans lost their f’n minds.  It’s hard enough losing to the same coach and quarterback for 15 years straight but to lose at home, blow a late lead and have it all come to fruition because of an annoying NFL rule is enough to send any sports fan reeling.  The saddest part of their reactions was the repeated and desperate cries of “cheaters”.  It’s perfectly understandable to not like the NFL’s “survive the ground” rule regarding what is and isn’t a catch, but somebody needs to inform Steelers fans (and Raiders fans for that matter) that NFL officials enforcing a rule already on the books is not actually cheating nor is it the NFL rigging the outcome for New England.

-OK, maybe we’ll cite one example because this is really damn funny:  https://www.instagram.com/p/Bc1McOfjcSD/

-Words to live by:  There are two concrete truths in life: never get involved in a land war in Asia and never throw a slant on the goalline against the Patriots in a big game.

-Taking the chalk:  The Patriots victory over the Steelers meant that every NFL favorite, based on the point spread, won week 15 – only the third time since the 1970 merger that has happened.

-“Never stop fighting till the fight is done”:  One of the sneaky underrated plays from the game was the Patriots defense keeping Steelers receiver Juju Shuster out of the end zone on his 69-yard catch and run in the final minute.  When the speedy Shuster cut back to the middle of the field in Patriots territory it looked like he was a sure bet to score.  But the Patriots secondary never gave up on the play, eventually pinning him down and gang tackling him on the 10-yard line.

-Why was Trey Flowers covering (or trying to anyway) Le’Veon Bell on some key pass plays?  That was a very Tomlinian move by Belichick.

-Gronk smash Pittsburgh:  It is widely accepted that Gronkowski is not only the best tight end in the NFL but is on a trajectory to be the best tight end of all-time, but a week ago if someone asked you what the signature game of his career was you might have struggled to come up with an answer.  I think it’s safe to say that is no longer the case after what Gronk did to the Steelers.  Despite a slow start, Gronkowski finished the game with 9 catches for a career-high 168 yards (10 catches if you include the two-point conversion).  Nowhere was Gronk’s dominance more on display than on the game-winning drive, when he completely took the game over with five plays:

Play one:  Brady to Gronk deep down the middle for 26 yards

Play two:  Carbon copy of play one, another 26 yards

Play three:  Gronk reaches down and snatches the ball just before it hits the ground for another 17 yards

Play four:  Gronk seals off a defender with a key block on Dion Lewis’ 9-yard game-winning touchdown

Play five:  Gronk fakes an inside release, jukes the defensive back out of his jock, catches a wide-open two-point and celebrates like a deranged mad man

It was Gronk at his unstoppable best.  Someday a guy will have to go in that room at the Pro Football Hall Of Fame and make the case for Gronkowski’s induction and after Sunday that guy’s job just got a whole lot easier.  Now all he has to do is walk in, pop in the Pittsburgh tape, kick back, and watch the HOF votes tumble in.

-Tomlin not double-teaming Gronkowski at any point on that final drive is a fireable offense.

-Shhhhhhhh:  Tony Romo remains razor sharp with the Xs and Os stuff but desperately needs to learn the art of how to shut the hell up.

-Make space on the mantel:  Brady all but wrapped up the MVP on Sunday.  Not only did Brady lead the Patriots to a key road win but his MVP competition was decimated.  A week after Carson Wentz tore his ACL, dark-horse candidate Antonio Brown hurt his calf and Russell Wilson and the Seahawks imploded against the Rams.

-No easy task:  If Brown is healthy come January and the Steelers get past the Jaguars don’t count me as one of the people that thinks this rematch will be an easy win for the Patriots if the game is played in Foxboro.  Pittsburgh represents all kinds of matchup problems for the Patriots defense and, despite the Steelers dubious history against Belichick and Brady, Pittsburgh could easily win next month in New England.

-Belichick is not pliable:  Interesting story in the Boston Globe by professional shit-stirrer Bob Hohler, who details how Brady whisperer Alex Guerrero has had his his team privileges revoked, banning him from team flights and from the sideline during games.  It’s hard to know just how big a riff this represents between Brady and Belichick, if any, because none of the principals are talking but it is definitely a situation worth monitoring.  The importance of this story would multiply tenfold if Jimmy Garoppolo was still a Patriot.

-Stars and stripes:  A Great story emerged last week about Tom Brady and his commitment to supporting the troops.  According to Pittsburgh Steelers left tackle, war hero and unabashed supporter of the National Anthem, Alejandro Villanueva, Brady routinely Skypes with soldiers stationed overseas on the front lines.  Brady has said nothing about this and has sought no publicity for his actions.  Go ahead Steelers fans tell me again how much you hate Tom Brady.