No doubt you’ve heard all kinds of sports commentators waxing euphoric about last weekend producing the best four playoff games in NFL history. Here is how the dean of football writers, Peter King, reported his take for NBC Sports yesterday morning:
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In 25 hours on the greatest playoff weekend in the 102-year history of professional football, the headlines, one by one, kept overtaking the last one:
- BENGALS KNOCK OFF 1 SEED TO REACH FIRST AFC TITLE GAME SINCE 1988
- NINERS KNOCk OFF 1 SEED ON 45-YARD FIELD GOAL AT :00
- ROGERS’ FUTURE UNCERTAIN; WON’T SAY IF HE’LL STAY A PACKER
- BRADY, IN A STUNNER, MIGHT WALK AWAY TOO
- RAMS AVOID MEGA-COLLAPSE, WIN ON FIELD GOAL AT :00
- HAS BRADY PLAYED HIS LAST GAME?
- MAHOMES, ALLEN IN DUEL FOR AGES
- KC WINS ON GREATEST COMEBACK OF REID’S LIFE
- OVERTIME RULES STINK
- ALL FOUR DIVISIONAL GAMES DECIDED ON FINAL PLAY
After the first three games of the weekend, drama-laden all, ended on last-play field goals, no way the fourth game could match them. Then KC 42, Buffalo 36 was better, and by a lot. ‘I’ve been watching football for 75 years,’ said 84-year-old Upton Bell, the son of Bert Bell, the NFL commissioner who preceded Pete Rozelle, ‘and nothing compares to this Buffalo-Kansas City game. I have never seen two quarterbacks in a playoff game play at a higher level than Allen and Mahomes. I was at the 1958 Colts-Giants championship, and that doesn’t compare to this game.’
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Truth be told, you really had to see these games play out to fully appreciate the euphoria. Thankfully I saw the most exciting parts of arguably the best two of them, namely Green Bay-San Francisco and Buffalo-Kansas City.
That’s why I see no point in commenting on the games themselves. Instead, I feel obliged to update this earlier commentary: “Turns Out Would-Be Jeopardy Host Is an Anti-Vaxx Nutcase: Who Is Aaron Rodgers?” November 8,2021. It includes this reference to Rodgers – after he was famously caught lying about being vaccinated:
Regular readers know what little regard I have for celebrity worship – as commentaries like “Celebrity-obsessed World Has Made Actors and Rock Stars the Statesmen of Our Times,” May 23, 2005. But I was a fan. That’s why I was genuinely disappointed to see Rodgers playing the victim and attempting to gaslight people for calling him out for such a brazenly irresponsible lie.
Unsurprisingly, most players want the NFL to punish him for the way he endangered so many of them by flouting Covid protocols so imperiously. But, ironically, I gather the NFLPA’s own collective bargaining rules prevent the NFL from suspending or even fining Rodgers.
Well, it turns out the NFL fined him “$14,650 for violating the league’s Covid policies.” But I can think of no greater punishment than the inglorious way the San Francisco 49ers ended this bastard’s season. After all, it was on his home field and in wintry (Green-Bay) conditions everyone said favored his team.
Not to mention that the cocky Rodgers was so confident of winning this game, he spent most of the week beforehand playing Fox News pundit on social media:
Unvaccinated Green Bay Packers star Aaron Rodgers slammed President Joe Biden’s ‘fake White House’ after the commander in chief joked last month about the quarterback not getting inoculated against COVID-19. In a lengthy ESPN story about the outspoken NFL veteran published Friday, Rodgers fumed about Biden recently labeling COVID-19 the ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated.’
‘When the president of the United States says, ‘This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated,’ it’s because him and his constituents, which, I don’t know how there are any if you watch any of his attempts at public speaking, but I guess he got 81 million votes,’ Rodgers said Thursday, according to ESPN.
(New York Post, January 23, 2022)
“I guess he got 81 million votes”? And thus Rodgers outed himself as a MAGA idiot who believes Biden is a fake president because Trump won in 2020 …
Clearly nothing is more deplorable than a public figure lying about his vaccine status. But his Trumpian rant against Biden explains why everyone – from his own parents and siblings to his teammates and coaches – thinks he’s the most selfish and self-righteous SOB they know.
In any event, here is how I commented on his team’s loss at The Washington Post early Sunday morning:
The Green Bay Packers might’ve won last night’s game if Aaron Rodgers had spent more time studying football plays than owning political libs. That said, the San Francisco 49ers clearly own Rodgers the way he claims he owns the Chicago Bears …
For those of you who don’t know, the second part of that comment pertains to karma stemming from the way Rodgers taunted Bears fans during Green Bay’s win at Chicago on October 17. After scrambling for a touchdown, he glared into the stands and shouted, repeatedly:
All my f*cking life, I own you. I still own you.
I know, classy, right? Well what could be more karmic than Packers fans taunting him as he left his own stadium by shouting at him “the 49ers still own you, Aaron”! Because this is now the fourth time the 49ers have knocked a Rodgers-led Packers team out of the playoffs.
Finally, apropos of the headline above about uncertainty if he’ll stay a Packer, as indicated, he has so alienated everyone in the Green Bay organization with his diva behavior, they might just be ready to say:
Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way on out, Aaron!
In any event, nothing symbolizes a passing of the old guard quite like this best weekend in NFL history seeing both Brady, the GOAT, and Rodgers, as a goat, eliminated from the playoffs …
Related commentaries:
Aaron Rodgers… Tom Brady…
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