The Pip joined a fantasy football league this year with a bunch of fellow eighth-grade boys. He didn’t really pay attention to (American) football before this, and mostly used the auto-draft feature of the league to pick his team (aside from selecting kicker Yonghoe Koo in the first round, playing off a running joke in their friend group about The Pip being half Korean), but he got heavily into it as the season went along. He ended up winning his league, in large part thanks to getting Detroit RB Jahmyr Gibbs and Washington QB Jayden Daniels through some combination of auto-draft and late scrambling to fill holes. (Said victory has been handled with all the class and humility you would expect from a 13-year-old boy in 2025…)
Anyway, since he’s gotten into football, we’ve had football on TV in the house again; the last few years I mostly haven’t bothered because my Giants have sucked and we were trying to avoid distractions from the kids doing homework (which happened more in theory than in practice). I’ve ended up seeing most of the NFL playoff games to this point, including passing up a few Movie Night opportunities to watch football instead, and that’s at least arguably worth a blog post.
As noted above, I’m a fan of the New York Football Giants because my father and grandfather rooted for them (same for the Yankees; neither of them cared about the NBA so I have no particular attachment there). This has made for some good moments, though a bit of marital tension, given that Kate grew up north of Boston and rooted for the Patriots. The Giants memorably beat the Patriots twice in Super Bowls, the last time in 2012 when The Pip was an infant; that was awkward… They’ve been on a long slow slide since then, though.
I mention this because as a Giants fan, this past weekend’s conference championship games were kind of a difficult watch. Not only did the Washington-Philadelphia game feature two of the Giants’ divisional rivals (though neither is as hated as the Cowboys, who happily also had a terrible year), but Philadelphia’s best offensive player is running back Saquon Barkley, who was on the Giants last season. They let him walk away as a free agent rather than give him a big contract, having already made the mistake of committing significant money to QB Daniel Jones, who was cut in the middle of this season.
Barkley of course opened the game with a 60-yard touchdown run on the Eagles’ first offensive play, en route to a 3-TD game. Which, as a Giants fan, induced an equal mix of “I’m glad he’s doing well” (Barkley was a class act all through his time with the Giants), and “God, the Giants are run by idiots…” It just boggles the mind that they had this kind of generational talent in the house and let him leave.
But, then, this also goes to show the collaborative nature of football— in particular, the importance of the offensive line. The Giants’ problem across the years, dating back to the ragged end of the Eli Manning era, has been their inability to field a competent offensive line. When you’ve got a genuinely great QB like Manning back there he can make up for that to some degree, but when you’re running Daniel Jones out there, not so much.
This was shown nicely in one otherwise not-that-significant play in Sunday’s game, where the Eagles snapped the ball and then pitched it to Barkley five yards back of the line of scrimmage. He caught the ball cleanly, got up a head of steam, and powered for a significant gain, close to a first down. This is a play that the Giants run all the damn time, maddeningly, and in New York would’ve generally ended in a two-yard gain after he fought through two tackles in the backfield and dragged a lineman into positive territory. Even an all-world individual talent can only do so much when there’s basically no blocking in front of him.
That game wasn’t really all that competitive— the score was technically kind of close for a while, but Philly was firmly in control the whole time. The Pip was rooting for Daniels (and thus Washington) because of his fantasy success, but while Daniels himself played well, his backs and receivers kept dropping the ball. And Washington’s defense just couldn’t do anything against the Eagles’ offensive line.
This was most dramatically on display in a sequence where the Commanders were repeatedly called for penalties trying to stop the “Tush Push” play1 where the Eagles just line up all their biggest guys in a tight bunch and shove forward en masse to get a short gain. This is basically unstoppable given that the defensive players can’t move until the ball is snapped, leaving Washington trying to guess the timing and repeatedly leaping across the line. Which is a penalty, but also literally the only hope they have of stopping that play.
The whole sequence was pretty gross to watch, and I hope they figure out a rules tweak to ban it, because it’s not remotely entertaining as a part of American football. And I say this as somebody who spent many years playing rugby, where giant heaving masses of guys pushing each other is a significant part of the game (and I was, in fact, one of the guys doing most of the shoving). The key difference is that in rugby the heaving masses are a transitional step, used to establish possession and set up more dynamic play, not a miserable grind to move the ball eighteen inches forward.
The second game was much more entertaining from a pure football perspective, as the two quarterbacks— Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes and Buffalo’s Josh Allen— played great games. I was sorta-kinda pulling for the Bills in this one, as I have a lot of long-suffering Buffalo fans in my life, which again, made this kind of a tough watch. Not because they lost per se, but because the manner in which they lost was so Giants-esque.
And, ironically, this also comes back to the borderline-unwatchable armored rugby2 play that was so gross in the first game. Only this time, it was the failure of that play when run by the Bills— they made multiple attempts to run a play where Josh Allen takes the ball and tries to “sneak” to the left of the center for a short gain, and got stuffed repeatedly because literally every person in America knew it was coming. And the Bills’ offensive line was nowhere near as dominant as the Eagles’, so the Chiefs were just stacking guys in the exact spot Allen was headed for. The announcers even kept saying “The Chiefs told us that Allen likes to go to the left here, and they’re ready for it.”
This culminated in a fourth-down attempt where it’s arguable that Allen may have gotten far enough to keep possession but the refs spotted the ball short of the line, resulting in a turnover. Which, you know, may have been a bad call— I think he got there— but the worse call was running that play again instead of, you know, literally anything else. If Allen had tried to go to the right of the center, I think he could’ve gained the yard no problem, but they did the one thing that everybody not cashing a paycheck from the Bills could see was not going to work.
Which is absolutely a Giants kind of move— taking a play that doesn’t work because your offensive line can’t hold up and running it again because, you know, maybe the fifth time is the charm? That was pretty the entire story of the Saquon Barkley/ Daniel Jones era in New York. It’s a damn shame, because Allen is a great player, and the Bills fanbase is long-suffering, and they deserve better.
So, anyway, we’ve ended up with the most boring of all the possible Super Bowl options heading into this year’s playoffs, with Kansas City going for their third title in a row against the Eagles, who they beat two years ago. On the bright side, it will probably be a competitive game, but it’s not exactly inspiring, the way that, say, a Buffalo-Detroit Super Bowl would’ve been.
It is what it is, though, and at least this year we’ll be watching for more than the commercials… (I haven’t asked, but I suspect The Pip is going to be rooting for Philadelphia because Jalen Hurts was the other QB on his championship fantasy team…)
So, yeah, that’s some sports commentary. If you want to read reactions to the actual Super Bowl, here’s a button to get them in your inbox in a couple of weeks:
And if you want to argue with any of this, or sympathize regarding the idiocy of the Giants’ management, the comments will be open:
The announcers had quite obviously been instructed to use the phrase “Brotherly Shove” instead (because Philly) which is superficially more dignified but in practice less so.
Hat-tip to Wells Twombly by way of Bryan Curtis at the Ringer.