Tuesday, January 10, 2006

For Tom

Look who's #1!

The NFL Misery Index

3 comments:

Ren said...

It's nice they recognized my Vike's level of suckitude.

Anonymous said...

Of course when attacking the Bengals for being in the league for 40 years and having the Ickey Shuffle as their only contribution, I think he seriously forgot that the Bengals gave three things to the NFL.

1. Having receivers bring in the play from the sidelines (Paul Brown developed this with the Bengals in the early 70s)

2. The no-huddle, sugar-huddle, or what ever you wish to call it.

3. The "west coast" offense was developed in Ohio way before it moved to California. Sid Gillman and Francis Schmidt developed the early version at Ohio State in the60s and Bill Walsh invented the Walsh Offense while with the Bengals in the 70's before taking it to SanFran and making it famous.

How did the term get its name? From Bernie Kosar, when he was a backup quarterback with Dallas in '93. I was doing a piece on the Cowboys. I asked him what the offense was like.

"Oh, you know, the West Coast Offense," he said. "Turner and Zampese and Don Coryell and Sid Gillman. That thing." (Bernie obviously had a good knowledge of NFL history).

I used the quote. It was picked up by a West Coast wire reporter, except that he got it screwed up and he attached it to the San Francisco attack that Bill Walsh had used in San Francisco's Super Bowl run of the '80s. What the hell -- San Diego, L.A., San Francisco -- it's all West Coast, isn't it? And that's where it stuck.

At first Walsh was quite upset by the misnomer. "Call it the Walsh Offense, or the Cincinnati Offense," he said, "but not the West Coast Offense. That's something completely different."

Tom said...

Yes, we're miserable. Obviously.

In response to our anonymous reader I will only say that Cleveland fans have long argued that the west coast offense was really a derivitive of what Paul Brown was doing back in the day with Cleveland (Walsh was a Brown assistant later in Cinci). I'll add that Kosar was one of the smartest quarterbacks to play in the NFL--he had to be to overcome all of his physical shortcomings.

Above all, it must be kept in mind that Cincinnati sucks.

(I can't help it.)