winding way

I used to read Star Wars books, from sixth grade through the end of high school. There are a great many such books, generally focused on the post-Return of the Jedi escapades of Luke et al., and I guess the best way to describe my brush with the yawning expanse of the expanded universe is that I enjoyed it at the time. The books aren’t great, are generally thinly veiled contrivances for getting the core cast together on a new planet for some lightsabering, but I have a soft spot for the characters introduced early on - the Solo twins Jacen and Jaina, the Force-sensitive assassin Mara Jade, Grand Admiral Thrawn.

I was thumbing through some of the newer books today, all part of a series called Legacy of the Force, and the impression I got is that, while the books themselves have not gotten better, the series as a whole has compensated by going very, very dark. The derailment of the Star Wars franchise is not news, but this is the grand vision? A universe locked in perpetual war, wherein the children, grandchildren, distant descendants of the Skywalkers are damned to fall again and again to the dark side, sundering alliances and forging new empires every three years? Luke Skywalker redeems his father and fells the Emperor and is rewarded by endless war. Nice work, authors. Way to keep to the spirit of the thing.

(I am livid that I care about any of this.)

Troy Brown retired! Long time coming, but man, I’ll miss him. He was about as versatile a football player as you’ll ever see, a wide receiver and special teams guy who spent the better part of the 2004 season playing cornerback when the Patriots’ secondary got eviscerated by injuries and dragon attacks. Emblematic, more so than anyone else, of the team-first attitude the Patriots cultivated under Brady and Belichik.

Brown is also responsible for the one of the best football plays I ever did witness. (Video here, with the play in question starting at 0:44). The situation: fourth and a few yards, midway through the fourth quarter in a divisional playoff game against the Chargers. The Patriots trail by eight, six and a half minutes to go, so they need a first down or they’re going to be in all kinds of trouble. Brady drops back, throws a pass across the middle intended for he-of-the-giant-eyes, Reche Caldwell. The pass is no good. It gets picked off.

Now all the guy who made the pick needs to do is slide and the Chargers have the ball and a chance to eat some clock. That would be the game right there, more or less. Hell, all he really had to do was knock the ball down - it was fourth down! But he runs tries to run it back. It is a bad decision. He runs by Troy Brown, who gets a hand in and strips the ball. Caldwell recovers, Patriots go on to score and eventually win the game. That’s some heads-up ball, a critical play at a critical juncture.

Stuff like that. Fare thee well, Troy Brown.

The game isn’t over - and, praise Football Jesus, is not being aired in Maryland - but it’s going to go down as a good, old-fashioned drubbing. And not the good kind of drubbing to which I have become accustomed. The Patriots’ defense was an absolute sieve, all day. I don’t know how many yards or how many TDs Ronnie Brown ran for, but it was a more than I would have thought possible, including a 62-yard run after the Pats first TD that was the back-breaker.

Brutal loss, but a reality check that was probably due in these dark and Brady-less times.

Patriots won 19-10. As I said, I don’t think the addition of Favre or a win over the Dolphins catapults the Jets to the status of playoff contender, but regardless, it’s nice to see Cassel get a win his first time out. The passing game was strictly dink-and-dunk, only a couple attempts outside ten yards, one of which was a wobbler that Randy Moss couldn’t come down with. The biggest plays came on defense. Brandon Meriweather had an interception inside Jets territory that set up a score, and Adalius Thomas sacked Favre for a twenty-yard loss on the Jets’ last drive. It was a great sack, lots of twirling. Kevin Faulk also had a nice catch-and-run that set up the touchdown.

Moss was under-utilized, and the offense only put together one touchdown drive despite getting great field position all game. Lots of sputtering in the red zone, no spreading the field with long passes. Laurence Maroney missed most of the game with a shoulder injury, which is such a giant surprise that I can barely even type it with my eyes springing out of my head like they are, but Lamont Jordan looked very sharp in the second half. All in all, not bad. I don’t know who the juggernauts in the AFC are going to be, and it remains to be seen if the Patriots can go toe-to-toe with them, but hey, at least the Patriots still own the Jets and their injury-mongering hordes.

The Patriots have the Dolphins next week, then a bye. That early bye may turn out well, giving Cassel extra time to settle in as the starter. The question then becomes how well the defense, which is old and not getting younger, will hold up over the season. But that was going to be an issue, Brady or not.

Patriots at Jets at 4 o’clock. Thus the grand experiment begins: How good are the Patriots without Tom Brady? How important is a top-o’-the-line QB is his team’s success? Obviously, we aren’t going to be seeing the shotgun-all-the-time offense of last season. That’s not the end of the world - the Patriots have plenty of competent backs and running the ball is a viable option - but even so, Matt Cassel is going to have to throw the ball sometime. And he is the unknown quantity.

Vegas Watch tried to project Brady’s value to the Patriots here, and between that and the follow-up comments, Brady seems to be worth somewhere between 1 to 3 wins over an average QB over a full season. A bad QB projects to be worth something like -2 wins. These numbers have a certain horse-sense appeal: QB is probably the most important position in football, says the football fan, and teams live or die by them. But to what extent is this true? Just how many wins is Brady worth over Cassel? No one really knows, and this is not just because Cassel hasn’t started a game since high school. Evaluating anything in football, where you have 22 guys on every play buzzing around like molecules of hydrogen, colliding, ricocheting, exploding, bouncing all over the place, is black magic of the highest order. No one knows how much of a team’s success is due to its key players and how much is due to the system they play in. This season will be, if nothing else, an interesting case study on that topic.

My sense is that, if Cassel is average, competent but not spectacular, the Patriots might be a 10-win team. Hell, with a strong running game and with Randy Moss playing jump-ball out there, he may not even have to be quite average. The AFC East is not good, and the Pats’ schedule is soft. Things could go all right.

But that’s all far-field, glowing points on the horizon. Today: Patriots-Jets. I’m sure the Jets’ fanbase, having tuckered themselves out with smug satisfaction over Tom Brady’s knee injury last week, are salivating at the prospect of facing the Brady-less Pats. Good luck with that, fellas. Even with the addition of noted treasonist Brett Favre, the Jets are bad, certainly no match for the Patriots with Brady. With Cassel? Well, as I said, he’s an unknown quantity. But at least he doesn’t have to start his first game against an NFL-caliber team.

I missed this because I was watching Goldeneye. Thank goodness for the amazing archival power of the internet.

Despite my best efforts, I remain fascinated (terrified) by the Sarah Palin thing. She finally sat down for an interview with Charlie Gibson, which is airing on Nightline right now. I continue to find her less than charming. Stunner! Gibson seems pretty sharp, pressing her repeatedly for details on her foreign policy views. He asked her, like, four times if she agreed with the Bush Doctrine, as in: Does she support entering a sovereign, democratic state, say, I don’t know, Pakistan, in pursuit of terrorists if said state denies its consent? Spoiler: She does not answer the question. She hits her talking points - t’r'rists hate eagles - and does not actually have to ask what the Bush Doctrine, because Gibson tells her after a minute, but she does not answer the question, because it’s a trap! The question is actually about Russia and Georgia. You’re a sly one, Governor Palin.

Throughout the interview, she keeps wedging Gibson’s name into her answers. For example, when asked about her comment that the Iraq war was part of God’s plan:

“But what Abraham Lincoln had said, and that’s a repeat in my comments, was let us not pray that God is on our side in a war or any other time, but let us pray that we are on God’s side.

“That’s what that comment was all about, Charlie. And I do believe, though, that this war against extreme Islamic terrorists is the right thing. It’s an unfortunate thing, because war is hell and I hate war, and, Charlie, today is the day that I send my first born, my son, my teenage son overseas with his Stryker brigade, 4,000 other wonderful American men and women, to fight for our country, for democracy, for our freedoms.

“Charlie, those are freedoms that too many of us just take for granted. I hate war and I want to see war ended. We end war when we see victory, and we do see victory in sight in Iraq.”

This is an incredibly annoying tick. To illustrate, try having a conversation with someone and slipping his name in every two sentences. (This is science, so you have to try it, or at least imagine trying it.) The point being, it is impossible to do this without sounding like you think the person you’re talking to is either (a) an asshole or (b) a moron. It’s like you’re covertly inserting an insult, that same kind of emphasis. You would think that, Charlie. What you’re too dense to understand, Charlie. It sounds jarring, defensive, petulant, unnatural. It bones the rhythm of her speech.

Barack Obama on Letterman, about the stupid, stupid pig thing:

“Keep in mind, that had I meant is this way, she would have been the lipstick, you see. The failed policies of John McCain would be the pig.”

That, friends, would be a zim-zam of the highest order. Delightful.

Speaking of zim-zams, here’s one on me, courtesy of the universe and Bernard Pollard: Tom Brady is lost for the year thanks to a below-the-knee hit halfway through the first quarter of last Sunday’s game. That’s seven-and-a-half minutes, fifteen plays, eleven pass attempts, seven completions into the season. Those are very small numbers. This is a nightmare made flesh, &c., but at least the NFL is getting more efficient in doling out its mini-tragedies. I didn’t even have to wait until the end of the season for my yearly emotional crippling.

Anyway, that is stale news, days old already. The newer news is the nature of the injury, which finally leaked today. According to the Boston Globe, Brady tore both his MCL and ACL, similar but somewhat less serious than Carson Palmer’s injury a couple years ago. The long-term prognosis for this sort of injury in a quarterback is good, which is a load off my mind, as I have spent an unjustifiably large amount of time pondering this topic since news of the injury broke. They were bad thoughts, these ponderings. Dark thoughts. Bad enough to lose the season, said I, but what if Brady was compromised permanently? I am not ready for that. But the Globe writes that, “Quarterbacks typically respond well after ACL surgery, in time regaining the muscle strength and agility to perform as effectively as before the injury.”

How much time, only the magicians know. A good bet would be that getting to 100% will take somewhat longer than the quoted six-to-nine month recovery period. Comforting news nevertheless.

I made a list of all the modifications I need to make to my thesis to get it out the door. It is longer than I anticipated. Nevertheless, the end is in sight. Onward! But first: Baseball.

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From Slate:

“But who can blame the McCain campaign for punching the press instead of pounding on Joe Biden? He’s the Pillsbury Doughboy of politics—his gut will swallow any well-formed fist thrust into it, and then he’ll giggle uncontrollably.”

A delightful image, to be sure, but what?