Well, that was a very good football game with an ending I’d rather had gone differently. Congratulations to the Chiefs. They’re an amazing football team and beat the Niners pretty much the way I feared they would. I’ve got the Niner loss down to Moody missing that Point After Touchdown and Wilkes’ defense in the second half and overtime.
The missed kick changed the entire strategy of the game. KC only needed a Field Goal to stay in the game instead of a touchdown. Losing Greenlaw was huge – and heartbreaking. The guy tore his Achilles tendon running back onto the field. This meant his backup came in. A coach like Reid is going to target a backup player and Coach Reid certainly did. Wilkes called a pretty good game at the start but there’s something about the guy. He seems to revert to less-than play-calling in some situations.
At one point, Defensive Coordinator Wilkes called SUCH a poor play, Head Coach Shanahan was forced to use a timeout to tell him to call something else. Even the commentators were saying it was a seriously bad play call in the moment. It’s possible Shanahan would have done that again but he only gets three timeouts per half. I’m guessing he was irritated he had to do it once, let alone use all his timeouts trying to help his DC.
Look, I don’t mean to lay this all off on Moody and Wilkes. Mostly, KC is a great football team and all of Niner nation knew this was a possibility going into the game. We also knew the weak points. In what turned out to be something of a metaphor for the game, Moody set a Putrid Bowel record with a long field goal. Yay! Then, he lost the record to KC’s kicker, Butker, in the same game. Rats!
Moody’s challenge is playing in the shadow of Robbie Gould, one of the great kickers to have played the game. He might get more consistent. But Wilkes has a long history of real average coaching. There was no reason to think he was the guy to suddenly step up to that level and it turned out he wasn’t. I suspect the Niners will give a presser and say Wilkes did a fine job and it wasn’t him and yadda, yadda. Then, I suspect, the Niners will seek out a stronger candidate.
On the up side, this was Brock Purdy’s FIRST full season and he took the team to, and had a chance to win, the biggest game of the big games. Because Brock is stuck in a rookie contract, the Niners have a LOT of salary cap space, so they may, well, be able to keep the core of the team together. What THAT means is that it’s more than just blather when the Niners say, “We’ll see you next season!”
Also on the up side? We get to leave all the hype about the big game behind us for awhile. Now all we have to endure is hours and hours of political commercials and that’s…ah, crap! When does football start, again?
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Today is Donny’s deadline to ask the Kangaroo Court to rule on whether or not Joe Biden has perfect immunity. Okay, no, that’s not his question. He wants perfect immunity for himself. The DC Court of Appeals has said, rightly, that no American president has perfect immunity. Donny knew he was going to lose this fight going into it. He didn’t care. The point was about stalling. The court sniffed that out and ruled that a) he doesn’t have perfect immunity, b) he could appeal to the entire panel but the case was going back to Chutkin and would be active again even if he did, and c) they gave him until today to file his appeal with the ideological kangaroos.
The kangaroos, I’m sure, would love to help him. They help him every chance they get. But in this case, how do they give Donny perfect immunity without giving it to Joe, too? The only real risk is that the court takes up the case and then waits until it’s slinking out the back door late at night in June to issue their ruling. That would buy Donny LOTS of time…
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Did you see that weasel crap about Robert Kennedy, Jr during the Scooper Brawl? A Super PAC that supports him used an ad that looked exactly like something John F. Kennedy used in the 1960 campaign, complete with vintage look and soundtrack, and just stuck ‘Robert’ in where it would have said ‘John’ originally. In fact, it WAS something John Kennedy used. I wonder if the PAC can be sued for plagiarism? The thing is, THIS Kennedy is no John Kennedy. He’s a righty, in fact. He’s trading on his father’s and uncle’s name but he’s not in their league by like, light-years.
The dude even pretended to be a Democrat until 2023, when he switched to ‘Independent.’ The subterfuge, pretending to be a Democratic Kennedy, helped to get him elected in the first place. Now he’s running for President. I don’t know. Pretending to be something you absolutely are not in order to trick the electorate into supporting you? That seems…sneaky. Then again, it really is the American way…
