A Loss and A Win...

I've been MIA for awhile - my apologies. Had a lot of things going on. . .
Most importantly: Yesterday was MBB's birthday. Happy Birthday Hon!

Sunday was a day of football for me. The Bengals kicked-off at 1:00 and OB's team played at 4:30. Now, this caused a bit of a problem for me as I (initially) wanted to watch my orange and black, but I wanted to see the red and black too. So, I watched the first half of the Bengals game and then got updates via cell phone from MommyMarie for the second half.

I was a bit embarrassed by how the first game went. I wasn't the only one! Here are some of the comments made by Peter King in the MMQB:

• Goat of the Week
  The entire Cincinnati defense. For a multitude of sins. For allowing the moribund Browns to score 51 points. For allowing 41 points and 365 total yards in the first 39 minutes. For not touching Lewis on a 66-yard touchdown run. For making Anderson look better than Kenny Anderson. Just a ridiculous performance by a unit that will doom this playoff contender to also-random.
• 3. I think this is the reason a lot of people in my business and a lot of coaches and football people respect Mike Pereira, the NFL's vice president of officiating. Last Monday night in the Cincinnati-Baltimore game, back judge Steve Freeman, on fourth-and-goal from the Bengals' 1-yard line with two minutes left in the fourth quarter, called Ravens tight end Todd Heap for offensive pass interference, negating a touchdown that would have tied the score at 27.
  The call, obviously, was absurd. There was some very slight jostling, but maybe 20 percent of the jostling that takes place between receivers and defensive backs on plays when pass interference is not called. A terrible call. The nation saw it; Pereira saw it. And when he was asked about it on the league's in-house channel, the NFL Network, Pereira could have said, "Oh, it's a judgment call, and the official obviously saw interference, in his judgment'' and ended it right there. No. This is what he said: "The judgment made is his to make. When I run it, I don't like it.'' Perfect.
  He didn't rip Freeman, though I'm sure privately he told Freeman it was a terrible call. (This, by the way, has nothing to do with swallowing a whistle in the final two minutes of the game, or ignoring ticky-tack calls in crunch time, which has always been urban legend in the NBA. This is all about whether a call was correct or not.) What Pereira said, in effect, was this: We all saw it was a bad call, and I'm sure even the back judge now knows it. There's no sense in any of us sticking our heads in the sand and pretending it didn't happen. I'm not going to rip the guy, but I am going to acknowledge that we have to do better.
• 5. I think this is what I didn't like about Week 2:
  b. Worst job of not getting two feet down in the end zone on a gimme touchdown: T.J. Houshmandzadeh. A sure touchdown should have been negated in Cleveland because he didn't drag his feet right.
  e. Really dumb play by Chad Johnson at the end of the first half in Cleveland. Browns up 27-21, 11 seconds left, Johnson catches a deep out from Carson Palmer with no timeouts left and, instead of ducking out of bounds, he lunges forward, stays inbounds and prevents the Bengals from getting off another play. Got to have a sense of where you are, and what the clock says, Chad.
  f. Phantom coverage job by Johnathan Joseph, the Bengal corner, on Kellen Winslow, resulting in the easy Winslow TD.

OK, enough about the game that I would rather forget and a better topic: THE WIN! OB's team kicked off at 4:30 and I was there with camera in hand! 277 pictures later (I haven't been able to delete out the bad ones yet) and we have another win!!! I was pretty excited about this - both of the games that I have taken pictures of...They have won. :)

Namaste.