The Ebbtide Crew did not do a podcast this week, but our football teams had interesting games in Week 13. The Saints completed the season sweep of the Falcons. Batman’s Titans gave up four touchdowns in the first half to Cleveland Browns which sealed their fate for the rest of the game. Tideking’s Raiders won their game against the Jets facing a zero blitz that saw Derek Carr throw a bomb downfield to top rookie Henry Ruggs for the go-ahead score. That bad defensive call by the Jets defensive coordinator, Gregg Williams, led to his dismissal from his post the following day.
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Last week, when NBA star, Paul George (PG), appeared on the All The Smoke podcast and spoke on why the Clippers loss their 2nd round series to the Denver Nuggets after being up 3-1. The part that got the most scrutiny was when PG put the blame on former Clippers coach Doc Rivers for their playoff loss. PG said that Rivers didn’t use him correctly. Rivers used him like JJ Redick or Ray Allen, and that just wasn’t his game.
My impression of PG has always been that he is a phenomenal talent, but he is no dog. He just doesn’t get after it in crunch time. When you start dissecting his career, there is a reason he wasn’t highly recruited out of high school. There is a reason he has only thrived on small market teams in the league. He is in LA now! The stars come out to see some basketball. PG and Kawhi came out to LA to shift the conversation from the Lakers to the Clippers. There are 2 legit NBA teams in LA now, and for PG to not take sole responsibility is not a good sign if I was a Clipper fan. Still, the Clippers just gave him a max 4-year deal worth $ 190 million.
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The biggest announcement this week came from the Philadelphia Eagles making the move of replacing Carson Wentz as their starting QB and putting in rookie back up QB Jalen Hurts. Wentz was a top draft pick in 2016 and had an impressive rookie campaign. In 2017, he had an MVP caliber season that had the Eagles as a top seed in the NFC, but he was sidelined with a torn ACL & LCL with a few games left before the start of the playoffs. The Eagles went on to win the Super Bowl in his absence.
Since that season, Wentz has not been himself and his play has digressed each year since. This season after falling to a record of 3-8-1 and still with a chance to win a crappy NFC East division title, Head Coach Doug Pederson has to go in another direction just to see if they can make a run. My Saints are coming to town, and our #1 ranked defense is unforgiving. They will eat up Wentz like a Gene’s hot sausage po-boy, fully dressed.
Hurts is more mobile, and if Wentz can learn anything from Hurts, it’s how to be able to sit on the sideline and refocus. Hurts was pulled as the starter at Alabama, at halftime of the National Championship game and never saw the field again until the end of his last season when Tua Tagovailoa got hurt in the SEC championship game the following year. The next season he transferred to Oklahoma and had an extraordinarily successful Heisman campaign his senior year. The rest of the season for the Eagles will be an interesting one. Depending on Hurts success or failure this weekend, the fate of their organization is at stake.
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The 2020 Presidential Election is finally over, and Joe Biden will be our 46th U.S. President, only don’t tell our current President that this is the case. We are over month past the election, and he is still contesting the results of this election. His campaign lawyers have filed lawsuit after lawsuit claiming that the election is fraudulent one. Trump claims that the votes in some states are fraudulent and shouldn’t be counted. The only problem is that he has no proof of fraud. His team of lawyers, headed by Rudy Giuliani, were in front of the press for weeks claiming fraud, but once inside the courtroom, they had nothing to show for evidence. One by one, these lawsuits are getting thrown out because no lawyer in their right mind wants to perjure themselves.
By refusing to concede this election, he has actually rallied his base and the majority of the Republican party and it has been one of the biggest mockeries of democracy that I’ve seen in my lifetime. Trump supporters have taken a step too far by harassing their fellow Republican party members who have accepted their defeat. Several Republican State Secretaries of State have received death threats daily since the election, and they have gone as far as to protest in front of the Secretaries’ homes armed with weapons. What are we doing?
As tragic as all of this is, the refusal to go quietly in the night has been obviously a hinderance, now nuisance, but unfortunately, it is ingenious. Trump has managed to raise $200 million for his “super-pac” that will fund his campaign efforts for a possible presidential run in 2024 and to continue to challenge the legitimacy of this election. Surely, we all know that his money is going straight to his pockets. He has a litany of criminal and civil cases awaiting him in multiple states. From tax evasion, price gauging, to payment delinquency to name a few.
I’ve never seen anyone in my life who will ignore the negative as much as Trump. Thousands of people are dying each day, we are in one of the worse recessions to start off any decade. Unemployment benefits are set to run out for most Americans who lost their jobs early on in the pandemic. What does Trump do? He takes credit for the vaccine that has been approved to help combat Covid-19, he touts how the stock market continues to rise under his watch. There are no losses in Trump’s mind. Somehow when the world asks him that’s all you got? He has some more ignorant shit in his arsenal.
For Paul George and Carson Wentz, I hope they can answer the question of that’s all you got? Can Wentz, more so than PG, take these setbacks and find another gear and take it to the next level? Right now, they are living up to their small school recruitment, and they’re at the point in their professional careers where once again, they have to play above it and move forward. If not, they will have cost their teams a lot of money when it’s all said and done.
Tony Love
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