|
The Giants are playing for their conference championship on Sunday; the Jets are not.
There are many reasons, but one of them has to do with change and self-control. The Giants know how to effect growth; the Jets do not. Let us go backwards more than four years to Tom Coughlin, who often seemed so miserable that a reporter listening to his rants might feel like putting an arm around him and leading him away from the podium, saying, “There – there – there.” The Giants, and Coughlin’s family, could see how tortured he was, from too many years in the foul dungeons of football. I caught up with the Giants in London in October of 2007, fresh off their flight from New York, for the league game with Miami. I expected Coughlin to be a basket case because of the enforced trans-Atlantic flight. Instead, he smiled and said a professional had to live with circumstances. Surely, I wrote, this is the only man in the world who thrives on jet lag. He was a somewhat modified Tom Coughlin. And the Giants won the Super Bowl that season. Beat New England. Cause and effect? Partially. It turned out that after the 2006 season, Pat Hanlon, one of the best team PR people in sports, had put Coughlin in a room with some sportswriters familiar with the team. (I was not one of them.) Later, Coughlin described that meeting: “One of the things that punched me in the nose was when one columnist told me, ‘You act as if you really don’t have time for us,’ ” Coughlin said. “That really stuck in my craw. I have a coach’s ethic about hard work. I thought to myself, I can be more patient.” I have no idea what else happened with Coughlin between seasons. I do know that the hybrid ownership of the House of Mara and the House of Tisch is back in the conference title game, partially because their coach learned to relax just a trifle. The Jets, after two straight appearances in the conference title game, regressed this season. Part of that is directly traceable to the undisciplined behavior from the players and the head coach. Rex Ryan sets the signals. And the management of the Jets seems blind to the negative impact Ryan ultimately has on his players. He pops off. His players pop off. When an old pro like LaDainian Tomlinson says the locker room is in chaos, this is a sure sign things are bad. The Jets’ management needs to find a way to get through to Ryan. Talent isn’t everything. The Jets need to take a look at themselves, the way I think the Giants did. Is growth possible for this current bunch of Jets? Unclear.
Hansen Alexander
1/20/2012 07:48:16 am
Actually, George, although the instant concensus is that the Jets were .500 because of a bad locker room and because the head coach apparently adores of style of one Muhammad Ali, more facts are needed to judge the reason for a .500 season. A dreadful offensive coordinator, who was apparently mistaken for his father, has left town and deposited all the blame on his receivers. How such an allegedly bad locker room would have been with a repaired offensive line, healthy running backs, and quarterback who can see downfield when the calendar moves past Thanksgiving, must be examined. And despite the say so of the writer of the column I am responding to, Mr. Coughlin did not smile until 2:26 was left in the game against Green Bay, against the impression of the writer who inferred that the mentioned coach has been smiling since he saw the Tower of London....Or maybe he thinks his defensive ends are the Tower of London...
George Vecsey
1/20/2012 08:04:40 am
Hansen, thanks. Totally agree with your football analysis. And the key words about Coughlin are "just a trifle." GV
Hansen Alexander
1/23/2012 04:58:35 am
Trifle is the word. Of course yesterday's smile occurred in that overtime minute, and only sideways to Galbraith? I guess he won't smile straight across the field at the camera for being mistaken for happy.
George Vecsey
1/23/2012 06:12:24 am
Ultimately, behind that football-coach misery, I think he is a decent and humble man. Wild run...GV Comments are closed.
|
QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online. The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal…. After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The progress stems mostly from three factors: First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot. Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.) Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. “Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.” That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.” That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data. One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines. Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks. Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions. Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.) *** From the great Maureen Dowd: As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels." --- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing. *** "Putting out the paper," we called it. Much more than nostalgia. ---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html Categories
All
|
