Richard Sherman, a few other things

There have been some people, Erin Andrews of Fox Sports and USA Today sports columnist Will Leitch, calling what Seattle Seahawks’ cornerback Richard Sherman’s comments after the game against the 49ers on Sunday, “awesome” in Andrews’ words, and “heroic” in Leitch’s words. For some reason I didn’t see that.

To me it was pretty violent, out of control behavior and was not “heroic.”. Sherman is a very good  cornerback, maybe the best in the NFL, though Kennan Lewis of the Saints, Aqib Talib of the Patriots and usually Darrelle Revis of the Tampa Bay Bucs have a pretty good argument with Sherman. So I’m not going to go that far. But he’s outstanding. He’s a Stanford grad, which is impressive, and he’s articulate many times.

But his tirade on Sunday against Michael Crabtree after the game on national television was totally out of line. I know football players are violent on the field. Everybody except the quarterback, who has to do a lot more thinking than the other 21 players out there, are out there to knock the other guy’s block off. I get that and I understand that’s the nature of the game. But to say that Sherman’s interview after the game was “awesome” (in Andrews’ words) is way off base. It might work for reality TV, which I guess is what Andrews is looking for in her postgame interviews, but I’d rather have a calm, focused, intelligent interview with some humor in there too. That wasn’t fun to watch. Andrews even seemed a little scared to me. He seemed borderline dangerous, and mentally unbalanced. To shed some light on his reaction, Crabtree had allegedly tried to fight Sherman at a party last August in Arizona. But after Sherman made an incredible play deflecting Colin Kaepernick’s attempted go-ahead touchdown pass away and his teammate intercepting it in the end zone to clinch the Seattle victory, he should have just celebrated with the crowd and his teammates and left it at that. Instead, he taunted Crabtree and then had his what I would call a verbal explosion after the game. For Leitch to call it heroic is clueless. He acted like an animal. That’s fine on the football field and with your teammates in the lockerroom, but not cool when talking to the national media. Leitch wrote that Sherman is smarter than us (America). I guess because he graduated with a degree in Mass Communications from Stanford we’re supposed to assume he’s on the same intelligence level as Seattle’s owner, Paul Allen, the founder of Microsoft. For some reason, i don’t think Sherman is smarter than most people. He may be smart enough to get by and certainly to play football, but I don’t think those comments were intelligent. I thought they leaned more on the side of abusive and unintelligent.

Sherman has a major chip on his shoulder and he lashes out against anyone who may question him as a player. Skip Bayless interviewed him– with Bayless in the ESPN studio in Bristol, Connecticut and Sherman in Seattle– on ESPN’s First Take. Sherman had obviously taken exception to what Bayless had said about him on the air in earlier broadcasts. I think Bayless said he wasn’t the best corner in the NFL in another show. Sherman, in the interview, said “I’m better than you, you’re nothing.” Skip is a pretty accomplished sports writer and broadcast journalist, so to attack him like that is pretty baseless and ignorant. And it was not funny. It was abusive. Not good TV as Erin Andrews likes in what she now wants in her “reality” segments after the game or any time.

So I’m not into Richard Sherman’s act. It’s bad for football. He needs to calm down and some members of the media need to quit gushing like Old Faithful about him. There’s nothing interesting or classy about what he said Sunday. It was barbaric really. He needs to calm down his act and focus on the Super Bowl and quit mouthing off. He’ll have plenty to worry about on Sunday, February, 2nd, against Peyton Manning and the Broncos wide receivers. So he needs to quit this self-aggrandizing, clown show he’s got going and get back to concentrating on football.

By the way, the better team didn’t win on Sunday in Seattle. I call the Seahawks a gimmick team. Russell Wilson is a gimmick quarterback. He has a lot of athletic ability, but he’s not a passer at all. He gets it done, but it just doesn’t look like real football to me. His go-ahead touchdown pass was on an offsides play on the 49ers, who let down their guard once the flags were thrown, allowing Wilson to throw for seven. Otherwise, he didn’t do anything except run a little bit. It’s just not an interesting football team to watch. The Niners play the game the right way. To me, they’re the Alabama of the pros. They play good football. Seattle I guess gets it done, but I don’t like the way they play. There’s no fluidity to their offense. They just do it on the fly with what looks like no coordination or planning. It’s just not real football on offense. Their defense is good, but I want t o see them defend Peyton before I start saying they’re really good.

Gene Steratore, the head ref for the Seahawks-49ers game, made a blatant error when he didn’t call a roughing the kicker penalty on Seattle in the second quarter. By rule, when a defensive player runs into the punter’s plant leg, which the Seattle guy did, it’s roughing the punter and a 15 yard penalty and an automatic first down. Steratore called it running into the kicker, which is a five yard penalty, and the yards didn’t give the Niners a first down. Was kind of a critical call in the game. If the 49ers get that first down there is no guarantee they’re going to score, the ball would have been on their own 40 something yard line, but it could have made the difference at that time in the game in which the Niners were leading. It was reported that Steratore had worked three college basketball games that week. My objection to that is, man you’ve got your first priority on Sunday why are you wearing yourself out with all of that travel and calling three basketball games that week? Not very good planning and he missed an important call in the game that cost the 49ers. May have cost them the game. Bad mistake. He’s made quite a few this year.

Finally, Bill Belichick called Wes Welker’s collision with Patriots’ cornerback Aqib Talib a purposeful act and said to the media that the league ought to take action against Welker. I watched the play three or four times yesterday and I didn’t see Welker trying to hurt Talib. It was offensive pass interference on the “pick” play by Welker, but Welker wasn’t intentionally trying to hurt Talib, who left the game with an injury and never got back in. It did have a bearing on the outcome of the game as Talib is a terrific cover corner and Demaryius Thomas had his way catching passes from Manning the rest of the game; but looking at the contact, Welker hit the ground a lot harder than Talib. You would have thought Welker was hurt a lot worse than Talib. The refs missed an offensive pass interference call, but there was no intent on Welker’s part to hurt Talib. There’s a history between Belichick and Welker, who played for the Patriots for several years before signing with the Broncos last offseason, and it looks more like sour grapes on Belichick’s part.