There is a billboard near my local McDonalds in Los Angeles that exclaims, “It’s Back”.  The billboard is referring to the short-time promotional sandwich of the past, the McRib.  It’s back and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.  I know there are some people that like it and I’m sorry if I offend you, but I always felt it was one of the worst things I had ever eaten in my life.  It is slopped with onions and a sauce that tastes like it was mixed with shoe polish.  It’s awful, yet as McDonalds does, it brings the marketing with full force pushing its McRib on any grease-addicted consumer that walks the streets of Southern California. 

The guy who thought this was a good idea should be fired, but at least consumers still have a choice when they step foot in the establishment.  The farce the NFL brought to the table for Thursday Night Football was down right embarrassing and somewhat insulting.  The NFL executive or whomever thought it would be a good idea to showcase the New York Jets and the Buffalo Bills as their Thursday Night game of the week should be standing in line at the unemployment office with the McRib guy.

There is no sport in America or the world for that matter that markets itself better than the NFL.  Each week of the regular season has gone from being another game on the schedule to an event and this is owed to the craftiness of the NFL.  So when I saw that this week’s primetime nationally televised game was the Jets and Bills all I could say to myself was huh?  I’m a passionate Jets fan and I barely was able to watch the game.  It was a painful realization of the lack of good teams in the NFL this year.

The NFL Network is doing an awful job in trying to sell subscribers to their network with the matchups they’ve rolled out on Thursday nights.  Only one of the four matchups thus far have featured teams with winning records, the Giants versus the Broncos, and one of my fellow Study of Sports writers has already offered his opinion of that one.  They’d be better off advertising their all day coverage of the draft combine bench press.

The NFL seems like it’s getting a bit cocky to me.  They think they can show anything and people will watch cause it’s football and it’s on.  They are partly right and the fact that there are people making “friendly wagers” on games doesn’t hurt viewership, but the average NFL game this season has become unwatchable.  The parity that the NFL hangs their hat on is not apparent this season and worse than that are the number of flat out bad teams on display.  Add to that the ridiculous amount of commercial time that seems to increase on a weekly basis and it’s come to the point where unless your doing something else, drinking helps, it’s difficult to sit through a full game. 

Take last week’s showcase Monday night matchup between the Patriots and the Saints, one of the games of the year.   At the end of the first quarter the Saints started a drive after three minutes of commercials that lasted four plays, two minutes clock time.  They punted.  Three minutes of commercials followed.  The patriots come out and on the first play Tom Brady throws an interception.  Two minutes of commercials.  Saints get the ball, run two plays, end of quarter.  Another three minutes of commercials.  If you’re scoring at home that’s roughly twenty-two commercials to six plays.  And they are worried about instant replay slowing down the pace of the game, are you kidding me?

I’m off my soapbox now and in terms of the actual game, the Jets made some plays on both sides of the ball and were able to pull out a victory in the division.  Their number one ranked rushing attack controlled the game and for the second straight week the defense has captured some of that dominance that got everyone excited in the beginning of the season.  Darrelle Revis won the battle with Terrell Owens and had his second interception in as many weeks. 

They are now 6-6 and with Tampa Bay coming up, could find themselves back in the playoff discussion.  There is no sense in arguing that this is a playoff caliber football team, they are not.  They lose to bad teams and the ones they beat they do so unimpressively, but they always leave a glimmer of hope.  That’s all a Jets’ fan has is hope.  The question now is which will last longer, the McRib promotion or the Jets playoff chances?  We’ll see, but as of today they both seem like bad ideas.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 11:00 am and is filed under AFC, AFC East, Football, New York Jets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.