The 2021 NFL Week 11 Roundup | Save the Date
Shovel. Ready?
Los Angeles Clippers owner and Microsoft magnate Steve Ballmer hates February. Not any particular February, EVERY February. At any given New Year’s Eve celebration at his expansive five acre compound magnificently fronting Lake Washington in Hunts Point, WA, family and revelers regale themselves of the finest meats and cheeses in all the land. The skies are illuminated by a bespoke fireworks spectacular commissioned just for the occasion as synchronized, propulsive music throbs from the concert-quality Sonance matrixed outdoor audio speaker and subwoofer array. Attendees greet the occasion with pensive reflection, hopeful renewal and forward-thinking optimism of a buoyant new year to be experienced and discovered. As Steve roams his party, his famous booming voice and coat hanger toothy smile disguise a stomach twisting itself into a pretzel. Behind the gloss, he knows that February looms large. A February quirk of the calendar that he inherited with his famous 2014 purchase of the Clippers for $2B. You see, February is planning month for his beloved basketball Team 1139 miles due south. Not so beloved are the complicated logistics, binding lease terms, buzzy event competition, restrictive broadcast stipulations and general short shrift granted the Clippers in penciling out just the mere parameters of a schedule for NEXT Season. It’s all just a migraine awaiting inescapable escalation involving attorneys of all stripes, media giant AEG, the NBA, the Lakers, the Kings, razor-sharp elbows and a hornet’s nest of cast iron me-first egos. Happppppppy New Year, sighs Steve every December 31. His crestfallen internal enthusiasm betrays the outward seasonal sentiment.
I suppose we should start with the basics of NBA scheduling. The planning for any Regular Season begins before the preceding one even ends. The NBA Regular Season draws to a close every April giving way quickly to the Play-in Tournament through May, the Playoffs and lastly the Finals in June. Each of the League’s 30 Teams play 82 games dotted tightly across 19 weeks from mid-October to mid-April. Here alone, we’re talking more that 4 games/week. Next, layered in are the required matchups against Divisional and transcontinental Conference opponents (four stipulations) to ensure competitive balance. The final comprehensive component of the scheduling chess is Home Court availability. Each Team is responsible for compiling a list of at least 50 dates when their Home venue will be available. Of those dates, four must be on Mondays and four must be on Thursdays. All venue conflicts, potential or otherwise, must also be identified for the entirety of the upcoming Season. It’s this final piece of the puzzle that each Team begins sketching in February. Home Court Availability. The homework is due to the NBA in early March. The NBA, in turn, pumps in all this information from all 30 Teams and dumps it all into the fancy Scheduling machinery (actually just Evan Wasch, SVP NBA Strategy & Analytics) where in August a gift-wrapped, minty fresh PDF-embedded League schedule is sent off to the printing presses. Teams await the fresh hell the NBA is to foist upon each of them with implied tight turnarounds, energy-soaking double-headers and bleary 8-day road shows. Steve girds himself for this late Summer dump with the same anxiety and dread that greets him on New Year’s Day.
And so each February, Steve journeys down to Los Angeles to pore over the calendar with Team officials. And play duck-duck-goose with the Lakers and NHL’s Kings. Well, watch his co-tenants play duck-duck-goose is more apropos. It’s all a horrible annual reminder of the strings attached to his landmark purchase just 7 years since. The Clippers are the perennial Charlie Brown of the NBA, forever the invisible welterweight counterpart in the Los Angeles market to the world-beating Lakers. 1999 was no different. Terrible Season compounding the worse Season that preceded it, the Clippers were then playing in the cramped, rust bucket LA Sports Arena a few miles south of Downtown. Then-Owner Donald Sterling figured a new forever home might light a fire under Team ambitions (it didn’t, at least for another decade). In June 1999, the Clippers signed on to become co-tenants of the then brand-spanking new Staples Center built at a cost of $375M. Late to the Escrow party, the Team has been paying the price ever since. As part of the shared tenancy agreement, the Lakers enjoyed right-of-first refusal for crucial Home Court Availability. THEN the Kings, whose Season naturally overlapped with the NBA’s. THEN the Clippers. Steve has been fighting for their leftover table scraps ever since. This is why tipoff for Clippers home games are regularly set for 12:30pm — well clear of desirable Lakers and Kings primetime slots later in the evening. The 1999 agreement Steve feels makes it impossible for his Team to ever even dream of a balanced schedule. Tack on onerous profit participation terms, junior shares of luxury suite and concessionary revenue and you have the makings of revolt. The competing popularity of Staples as a multi-hyphenated entertainment venue (Grammys, concerts) further blackout lucrative weekend dates and adds drama to an already combustible tinderbox of frustration. It’s a Devil’s bargain cursed upon his Team by a prior problem-plagued regime.
Reflexively, Steve executed a shortcut what any Windows-user knows perhaps too well: CTRL-ALT-DELETE. He rebooted. And rebelled and flexed in the showiest way possible — he WALKED. With the expiration of the draconian lease coming up in 2024, Steve pulled up Zillow on his phone and tapped in a few easy must-haves: a rambunctious arena with a capacity for 18,000 fans, an 85,000 square foot practice facility, airy space for the on-site sports medicine clinic and Team offices, plentiful retail potential and an outdoor plaza with build-out potential of a quarter million square feet. OH yah, close to mass transit and parking spaces for thousands upon thousands of vehicles. And 1500 toilets. Only three potential locations in Southern California emerged on the results Tab. Steve hearted the Inglewood one best. On the OTHER side of Century Blvd, the plot of undeveloped land lived just south of the SoFi Stadium/Hollywood Park complex. Pure inspiration, Steve immediately was struck with erecting his purpose-built arena in tight proximity to a proven sports juggernaut. It was a no-brainer and one where his Team would control all aspects of Operation, including all-important Home Court Availability. Moreover, 100% of complex revenues would flow directly to Team’s top line without the need for dilutive shares and exotic redirects.
Much to Steve’s chagrin, the expansion of the funnel wouldn’t come cheap. Especially in LA. He right-swiped on the SoFi-adjacent property and wrote a $66M check to the City of Inglewood to back up the affection. Steve forked over another $80M to the city so as to fund affordable housing initiatives in the area BECAUSE, well, OT bonus points. A year ago March, he dropped a whopping $400M to purchase the nearby (similarly-inclined though much older venue) Forum effectively ending never-ending costly and time-consuming litigation brought by Forum-Owner MSG. The price tag attached to the Clippers new home blinks in bright neon at $1.8B all-in. Or about 1.5% of Steve’s current net worth, a figure that escalates in-sync with Microsoft. Offsetting this eye-watering $1.8B invoice is news you might have read about a few months back. Steve sold the naming rights for the venue to Intuit for a princely $500M in a 23-year deal, following au-current trending in Sports. Because, sure, when you think Clippers, think your friends at Intuit — makers of CPA-adored software Turbo Tax and QuickBooks. What does half a billion get you? Intuit Dome FT(c)W. For the comical Win. Whatever the name etched onto the side of the building or emblazoned upon the rooftop LED wordmark, Intuit Dome is to be a jewel of a venue. It’ll boast of an NFL-caliber 44,000 square foot twin-sided 8K dual-purpose scoreboard and video screen, the most spacious standard leg and hip room in the NBA, 51 consecutive rows of baseline seating in 360 degrees, FEWER luxury suites prioritizing the everyday fan experience AND the highest seat-to-toilet ratio in the League at 27:1. Computer modeling guarantees a trip to the restroom, food purchase and return to a seat on a sold out night in under the time elapse of a standard NBA timeout. And in a final whimsical design flourish, Intuit Dome will prominently display the Team jersey from every high school in California. Just because. Talk about a venue for the masses, democratizing plain old good sensible taste. Classy.
So the Clippers are well on their way to charting their own course, free of ugly contractual clauses that lock-in the Team at a competitive disadvantage and permanent third-rate status. Superstars Kawhi Leonard and Paul George stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Steve just 67 days ago at the ceremonial Intuit Dome groundbreaking in Inglewood complete with silver hand shovels to turn over the first heaps of dirt. And a new leaf. While the Lakers up the Harbor Freeway quietly signed a 20 year lease extension at Staples this past spring and a noisily delivered an Onionesque punchline $700M crypto.com renaming right deal (shouldering aside Staples) just last week, Steve is moving ON. Finally he and the Team he so treasures are in control of their own destinies. Well, beginning in 2024. But still. It’s not that far off considering the suffocating entrapment of the past two decades. Now if only turning around the Team’s on-court record were as simple. They’ve still never reached the Finals, one of only 6 Teams in the NBA to claim the dubious honor. The Clippers, though, have made the playoffs in 6 the 7 Steve Ballmer years and advanced into the Western Conference Finals as recently as June. Then they went home emptyhanded. Steve is seen by many as the NBA’s version of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, a mover and shaker decorated with intelligent foresight, unadulterated ambition, consensus-building salesmanship and the North Star stewardship demanded of the 6th most valuable franchise in the NBA. Rather loudly, Steve is planting the seeds and utilizing all the tools at his disposal to deepen the Clippers Season well into June. With hoped-for regularity. And with it, he might just get his New Year’s Eves and Februarys back in exchange. A priceless bargain in a League bereft of them. It’s Showtime…but for the Clippers. Take THAT Lakers.
NOW as we turn to Week 11 in the NFL, it’s BEEN Showtime as a return to normally contrasts starkly with continued surprising erosion. It was a frigid afternoon drenched in a grey rain buffeted with howling winds up in Buffalo on Sunday and right on queue the bright lights of Hard Knock cameras exposed an Indy embarrassment of the Bills, 41–15. IND QB Carson Wentz ceded the show to instant MVP RB Jonathan Taylor who alone merited 32 carries, 185 rushing yards (to add to his League-leading stats) AND 4 TDs. BUF QB Josh Allen, whose eyes were televised to be as wide as saucers before drooping longingly, had no answers for such a showout. Nor did the Team’s DEF which looked to be sheltering from the stormy weather in sunnier stretches of its early Fall record, if only in memory. With the unspeakable loss, BUF cedes the AFC East top spot to the PATS. And with the standout WIN, the Colts are suddenly hotsy totsy. For a week anyways. Over at Arrowhead Stadium, the Chiefs strung the Christmas lights AND their 4th victory in a row, 19–9. This time with help from the Cowboys who entered the game with the League’s most fearsome Offense. But with KEY receiving core in Amari Cooper (COVID) and CeeDee Lamb (concussion) OUT, DAL QB Dak Prescott was left with few toys in his toy chest. Meanwhile, his counterpart with the Chiefs, Patrick Mahomes rung in the pre-Thanksgiving week with a ho-hum performance. The Team’s DEF pass rush delivered a strong and early Christmas gift to fans and with it a much-needed boost to their post-Season playoff street cred. At 7–4, KC has been redeemed. And cry no tears for DAL who remain atop the NFC East. Down in Charlotte, a weird, interesting and explosive family reunion played out before our very eyes. Cam Newton, the losing end of a Summer bakeoff up in NE to Mac Jones, celebrated his re-debut with the Team he signed with a decade ago out of college — Carolina. The raucous start (in for an injured Sam Darnold) was ornamented with all the trappings of a legend (21/27 189 yards 2TDs). But he didn’t count on WFT Ron Rivera, CAR’s former head coach, and QB Taylor Heinicke countering with an even stronger performance (16/22 206 yds 3TDs). Cam also didn’t count on a weak DEF that allowed such opposing transgressions. CAR lost 21–27 but delivered promise. So too WAS where a rabbit was pulled from their cartoon top hat when no one was expecting a magic show.
At SoFi, the Chargers bounced back from last week’s loss to nearly lose it all against Steel City on Sunday night. A late game 4th quarter PIT drive forced LAC back on its cleats but a last-minute PIT DEF catastrophe that allowed a Justin Herbert-Mike Williams 53-yard connection sealed the deal in LA’s favor, 41–37. The slumping Steelers slink away as the next two must-win weeks determine their post-season. The Chargers muster on at 6–4. UP in Seattle, you KNOW things are bad when HC Pete Carroll walks away from a post-game press conference in frustration only to return — apologetic — moments later. The occasion mimicked the Team’s second loss in a row this time to the NFL-best ARI, 13–23. Even without star QB Kyler Murray, ARI’s balanced and wears-like-iron OFF and DEF demonstrate whey the Cards have earned the League’s best record at 9–2. SEA QB Russell Wilson was left to tend the lemonade stand solo with a still clearly-recovering hand busily pressing resistant buttons on the cash register. The Team’s 3–7 record reflects it. In Nashville, oh how the mighty have fallen. A heady 6-game winning streak GONE. To the woeful Texans, 13–22. Titans injuries are piling up and for the Team, the Emperor had no clothes on Sunday. QB Ryan Tannehill matched his single TD with 4 INTs. How HOU with a poor DEF was able to apply such pressure to a highfalutin Team is beyond words. The Titans allowed a Texan moment in the sun. We’ll see if that cloud cover returns in Week 12. And if TEN can ever be credible without Derek Henry.
IN this week’s Round Robin, calamity is accreting in Las Vegas where the Raiders collect their 3rd L in succession, this time memorably to the Bengals, 13–32. Their tradition backslide to the January has begun. Green Bay LOST to the Vikings despite Aaron Rodgers and Kirk Cousins playing at elevated levels on Sunday. A tight 34–31 MIN victory might be evidence of karma making its rounds with Aaron’s recent travails and complaints of a hurt toe. He hopes history will kiss his boo-boo and make the hurt go away. At 8–3 and nipping at the ARI’s heels, he might be onto something. The Jags returned to their losing ways at home where a resurgent and no longer injury-plagued 49ers Team underlined their RETURN to seriousness of purpose, 10–13. Jimmy G naysayers have been silenced. UP in the Windy City, the Bears lost yet another game to the Ravens in what should have been a W, especially considering the absence of superstar Lamar Jackson. The tight 13–16 loss illustrates the degree of aimlessness on view. The Eagles are literally rushing back into contention having snuffed away the Saints, 40–29, the Jets lost to the Fins in a game where MIA continues to need more out of Tua Tagovailoa than his buzzy promise of 2019 and our lovely Lions remain winless at 0–9–1 despite a beleaguered opponent in the Brownies. So that’s THAT.
