WATERCOOLER CHAT: SHERMAN’S BRILLIANT MARKETING, ABOLISHING THE EXTRA POINT, BELICHICK CALLS WELKER OUT
FOOTBALL
As expected,  the talk of the last couple of days is about Seahawks’ cornerback Richard Sherman’s post-game rant.  As I mentioned in Monday’s post, Sherman called out 49ers receiver Michael Crabtree saying that Crabtree was a “sorry, mediocre” receiver. Apparently, these two had bad blood well before this game, and Sherman knows how to call attention to himself. He’s great at self-marketing, and that outburst is just a sliver of his personality. He is now going to be a very big storyline heading into the Super Bowl.  I guess he knew exactly what he was doing.
And in some other NFL news, commissioner Roger Goodell is considering abolishing the extra point. It’s just too easy for kickers, and there were only 5 missed extra points this year out of some 1,200 attempts. He thought an interesting way to change it would be for touchdowns to be worth 7 points, with the team getting an option to go for a play to make it 8 points. However, if they miss, the touchdown is only worth 6. This would be a pretty major shakeup for the traditional NFL, and would change a lot of teams strategies. On the other hand, the extra point can be considered a bit outdated.  In the past,  teams didn’t have polished kickers (they used fullbacks) so the extra point was dramatic and important to the game.
Finally, after taking a beating from the Broncos, Patriots’ coach Bill Belichick has taken a shot at his former player, Wes Welker. Welker laid a serious hit on Patriots’ cornerback Aqib Talib. This caused Talib to get ruled out of the game, and put a hole in the Pats defense. Belichick says he believed Welker’s hit was intentional and that it was a very dirty play. Welker responded by saying he was only trying to set a pick on Talib to take him out of the play and had zero malicious intent. It’s hard to know what’s true, but it just adds more fuel to the story that Welker left the Pats because he didn’t like Belichick.
