Wilbon's RightNever discount the NFL's ability to
get things wrong.
Of course, it's a game that shouldn't be played on Monday night, nor should it be played eight miles outside of New York City on the Giants' home field. It's a New York-centric decision, an impossibly arrogant presumption that if you can't be where you want to be, you certainly want to be in New York. Boy, it's so nice of the executives on Park Avenue to be so kind to the Saints, who are displaced from Louisiana and have relocated to San Antonio.It was a ridiculously bad decision to move the game to the Meadowlands, for reasons that Wilbon points out:
1. Unfair to Saints' fans, who could have made the drive to a game in Baton Rouge or Mississippi or Alabama.
2. Unfair to the other teams in the NFC East which now sees one of its teams with nine home games and seven road contests. Actually this is not quite as big a deal as Willbon makes it out to be. Last year home teams won 56.6% of the games, so a team that had nine home games and seven road games would be expected to win 8.1 games (literally impossible, but ten teams with a similar schedule should end up winning about 81 games) instead of 8.0. Of course, if the Giants win tonight, expect some griping in Philly and Dallas.
3. Unfair to the Saints, whom some have annointed "America's team". Of course, this is the flip side of the Giants' coin; essentially what the Saints have lost by playing on the road is about 1/10th of a game. But again, that's on the odds. Suppose the Saints lose a close game tonight, one that they can convince themselves they would have won at home. And suppose the Giants and Saints are tied at the end of the year for a wild card playoff spot; under the rules the Giants would go based on their head-to-head victory. If that knocks the Saints out of the playoffs expect a lot of anger at the league from their new fans. Another bad potential is if the Giants and Saints are tied for the top wild card spot; that would mean that the two teams would play in the Meadowlands in the first week of the playoffs.
Of course, if the Saints win...
