Tied Up

          

            Well this is awkward.

           

            The San Francisco 49ers and Saint Louis Rams somehow played 75 minutes of football and nobody won. They each made big plays, scored points, and made defensive stops, yet the final score was 24-24. This phenomenon has not happened since 2008 when the Eagles and Bengals were done playing with the score 13-13.

            Ties are more awkward than a guy’s first contraceptive purchase. They are more baffling than trying to explain the birds and the bees to your eleven year old son.

You don’t know how to react to a tie as a fan because you can’t really be mad at the result one way or another. People paid good money to watch a football game that ended without a tangible result. Although in the case of San Francisco, they will probably have more questions than answers about them because they were big time favorites to beat the Rams.

            And the post game press conferences are just open ended venting sessions that don’t make sense.

            Ties are a journalist’s nightmare. When a team wins or loses, writers are dependent on portraying the causes that lead to the results. Causes and effects fuel journalism stories like diesel fuel fuels a Mercedes.

            However, ties are the journalistic equivalent of putting gas in a car and having the car stall out after driving it on the highway for 50 miles. You know that you were either supposed to get to your destination fine, or something would lead to you getting lost. But

stalling out is just awkward because you don’t know what lead to this result; ties work the exact same way.

            Don’t get me wrong, there is still plenty of good stuff that can be taken away from this game. This tie made Alex Smith suddenly a lot more valuable as a quarterback because without him, the 49ers can’t even beat the Rams. The young Rams team played well against presumably one of the best teams in the NFC. And Colin Kapernick is not and will never be an NFL starter because he can’t even beat the Rams.

            Still, looking at all angles a tie in a professional sporting event should not happen nor should it be allowed to happen. Yes there is the overwhelming argument of player safety and if the NFL actually gave a damn about the players it would be a valid argument. But the average NFL player gets paid an average of 1.9 million dollars a year to produce wins not ties. Simply put, the players and coaches are making too much money for a nine billion dollar industry to give out a half baked result like a tie.

            Ties leave both teams with more questions than answers. So it makes sense to ask to ask why the NFL even bothers letting ties exist at all. Well if they want to be awkward let them its’ their loss…err win….no wait tie.

            Yup. It’s still awkward.