Free Friday: We actually are allowed one good TNF game

Plus, I write about the election in what will probably be my political one-off.

Bengals 34 at Ravens 35

In a way, this was just continuing the theme of the Bengals season. Their defense kinda stinks, no matter how much Lou Anarumo fiddles with things. They were able to stymie Lamar Jackson at times, and the Ravens offense had seven points early in the third quarter. But the dam burst pretty easily behind a Chase Brown fumble leading to a short-field score and this despicable effort on Tylan Wallace’s 84-yard touchdown catch:

Three missed tackles, a bunch of guys assuming the underneath catch would just be an easy reset, and Wallace was gone.

And, in a way, this was just continuing the theme of the Ravens season. Their defense kinda stinks. It especially stinks when Kyle Hamilton leaves the game early. They were able to effectively get pressure on Joe Burrow — 26 quarterback pressures on 59 dropbacks — but Burrow did a terrific job of handling that pressure and stepping up into the pocket. And then, Baltimore’s secondary did the rest:

I’m not sure what Marcus Williams was doing here. He didn’t funnel Ja’Marr Chase inside. He didn’t make a real attempt to tackle him. He traffic-coned.

Those two things combined to make, well, actually a pretty fun football game. There were 34 points in the fourth quarter alone, the stars shone bright as Burrow, Chase, and Lamar Jackson all delivered individual play at the top of their games. The Bengals, recognizing the urgency of the situation and understanding that Jackson destroyed them, were incredibly aggressive. They attempted zero field goals. They went for it on fourth down four times. And then, at the end of the game, they created a new classic in one of my favorite genres: Love The Idea To Go For It — What Was That Playcall?

I think the idea to go for it and try to win the game there was completely sound. But you have a guy who has 11 catches for 264 yards and three touchdowns, and you have seen that the Ravens are going to single cover him … why are we throwing to Tanner Hudson in what amounts to tight double coverage? Burrow’s throw is actually pretty good given the circumstances, and the window is there, I’ll admit. But … why?

Both teams continue on their established trajectories before the game, and the only thing that really changes is Cincinnati’s urgency. At 4-6, with two games up in the next three weeks against the Chargers and Steelers, they essentially need to win both to remain more than a fringe playoff team. Especially because they’d be handing the Chargers a huge tiebreaker if they lost that game.

The toe dip into politics that you’ve all been waiting for

I don’t enjoy talking politics, and I think for me an ingrained level of cynicism exists just because my desires (progressive/leftist/etc.) are never going to be expressed on a national level in our current system. I’m happy to vote practically for who I want to win — even though living in Texas means that doesn’t really matter on a national level — and spoiler, that was not Donald Trump.

But being less the despair type and more of the “why?” type, I’ve been mainlining the data. And as someone who often feels cast aside by the current platforms of the Democratic party (i.e. would rather not be paying for endless war/cleansing in Gaza), I can empathize with the plight of people who felt that way.

The data point that jumps out the most to me is as follows:

I live in a household that would be considered “affluent” here, which is why I kind of assumed Harris would win. Most people that I’d talked to about the election didn’t want to introduce destabilization of the economy into their lives. But it turns out that there are many more people out there who did. And when you think about what inflation really means, I think this shift makes a lot of practical sense. I will admit my privilege up front and tell you that eggs being $7 a carton or whatever for a few months did not meaningfully impact my life beyond some grousing. But that’s not the case for everybody else. The donor class saw their home values rising and their stock portfolio surging, but lower-earning Americans reaped nothing from that.

More functionally speaking, now that businesses know they can just push the “gouge” button and Americans will fire the manager, it feels like it is almost impossible for the Democratic party to have any power for more than four years. They were already fighting the ingrained disadvantages of including groups of people in their coalition with socially repugnant ideas for money. The Harris’ campaign’s closing pitch was about how Dick and Liz Cheney liked them, and the people who made money responded to that. But you can’t sway a bunch of independent voters that way and also not alienate a lot of your core base. They took on the persona of the 1990s-early 2000s Republican, and that viewpoint is currently a political loser.

As I am self-admitting: I have privileges. I try to be an ally, I try to donate where I can, and I’m almost positive that what I do is not enough because I’m not sure what would be enough. Unless the bleakest possible view of what happens comes true — and even then I have escape options — few of the terrible things that are going to happen because of this are going to impact my day-to-day life. I don’t blame lower-earning people voting for Trump, because while I’m sure some (many?) of them turned out to vote for racism and sexism, I think at its core the shift towards Trump is an economic issue.

I wish I had any faith that the Democratic party would take that data and run with it in a real way. But instead the only self-reflection that has been aired is elites doing the “well, guess we need to be more racist and transphobic” bit. You don’t need me to be the 800th online writer you know to tell you that they don’t deeply care about most of their constituents willfully.

But it gets hard to ignore when it leads you to this timeline.