Double time

I would again like to thank the Don Funk Sports Bar and Grill, partially sponsored by me, for hosting another football Sunday.

The Titans won again. Due to Missouri’s mind-numbing inability to score touchdowns in the second half, I am no longer focusing on the Titans’ disappointing season. I wonder how many wins it will take for me to forget. Two isn’t enough.

There have been two weeks of Vince Young doing everything asked of him to win. The people who supported him before still support him. The haters will always hate. I am impressed, although three weeks of impressed would be better than two. Also we’ve seen Chris Johnson have the best two-week stretch a Titan RB has ever had. Johnson has 350+ rushing yards and five touchdowns. You know what, though? I’m not putting Johnson’s awesomeness in the negative category for Young. If you have to worry about the QB running and it helps the RB, all the better.

In the first game. Young threw mostly short passes and took no chances. Yesterday, Young tried the deep ball. Gage caught a couple of deep passes, including one of the best catches I’ve ever seen.

Young scored on a seven-yard TD in the second quarter. I thought that touchdowns were hard to come by. The 49ers scored two in the final ten minutes of the half, and Alex Smith looked like the better of the former top picks who were trying to shed the bust label in their second act. When Smith scrambled and found an inexplicably wide open Jason Hill, I was upset. The defense was not building on last week’s good performance.

Jacob Ford changed that. He hit Smith on a throw. Smith’s elbow forced the ball forward and the call on the field was an incomplete pass. After a challenge (with Jeff Fisher looking fresh in that three sizes to large shirt), it was Titans ball. Chris Johnson gained all 36 yards on the drive. Touchdown.

It was the defense’s turn to frustrate Titan fans. The 49ers held the ball for what seemed like forever. A third-down stop inside the ten yard line held the 49ers to three points.
At this point the 49ers had mostly shut down Chris Johnson. That ended quickly. He found the corner and scored on an 81-yard touchdown. Or did he? Replay showed that his right heel scraped the white line halfway to the score. Could the Titans overcome the close call? After a negative play by Johnson, Young threw a deep pass to Gage. Two games ago, no Titan receiver could make a catch. Continuing this week, there were no drops. There is no good reason for this. Gage jumped up, Matrix style, took a hit at his peak height, and held onto the ball. That was the kind of play that let fans know that this team was different.

Young scrambled, Chris Johnson got a shot and even LenDale White had a carry. It was fourth and less than one at the two-yard line. It was time for Heimerdinger to do something really dumb. The advantage he had was that Chris Johnson would end up with the ball. He called an option run to the short side of the field. Young pitched the ball almost immediately. The 49ers would pin Johnson to the sideline for sure. But they didn’t. Johnson scored. The Titans took the lead.

The rest of the game had the kind of opportunistic defense that made last year so fun. Smith ended up with four touchdowns, including a clinching pick six by Courtland Finnegan. Jason Hill entertained us with the spank dance after the garbage time TD, but it was too late. The Titans won.

The Bills should be a win, but you never know. Young had one of his best games of his rookie year in Buffalo three years ago. A win would make the team 3-6, or 30% of the way to a pipe dream ten-game winning streak. If the Giants could go from 5-0 to 5-4, who knows. This is the National Football League.