Kovacevic: Too much perfection is flawed

Brief and to the Point ...

• The eight-lateral, 46-second, phenomenal finish to Miami's victory at Duke this past weekend might well have included an infraction or two. It absolutely involved the officials misinterpreting a rule about what could and couldn't be challenged, and the ACC suspended them two weeks for this.

That wasn't enough for some. It wasn't even close.

Believe it or not, grown men and women, including a few in the national media, actually advocated for the conference to alter the outcome. You know, declare the team that lost the one that won. Their thinking was that, since it was the final play, there would be no need to replay any part of the game -- that's how Major League Baseball handles its upheld protests -- and it would be simple enough to just wave off Miami's touchdown.

Meaning to wave off this ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YXwuaniPoc



Even though both teams walked off the field. Even though the officials had blown the final whistle. Even though this discussion was happening the next day.

It's so nonsensical I can't even muster a coherent counter for it.

So rather than try, I'll instead offer this: Be careful about messing too much with what fans see with their own eyes and how they feel when they see it.

Something similar could be cited from our city just a couple weeks ago:

http://i611.photobucket.com/albums/tt197/DKPghSports/MalkinOTGoal_zpsasbu5qfz.gif

The Penguins, as you'll recall from what's above, beat the Panthers in overtime on an undisputed legal Evgeni Malkin goal. But as you'll also recall, everyone had to stand around for 3-4 minutes before it was confirmed. And once it was, there was little left in the way of celebration. The delay was one big buzzkill.

What's worse, to repeat, the goal itself was legal. The delay arose from a a new NHL rule that allows replay officials to rewind the clock all the way back to the point of zone entry to check if the scoring team entered offside. And it's about as knee-jerk as any rule in hockey history, having been installed over the summer wholly to appease the Canadiens' complaint over a single offside goal scored against them in the most recent playoffs.

Replay is fine in moderation, but when does it extend to reviewing too much, too far back to make everything perfect?

Refs and umpires are human and, thus, they aren't perfect. Neither is the world. Spend too much time trying to make it all perfect, and you'll never fully appreciate what takes place along the way.

• Jim Rutherford can't make it any clearer that he wants Daniel Sprong to stay with the Penguins all season. Mike Johnston can't make it any clearer that he'd rather have a root canal after every meal than give Sprong any meaningful ice time. The GM and his evaluators have made the determination that the player belongs in the NHL, and the coach takes to the podium to call him "a junior player."

Sounds like quite the conundrum, huh?

Well, it shouldn't be.

Rutherford and his men are right, and the coach is wrong. Rutherford needs to assert himself here. Which he's eminently capable of doing.

One glance around the NHL is all it takes to see that young legs are a must. And not so they can be responsible puck managers, either.

• If you want to truly appreciate what Marc-Andre Fleury is doing right now, monitor his rebound control. The reflexes have been there his whole life. The angles and body control have improved dramatically the past two years. But the rebound control is without precedent.

Johnston described it the other day as "the puck's kind of sticking to him right now," and that's worded beautifully.

• Sidney Crosby's unwillingness to move below the goal line on the power play is not only open defiance of the coaching staff's wishes but also a case of denial. Crosby is excellent down there, and it would be a tremendous boost -- for the team and the individual -- if he complied.

• The Canadiens are 11-2 with a plus-26 goal differential, both best in the NHL. But they won't finish among the top two, possibly even the top three in the Eastern Conference. Nowhere near enough scoring depth.

• Not everyone loves Mike Tomlin's many Tomlin-isms. I'll confess that I do. And I'll go so far as to say that the first few minutes of his weekly press conference, in which he breaks down the next opponent, send me into linguistic nirvana at least once or twice. I'll be he does it again today.

What I can't stomach is this: Don't preach about embracing challenges and having an open mind -- both Tomlin staples -- while stubbornly stiff-arming any of the available advanced analysis regarding clock management.

Chuck Noll, the greatest coach/manager our city will ever know, went from his hiring in 1969 all the way through 1987 without a special teams coach. He insisted upon filling that role himself. And he insisted on that even when 27 of the NFL's 28 teams at the time had hired their own specialist in that role.

But Noll relented after the special teams stunk in 1986 and hired not one but two special teams coaches.

And on that February day in announcing his new hires, he told reporters this: "What do they say about how, when you want to get a mule's attention, you hit him in the head? Well, that hit me in the head."

That will make a superb, if borrowed, Tomlin-ism someday.

• Vontaze Burfict's tackle of Le'Veon Bell was legal but ugly:



And it should be illegal. In fact, any action that targets the knees, whether by an offensive or defensive player, should be illegal. It's amazing that it took the NFL as long as it did to address chop blocks, but it eventually, if not completely, did.

Injuries to the knee are the most common kind in the NFL. In fact, if broken down specifically, they're the three most common injuries, in order: 1. ACL. 2. MCL. 3. Meniscus.

These don't grab medical headlines the way concussions have in recent years, and rightly so, given that sports medicine has made huge strides with the knee while concussions remain terrifyingly uncharted. But they take away a ton from the game of football -- at all levels -- and they shorten careers.

• People in Cincinnati are raving about the Bengals being 7-0, and I suppose that's fair. But some of the superlatives that followed Sunday seemed a little irrational. I saw a team that looked like it was desperately doing everything down the stretch to give the game away ... only to find the opponent was doing exactly the same.

Let's hold off the parade plans until Marvin Lewis wins his first playoff game. He's 0-6 in the postseason, and this in 12 years as head coach.

• Don't think the Steelers can earn the wild card?

Why is that exactly?

Even as this is being typed, their 4-4 record is the sixth-best in the AFC. That's the second wild card spot. The Raiders, their next opponent, are 4-3. The other teams in the mix are the Bills, Jets, Dolphins, Texans and Chiefs.

To boot, the second half of the Steelers' schedule includes two teams out of the eight currently holding a winning record, the Bengals and Broncos.