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Not that the Phillies Need Bulletin Board Material, But Kirk Herbstreit Provided Some
Published:
Herby with a bit of disrespect towards the Phils while the Rams were choking at home against Mac Jones and a banged-up 49ers team:
Do you think the Phillies are a bulletin board material team? I can’t imagine they are. They know what the task at hand is. It’s the NLDS, not the first round of the NBA playoffs, where the #1 seed is playing a 40-win Washington Wizards team. They knew they were probably going to have to go through the defending champion LA Dodgers to get back to the NLCS, so here we are. This series should require no extra motivation.
But if you wanted to play the disrespect card, there’s enough to work with. The Phillies are series underdogs, albeit very slight underdogs, so you could go the 2017 Philadelphia Eagles route and put on Lane Johnson’s dog mask. You’ve got Ohio State lover Kirk Herbstreit now suggesting that the Dodgers have already won the NLDS, which is a slight. And you know it doesn’t take much to draw up a “nobody believed in us” storyline anyway. The Georgia Bulldogs went 15-0 three years ago and Nolan Smith had the audacity to say afterward that pundits were predicting a 7-5 season.
He told our sister site Saturday Down South:
“You gotta create your own narrative man. Sometimes you gotta put the chip on your own shoulder. But we did have a humongous target on our back, as we saw in the Missouri game… sometimes you gotta juice it up for the guys, especially when you an old man last year. I just wanted everybody to know I said it the whole summer.”
It’s curious, the narrative thing. Philadelphia fans always seem much more comfortable in an underdog role, when the perceived slights are being made against them. Playing the favorite is less comfortable, and makes things a little harder to swallow if the team ultimately crashes out of the playoffs. But the ole’ chip on the shoulder routine is on-brand, so we’ll see if Phillies fans and maybe even the players try to ride that during this postseason.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com