NFL Regular Season Thread 2010
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COMBINE!
Loads of young black bucks being measured and put through tests. It's like slavery all over again. But live on the NFL website. Brill.
And Cam Newton is throwing. Briller.
And there is talk of Gabbert being number one pick. Bizarro.
Loads of young black bucks being measured and put through tests. It's like slavery all over again. But live on the NFL website. Brill.
And Cam Newton is throwing. Briller.
And there is talk of Gabbert being number one pick. Bizarro.
Nate Sodler's my man methinks.
Stephen Paea benched 225lbs 49 times yesterday. He is the Tongan Hulk.
Cam Newton completely shat the bed in the throwing drills, whereas Ryan Mallet looked like he was painting it on. I'd still pick neither of them though. Ponder looked good. Depending on how he interviewed, I wonder if he might slip past a few people and go much higher than initially thought. There's still a lot of chat that Blaine Gabbert could go first round. I'm not going to doubt it, as underestimating the stupidity of NFL teams is a folly, but it would seem a massive fucking reach. He was in a gimmick offence and loses the ball at anything over about ten yards. Locker threw well. Probably not well enough to get himself back as a Day 1 pick though. I hope he does well. There's still a good signal caller in there somewhere. Jerrod Johnson was hilariously shit.
Man, there are a lot of QBs who I really enjoyed watching in college going in this draft. Newton, Mallet, Kaepernick, Tolzien, Locker, Ponder, Stanzi, Dalton, Enderle, Tyrod, and I really liked Pat Devlin even though he was throwing in 1-AA with Delaware. Going to be interesting seeing where they fall.
Julio Jones looked completely fucking sick. He is wicked. And Ingram had a ten yard split of like one-five. Dude is dynamite off the line. And McElroy reportedly scored 48 on the Wonderlic. All your bases are belong to Bama.
Cam Newton completely shat the bed in the throwing drills, whereas Ryan Mallet looked like he was painting it on. I'd still pick neither of them though. Ponder looked good. Depending on how he interviewed, I wonder if he might slip past a few people and go much higher than initially thought. There's still a lot of chat that Blaine Gabbert could go first round. I'm not going to doubt it, as underestimating the stupidity of NFL teams is a folly, but it would seem a massive fucking reach. He was in a gimmick offence and loses the ball at anything over about ten yards. Locker threw well. Probably not well enough to get himself back as a Day 1 pick though. I hope he does well. There's still a good signal caller in there somewhere. Jerrod Johnson was hilariously shit.
Man, there are a lot of QBs who I really enjoyed watching in college going in this draft. Newton, Mallet, Kaepernick, Tolzien, Locker, Ponder, Stanzi, Dalton, Enderle, Tyrod, and I really liked Pat Devlin even though he was throwing in 1-AA with Delaware. Going to be interesting seeing where they fall.
Julio Jones looked completely fucking sick. He is wicked. And Ingram had a ten yard split of like one-five. Dude is dynamite off the line. And McElroy reportedly scored 48 on the Wonderlic. All your bases are belong to Bama.
AJ Hawk released, although will probably be re-signed.
Please please please go for him Mr Mayhew.
Please please please go for him Mr Mayhew.
Bill Simmons on the NFL Owners:
Take a deep breath, suspend all disbelief and walk through the following hypothetical (and admittedly ridiculous) scenario with me ...
It's December 2006.
I decide to leave ESPN, start my own blog and charge $10 per year for anyone to read my column. Just for fun -- again, it's hypothetical! -- let's say one million readers sign up, guaranteeing me $10 million for that first year (2007). And let's say I sign advertising deals with three sponsors for another $2 million apiece, raising my total haul to $16 million for Year 1. I spend the next 12 months writing and pinching myself for my good fortune. Life is good.
Fast-forward to December 2007. I just learned something about myself. I don't like it. I know it's wrong. I can't shake it. I can't deny it. See, I really, really like money. Even if I never imagined making $16 million in my lifetime, much less for a single year, I now find myself smitten by those dollar signs. How much more can I make? How high can this go? Someday, I want my financial adviser to cackle and say, "Good Lord, I don't even know what to do with all this cash flow." That's what I want.
Hence, I need to raise the total value of my "franchise." I build a more sophisticated website, pay for designers and extra bandwidth, then hire a team of writers and editors to work for me. That creates $2 million in expenses for Year 2, which I pay off by finding a fourth sponsor. In order to cover these additional expenses, I'm "forced" to raise the 2008 subscription fee to $25. (That's what I tell my idiot readers.) This time around, only 700,000 readers sign up. Between sponsors and subscribers, I am still guaranteed a total haul of $23.5 million for Year 2. Profit. This is good. I am showing "growth." Even as I slowly antagonize my audience.
By the end of Year 2, I have the hottest sports website on the Internet. Everyone wants to work for me for the visibility and prestige, and also because I share revenue with employees (they get salaries plus a small piece of everything I am pulling in). An overload of potential sponsors allows me to jack my rates and pocket $30 million in ad revenue for Year 3. But you know what? I love the smell of money. I can't get enough of it. Sometimes I go to the bank, withdraw a wad of $100 bills, throw it on my desk, lean my face over it and smell the pile like cookies baking in an oven. I can't get enough. I am insatiable. I need more.
For Year 3, I limit subscriptions to 300,000, then sell "personal subscription licenses." For an upfront fee of $200, a reader would purchase the right to subscribe for 10 years -- a decade-long contract of sorts -- at whatever price I charge. Did you catch those last five words? At whatever price I charge. How stupid are these people? Yeah, I know, they are my fans ... but don't they realize that I'm throwing on a ski mask and holding them up? And so what if this makes me the greediest, most soulless a-hole who ever lived? I WANT THAT MONEY! This is America! Greed is good! I have lost my mind.
Incredibly, I sell those 300,000 PSLs for a total haul of $60 million, then make another 50,000 PSL-free subscriptions available on a first-come/first-serve annual basis. (Those sell, too.) Was that influx of money worth getting ripped by media reporters and savaged on message boards and blogs? Are you kidding? Please. Throw in another $12.25 million from the $35 subscription fee for Year 3 (which, very quietly, I jacked up another 10 bucks) and a robust $20 million in ad revenue and, even after you remove expenses and revenue sharing, I still pocket $80 million.
Now I'm on the cover of Business Week, I'm featured in Vanity Fair, I'm making appearances on Bill Maher and "The Daily Show." ... I'm a rock star, the writer/entrepreneur who turned his little blog into a nine-figure operation. I spend another $5 million on staff, then another $10 million on a five-story building on Hollywood Boulevard, then another $10 million renovating it into a state-of-the-art office that features a lavish two-story sports bar with a 250-inch Panasonic HD plasma that costs $400,000 (the first of its kind) ... which, by the way, I didn't have to pay for because I convinced the city of Los Angeles to fund almost all of it with taxpayer money. I will generate revenue from journalism buffs, tourists, you name it. Or so I think.
See, I may have bitten off a little bit more than I could chew this time.
My site wasn't as good in Year 3. A few of my best writers bolted because I didn't give them a bigger revenue cut. A few rival sites launched -- all free, all cutting into my traffic -- and the backlash over my PSLs and exorbitant subscription fees hasn't slowed down. Not that I care; my only concern is not showing enough growth. Even after selling one-third of the business to foreign investors for $100 million (my employees don't get a cut of this, of course), and even after raising subscription fees to a staggeringly obscene $50 for Year 4 -- which my 300,000 subscribers are forced to pay since they were dumb enough to buy those PSLs that they can't sell now -- my bottom line looks like this:
Year 1 (2007): $16 million profit
Year 2 (2008): $23.5 million profit
Year 3 (2009): $80 million profit
Year 4 (2010): $95 million profit
I'm not growing fast enough. I don't fully own my business anymore. I already played my two best quick-hit tricks (PSLs and investors) for cash flow. I have a 100-person staff at this point that's growing every month. Looking ahead to Year 5, I decide to change my revenue-sharing agreement with my employees -- ask them for more money back, basically -- to make up for my projected fall in revenue. They resist. They want the same agreement as before, only with better health care.
My counter: That's fine, as long as you work six days a week to help me generate more revenue, because again, MY BUSINESS NEEDS TO KEEP GROWING!!!!
That was my ballsiest request yet. I made it despite new medical evidence (take an extra leap of hypothetical faith here) that spending too much time in front of a computer is significantly more dangerous than we ever imagined. Doctors believe over-computer stimulation (OCS) directly leads to early death, Parkinson's, concussions, cancer, blindness and various other terrible things -- a slight problem for me, since, you know, my business revolves around people reading computers and writing on them. For three years, I willfully ignored this information even as the New Yorker and New York Times repeatedly wrote about it, then belatedly pretended to care halfway through Year 4 -- although, really, I could have given two craps, I just had to PRETEND I did -- because legally, I might be liable for making employees work even longer hours despite the risks. Thank God none of my media cronies crushed me for ignoring those same dangers in 2007, 2008 and 2009. Phew.
My long-term fear? The dangers of extensive computer use will scare writers and readers away from computers altogether. But that's decades away. Habits take time to break. I'll be living on my own beach in Mexico or St. Bart's by then.
My short-term fear: My employees will walk at the beginning of Year 5 unless I give them a slightly better deal and bend on six-day workweeks. You'd think I would take care of these people, that I made enough money already, that it's the decent thing to do. But my franchise isn't worth quite what it could be. I wanted to be generating a $150 million profit in Year 5. I can't slam on the brakes. Not now.
I scramble and swing a deal with Apple: $200 million for five-year rights to sell applications for my site. There's an evil wrinkle: The deal can't kick in until the start of Year 5. If my site goes into hiatus because I locked out my employees, I can still cash that $200 million for myself. How does that windfall help me? Now I don't care if my employees walk: I have my Apple money, my foreign investor money and my PSL money. I can play hardball. I can afford to wait them out.
They are peons. They live paycheck to paycheck. They will fold. They will accept my crappy deal. Eventually.
What I don't anticipate: My employees are savvier than I thought. They file a lawsuit claiming my Apple deal was unethical, that I intentionally sought that $200 million nest egg as a negotiating advantage, that I shouldn't be allowed to touch that money during a labor dispute. Uh-oh. A judge rules in their favor. So long, nest egg. Meanwhile, my foreign investors are incensed that Year 5 might not happen; they feel like I deceived them. My PSL owners are threatening to sue for failing to deliver promised content. My bills at my Hollywood complex keep piling up. And the media is crucifying me for being greedy and losing touch with the same readers who made me wealthy.
Guess what? I still don't care.
If Charlie Sheen is addicted to winning, then I am addicted to making money. I have lost any and all perspective. I don't care if I lose my readers in the short term; they will come back. I don't care if I lose my staff; I can always find new people. I don't care about the health of my employees; as far as I'm concerned, they knew the risks. I don't care if my website is gravitating toward quantity over quality, or that we chase page views with shorter, Google-friendly stories instead of posting the same top-notch content that got people reading us in the first place; I want only to generate more revenue than the previous year.
Heck, I don't even care that one of my former employees was so destroyed mentally by OCS that, instead of just killing himself, he made arrangements ahead of time for his brain to be studied by OCS scientists, then shot himself in the heart. It was the creepiest, most haunting story in recent memory, the kind of incident that makes you sigh and say, "Wait, what are we doing to these people?" I don't care. I don't care. I don't care.
Remember the scene in "Shawshank" when Andy tells the warden that he's done with laundering money for him? The warden's eyes narrow. He shakes his head. He looks at Andy as dismissively as one human being can regard another.
"Nothing stops," he says. "Nothing."
That's me. I'm the warden. Nothing stops. I will make more money than I did last year, and I will continue to regard employees and readers as disposable pawns. This isn't about common sense, dignity, relationships, long-term plans, or even preserving the fragile relationship between a customer and a provider. It's about generating more money in Years 5 through 8 than I made in Years 1 through 4. That's it. Oh, and steamrolling anyone who gets in my way. I forgot that part.
Now tell me ...
Would I make a good NFL owner?
Take a deep breath, suspend all disbelief and walk through the following hypothetical (and admittedly ridiculous) scenario with me ...
It's December 2006.
I decide to leave ESPN, start my own blog and charge $10 per year for anyone to read my column. Just for fun -- again, it's hypothetical! -- let's say one million readers sign up, guaranteeing me $10 million for that first year (2007). And let's say I sign advertising deals with three sponsors for another $2 million apiece, raising my total haul to $16 million for Year 1. I spend the next 12 months writing and pinching myself for my good fortune. Life is good.
Fast-forward to December 2007. I just learned something about myself. I don't like it. I know it's wrong. I can't shake it. I can't deny it. See, I really, really like money. Even if I never imagined making $16 million in my lifetime, much less for a single year, I now find myself smitten by those dollar signs. How much more can I make? How high can this go? Someday, I want my financial adviser to cackle and say, "Good Lord, I don't even know what to do with all this cash flow." That's what I want.
Hence, I need to raise the total value of my "franchise." I build a more sophisticated website, pay for designers and extra bandwidth, then hire a team of writers and editors to work for me. That creates $2 million in expenses for Year 2, which I pay off by finding a fourth sponsor. In order to cover these additional expenses, I'm "forced" to raise the 2008 subscription fee to $25. (That's what I tell my idiot readers.) This time around, only 700,000 readers sign up. Between sponsors and subscribers, I am still guaranteed a total haul of $23.5 million for Year 2. Profit. This is good. I am showing "growth." Even as I slowly antagonize my audience.
By the end of Year 2, I have the hottest sports website on the Internet. Everyone wants to work for me for the visibility and prestige, and also because I share revenue with employees (they get salaries plus a small piece of everything I am pulling in). An overload of potential sponsors allows me to jack my rates and pocket $30 million in ad revenue for Year 3. But you know what? I love the smell of money. I can't get enough of it. Sometimes I go to the bank, withdraw a wad of $100 bills, throw it on my desk, lean my face over it and smell the pile like cookies baking in an oven. I can't get enough. I am insatiable. I need more.
For Year 3, I limit subscriptions to 300,000, then sell "personal subscription licenses." For an upfront fee of $200, a reader would purchase the right to subscribe for 10 years -- a decade-long contract of sorts -- at whatever price I charge. Did you catch those last five words? At whatever price I charge. How stupid are these people? Yeah, I know, they are my fans ... but don't they realize that I'm throwing on a ski mask and holding them up? And so what if this makes me the greediest, most soulless a-hole who ever lived? I WANT THAT MONEY! This is America! Greed is good! I have lost my mind.
Incredibly, I sell those 300,000 PSLs for a total haul of $60 million, then make another 50,000 PSL-free subscriptions available on a first-come/first-serve annual basis. (Those sell, too.) Was that influx of money worth getting ripped by media reporters and savaged on message boards and blogs? Are you kidding? Please. Throw in another $12.25 million from the $35 subscription fee for Year 3 (which, very quietly, I jacked up another 10 bucks) and a robust $20 million in ad revenue and, even after you remove expenses and revenue sharing, I still pocket $80 million.
Now I'm on the cover of Business Week, I'm featured in Vanity Fair, I'm making appearances on Bill Maher and "The Daily Show." ... I'm a rock star, the writer/entrepreneur who turned his little blog into a nine-figure operation. I spend another $5 million on staff, then another $10 million on a five-story building on Hollywood Boulevard, then another $10 million renovating it into a state-of-the-art office that features a lavish two-story sports bar with a 250-inch Panasonic HD plasma that costs $400,000 (the first of its kind) ... which, by the way, I didn't have to pay for because I convinced the city of Los Angeles to fund almost all of it with taxpayer money. I will generate revenue from journalism buffs, tourists, you name it. Or so I think.
See, I may have bitten off a little bit more than I could chew this time.
My site wasn't as good in Year 3. A few of my best writers bolted because I didn't give them a bigger revenue cut. A few rival sites launched -- all free, all cutting into my traffic -- and the backlash over my PSLs and exorbitant subscription fees hasn't slowed down. Not that I care; my only concern is not showing enough growth. Even after selling one-third of the business to foreign investors for $100 million (my employees don't get a cut of this, of course), and even after raising subscription fees to a staggeringly obscene $50 for Year 4 -- which my 300,000 subscribers are forced to pay since they were dumb enough to buy those PSLs that they can't sell now -- my bottom line looks like this:
Year 1 (2007): $16 million profit
Year 2 (2008): $23.5 million profit
Year 3 (2009): $80 million profit
Year 4 (2010): $95 million profit
I'm not growing fast enough. I don't fully own my business anymore. I already played my two best quick-hit tricks (PSLs and investors) for cash flow. I have a 100-person staff at this point that's growing every month. Looking ahead to Year 5, I decide to change my revenue-sharing agreement with my employees -- ask them for more money back, basically -- to make up for my projected fall in revenue. They resist. They want the same agreement as before, only with better health care.
My counter: That's fine, as long as you work six days a week to help me generate more revenue, because again, MY BUSINESS NEEDS TO KEEP GROWING!!!!
That was my ballsiest request yet. I made it despite new medical evidence (take an extra leap of hypothetical faith here) that spending too much time in front of a computer is significantly more dangerous than we ever imagined. Doctors believe over-computer stimulation (OCS) directly leads to early death, Parkinson's, concussions, cancer, blindness and various other terrible things -- a slight problem for me, since, you know, my business revolves around people reading computers and writing on them. For three years, I willfully ignored this information even as the New Yorker and New York Times repeatedly wrote about it, then belatedly pretended to care halfway through Year 4 -- although, really, I could have given two craps, I just had to PRETEND I did -- because legally, I might be liable for making employees work even longer hours despite the risks. Thank God none of my media cronies crushed me for ignoring those same dangers in 2007, 2008 and 2009. Phew.
My long-term fear? The dangers of extensive computer use will scare writers and readers away from computers altogether. But that's decades away. Habits take time to break. I'll be living on my own beach in Mexico or St. Bart's by then.
My short-term fear: My employees will walk at the beginning of Year 5 unless I give them a slightly better deal and bend on six-day workweeks. You'd think I would take care of these people, that I made enough money already, that it's the decent thing to do. But my franchise isn't worth quite what it could be. I wanted to be generating a $150 million profit in Year 5. I can't slam on the brakes. Not now.
I scramble and swing a deal with Apple: $200 million for five-year rights to sell applications for my site. There's an evil wrinkle: The deal can't kick in until the start of Year 5. If my site goes into hiatus because I locked out my employees, I can still cash that $200 million for myself. How does that windfall help me? Now I don't care if my employees walk: I have my Apple money, my foreign investor money and my PSL money. I can play hardball. I can afford to wait them out.
They are peons. They live paycheck to paycheck. They will fold. They will accept my crappy deal. Eventually.
What I don't anticipate: My employees are savvier than I thought. They file a lawsuit claiming my Apple deal was unethical, that I intentionally sought that $200 million nest egg as a negotiating advantage, that I shouldn't be allowed to touch that money during a labor dispute. Uh-oh. A judge rules in their favor. So long, nest egg. Meanwhile, my foreign investors are incensed that Year 5 might not happen; they feel like I deceived them. My PSL owners are threatening to sue for failing to deliver promised content. My bills at my Hollywood complex keep piling up. And the media is crucifying me for being greedy and losing touch with the same readers who made me wealthy.
Guess what? I still don't care.
If Charlie Sheen is addicted to winning, then I am addicted to making money. I have lost any and all perspective. I don't care if I lose my readers in the short term; they will come back. I don't care if I lose my staff; I can always find new people. I don't care about the health of my employees; as far as I'm concerned, they knew the risks. I don't care if my website is gravitating toward quantity over quality, or that we chase page views with shorter, Google-friendly stories instead of posting the same top-notch content that got people reading us in the first place; I want only to generate more revenue than the previous year.
Heck, I don't even care that one of my former employees was so destroyed mentally by OCS that, instead of just killing himself, he made arrangements ahead of time for his brain to be studied by OCS scientists, then shot himself in the heart. It was the creepiest, most haunting story in recent memory, the kind of incident that makes you sigh and say, "Wait, what are we doing to these people?" I don't care. I don't care. I don't care.
Remember the scene in "Shawshank" when Andy tells the warden that he's done with laundering money for him? The warden's eyes narrow. He shakes his head. He looks at Andy as dismissively as one human being can regard another.
"Nothing stops," he says. "Nothing."
That's me. I'm the warden. Nothing stops. I will make more money than I did last year, and I will continue to regard employees and readers as disposable pawns. This isn't about common sense, dignity, relationships, long-term plans, or even preserving the fragile relationship between a customer and a provider. It's about generating more money in Years 5 through 8 than I made in Years 1 through 4. That's it. Oh, and steamrolling anyone who gets in my way. I forgot that part.
Now tell me ...
Would I make a good NFL owner?
Interesting analogy.
What's everyone's take on what's going to happen? Think the week's extension will allow them to get the job done?
What's everyone's take on what's going to happen? Think the week's extension will allow them to get the job done?
The ultimate threat of litigation will probably end it, but only when the owners want to deal.
The apparel antitrust case last year, when the Supreme Court ruled the NFL is not a single entity in antitrust matters, means that the owners cannot just dismiss any antitrust suit brought by the players if the NFLPA decertifies. That would be a lawsuit that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and go on for ages. Coupled with the courts ruling last week that the owners cannot access the $4bn in TV money payments they negoiated to receive in the case of a lockout, it provides the players with the only leverage they have.
There is no way the league will agree to the financial proposals the players were originally suggesting, but they'll probably reach some compromise involving extra money but 18 games. Of course, this is the NFL, so why would anyone do anything now when they can wait until the last possible moment? A decertification followed by a summer lockout and a late August agreement wouldn't surprise me.
It makes a bit of a monkey of the draft though. With no free agency negotiations, the top ten could be a proper clusterfuck. This whole Blaine Gabbert at number one thing makes me want to enter the draft myself. I mean, seriously, it's Blaine Gabbert for fuck's sake. I'm Carolina, I have no team and can't make free agency signings before the draft. Do I let myself be backed into picking a massive QB gamble, or do I do I pick a big man and wait for Love next year, especially as we might miss football this year? The only real dilemma is that Fairley and Bowers really only have one year of production each, so you wonder about them. Obviously they were both wicked last year, but you're handing out large cheques here. On purely athletic terms Peterson is number one, but can you pay someone number one money when teams can just throw away from him and nullify him? Perhaps they give Clausen another chance and go for Green or Jones. It's a massive dilemma for Carolina, magnified by the lack of free agency choices.
The apparel antitrust case last year, when the Supreme Court ruled the NFL is not a single entity in antitrust matters, means that the owners cannot just dismiss any antitrust suit brought by the players if the NFLPA decertifies. That would be a lawsuit that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and go on for ages. Coupled with the courts ruling last week that the owners cannot access the $4bn in TV money payments they negoiated to receive in the case of a lockout, it provides the players with the only leverage they have.
There is no way the league will agree to the financial proposals the players were originally suggesting, but they'll probably reach some compromise involving extra money but 18 games. Of course, this is the NFL, so why would anyone do anything now when they can wait until the last possible moment? A decertification followed by a summer lockout and a late August agreement wouldn't surprise me.
It makes a bit of a monkey of the draft though. With no free agency negotiations, the top ten could be a proper clusterfuck. This whole Blaine Gabbert at number one thing makes me want to enter the draft myself. I mean, seriously, it's Blaine Gabbert for fuck's sake. I'm Carolina, I have no team and can't make free agency signings before the draft. Do I let myself be backed into picking a massive QB gamble, or do I do I pick a big man and wait for Love next year, especially as we might miss football this year? The only real dilemma is that Fairley and Bowers really only have one year of production each, so you wonder about them. Obviously they were both wicked last year, but you're handing out large cheques here. On purely athletic terms Peterson is number one, but can you pay someone number one money when teams can just throw away from him and nullify him? Perhaps they give Clausen another chance and go for Green or Jones. It's a massive dilemma for Carolina, magnified by the lack of free agency choices.
The judge's ruling on the $4B lockout fund is absolutely huge and weakens the owners significantly. I don't see the players accepting 18 games though, nor do I think they should expand to 18 games. As much as I love my football on Sundays, I think the extra wear and tear will deteriorate the product, especially in the playoffs. I don't want to see the best teams playing improvised, shit football because the starting lineup is battered and bruised more than usual. But if they do accept the 18 games, it will no doubt be because of massive financial compensation from the owners, and cutting back on training camp, workouts, and exhibitions.
I'm also concerned that if there is a short work stoppage that resolves at the end of the summer, next season will be shit because of the disruptions to free agency and players not being able to do organized workouts, using the team playbooks.
Anyways, let's just get it sorted and get McNabb to Minnesota (unless you think someone better is available? Palmer maybe? I dunno...) and get this kicked off.
I'm also concerned that if there is a short work stoppage that resolves at the end of the summer, next season will be shit because of the disruptions to free agency and players not being able to do organized workouts, using the team playbooks.
Anyways, let's just get it sorted and get McNabb to Minnesota (unless you think someone better is available? Palmer maybe? I dunno...) and get this kicked off.
[quote author=MC Golgotha link=topic=41376.msg1292702#msg1292702 date=1298913915]
Stephen Paea benched 225lbs 49 times yesterday. He is the Tongan Hulk. [/quote]
At the CFL combine this past week, someone did 225 for 47 reps. Pretty impressive for a (soon-to-be) CFLer. Ridiculous lifting by both of them.
Stephen Paea benched 225lbs 49 times yesterday. He is the Tongan Hulk. [/quote]
At the CFL combine this past week, someone did 225 for 47 reps. Pretty impressive for a (soon-to-be) CFLer. Ridiculous lifting by both of them.
Yes. But Jerry will tell you that you also get at least one more multi-million dollar full house full ticket price home game and the TV money that comes with it. And if you're going to make me subsidise small market teams, goddamnit, then players can sacrifice their brains so I can get my money. Fair's fair.
[quote author=darkstarexodus link=topic=41376.msg1296335#msg1296335 date=1299476663]
The judge's ruling on the $4B lockout fund is absolutely huge and weakens the owners significantly. I don't see the players accepting 18 games though, nor do I think they should expand to 18 games. As much as I love my football on Sundays, I think the extra wear and tear will deteriorate the product, especially in the playoffs. I don't want to see the best teams playing improvised, shit football because the starting lineup is battered and bruised more than usual. But if they do accept the 18 games, it will no doubt be because of massive financial compensation from the owners, and cutting back on training camp, workouts, and exhibitions.
I'm also concerned that if there is a short work stoppage that resolves at the end of the summer, next season will be shit because of the disruptions to free agency and players not being able to do organized workouts, using the team playbooks.
Anyways, let's just get it sorted and get McNabb to Minnesota (unless you think someone better is available? Palmer maybe? I dunno...) and get this kicked off.
[/quote]
If the players want anything like the money they're asking for, then I imagine they'll have to go for 18 games. I think maybe rosters might be enlarged (which will have contract consequences as the cap won't be raised in proportion) to cope. 58 players or something.
I really like Carson Palmer, but the Bengals rarely let people leave. Ask Chad. It's a shame, because there's a player in Palmer, he just needs to not be in Cincy. Maybe we'll see if the Bengals take a signal caller in the draft. They won't take one on the first day, but there are some nice looking lower round picks there. They might let Palmer go after that. Hell, he's threatened to retire if they don't.
If Palmer was available I'd take him over McNabb simply on the age issue. I wonder how much longer McNabb has left, especially after last year. Equally though, I think you might pick one in the first round. It's the 12th pick so the contract will be large but not insane, especially if you go for someone like Jake Locker, who won't be expecting to go so high. Newton could still be there. That would be funny. Would love to see Peppers and Suh trying to tear his spine out next season. Peterson and Amukamara would obviously be your first draft choices, but neither are likely to fall that far. Jared Allen also needs some help, so a DE might be the pick. Like I said before, everyone's choices just got ten times harder because there's no free agency. If a CBA is signed on Friday teams are going to free agent spastic.
The judge's ruling on the $4B lockout fund is absolutely huge and weakens the owners significantly. I don't see the players accepting 18 games though, nor do I think they should expand to 18 games. As much as I love my football on Sundays, I think the extra wear and tear will deteriorate the product, especially in the playoffs. I don't want to see the best teams playing improvised, shit football because the starting lineup is battered and bruised more than usual. But if they do accept the 18 games, it will no doubt be because of massive financial compensation from the owners, and cutting back on training camp, workouts, and exhibitions.
I'm also concerned that if there is a short work stoppage that resolves at the end of the summer, next season will be shit because of the disruptions to free agency and players not being able to do organized workouts, using the team playbooks.
Anyways, let's just get it sorted and get McNabb to Minnesota (unless you think someone better is available? Palmer maybe? I dunno...) and get this kicked off.
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If the players want anything like the money they're asking for, then I imagine they'll have to go for 18 games. I think maybe rosters might be enlarged (which will have contract consequences as the cap won't be raised in proportion) to cope. 58 players or something.
I really like Carson Palmer, but the Bengals rarely let people leave. Ask Chad. It's a shame, because there's a player in Palmer, he just needs to not be in Cincy. Maybe we'll see if the Bengals take a signal caller in the draft. They won't take one on the first day, but there are some nice looking lower round picks there. They might let Palmer go after that. Hell, he's threatened to retire if they don't.
If Palmer was available I'd take him over McNabb simply on the age issue. I wonder how much longer McNabb has left, especially after last year. Equally though, I think you might pick one in the first round. It's the 12th pick so the contract will be large but not insane, especially if you go for someone like Jake Locker, who won't be expecting to go so high. Newton could still be there. That would be funny. Would love to see Peppers and Suh trying to tear his spine out next season. Peterson and Amukamara would obviously be your first draft choices, but neither are likely to fall that far. Jared Allen also needs some help, so a DE might be the pick. Like I said before, everyone's choices just got ten times harder because there's no free agency. If a CBA is signed on Friday teams are going to free agent spastic.
