Sports: NFL

[Yodaking]

Watch DC announce they picked the Redhawks for their new name and ruin your bird parlay.

As for the 17 game season, I'm still not a fan. 16 was pretty perfect as is, but if 17 was inevitable they could have at least figured out a way to make the extra 16 games at a neutral site. Throwing St. Louis a couple of games each year might have made the lawsuit go away. London already gets 2 games and I know they want to expand into mainland Europe. Mexico City has been scheduled for games, Canada could host a few too. San Diego can still sell tickets and the Pro-Bowl in Hawaii is always a sell out, so why not give them a regular season game too?

[Tornado]

That is the interesting idea. I would like to see them at college stadiums. Lions at the Big House!

[AMIS]

Originally Posted by Yodaking

Watch DC announce they picked the Redhawks for their new name and ruin your bird parlay.

As for the 17 game season, I'm still not a fan. 16 was pretty perfect as is, but if 17 was inevitable they could have at least figured out a way to make the extra 16 games at a neutral site. Throwing St. Louis a couple of games each year might have made the lawsuit go away. London already gets 2 games and I know they want to expand into mainland Europe. Mexico City has been scheduled for games, Canada could host a few too. San Diego can still sell tickets and the Pro-Bowl in Hawaii is always a sell out, so why not give them a regular season game too?

Not sure that would help the St. Louis situation but I could see scheduling one a week outside the U.S. or in large colleges.

Awesome idea.

[Tornado]

Kudos to the Bengals!

In three weeks Matt Stafford has accumulated two more playoff wins than the Lions have in 50+ years.

[Dad_Scaper]

The hardest thing in sports is to stop losing, as one local sports personality says. Other teams aren’t getting all the breaks. The governing league and the officials aren’t conspiring against you.

Some teams have a culture of losing. The Bengals have lightning in a bottle. Losing organization making it all the way to the super bowl. It’s no easy feat. Maybe if they keep this up for a couple of years they won’t even be losers anymore. We’ll see.

Lions? Brown? Jaguars? WFTs? Losing organizations. Good luck with the work that has to be done.

[dok]

Originally Posted by Dad_Scaper

I cannot believe the Dolphins fired Flores. You want to be a loser franchise? This is how you get to be a loser franchise. Fire the guy who stopped the losing.

Idiots.

Turns out they wanted him to lose, and he wasn't with the program. Wow.

[Dad_Scaper]

Yeah. This is going to be a show, that's for sure.

On a mostly (but not completely) unrelated note, about the WFT Commanders: if it seems like the whole renaming process started abruptly, proceeded weirdly, and ended with a thud, don't forget the origin of the timing of the name change.

7/3/20 - Press release from the Redskins announcing a "review of the team's name."
7/16/20 - The Washington Post reports that 15 women were preparing to sue the Redskins for routine and horrifying incidents of harassment and abuse. The article opens as follows:

A few months after Emily Applegate started working for the Washington Redskins in 2014, she settled into a daily routine: She would meet a female co-worker in the bathroom during their lunch breaks, she said, to commiserate and cry about the frequent sexual harassment and verbal abuse they endured.

The whole thing has been a debacle because the launch event was not part of a thoughtful plan. It was just a distraction from the organization's exploding (at the time) legal problems.

Make no mistake, this timing was not a coincidence. The team did the same thing, more recently, when they announced an utterly disgraceful, incompetent, slipshod ceremony retiring Sean Taylor's jersey, contemporaneously with the findings that Jon Gruden had been exchanging gross emails with WFT insiders for years.

This is the most disgracefully run organization in football. I wonder if there is anything that could happen that would lead the commissioner to take action against Snyder. It would have to be pretty bad (or the same level of bad, with a different commissioner).

[Yodaking]

Cowboys vs. Commies for years to come.

Patriots vs. Commies should be good for ratings as well.

[Dad_Scaper]

. . . and they've done it again! The WFTs announce their new names several days before a new story breaks purporting to document more institutional sexual abuse. Not just harassment, but hands on abuse, with accusations (this time) specifically identifying Snyder as a witness to, and participant in, some of the sexually assaultive conduct.

They know these stories are coming before they break, of course. Journalists will ask both the team and the people in and around it for commentary, before they go to press. So they know it's coming, and can time these little distractions accordingly.

I am aware that the Flores accusation is the bigger story, in that it has already gripped multiple teams with its icy fingers and I am very curious to see where it goes, but the trainwreck that is the NFL franchise in DC is fascinating to me. It should not be overlooked, and I do wonder if it will ultimately lead to action by the NFL.

I have no sympathy for the guy, but I wouldn't wish Roger Goodell's problems on anyone right now. The league is in a firestorm right now, heading into the Pro Bowl and then the Super Bowl.

edit: I just realized that there *are* winners here. If the Texans want to offer their HC spot to Josh McCown, whose entire coaching resume so far is being an assistant coach for one year at the high school level but who is a good theological match with the Evangelical Texans ownership, now's the time! Nobody would even notice, outside of Houston!

[AndreThaGiant]

As MN native, I'm reeeeaaaally hoping that Sean McVay doesn't retire after that Superbowl win. Kevin O'Connell will have no reason not to just accept head coach of the Rams instead of the Vikings. The Vikes NEED an offensive-minded coach like McVay. We have so many offensive weapons that felt under-utilized under Zimmer.

P.S. That halftime show took the cake for best ever for me.

[Dad_Scaper]

It was a pretty good halftime show. Best one I can remember for the last few years.

As awful as the off-field stuff has been for the NFL recently, every game since the wild card round has been thrilling, with some of them sensational.

As for the Super Bowl itself, Bengals fans crying about NFL officiating are making me laugh, considering they got on the board with a blown non-call on a blatant face mask, leading to a long touchdown. You can't get the benefit of moderately generous treatment from the refs for 3 1/2 quarters (various other minor missed calls, other than the facemask) and then expect sympathy when for the last 1/2 of 1 quarter, some ticky tack stuff goes the other way.

Also Joe Burrow appears to be a good quarterback, but the comparisons to the NFL's elite are premature.

[Hahma]

I agree with everything you said DS, though for the halftime show, I didn't think it was cool that Snoop promoted the Crips gang. That's not a good message at all, especially since they are more responsible for young black men getting killed than any cops ever will.

I was happy that the Rams won, especially after that blown non-call for offensive interface. Not to mention the Bengals coach going for a 4th down at mid field. I get that its the trend this year to go for 4th downs a lot, but considering this is the Superbowl and at mid field, it would have been more prudent to punt and live to fight another day. With the Rams scoring after the failed 4th down attempt, it drove home the point more.