Blog Posts For Tag: Football

The seventh week of the NFL season has a surprisingly few premier games on the schedule. There is one game that stands out among the many others though. On Sunday, at 1:00 PM ET, the Atlanta Falcons will travel to Ford Field to play the Detroit Lions.

The Houston Texans are trying to fill the void left by Peyton Manning in the AFC South. The Colts are winless, making Manning’s placement on the IR more and more likely. Meanwhile, the Texans are taking advantage of an impressive running game while the passing game heats up.

The New York Jets have a championship caliber defense and added two talented veterans to its wide receiver core, yet the postseason hopes remain in the hands of Mark Sanchez, the same man who let the football consistently slip out of his hands in the last preseason game on the schedule. This is disconcerting for fans that purchased Jets tickets expecting a chance to see this team make a run at the Patriots and first place in the AFC East and then the Super Bowl.

It is uncommon that an NFL team would come into the season with an issue at kicker, but the Dallas Cowboys can hardly be called the typical NFL franchise. This is “America’s Team” with an overbearing owner in a state where football is a religion that inspires fanaticism that goes beyond the Sunday morning tailgate.

Last season the Dallas Cowboys finished sixth in the NFL in passing yards, even with Romo under center for just six games. Well, if the fans want Dallas Cowboys tickets to extend beyond the 2011 regular season into the NFL playoffs, this team is going to have to figure out just how to put together as prolific an air attack with Miles Austin, Dez Bryant in his first healthy year in the league, and a collection of unproven wide receivers.

The road to Super Bowl LXVI runs through Gillette Stadium in Foxboro on the AFC side of the playoffs and through the Georgia Dome on the NFC side, but the Super Bowl tickets will only be good for the game at Cowboys Stadium on February 6, 2011.

For those looking ahead to February in Dallas, Week 13 in the NFL proved to be a revelation for the AFC and a confounding experience leaving a glut of potential Super Bowl suitors in the NFC. The New England Patriots set themselves apart as the best team in the AFC East and the team with the most momentum heading into the last few weeks of the NFL regular season. Meanwhile, the top six NFC teams all won, most struggling in the process.

The Philadelphia Eagles are 7-3 and suddenly they are clearly the best team in the NFC East. They also may be the best team in the NFC. They certainly possess the best weapon in the NFL in Michael Vick. I know Peyton Manning and Tom Brady are enjoying early MVP buzz. I also know Aaron Rodgers continues to be a vastly overlooked quarterback. But, Vick can outrun and maybe out throw this competition, though he does lack the touch and the recognition these pocket passers possess.

The NFL is a little over the half way mark and as far as I can tell there 11 teams capable of reaching the Super Bowl, five from the NFC and six from the AFC. While I base this simple observation on records, the scoring differential, and not playing in the West division of either conference, I see these teams and get excited by the story lines FOX and ESPN will be busy creating a week's worth of film around. I know it is silly. I should be thinking of offensive and defensive stats, but nobody buys Super Bowl tickets and gets excited by the yards allowed per carry no first defense allowed by their favorite team.

The Dallas Cowboys may have won state bragging rights after Week 3's 27-13 win over the Houston Texans, but they have won nothing else, literally. The 1-3 Cowboys are in last place in the NFC East, a division plagued with three 3-2 teams atop the division standings.

The news that Michael Vick had supplanted Kevin Kolb as the Philadelphia Eagles starting quarterback hardly came as news to Eagles fans and hardcore NFL fans. We all knew once Kolb gave Vick a chance to electrify the fickle crowd at Lincoln Financial Field, then Kolb’s tenure would come to an end. This serves as an example of one of two ways a professional quarterback not in a body cast can lose his starting job.

I began this piece trying to find a way to compare football to a relationship because it is just that. Every season I begin a love affair with a definite shelf life. I like to think of it as my Fall Fling. However, I discovered the stages of a relationship are far more arduous and contentious than my feelings about the NFL season.

Last season I wrote pretty extensively about the NFC East. This is a hard fact to swallow for a NFC North kind of guy, but the division had the most compelling storylines and it seemed every team in the division had at least a couple of weeks in which they appeared to be serious playoff contenders (even the Washington Redskins were once 2-2 in 2010). This season I am going to have to swallow that bitter pill again.

The Washington Redskins are the 2010 Redeem Team. Donovan McNabb needs to prove he is a Super Bowl-caliber winning quarterback, Coach Mike Shanahan has to prove he was not just riding John Elway and Terrell Davis’s coattails for two years, and a host of veterans want to prove they have not yet passed their prime.

This weekend four major sports stories dominated: Butler beat Michigan State to reach the NCAA Men’s finals, the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees opened the MLB season, Tiger began taking practice swings at Augusta in preparation for the Masters, and Donovan McNabb was traded to the Washington Redskins. That is actually quite a bit to handle, but this begs the question, how do these stories rank?

Most years, being first on the clock is a mere formality in the NFL Draft game, with the last-place team’s needs and choices obvious, and left to be envied by much of the league. Such is not necessarily the case for the St. Louis Rams in 2010; with the direction they choose going a long way in determining the franchise’s long-term future.

I have not seen the new movie Legion, but I have seen trailers and read reviews and the big-budget apocalyptic thriller is by all accounts a disaster. Similarly, I have not seen the backroom collective bargaining agreement (CBA) discussions between the NFL Players Association and the team owners, but I have seen trailers (the three debacles known as the 1994-95 MLB strike, the 1998-99 NBA strike, and 2004-05 NHL lockout) and have read the reviews (Tim Graham’s February 1st ESPN column) and am pretty sure it would be a disaster of actual biblical proportions.

The Monday after the NFL conference championships the football news is pretty scarce. There is some analysis of the Colts victory (they looked bored until the Jets scored their second touchdown, at which point they outscored New York 24-3) and the Saints overtime win (they struggled to win despite winning the turnover battle 5 to 1). In other news, the Pro Bowl replacements have been announced for the four players playing in the Super Bowl. Then, there was a little ditty about the league canceling a second game in Britain next season…and possibly expanding the league with a team in the UK. That’s right; the NFL is publicly championing expanding American football to a country whose sports fan base is upset that we call their version of football soccer.

With one week left in the regular season I must ask, has the tide finally turned? Has the unbridled domination of the NFL by the AFC finally been undone? Can the NFC finally hold its head high and make a case that it is not a Triple-A version of professional football?

With three weeks left in the 2009 NFL season the playoff picture is still unclear. The NFC is wrapped up in NFC East drama and the AFC has four teams vying for the last wild card spot with a 7-6 record. All the while, there may be two undefeated teams in the postseason. Suddenly I am worried that this will not end in a historic match up between the New Orleans Saints and Indianapolis Colts in the Super Bowl. Alas, before we get to that February 7th game at LandShark Stadium in Miami more than a month of football has to play out, so I say why not offer a few predictions.

Get ready for one the worst years for parity in the NFL in 2010. Some would argue that parity has been on its way out since the Patriots went 16-0 in 2007 and the Lions went 0-16 the very next season. Those franchises are just aberrations though. The New England Patriots were somehow able to convince aging players to take a pay cut in exchange for a very real chance for a Super Bowl ring and the Detroit Lions are just a franchise with a terrible front office year after year. The real attack on parity is behind closed doors being decided by the players union, owners, and Roger Goodell.

Most years my football obsession begins to lose a bit of its maniacal edge in the last few weeks of the season, especially as a Chicago Bears fan. However, the 2009 edition of the NFL still has kept me on edge and checking ESPN just about every day to look for more than just fantasy football advice for the weekend. What is so different about this year that I have remained tethered to the television for 10 hours every Sunday through Week 12?

Just two divisions left and all the starting quarterbacks in the NFL have been unfairly judged by me. The AFC South and AFC West are perhaps the two divisions in football with the most upheaval ahead. They have consistent champions, yes, but they also have franchises that have consistently fallen behind in the standings and need a gale force wind worth of change throughout their organization.

Last week I scrolled through the current starting quarterbacks in the NFC, did a little mental carbon dating, and gave each quarterback a shelf life, giving some praise and future accolades and damning others to the fledgling United Football League. This week I look at the AFC East and make some bold and some quite obvious evaluations.

Great running backs and playmaking receivers have been a rare find in the NFL, championships teams have always been able to get by with simply very good backs and wide outs. At the turn of the century this could be said about quarterbacks as well. Just look at a list of Super Bowl champions. The Tampa Bay Bucs won the big game in 2003 with Brad Johnson behind center and Trent Dilfer managed the Baltimore Ravens offense in 2001 as they won the Super Bowl. Now the league is more pass happy than ever and a simple game manager will not be enough, making a quarterback the most precious commodity on a football team once again.

After six weeks of the 2009 NFL season it is just about to start seriously listening to those early MVP murmurs. The field is going to be dominated by quarterbacks with eight starters posting a quarterback rating in the triple digits, lacking running backs with just one back averaging more than 100 yards a game, and unfairly biased against defensive players because an assisted tackle is simply so much less sexy than anything a running back can do.

The NFL is entering a new era when quarterbacks have more fantasy value than running backs, home field is not that big of a deal (the home team only wins 54 percent of the time this season), and parity has dissipated as nine of the 32 teams in the league have either no losses or no wins. Yes this is a new age in the league and there are seven football seals that have been broken this season to put an end to everything we knew about football.

No Bears, no Packers, no Saints, no Chargers oh my! What will Week 5 behold without two of the classic football franchises and what may be the NFL’s best football team. We can do without the Chargers until the last five or six weeks since that is when they start playing for real and making there annual improbable playoff run. This week definitely has some interesting match ups, but there are plenty of blowouts on the horizon to boost the fantasy numbers.

After three weeks of NFL football all the preconceptions from the 2008 season have been washed away and replaced by new beliefs. Some of these new revelations are not that ludicrous, for instance the Jets look like they will actually be a good team this season and may challenge the New England Patriots for AFC East supremacy. Most of these developments are just trends that will fade in the next couple of weeks though. Five of those most bizarre trends are listed below.

The first week of football is great for two reasons. The first is that you get to watch 10-plus hours of football. I know I woke up at 7:00 in the morning because I was so freaking giddy to sit on the couch for 10 hours. It somehow seems ridiculous that I could get so excited to play an invalid for the day. The second reason is that suddenly you have real stats to compare and make educated guesses and bets for Week 2. Below are my guesses, with scores compiled by some miraculous mental operation that takes into account stats, injuries, the latest Vegas lines, and useless emotional allegiances.

Is it too early to use Halloween sayings in September? Well, five pound bags of candy imaginable have been out on the shelves since August so I guess not, especially when that simple turn of phrase so perfectly embodies the NFL preseason. Should fans expect what transpires on the field in the four-game preseason to become any sort of a reality during the long 16-game regular season? Is this a trick or a treat? What are we supposed to expect from these preseason trends?

My heart jumped when I realized that my latest move landed me in the cave of married friends’ duplex in Chicago without any means to watch March Madness. They did not want to get cable, which is cool, and meant to get rabbit ears at some time but never quite got around to it. I could have gone out and splurged on rabbit ears and that digital signal box but I really did not want to start feeding me television habit. So there I was stuck between my desire to watch endless hours of basketball and not wanting to spend needless money on something I was going to use for a couple weeks. Then I found that NCAA.com was streaming the games live and the heart murmur went subsided.

This weekend not only signals the beginning of the March Madness, but it also marks the final playoff games of the World Baseball Classic and the beginning of the MLS season. The sad reality is that I do not care about either one. I do not care about the WBC because I have 162 games of MLB baseball in front of me and that is a lot of baseball to care about. I simply do not know why I cannot get myself to care about the MLS though.

Terrell Owens left America’s Team for a team he dubbed North America’s Team. While some might be amused by this clever turn of phrase, many more are surprised by the decision to play in Buffalo for Dick Jauron, the place offense goes to die. In retrospect, the last couple of years have actually been a pretty dynamic and shocking time for us in the sports world. Owens decision joins the ranks of these other sundry moments that have kept me on my feet in the last couple years.

It seems odd to me that I am spending so much time clicking on the NFL tab on ESPN in March, but this year I cannot help but turn my attention to a wild array of signings, trades, and controversial roster moves. The latest escapade to pique my interest is the cutting of Terrell Owens by the Dallas Cowboys.

The stock market may be a bear right now, but the first day of the free agent market was bullish. The opening day acquisitions have been somewhat surprising considering the fact that most MLB teams spent the winter in hibernation despite a very soft luxury tax and most NBA teams scrambling to gather as many expiring contracts as they could in preparation for the salary cap decrease, the loaded free agent market in the summer of 2010, and the impending lockout in 2011.

Professional sports in the United States are a funny thing. A sport that goes in circles can entertain millions. A sport as quick and violent as Lacrosse cannot make headway in a culture that loves to see pain being doled out and inflated scoring. A sport loved by the world fails miserably time after time (I must admit I cannot stand soccer either).

Sports leagues are an even more amazing phenomenon. Look at the history of the NBA, MLB, and the NFL. They each seemed to catch a lucky break or get a particularly stellar group of showmen that moved each league into the major three. Is there any room left for competition though? Four football leagues are about to find out.

54-31! 54-31! How often does a team (the Kansas City Chiefs) score 31 points and still get blown out by 23 points?!?