Amazing commercial for the NFL Play 60 program.
NFL
The going price of being home to an NFL team just went up
The Minnesota Vikings just revealed the drawings for their $925 million stadium in downtown Minneapolis. The stadium is set to open in 2016, built on the ruins of the Metrodome. Barring any unforeseen holdups, this will be the Vikings’ last season in the Metrodome—they’ll play two years at UM’s TCF Bank Stadium during construction. Expect a Super Bowl to be coming to Minnesota in the near future.
The public in Minnesota is responsible for $500 million of the cost. You read that right, they taxpayers are shelling out a half-billion dollars so a billionaire can charge them a massive sum to go into a stadium and watch the game.
The worst part of it is that in 30 years, the then owners of the Minnesota Vikings will be back looking for another new stadium. Then what? A billion or two dollars from the public purse.
I am big NFL fan but this is crazy. The NFL is the most profitable enterprise in North America. Each franchise is worth around a $1 billion but the public keeps buying them stadiums that charge ticket prices that they can’t afford. When does it stop?
That and I think I have seen this stadium design before.
Oh right, here it is.
Tyrann Mathieu has a bumpy road ahead of him
I can’t see this working out at all
For all the drama that went with Mathieu crying on television after being selected and then giving an emotional interview to ESPN afterward, execs weren’t buying it.
To most, the question came down to this: Why does he keep drawing so much attention to himself? Why was he on television at all? Why was he tipping off the network to the possibility that San Francisco might take him with the No. 31 overall pick? Why was he on the cover of ESPN the Magazine? Why was he lending his name to some party promoters, even if it was some misunderstanding?
“Every time you turn around, it’s something else,” another NFC exec said. “There’s a certain point where you just tune it all out.”
Before the draft it was reported that Mathieu was a no-show for visits to Houston and Seattle for interviews. He unnerved other teams by talking about how he is still chewing tobacco to “take the edge off.” While he has left behind some of the bad influences in his life, he still is hanging out with something of an entourage of people from a troubled past that includes him getting kicked off of LSU’s football team last year.Sure, Mathieu has been seeking guidance from a pastor in Baton Rouge and from his high school coach. Sure, he’s not a malevolent kid. He’s just smoking marijuana, not assaulting people. But he’s also the kid who worked out, admitted he had a problem and seemed to think everything was fixed. It’s as if Mathieu put a Band-Aid on an open gash and thought, “All better.”
It’s almost as if getting kicked off the team wasn’t quite enough for Mathieu to get the concept of rejection. Hard lessons fade like a bad dye job when you have people like ESPN’s Jon Gruden calling you the best cornerback in the draft (even though Arizona and most teams saw him as a safety if he’s going to start) and when you’re fully armed with the notion that rules don’t apply (Mathieu admitted to failing at least 10 drug tests at LSU).
You have a kid that doesn’t listen to anyone, has a drug addiction, surrounded by bad influences and is now being paid about a million dollars a year. He’ll be cut by this time next year, signed by the Raiders or Bengals, cut, and in the CFL by 2014 where he will play about 6 games.
Cause and Effect in the NFL
I have been a fan of NFLosophy on Twitter for a long time and now he has a blog. He has a great post on the myth of balance.
I know how it works because I did it. I lived it, although only for a season. I am a former Football Operations Coordinator for an NFL team. I began as an intern for one team and then was an intern for the team that eventually hired me. My job was to manage the day-to-day operations of the team. Essentially, my job was to take all of the non-football related duties and handle them so the coaches and personnel department could focus on the football related duties. It’s a lot of work. I was removed with the football staff when our team had a poor season. It’s simply part of the business.
Here is comments on “balance in football”
The cause is running the football. The effect is winning football games. This logically leads us to the conclusion that maintaining balance and keeping with a solid run game will lead to more wins. This is why you hear analysts and talking heads discuss it all week long leading up to games — “Team A must stick with the run game. They have to stay balanced to win this game.” The stats support the theory — “They’re 3-0 when running the ball 20 times and 1-4 when they run it less than 20. So they need to keep pounding the rock.” If there’s logic involved and the stats support the statement, then it has to be true, right?
Nope. It’s all a lie. Balance is the biggest fallacy in football. It’s an illusion that people logically arrive at because we’re confusing the cause for the effect. Putting the carriage before the horse, if you will. Or more aptly, putting your ass in front of your face.
The cause is winning. The effect is running the football.
Put another way: Winning (or being ahead) is what causes teams to run the football more.
This is why balance is an illusion. Go look at the box scores at the end of games and you’ll typically see that the team who won probably had more “balance” to their playcalling. That’s because when they were leading in the 4th quarter they were trying to drain the clock and ran it 2 out of every 3 downs. After a couple first downs on a couple different series in the 4th quarter, the team that is leading has padded its rushing numbers by somewhere in the neighborhood of 12-15 rushes to 3-5 passes. Before those 2 series, that team could have had twice as many passes as it had runs, but now because of trying to melt the clock, they’re “balanced.”
So what is balance in the football?
To really determine a team’s balance I look at first half rushing and passing attempts. That tells me what a team wanted to try to do. I can take into account the number of called runs and passes along with the effectiveness of each playcall and discern what their intent was for the gameplan. A team who isn’t having a lot of success in yards per carry but is still calling an even amount of runs and passes is a team that is making a concerted effort to stay balanced. If they’re gashing our defense for 6 yards per carry, well then we can just attribute that to their playcaller following the production.
The other team could disregard balance entirely by throwing it 20 times and rushing it 10 in the first half. Coaches try to avoid this because a gap in balance like that allows the other team to adjust their personnel and packages accordingly. Under pass heavy circumstances, a defense can almost assume a pass out of one-back sets. They can switch to nickel, play more coverage, and focus more on pass rush. All of this is why I favor the idea that teams should stick with what is productive until the other team proves is can stop it. Once the opposing team adjusts to a personnel package filled with DBs to stop the pass, then start handing the ball off and gashing them for runs.
Makes sense to me, even if it confuses Phil Simms.
Not a lot of franchise quarterbacks on this list
Here’s the updated free-agent list at QBs with Tarvaris Jackson off the board
Joe Flacco/BAL/UFA
No chance he hits the free market.
Brian Hoyer/ARI/UFA
His claim to fame is that he backed up Tom Brady. Played a bit in Arizona. Like all quarterbacks in Arizona he underwhelmed.
Matt Moore/MIA/UFA
There could be some teams interested in Moore. Norv Turner was a fan of Moore’s and wanted him in San Diego. He would be an upgrade in Cleveland. There is also noise that he is very popular in Miami and they want him to return as a backup.
Chase Daniel/NOR UFA
Yeah… he was fun in college but has no chance of a pro career. A third stringer at best.
Brady Quinn/KAN UFA
I love Brady Quinn but only because I have memories of him at Notre Dame and one good game in Cleveland. Not only is he a mediocre backup QB at best, his comments suggest he isn’t a great locker room guy. He seems to have a sense of entitlement about playing quarterback in the NFL
Matt Leinart/OAK UFA
Which CFL team will he sign with?
Tyler Thigpen/BUF UFA
Probably is out of the league.
Derek Anderson/CAR UFA
I can’t believe that he is even a consideration. What is he doing in the league? He had one good season and the rest were atrocious.
Jason Campbell/CHI UFA
An interesting choice. He has started and played well before. To be honest Oakland played better with him as starting QB than they have with Carson Palmer.
Byron Leftwich/PIT UFA
Outside of Pittsburgh, he has no market value.
Rex Grossman/WAS UFA
Bad Rex, bad Rex. Would you feel secure if your team signed Rex even to a third string contract?
Josh McCown/CHI UFA
Still in the league?
Kellen Clemens/STL UFA
Backup and nothing else.
David Carr/NYG UFA
His career hasn’t quite turned out as well as we had hoped.
Josh Johnson/CLE UFA
Meh.
Bruce Gradkowski/CIN UFA
Ugh.
Drew Stanton/IND UFA
Maybe try baseball again.
Charlie Batch/PIT UFA
Your drafting caused Barry Sanders to retire. You should be punished in some way for that.
Luke McCown/ATL UFA
Backup and nothing more.
Jordan Palmer/JAC UFA
UFL bound. What? The UFL doesn’t exist anymore? Well he is still UFL bound.
Expect to see Tebow on this list once he is cut by the New York Jets. I expect him to sign with ESPN to cover college football. If I was a GM in need of QB, I would be calling San Francisco hourly about Alex Smith or New England about Ryan Mallet.
The Cost of Professional Sports
If you live in New York, this should infuriate you
You might have missed this in the pre-holiday news dump, which it was specifically timed for—it’s a good idea to downplay the implications of a story like this. An agreement was announced in a “hastily called news conference” to keep the Bills in Buffalo (actually Orchard Park) through at least 2020. But the real story is in the details: the Bills have been allowed to pick up just 16 percent of the costs to keep them in town. If you’ve ever had the slightest curiosity as to how sweetheart a deal an NFL team can possibly get, the full agreement can be read below.
It’s going to cost $271 million for upgrades to Ralph Wilson Stadium and 10 years of running the place on gameday. The Bills will pay just $44 million of that. Erie County will cover $103 million, while the state of New York is on the hook for $123 million. If that turns out to be not cushy enough, the Bills can buy their way out of the lease after year seven. We and others have railed against the outrage of public financing for stadiums for years, but it’s still shocking to see in 2012 a textbook case of a community held for ransom, forced to give in to every last demand of a franchise threatening to move.
Best Conversation of Super Bowl Week
This conversation between Caterina Fake and her taxi driver is priceless and a much read about how she probably isn’t going to be watching the Super Bowl
Oddly enough despite being a passionate NFL fan, I probably won’t watch the game either. My problem is that I start to care about the NFL draft on Monday and I go strong all through the off-season and keep it up until about week 15 of the NFL season before I burn out. By the time the Super Bowl week hits, I can’t handle anymore football which means I only pay a passing interest in the game itself unless Denver is in it. In other words, I’ll be back caring about football on Monday.
In case you are wondering if Tom Brady has lost the common touch
His $20 million mansion has a moat. Of course it kind of makes sense as Yahoo! Sports puts it.
And the moat should keep the mounted infantry attacks on the Patriots quarterback to a minimum, which should help Bill Belichick sleep better at night.
While Brady is extremely well paid, Gisele makes even more than he does (some have called her the last of the supermodels) so I am assuming the mortgage payments are going to be made. That being said I remember being in Boston when he was first starting off his career and they had this magazine article about how he was just like everyone else. I am just assuming that this is no longer the case, unless moats are much more common in your part of the world than they are in mine.
Saskatoon’s Future: Being blackmailed by billionaires
As Saskatoon grows bigger, more and more people have talked about bringing a pro sports franchise to the city. Hockey has been dreamt about since Bill Hunter tried to bring the St. Louis Blues to Saskatoon in 1984. We saw one group try to bring the Phoenix Coyotes here for at least a couple of games a season and there has been been some talk of a CFL franchise coming to Saskatoon (even if it meant that it would kill the Riders). A pro sports franchise would be fabulous in the short term. We would sell out Credit Union Centre and cough up money for some much needed renovations and capital improvements. There may even a new stadium built downtown, where Credit Union Centre should have been built in the first place. That is how it will start out but let me tell you how it will end.
Over the weekend, the Edmonton Oilers’ owner and senior management went to Seattle to tour the Key Arena in an effort to get the City of Edmonton to pay for an even larger part of a $500 million dollar stadium deal. After getting the city to pay for the entire stadium up front and then giving billionaire owner Darryl Katz a sweetheart loan for his portion (to be paid back over 35 years), he wants an additional $6 million subsidy to run the arena. Instead of paying back his portion back $5.5 million a year, Katz is now demanding that he gets a free half-billion dollar stadium and $500,000 a year to run it. Where do I sign up?
Katz isn’t the only owner to behave badly. For every responsible sports owner with deep ties to his community, there are numerous ones that extort their community to buy them things or as the threat goes, they will move their franchise. The threat works as there is an empty hockey stadium in Kansas City and Seattle is building a new stadium to lure back the NBA (probably the Sacramento Kings). Hockey is an excellent second tenant to make even more money. Seeing everyone else do it, enables even local billionaires to behave badly. Katz which has deep roots to the Edmonton area and is a very profitable market with a very loyal fan base is basically blackmailing the Edmonton city council to give him the deal that he wants or he will move a team that has spent its entire existence in Edmonton to Seattle.
Now that Seattle has reached out to him (and he has reached back), expect a Kansas City visit as well. Why not play multiple markets off each other until Edmonton City Council responds to the bullying. While it doesn’t excuse Katz’s behaviour, many other owners behave the same way. The NFL has an empty Los Angeles market where the threat of teams moving to Los Angeles has gotten it better stadium deals in almost every market where the NFL has a new stadium. It will be used for leverage in the upcoming years in Jacksonville, Miami, Oakland, and San Diego. While FedEx Field in Washington is only 15 years old and still cutting edge, owner Daniel Snyder has already declared it as “half-life” and wants a new downtown, stadium. Instead of wanting Washington to pay for it, he is willing, if they give him a big chunk of land to develop for free. So why does a 15 year old stadium that is the largest in the NFL need to be replaced after only 15 years? He wants to keep up with the Giants/Jets/Cowboys and maybe even the new Rider stadium. EIther the Washington taxpayers pay for the stadium or give him premium land for his own profit. Either way, taxpayers pay. Just watch, if he doesn’t get what he wants, he will move the team. Threats of moving teams got a new stadium built in Miami even when there isn’t a great market left to move to and this was after Jeff Loria had already proven that he is the worst owner in sports (he destroyed the Montreal Expos).
Heading back to Seattle, the Key Arena was completely renovated in 1995 and brought to NBA standards. NBA commissioner David Stern called it state of the art but less than a decade later, he was in town demanding that Seattle build the Supersonics a new team, invest another $220 million into the stadium or they would move. When the city said no, the team moved to Oklahoma and became the Thunder. In 2002, the Charlotte Hornets moved to New Orleans because of their antiquated stadium that was built in 1988. The fans supported the team through 364 consecutive sell-outs but even that wasn’t enough to keep the team in town. The stadium didn’t make it’s 20th birthday before being demolished (it was 13 years old when Charlotte had their first referendum on building a new stadium).
This is what happens. Billionaire owners of profitable teams want more and the expectation is that taxpayers give it to them. It happens all over the place and as Saskatoon grows, it will happen here, whether it is a NHL team, a CFL team or even a AHL team; it’s great for a while and then all of us have to pay up for the right to buy tickets to watch a team. It’s a sick system and I feel bad for the City of Edmonton, Edmonton Oilers fans, and fans of sport in the city because it’s not right.
Will the same thing happen in Saskatoon? If pro sports come to Saskatoon in a real way, of course it will. We will tell ourselves that it won’t happen, we have local owners, and we are a growing market in a booming economy; just like Edmonton told itself when Katz bought the team. It’s only a matter of time.
What went wrong with Vince Young
Excellent column on Fox Sports by Jen Floyd Engel on what happened to Vince Young
A 20-year-old model embarking on an NFL career is doomed to fail if he does not have the right people around him. Family is not the right people, no matter how good or loving or well-intentioned they are.
I should note I liked his mom almost immediately as we sat down for dinner my first night in town. She is one of those parents who had poured everything she had into her kid. It is hindsight to say so now, but there were red flags, mostly the use of “we.”
What was obvious, even before his senior year of college, was that “we” were all going to be working for the NFL.
It is why I hate the Hall of Fame speeches, most recently that of Deion Sanders. I cringed at the part about him making it and how his mom never had to work again — like there is something wrong with work. This is the trap, and there is nobody willing to talk about the trap or why it is a trap or why it is screwed up.
It is like they say on airplanes: Secure your own mask before helping those around you. VY’s biggest failing was not securing that $26 million in guaranteed money before helping anybody else.
Yes, we are talking about $26 million in guaranteed money.
I once asked former NFL coach Bill Parcells what his advice to players was regarding money. He was always meddling in their business, calling them into his office and giving advice too few listened to. What he told them was to bank that signing bonus for a year, live on only one game check, then after a year live on the interest from the bonus.
He said few players listened.
This is the kicker
This sad state of Vince Young, broke and unable to pay the bills, begs the question: How could he be so stupid? The sad and simple answer is this is what too often happens when a 20-year-old is forced to become the family patriarch.
I was never a Vince Young fan. I thought he was a kind of Kordell Stewart and like Tim Tebow they can have some success in the league but it doesn’t last that long but no one seemed to be able to realize that, most of all, Young and his family who seemed to think that the good times would keep on rolling and rolling. What I find unbelievable is that Young despite being a backup QB, seemed to think that the money would either never stop or he just couldn’t say no to his mother and uncle. Either way, what a horrible feeling know what you blew $48 million.
Super Agent Drew Rosenhaus has some explaining to do
An NFL veteran player who spoke to Y! Sports on the condition of anonymity, said he was recruited simultaneously by Rosenhaus’ and Rubin’s companies in or around 2006, and that the firms had a cooperative recruiting relationship until at least 2008. The player was among those who lost money in the Alabama casino operation.
“[A Rosenhaus employee] came to see me and [a Rubin employee] was on the trip with him. They recruited together,” the player said. A former Rubin employee confirmed the firms recruited prospective clients together during this time and that the direction to do so came from firm management.
“I would have loved to have known all the shady stuff that was going on with Jeff Rubin,” the veteran player said. “That information would have changed things dramatically [in terms of allowing Rubin to manage my finances]. … To find this stuff out after the fact is disheartening. And that’s part of the reason I fired Drew, because I had to question if he had my best interests in mind.”
When asked about the player’s claims, Rosenhaus said neither he nor anyone at his firm ever cooperatively recruited a prospective client with a financial adviser to the best of his knowledge.
“Not that I know of,” Rosenhaus said.
Rosenhaus said agents and financial advisers are sometimes forced to meet with a player simultaneously in the recruiting process. Of five other agents surveyed, only one said he had ever experienced anything like that.
How is Tim Tebow doing at Jets camp?
The Onion has the (blown) coverage
“Tim has exhibited over and over again that he can find the ground on a quick slant, fly route, button hook, Hail Mary, or screen pass,” Cavanaugh said. “Tebow just has that soft touch. He can toss a beautiful fade and precisely deliver the ball right to the ground in the corner of the end zone.”
“Sometimes he’s doing it almost to a fault,” Cavanaugh continued, “immediately flinging it to the ground when it’s not even his first or second option.”
After a meeting with Jets offensive coordinator Tony Sparano, Tebow has reportedly been focused on spreading the ball around more and has developed other favorite targets, including Gatorade coolers, D’Brickashaw Ferguson’s back, the bench, the pylons, a laundry bin filled with towels, and the team’s golf cart.
Only 11 Years
Today LaDainianTomlinson retired from the NFL. As a Denver Broncos fan I despised watching Tomlinson carve up the Denver defence season after season but I respect his work ethic and how he played the game. I watched a 60 Minutes segment on him once on his insane workouts, almost gravity defying workouts, which gets me to my point that despite being an elite athlete and an insane workaholic, even Tomlinson could only play running back for 11 years in the NFL.
Tomlinson won the MVP in ’06, when he set NFL single-season records with 31 touchdowns, including 28 rushing, and 186 points. He ran for a career-high 1,815 yards that year, giving him the first of two straight league rushing titles.
Tomlinson finishes his career with 13,684 yards and 145 touchdowns.
First ballot Hall of Fame inductee.
