2016 NFL Season

[pilferk]

It looks like it.
I meant to compliment you on your "Mo Vaughn" usage the other day. I thought I was the only one who used that. People rarely understand what I'm talking about when I say it. I get a lot of puzzled looks.

Thanks!

I probably get the same strange looks from people on the other sides of keyboards, too...but I'm not there to see them, so...whatever. I think they get it enough to take the audible "equivalent" meaning.

Around this neck of the woods in CT, most people of my age and generation "get it" because, even tho the Yanks/Sox mix is about 50/50, even the Yanks fans are passingly aware of Nomar and Mo level of Sox players.  And the stories that go with them.   And the Sox fans are obviously very familiar.

Edit: What's REALLY funny is I still have a few friends who are Sox fans who will refer to fucking something up as "Bucknering the hell out of it".

[faldor]

It looks like it.
I meant to compliment you on your "Mo Vaughn" usage the other day. I thought I was the only one who used that. People rarely understand what I'm talking about when I say it. I get a lot of puzzled looks.

Thanks!

I probably get the same strange looks from people on the other sides of keyboards, too...but I'm not there to see them, so...whatever. I think they get it enough to take the audible "equivalent" meaning.

Around this neck of the woods in CT, most people of my age and generation "get it" because, even tho the Yanks/Sox mix is about 50/50, even the Yanks fans are passingly aware of Nomar and Mo level of Sox players.  And the stories that go with them.   And the Sox fans are obviously very familiar.

Edit: What's REALLY funny is I still have a few friends who are Sox fans who will refer to fucking something up as "Bucknering the hell out of it".

Did they say that prior to the 2004 World Series? I couldn't even watch that replay until then. Hurt too much. I had friends in college that were Mets fans and they'd fire up that clip. I'd bolt out of the room as fast as I could. I'm all good with Billy Buck now. I was able to laugh freely at his episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

[pilferk]

Did they say that prior to the 2004 World Series? I couldn't even watch that replay until then. Hurt too much. I had friends in college that were Mets fans and they'd fire up that clip. I'd bolt out of the room as fast as I could. I'm all good with Billy Buck now. I was able to laugh freely at his episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Since High School (90's), generally.

It's reserved for when they really, really, really fuck things up.  Like "The transmission that I fixed but forgot to bolt back down and left in the middle of the highway" or "The server I was trying to back up that I actually ended up formatting and then parking the heads while trying to interupt the format" level of fucking up.

I think by making it their own, it hurt a bit less.

But I have PLENTY for friends who felt like you do.  Who, even AFTER 2004 (but not after the 2nd one), would say "too soon".

[faldor]

Putting a nice bow on deflategate, at least for me.

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/were-all-dumber-from-deflate-gate-and-nfls-win-over-tom-brady-230159510.html?soc_src=mail&soc_trk=ma

Also, I read that the NFLPA is still reviewing its options and may continue its fight to the Supreme Court even without Brady. I didn't even know that was an option, but further proof that this no longer has/had much of anything to do with psi or Tom Brady.

[JAEBALL]

I am really itching for week 1.

Every Sunday at 1 pm is like Christmas.

[pilferk]

Putting a nice bow on deflategate, at least for me.

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/were-all-dumber-from-deflate-gate-and-nfls-win-over-tom-brady-230159510.html?soc_src=mail&soc_trk=ma

Also, I read that the NFLPA is still reviewing its options and may continue its fight to the Supreme Court even without Brady. I didn't even know that was an option, but further proof that this no longer has/had much of anything to do with psi or Tom Brady.

So, i heard this, too and looked into it. They would file a procedural appeal in regards to article 47. In essence, though, it wouldnt actually effect the suspension, but would be in terms of the legality of that section of the cba. If the supremes heard it, and ruled for the nflpa, going forward that part of the cba would be nullified. But previous usages eould stand.

The issue is, the nfl could then use a tower defense precedent, and say removing article 47 causes the foundation of the tower(contract) to crumble, and nullify the entire cba, forcing everyone to stop work until a new one could be crafted.

[faldor]

Just one woman's opinion. She's been very critical of Goodell all along and pro Patriots. I agree with most of this article, but I don't know if I agree that this is going to ruin his legacy. With as awful as I think he is, the NFL continues to flourish under his reign, and ultimately that matters most. But, I hope she's right.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/redskins/why-roger-goodell-not-tom-brady-is-deflategates-real-loser/2016/07/19/946c09b2-4dcc-11e6-a422-83ab49ed5e6a_story.html?tid=pm_sports_pop_b

Why Roger Goodell, not Tom Brady, is Deflategate?s real loser


By Sally Jenkins Columnist July 19 at 4:24 PM

Deflategate has always been an inverted scandal. The real attack on the integrity of the game came not from the New England Patriots, but from the NFL commissioner. The real cheat wasn?t Tom Brady, but rather Roger Goodell. The real verdict is that Brady?s Hall of Fame career is unaffected, while Goodell will go down in history as a ruined figure.

Brady will serve an arbitrarily issued four-game suspension to open the season because that?s what is best for his team: It?s smarter to go to training camp next week without any lingering uncertainty or risk of missing crucial late-season games. No doubt it?s easier for Brady to accept because by now he knows that in practical terms and the court of public opinion, he won. Zero evidence showed he ordered anyone to deflate footballs in the 2015 AFC Championship game, and a legion of scientists proved what anyone with a car already knew ? that cold weather causes air pressure to drop in footballs the same as it does in your tires. A seventh grader?s schoolboy experiment made fools of Goodell and his underlings in the league office.

Brady?s suspension will be an asterisk, and it may even help the Patriots, since they get to develop his backup Jimmy Garoppolo. In the long run no one will treat seriously the idea that Brady cheated to win, except the embittered fans of opposing teams who always questioned his character and will continue to do so with no more or less energy than before. The bottom line on his legacy is already set: He?s made six trips to the Super Bowl in just 14 seasons, winning four rings.

The real consequences are for Goodell. Deflategate was his defining moment in history, and it firmly established him as a political bungler and a dunce. His reputation won?t recover. Think about it. Who will ever believe Goodell, on any subject, ever again? Why would anyone listen to him or trust his competence on any matter?

From the start, Goodell acted rashly. He leaped to a conclusion of predetermined guilt without due diligence, and when he was embarrassed by the simple reality of the Ideal Gas Law, he behaved deviously, skewing and misstating facts and testimony. In persecuting Brady for ?conduct detrimental,? he himself performed in a way that completely undermined the public trust in the commissioner?s office.

A commissioner who was fit for the job would have ended Deflategate within a week. He would have announced that there was no way to fairly evaluate ?the preponderance of the evidence? because the NFL?s protocols for handling game balls were so lax that officials had failed to record the inflation measurements in pregame. He would have released the ball-inflation psi data the league collected this season that no doubt shows the effect of weather. Instead Goodell acted secretively and politically. He chose to pursue a bad case as a referendum on his hanging-judge authority. Shamed and reversed on so many mishandled issues, from Bountygate to the Ray Rice domestic violence case, he needed a win more than he wanted to do right. He turned the commissioner?s office into a sandhill.

The supreme irony here is that what was most important to Goodell, his image, has been destroyed. What was second-most important to him, his power, has been severely undermined. Though he won a technical victory when four judges split on whether he acted properly as an arbitrator, in reality he is a fatally weakened commissioner. He may cling to his job title for a while longer, because vain NFL owners don?t like to admit mistakes, but it?s clear they regard Goodell as a liability who needs help. Last summer he was divested of significant responsibility when Tod Leiweke was named chief operating officer of the league, filling a post Goodell had left vacant since his promotion in 2006. The league also hired former White House press secretary Joe Lockhart as vice president of communications, to further cushion Goodell. Lockhart reports to Leiweke.

The owners will be cleaning up the mess Goodell has made for some time. His long-term legacy is as the worst commissioner in the history of the league. His short-term legacy is that he?s brought league business to a halt, made it impossible to make progress on a range of important issues because the players union doesn?t regard him as an honest broker. The league needs the cooperation of the players on everything from expanded playoffs, to a 18-game season, to stadium credits, to proposed changes to off-season workouts. Good luck. Does John Mara really think the union will agree to anything with Roger Goodell?

All of these things will be stickier to resolve, and so will the slow walk to a new labor contract in 2021. Labor negotiations are always a morass, but with Goodell you can count on them to be especially problematic. Real power is not the martinet ability to hit a player with a draconian suspension; real power is the political capital to gets deals done on things the owners have publicly said they want. Pete Rozelle understood that, and so did Paul Tagliabue. Goodell has no capital. He has no leverage or strength. He spent it all on petty abuses.

Goodell has made just one statement in response since Brady decided to drop his appeal and serve the suspension. It came Monday night, and it was a ludicrous but telling one. ?We moved on from that as a league quite a long time ago,? he said. That was the sound of 32 owners telling him, ?Shut up, Roger.?

sally.jenkins@washpost.com

[faldor]

This pretty much sums up my feelings on the whole ordeal

http://sportsworld.nbcsports.com/tom-brady-is-innocent/

By Joe Posnanski
Tom Brady is innocent
Unequivocally, unambiguously, thoroughly and 100-percent innocent

The other day, I was talking with a friend about Tom Brady. And here?s what he said:

?I think he probably did something, but the whole thing was stupid.?

At the time, I sort of shrugged it off. I mean, for one thing, he?s right: The whole thing was stupid. For another, I?m no Tom Brady fan. What do I care?

But as time has gone on, I realized that I should have said something else:

I think Tom Brady is unequivocally, unambiguously, thoroughly and 100-percent innocent of any and all charges of deflating footballs in a cheating capacity. I don?t think he ever asked anyone to illegally deflate footballs. I don?t think he wanted footballs inflated below NFL standards. I think the whole thing ? every last page of the testimony, every last leak to the media, every text made public, every curious statistic like the one showing the Patriots fumbled less than other teams and every blunder Brady made along the way, like his awkward press conference and the destruction of his phone ? was a bunch of phony-baloney nonsense that was either directly or indirectly inspired by a made-up NFL witch hunt. I think he?s entirely innocent.

And let me say two more things:

1. As mentioned, I don?t particularly like Tom Brady, and I have no affinity whatsoever for the Patriots.

2. I believe Spygate was much, much worse than we in the public ever knew and that the Patriots ? Brady included ? would take any advantage they believed they could get away with. I believe this to be true of most teams and most players at the highest level of sports, but the Patriots in particular.

So why do I believe Tom Brady is unequivocally, unambiguously, thoroughly and 100-percent innocent of any and all charges of deflating footballs?

Because: The NFL spent millions of dollars in a ludicrous star-chamber investigation and, even with that, did not come close to proving it. Not even close. If this was a court of law and the NFL had presented that silly, convoluted, scientifically-challenged case of hearsay and bluster, the jury would have voted ?not guilty? before lunch. And the judge would have wondered why everyone?s time needed to be wasted.

Of course, there was no jury here. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has won the right to, more or less, be persecuting attorney, judge, juror and executioner. The shambles that remain of the NFL Players? Association is not powerful enough to stem his wrecking-ball style of commissioning (or even make football owners give out guaranteed contracts).

And the courts confirmed: It?s Goodell?s world. All the rest of us can do is mock him.

But while Goodell can suspend Brady for four games, while he can fine Brady and the team whatever he wants, while he can take away draft picks and speak piously about how he defended the game from the high crimes of the people breaking the ideal gas law, he should not be allowed to alter reality.

And that?s what he is doing. In sports, every story ? even the most convoluted and pointless and absurd story ? eventually becomes a one-line item. Take David Ortiz?s positive drug test, to stay in Boston. In 2003, David Ortiz and other baseball players agreed to go through a drug-testing survey to determine just how deep the PED problem went. The players and baseball owners agreed that if more than five percent of the players tested positive, drug testing would automatically begin. The survey showed that 100 or so players did test positive, triggering the automatic drug testing.

The results, of course, were supposed to be anonymous.

A year later, though, the dynamic changed. The tests were seized by federal agents in their pursuit of BALCO. Now the results were in open air. In 2009, the New York Times reported that David Ortiz was among the players who tested positive.

Ortiz ? who has never wavered from his statement that he never used steroids ? said he immediately tried to find out why he had tested positive. That seems a pretty basic right in America. But in one of the pathetic ironies of baseball?s ham-handed handling of PED use, he was told that they could not tell him ? because the results were supposed to be secret.

Ortiz says that one of the legal supplements he was using must have caused the positive test, but he doesn?t know which one. And he readily admits that he, like most baseball players, had grown sloppy and selfish in the way they used supplements ? they would use whatever everyone else was using. But since drug testing arrived, Ortiz says that he has been tested dozens and dozens of times, including at home in the Dominican Republic. He has never tested positive since.

So that?s a shortened version of the fuzzy David Ortiz drug story. But do you know what the one-line tag on David Ortiz is? Of course you do:

David Ortiz is a drug cheat.

But, you say, the test was not supposed to determine individual guilt and it was supposed to remain secret.

Too bad. It came out. He is a drug cheat.

But even MLB itself has called into question the results of those tests, pointing out that many were contested by the union ? and that the methods used to drug test were not the best ones ? and that there were numerous uncertainties and inconsistencies ?

Yeah, yeah. Drug cheat.

But Ortiz has vigorously and continuously denied using and has never tested positive again ?

They all deny. He figured out a way to beat the tests. Big deal. Cheater.

This is how it shakes out. Ambiguities fade, storylines harden, and eventually even the people who appreciate and embrace nuance often cave in to a ?where there is smoke there must be fire? position. When David Ortiz is up for the Hall of Fame in five years, there will be people who will not vote for him (interesting to see how many) because they will say he is a proven drug cheat.

So, for me anyway, it?s important to make this Brady viewpoint very clear: He?s innocent. He?s not partially innocent. He is not someone with a ?muddled history.? He is innocent. He was completely and utterly railroaded.

Look, the NFL charged him with breaking a rule NO ONE cared about. The NFL cared so little about air pressure in football that they let teams bring their own footballs, which were barely checked. My guess is if Brady wanted the PSI level of football lowered, he simply could have petitioned the NFL and they would have just lowered it ? they just wanted to make footballs comfortable for quarterbacks to throw.

Then, there is no proof at all that Brady ever wanted footballs deflated BELOW the league minimum. We know only that he liked footballs AT the minimum (especially because, as we know, football naturally deflate in cold weather). Even the famed ?Deflator? suggested his job was to make sure footballs were not OVERINFLATED.

More, the NFL showed no proof whatsoever that he broke the rule or encouraged anyone else to do it ? even in the absurd NFL-commissioned report, Ted Wells could only make the comical charge that ?it is more probable than not that Tom Brady was at least generally aware of inappropriate activities.? What a sentence. It is more probable than not that Ted Wells was at least generally aware that this charge was full of bleep.

And, finally, as if you need even more, there is only unconvincing proof and basically discredited evidence that the rule was EVEN BROKEN AT ALL. As you might have heard, a seventh-grader basically disproved it.

So, yes, Roger Goodell can suspend Tom Brady for four games. But his stupid and distracting witch hunt should not be allowed to affect the legacy of Tom Brady. We should remember him as one of greatest players in NFL history, no asterisks. Now, Goodell?s legacy ? that?s a whole other thing.

[tim_m]

Well Fitzpatrick finally resigned with the Jets today 1 year 12 million.

[AxlsMainMan]

Le'Veon Bell likely suspended 4 games for a missed drug test

[pilferk]

And the NFL just won it's appeal against the Adrian Peterson decision.

This pretty much solidifies, and sets precedent, for how the Fed courts view the NFL CBA.

The players might not like it...but...there you go.

[JAEBALL]

I can't sleep I'm so excited that week 1 is right around the corner.

Got my big fantasy drafts coming up ... Christmas in August for me.

Have some hope the Giants could put together a nice season. The defense is going to be 50 percent better just by accident and the offense I believe is just going to go ballistic. Target Eli in fantasy folks!

The division is real weak IMO. Think we take it down this year.

[AxlsMainMan]

Target Eli in fantasy folks!

I'd take Brady, Rodgers, or Roethlisberger over him.

[JAEBALL]

Target Eli in fantasy folks!

I'd take Brady, Rodgers, or Roethlisberger over him.

Sure ... But you can get Eli much later in the draft.

[Dr. Blutarsky]

Yeah, maybe he has a right to, but doing it in this way  is a shitty thing to do. Kaepernick cant stand up for the National Anthem for a country that allowed him to make millions of dollars playing football?? To put this into context, Usain Bolt stopped a live interview at the Rio Olympics just to show respect to the US National Anthem and he's Jamaican.

Colin Kaepernick protests anthem over treatment of minorities

San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick says he refused to stand during the national anthem Friday because of his views on the country's treatment of racial minorities.

"I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color," Kaepernick told NFL Media after Friday's game. "To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."


http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/17401815/colin-kaepernick-san-francisco-49ers-sits-national-anthem-prior-preseason-game

[Dr. Blutarsky]

Another shocker...Tony Romo is injured.

http://www.nfl.com/nflnetwork/story/0ap3000000691153/article/tony-romo-has-broken-bone-in-his-back

[JAEBALL]

I chuckled when I saw the breaking news on Romo.

As for that loser in San Fran .... Yeah this is America you don't have to stand for anybody ... but come on kid ... This country has treated you pretty damn good ...

On top of the fact his play has been atrocious lately ... Now nobody is going to give him a second chance after they cut him at the end of the year.

Well not a chance to start.

[tim_m]

Romo breaking a bone and being out 2 months happened sooner then i expected but i expected it. Time for Dallas to cut their losses with this bum. He just can't stay healthy. All the injuries are starting to take their toll.

[Dr. Blutarsky]

I figured Romo would at least make it TO the start of the season......

I am a Jets fan and my wife a Bucs fan so my household is well accustomed to shitty NFL seasons. So Ive got some empathy for the Dallas fans.

[AxlsMainMan]

RGIII has looked pretty sharp in preseason. It would be interesting if the Browns make the AFC North a 4-way race.