Two Rays Of Sunshine On A Gloomy Day

The weather outside Curmudgeon Central today is dreary at best – low clouds, drizzle, temperature in the mid-30s.  I probably won’t see the sun for the next 48 hours.  This is curmudgeonly weather and perhaps it is an omen for what I will get to kvetch about in 2017.  However, before I get into my grumbling groove for the year, I have two bits of uplifting news to share.  It is as if there are two little rays of sunshine beaming through the cloud cover here …

1. Gene Collier published the 33^rd annual Trite Trophy column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.  As always it is clever and entertaining.  I would have preferred that the “Third Runner-Up” for this year’s award as the winner but that is unimportant.  I commend this column to your reading; here is your link.
2. Last week, I told you that the powers that be at the Seattle Times had canceled Dwight Perry’s column Sideline Chatter as part of a cost-cutting/reorganization out there.  The final column was supposed to run on Jan 1, 2017.  Then I got news that Sideline Chatter had gotten a reprieve from the editors there.  Instead of running several times a week, it will only run on Sunday and the commitment to keeping it alive and kicking is only for a couple of months to see how things shake out.

As you probably suspected, I wrote to several of the folks at the Seattle Times lamenting their decision to sacrifice Sideline Chatter at the altar of newsroom reorganization.  If I were prone to using the false logic of post hoc propter hoc – which I am not – I would be hinting very strongly here that I was somehow responsible for the “stay of execution” here.  That is abject nonsense of course; what happened is that the folks who are in charge of putting out the paper there recognized that Sideline Chatter attracts readers to the paper and/or to the paper’s website.  Nonetheless, I can start 2017 knowing that there will be Dwight Perry columns for me to read – at least for the next month or two.

Now back to the gloominess that today’s weather suggests ought to be the tone for the day.  It is Black Monday – not to be confused with Black Friday, Sgt. Joe Friday or former Brooklyn Dodgers’ pitcher Joe Black – and that means a bunch of NFL coaches are no longer employed as they had been for the past season.  Three teams – the Rams, Jags and Bills – jumped the gun here and fired their incumbent coaches during the season.  Add to the list of teams that will be looking for new leadership next year the Broncos (Gary Kubiak is retiring for health reasons), the Niners and the Chargers.  Those are the known job openings as of this morning meaning almost 20% of the NFL teams will be “under new management” very soon.

Before getting to the rumors about who might get hired and where, let me suggest that there may be some other openings over the course of this week.

• The Colts have now – and have had for several years – the key ingredient for a successful NFL team.  They have a solid franchise QB.  Moreover, they play in a division that is not fearsome by any means.  Nevertheless, they have not been able to put together a solid winning team because their OL and the DL and their DBs are sub-standard.  Is that bad coaching?  Is that incompetent roster-building?  Is that both…?
• The Texans – in the same division with the Colts – spent a lot of money to sign a “franchise QB” last off-season and he stunk out the joint so badly that he was benched before the season began.  Might that coaching decision have polluted the waters there when it comes to the GM/Head Coach relationship?
• The Jets were awful this year and the problem is the aging roster.  They have studs on defense who have gotten long in the tooth; they have not much more than journeymen on offense.  Will the coach take the fall for that situation?
• The Bengals finished 6-9-1 after 6 straight years in the playoffs.  Marvin Lewis took over a franchise of futility and turned it into a respectable franchise.  But the NFL is a league dominated by “what have you done for me recently?”
• The Bears finished the year at 3-13; anytime a team does that and the coach has been there for more than a cup of coffee, you have to wonder about that coach’s longevity.  I think the Bears would be nuts to fire John Fox, but who do you know that can read the minds of the folks who own the Bears?
• The Panthers fell from 15-1 in 2015 to 6-10 in 2016.  That probably will not get Ron Rivera fired, but I’ll bet it puts him on a shorter leash than he enjoyed as of September, 2016.

In my opinion, the best jobs out there – purely from a football perspective – are the Chargers and the Broncos.  The Chargers have been hit by injuries for each of the last 2 seasons but they have a franchise QB and they have a solid RB and they have at least one very good WR.  The Broncos have an outstanding defense so the “restructuring work” only needs doing on one side of the ball.

In my opinion, the worst job out there is the Bills.  They have 3 QBs on the roster and none of them are any good; they have a very good RB who is getting very near the expiration date for most NFL RBs; they have a middling defense (19^th in the NFL) that allows opponents to run the ball and control the clock (29^th in the NFL in rushing yards allowed per game).  Added to those “football issues”, the fact is that Buffalo NY is not a magnet for top-shelf free agents.  For example, I believe the top tax bracket for NY State Income Tax is 8.8% …

I will be interested to see how many of the new coaching hires – and the interviewees who get serious consideration for jobs this year – will be “retread coaches” as compared to “up-and-coming hot commodities”.  Please note that of the 5 coaches fired during the season and at the end of yesterday’s action, 3 were retreads (Chip Kelly, Rex Ryan and Jeff Fisher) and 2 were “up-and-coming hot commodities” (Gus Bradley and Mike McCoy).

Finally, here is an item from Dwight Perry in the Seattle Times:

“DeVry University has agreed to pay $100 million over FTC claims that its ads misled prospective students.

“Especially the part about winning last year’s Rose Bowl.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………