Topical Rants | The Sports Curmudgeon

NFL Pre-Draft Analysis 2016

For new readers who have joined the parade here in the last 12 months, this is an annual feature. During the Fall, I watch a lot of college football games on TV because I like college football and I am retired. The essence of a “happy retirement” is doing things you like to do. Ergo…

While I am watching the college games, I like to look for players who might make it in the NFL as a means of earning a living. I keep a notepad next to the TV while I am watching and make notes on those players. Now, I gather them together for the purpose of deciphering them and compiling a list of players I saw who should be part of the upcoming NFL Draft.

That tells you what this feature is. Now let me tell you what it is not:

This is most definitely NOT a mock draft.

Given that method of “data collection” there are obvious shortcomings to the system here:

2. Even though there are tons of college football games on every weekend, I tend to focus on ones involving bigger schools and major conferences. That means there will be lots of players from smaller schools that I will have never seen. Thus, I will have nothing to say about them here – unless –

2a. Several folks have come to realize that I do this sort of thing every year and they know that I will not see small schools often. If they see a player at their school or a school local to their area that they think should be mentioned here, they send me an e-mail and I include it here with the notation that this comes from someone other than me.

3. Since I do not see any team play every game on their schedule – and often see a team only once or twice during a season – I can easily miss an outstanding player who winds up going in the first round of the draft.

What makes sense is to go position by position and for me to try to collate my notes around that. So, let me start with the Quarterbacks and that leads me to demonstrate the limitations of this essay right away.

Carson Wentz (N. Dak. St):

LA Times

I do not mean to minimize the importance of top flight college competition, but there are sufficient examples of players “making the jump from Division 1-AA football to the NFL” with significant success in the NFL.

Jared Goff (Cal): My notes say that he is “very accurate” and “hits receivers in stride”. To be sure, the fact that he played in a spread offense made some of those throws a tad easier than ones he will have to make in the NFL, but the tools are there. Reports say he is highly coveted by NFL scouts; I agree he could be a good first round pick.

Paxton Lynch (Memphis): He is big; a screen graphic said he was 6’ 7” and 245 lbs. However, he is also mobile and fast. Importantly my notes say “throws accurately on the run”. That might be an important asset for him at the NFL level. I think he will go in the late first round; if he is still available at the end of the second round, a team will be getting a bargain.

Cardale Jones (Ohio St.): Even after winning the College Football Championship Game two years ago, I was not sold on Jones. He is big and strong and there is no denying his arm strength, but I do not think he delivers the ball quickly or with impact. Here are my notes: “big and strong”, “fast enough on the run”, decent accuracy” “happy feet – seems to want to run rather than throw”. I would take him somewhere in the 4th or 5th round.

Connor Cook (Mich St.): I think he is the latter-day Kirk Cousins. He is not flashy; he has a good enough arm but not a great one; he can move around a bit but he is not a mobile/running QB; he is neither very big nor very slight. What he does is play solid error-free football. Here are my notes: “good accuracy” “very good on sideline passes” “big enough to take hits in NFL”. I think he is a sleeper in this draft; many reports say he will go in the third round. I think he is good value pick if he is still there in the third round.

Christian Hackenberg (Penn St.): Here are my notes: “plenty big enough” “limited mobility” “strong arm but questionable accuracy” “can throw the ball a mile”. I think he is a project for an NFL team but has the physical makeup to be worth the effort. Maybe he goes in the 4th or 5th round…?

Jacoby Brisset (NC St.): Here are my notes: “big and quick” “accurate short passes but misses lots of downfield throws” “ball sailed on him 3 or 4 times today”. Like Hackenberg, I think Brisset is a project for an NFL team but he has the physical makeup to be worth the effort. Maybe he goes in the 4th or 5th round just after – or just before – Christian Hackenberg?

Blake Frohnapfel (UMass): Here is the first of four contributions from a reader via e-mail. The writer is a UMass alum; I note that here in the spirit of full disclosure:

“The NFL likes big QBs (Manning, Roethlisberger, Osweiler) and [Blake] Frohnapfel is 6’6” and 235 lbs. He throws deep better than other QBs in the conference [the MAC] … he is more mobile than 235 lbs ought to be. He is definitely a project for the NFL but I bet a team will sign him as a free agent after the draft.”

Let me move on to the Running Backs; there appear to be more than a couple of capable folks here even though the position of running back in the NFL seems to have been devalued over the past couple of years.

Derrick Henry (Alabama):

Ezekiel Elliot (Ohio St.): If you want a running back a tad faster than Derrick Henry but not nearly as big, then this is your guy. I particularly liked his ability to “change direction and accelerate immediately”. He too will be taken in the first or early second round.

Jordan Howard (Indiana): Dean Wormer told one of the Delts in Animal House that “fat drunk and stupid was no way to go through life”. Well, Howard is “big, strong and fast” and if you are a running back, that is indeed a good way to go through life. He did not get the attention that Elliot got simply because Elliot played on a very good team and Howard played on a mediocre team. But Howard can play and if he drops into the top of the 3rd round, some team will get themselves a bargain.

Alex Collins (Arkansas): “Plays in a pro-style offense that features power running” “good straight ahead runner” “quick enough to an outside hole”. I think he is well-prepared to play in the NFL and should go by the end of the 3rd round.

CJ Prosise (Notre Dame): “Converted to RB due to team injuries” just last year. It sure looked to me like he had been doing this all his life. “Catches the ball well” is another plus. Here is a minus, “needs to get a lot better pass blocking”. I think he is 4th round pick.

Wendell Smallwood (West Virginia): He is not very big but he is quick and shifty when he gets the ball. He “catches well”. Here is my note that says some team needs to spend a pick on him late in the draft, “reminds me of Darren Sproles”.

Soma Vainuku (USC): He is a fullback so there are a bunch of NFL teams that will not even consider him. However, if you need a fullback, this guy is “built low to the road” and “an excellent blocker”. He has “decent speed” but “not gonna break any 60-yard runs in the NFL”. He is listed at 5’11” and 246 lbs. I am not sure he is that tall… He should go in the fourth or fifth round to a team that uses a fullback.

Troymaine Pope (Jacksonville St.): Here is a second information dump via e-mail from a reader. I never saw Jacksonville St play and would not know Troymaine Pope from Alexander Pope, Pope Francis or Helen of Troy. The e-mail came to me after Jax St. hammered Charleston Southern in the Division 1-AA tournament last year.

“I watched [Troymaine Pope] run over, around and through [Charleston] Southern’s defense like it wasn’t there. [Pope] is very fast in the open field and can make tacklers miss with sharp cutting. You won’t see him on TV but I’m sure NFL scouts have already seen him.”

[Aside: For the record, I looked up stats for the Jax St/Charleston Southern game and Troymaine Pope gained 250 yards rushing and scored 3 TDs in that game.]

Next up, let consider the Wide Receivers coming out of college this year.

Sterling Shepard (Oklahoma):

Laquon Treadwell (Ole Miss): He suffered a grotesque leg and ankle injury in 2014 but sure looked like he fully recovered when I saw him in 2015. He is “big and strong” and “fast enough”. He has “long arms and soft hands”. I think he goes in the first round too.

Will Fuller (Notre Dame): I liked his “straightaway speed” and that he “gets open deep”. My concern was “not very big”. I think he could go in the 3rd or 4th round.

Charone Peake (Clemson): “Perfect size and build for NFL” and “willing and able blocker on run plays” says that he should get a shot to play for pay next year. I think he is a 3rd round pick.

De’Runya Wilson (Miss St): He is “very big”. “Screen graphic said he was 6’ 5” and 230 lbs and he looks it”. He “catches the ball well” but he is “not real fast”. Given the size, a team should take a chance on him in the late rounds.

Kenny Lawler (Cal): He “gets open and [Jared] Goff throws him the ball”. Then he catches the ball and Cal moves downfield. Lawler is “big enough” and “catches well” but is “not real fast”. He “could be a good possession receiver” so I guess he goes in the late rounds.

Corey Coleman (Baylor): Coleman was a terror in the Baylor offensive system last year. However, the important words here are “in the Baylor offensive system”. He is fast and he has good hands and he runs decent routes. He is not very big. Some reports have him rated as the top WR coming out of college this year but I have seen far too many Baylor speedsters come to the NFL with little or no impact to take him in the early first round. Here are my notes: “blazing speed” and “shifty runner after a catch”. “Good hands” but “not very big”. He may be a star someday – – or not. If he were still on the board in the 3rd or 4th round, I would take him. But early in the first round …?

Next up should be the Tight Ends. However, as I have collated my notes from last season, I do not have any players identified with the Tight End position. So, this is the simplest section imaginable. Let me move on…

Moving on to the Offensive Linemen, I have a robust list here.

Laremy Tunsil (Ole Miss):

Jack Conklin (Mich St.): I thought he was a “dominant drive blocker” and a “good enough pass blocker”. He seemed “a bit slow” which is not great for leading runs outside. He should go in the first two rounds.

Ronnie Stanley (Notre Dame): He is “quick on his feet” and a “dominant pass blocker”. He too should go in the first two rounds.

Taylor Decker (Ohio State): Looking at my notes, he looks like Jack Conklin’s twin brother: “powerful run blocker” and “OK at pass protection”. Here is another guy who should go in the first two rounds.

Kyle Murphy (Stanford): He “does everything well except block downfield” because he is “not fleet afoot”. He should also go in the first two rounds.

Joshua Garnett (Stanford): He “controls his space” along the line and “opened some nice holes for Christian McCaffrey”. My notes say that I “would take [Kyle]Murphy first but take this guy next”. That means Garnett should go by the end of the second round.

Ryan Kelly (Alabama): He played center for the Crimson Tide and “dominated the interior line play”. Obviously, coming from a Nick Saban coached team he has sound fundamentals. He should go in the second or third round.

Sebastian Tretola (Arkansas): This team loved to run the ball inside and Tretola is “a bulldozer blocking straight ahead”. His pass blocking is “good but not great” and he does not “pick up blitzes well”. He will likely be taken in the later rounds.

Denver Kirkland (Arkansas): He is another “very large man” on the OL for a team that loves power running. He is “not as powerful as [his teammate], Tretola, but I think he is “a better pass blocker”. He will go somewhere near where Tretola goes in the draft.

Vadal Alexander (LSU): “This man is huge” but at the same time “he can lead run plays”. The best thing about him is his “drive blocking on inside runs”. I would guess he is gone by the end of the third round.

Caleb Benenock (UCLA): I liked his “good quickness and agility” and the fact that he was an “effective pass blocker”. He should go in the middle rounds of the draft.

Austin Blythe (Iowa): He was the center on an offensive line that led Iowa to a Top Ten ranking last year. I thought he was “excellent in pass protection”, “quick enough to get a block on the OLB on sweeps” and “agile for such a large man”. I think he can go in the middle rounds this year.

Siaosi Aiono (Utah): Frankly, I do not recall seeing Utah play last year but according to my notes, Aiono is “a fireplug” that can “block and move with agility”. If accurate, those sorts of notes suggest a late round pick.

Moving over to defense, let me start with the Defensive Line. I did not realize as I was making my notes that there would be a very distinctive SEC flavor to my listing – but that is how it turned out.

Before getting to my list, there are plenty of draft reports/analyses that have Sheldon Rankins (Louisville) and Vernon Butler (La Tech) as top-shelf defensive linemen. I did not see La Tech play last year so I have nothing on Butler; I did see Louisville play but have nothing in my notes on Rankins. That does not mean he is not a good prospect; what it means is that I did not make any note of his play in the particular game(s) I saw.

Jarran Reed (Alabama):

A’Shawn Robinson (Alabama): He is also a “run-stuffer” who “dominates inside”. I read some pre-draft reports that say Robinson does not play hard all the time and often just mails it in. If that is indeed the case, then any coach who can motivate him to play hard all the time will have a gem on his hand. If what I saw was nonchalant play, I wonder what he would be like if he were driven… I think he also goes in the first round.

Robert Nkemdiche (Ole Miss): He “generates inside pass pressure all the time” and is fast enough so that he “gets in on run plays to the outside”. I also wrote “natural athlete”. The downside here is that Nkemdiche has had some off-field issues one of which involved the gendarmes and marijuana. Based on football, he should go in the first round. Based on his potential for meatheadedness, …

Joey Bosa (Ohio St.): He was double-teamed about half the time because “he explodes off the snap” and “can push OTs around”. Lots of folks think he will go in the top 5 picks; I would not argue with that.

Shaq Lawson (Clemson): He “plays the run very well” and “can rush the passer inside or outside”. He is a DE and not an OLB because I never saw him have any pass coverage responsibilities. For a team willing to play him at DE only, this is a first round pick.

Kevin Dodd (Clemson): He is “strong and quick” and “gets good pressure on the QB”. Question:

Is he good because teams are focused on double teaming Shaq Lawson on the other side of the formation? I think he goes behind Lawson in the draft – – but not more than one round behind.

DeForest Buckner (Oregon): “Biggest college DE I can recall” and “really long arms” gives you an idea that he has the physical tools to be a DE in the NFL. He “rushes the passer well” and is “strong on runs to his side”. I do not think he can be an OLB because he is “not very fast” so he would probably have difficulty in pass coverage. I think Joey Bosa will be the first DE taken; after that, either Buckner or Shaq Lawson will be the next.

Chris Jones (Miss St.): He is “big and very strong” and “quick in pursuit of outside run plays”. I also noted “hustles on every play”. He looks like a guy to go in the first two rounds somewhere.

Carl Nassib (Penn St.): “Generates pressure on every pass play except when they drop him into coverage”. Another positive note was “hustles every play for the whole play”. This guy is a DE who might be able to convert to an OLB or a pass rush specialist. I think he goes in the 3rd or 4th round.

Chris Mayes (Georgia): A screen graphic said he was 6’ 4” and 335 lbs. My comment was “Is that all?” Mayes is very large and not very mobile. He “does not rush passer well” but “he can be a nose tackle in the NFL”. I see him going in the middle rounds this year.

DJ Reader (Clemson): “Nose-tackle prospect for any 3-4 team in the NFL” gives you an idea what I thought of this guy. He will go in the middle rounds.

Sheldon Day (Notre Dame): He is “built like a bowling ball” and is “really quick for a D-lineman”. He is “not gonna knock down any passes on the inside” but he “will generate pass pressure”. He looks like a middle round pick to me.

Travis Britz (Kansas St.): He “plays the run well” and he has “enough speed to generate pass pressure”. Also, “plenty of hustle”. He is a late round guy…

Next up are the Linebackers. In many years, I have more players on this list than any other position; that is not the case this year.

Let me note that lots of folks think Myles Jack – late of UCLA – is the top linebacker in the draft this year. I did not see him play because he was injured for the entire 2015 season. So with those introductory remarks, here is my list.

Reggie Ragland (Alabama):

Joshua Perry (Ohio St.): He “gives 100% on every play” and is a “sure tackler”. On run plays he “forces everything inside because of his strength”. I would guess he goes in the late first round.

Deion Jones (LSU): He “looks like he should be at safety” but he “is very strong and defeats blocks by bigger offensive players”. His “pass coverage was good” too. He will go somewhere in the second round.

Joe Schobert (Wisconsin): He “plays the run well” and makes “form tackles”. However, he “gets beat in pass coverage situations”. He is probably a 3rd or 4th round pick.

Cassanova McKinzy (Auburn): “Good speed” and “strong against the run” are his calling cards on draft day. I have no notes regarding his pass rushing abilities or his pass coverage abilities. Just a guess, but I’ll put him in the 4th round somewhere.

Blake Martinez (Stanford): “Plays the run very well” is good news for a guy who plays ILB. “Disappears on pass plays” is not good news for any defender aspiring to play in the pass-happy NFL. I think he goes in the late rounds.

DeVondre Campbell (Minnesota): “Athletic” “quick” “good tackler” “lots of hustle” and “decent speed” would tend to describe someone who will go in the top 10 overall. The problem here is that Campbell “plays out of control” and “takes himself out of plays”. He has the physical requisites to be an NFL linebacker but he needs coaching. I think a team that can afford to spend a year developing him as a linebacker will take him in the late rounds.

Next come the Defensive Backs. Because NFL teams like to move secondary players around, I will lump together the CBs and the safeties here.

Mackensie Alexander (Clemson):

Jalen Ramsey (Florida St.): What’s not to like? Ramsey is “big and strong”; he is “fast/covers lots of ground”; he “covers receivers well”; he is “good against the run”. He will go in the Top 10 picks…

Eli Apple (Ohio State): He is “super-fast” and “big for a CB”. He also “plays the run aggressively”. A negative comment was “not a tackler/drags people to the ground”. He will be drafted in the first two rounds this year.

Vonn Bell (Ohio St.): “Solid against the run” and “good pass coverage” are the plus comments. “Not very big” is the minus comment. I think the plus outweighs the minus here and I think he will be taken by the end of the third round.

Jayron Kearse (Clemson): He is “very big and strong” and has “the kind of physique an NFL team likes”. He is listed at 6’4” and 216 lbs. He played safety for Clemson and he “covered lots of ground in the secondary”. I think he too will be taken by the end of the third round.

Xavien Howard (Baylor): “Good size” and “good in man coverage” are strong points here. The weak point is he is “not as fast as other DBs”. I think he will be a mid-round pick.

Jalen Mills (LSU): He is “fast” and “very good in coverage”. He “needs to add strength” to play the run in the NFL. He should go in the third or fourth round.

Trae Elston (Ole Miss): He is a “big hitter” and “strong against the run”. However, he is also “awfully small”. I think he is a late round pick.

Jonathan Jones (Auburn): He is a good news/bad news player. Good news is “top-shelf speed” and “good tight coverage”. Bad news is “awfully small” and “could be overmatched physically” in the NFL. I think a team takes a chance on him in the later rounds.

Richard Leonard (Florida International): This e-mailed assessment comes from a former colleague who has retired to Delray Beach in Florida. Over the years, she has taken exception to my “picking on” FIU’s football program – a charge I deny because I think that in prior years FIU’s football program was severely bad. Nonetheless, here is what she had to say to me:

“[Richard] Leonard returns kicks and punts for the Panthers and he is their best cornerback. He is very fast …he is tough. If he can’t make the NFL at cornerback, he can make it as a special teams’ player.”

My former colleague has ample reason to take umbrage at my previous negativity with regard to the FIU football program. However, all of those disparaging comments are in the past. What she must be really upset with is this sort of commentary from Greg Cote in the Miami Herald just last weekend. Please note as you read this comment that Florida International University is located in Miami, FL and not in WhotheHellcares, Antarctica…

“FIU’s spring football game was canceled by bad weather. No, seriously.”

Now, isn’t that note from my former colleague the perfect segue to the final stage of this NFL Pre-Draft Analysis – the Special Teams Players?

Kaimi Fairburn (UCLA):

Will Monday (Duke): He is a punter. His punts were “long” with “plenty of hang-time”. I also noted that he had a “pooch-punt 35 yards downed inside the 5 [yardline]”. Once again, teams rarely draft punters but I think he too ought to be signed and given a tryout as a free agent after the draft.

Pokey Harris (Murray State): I will close with the fourth and final e-mail note from a reader whose daughter goes to Murray State or has recently graduated from Murray State.

“[Pokey Harris is] a little guy who returns kicks for the Racers. The program says he weighs 175 lbs but he looks smaller than that … He is definitely not “pokey” and he can change directions at full speed to escape tacklers.”

There you have it. When I watch the NFL Draft – and I will not watch all of it to be sure – I will be looking to see how well my notes match up with the draft boards that NFL teams assemble. I will particularly look to see how well my e-mail correspondents did with their assessments of Blake Frohnapfel, Troymaine Pope, Richard Leonard and Pokey Harris.

Finally, since I used a Greg Cote comment from the Miami Herald above, let me close with another one from him that speaks to something that I consider immensely important with regard to the NFL Draft:

“I can’t wait for the draft … mainly because it puts a merciful end to the endless speculation of national mocks drafts and local flat-out guessing on what Miami might do.”

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

Whither The Oakland Raiders?

News seems to be heating up with regard to the possibility that the Oakland Raiders might move to Las Vegas. A recent report in the Las Vegas Review-Journal said that Raiders’ owner, Mark Davis, would be in Las Vegas at the end of April to meet with the Southern Nevada Tourism Infrastructure Committee regarding the potential for an NFL caliber stadium in Las Vegas. Let me be clear about this:

pro forma

According to the report in the Review-Journal linked above, whatever recommendations this Committee makes this summer will not be binding on anyone but I assume that its recommendations will carry some sort of weight. If not, then one needs to question why the Committee exists in the first place and why any NFL owner would take the time to meet with its members.

Las Vegas developers would propose to build a 65,000 seat stadium at a site near McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas near the top end of The Strip. I am surely not any kind of “real estate mogul” with any kind of useful insight into the Las Vegas market, but I can offer this observation:

By the way, I believe the proposed site for the stadium would be within walking distance of the Pinball Hall of Fame. That should be a positive consideration for this Committee…

The Raiders do need a new venue; the Coliseum in Oakland is a dump – and I say that knowing that some dumps around the world might take offense at being lumped into the same category as the Oakland Coliseum. Moreover, the Raiders’ lease with the city to use the Coliseum ran out at the end of last season; and in order to play there again this year, the lease costs for the team went up by $925K. That may not be a “killer amount” for an NFL team, but any increase in rent for a facility that suffers from random sewage backups into the locker room areas is problematic. The lease extension signed by the Raiders gives them two 1-year options to extend the lease for the 2017 and/or the 2018 seasons if they have to.

The NFL has seemingly kept an “open mind” with regard to Mark Davis’ interactions and meetings with Las Vegas movers and shakers. You could look at that in two ways:

2. The NFL is allowing Davis to do this to keep the pressure on the folks in San Diego to find a way to build a new stadium for the Chargers there. After all, if the Raiders can move to a city that was not on the radar at the previous owners’ meetings, surely the Chargers can pick up and go to LA where they can be part of the Stan Kroenke real estate development extravaganza.

With regard to his current thinking on those sportsbooks – those dens of iniquity – that the NFL has sought to avoid in the past at all costs, here is Roger Goodell’s more recent commentary:

“[The sportsbooks] are things we’d have to deal with. We would have to understand the impact on us. Each owner would have a vote; it would be a factor many owners would have to balance; the league would have to balance.”

And …

“Relocations are always, as you know and we experienced it this January, one, painful, but two, subject to 32 teams’ view about it. They each make their own decision on that. That would be a factor that I think many owners would have to balance, the league would have to balance, but until we got a hard proposal that really put that in front of us, we’d have to understand what the ramifications of that are.”

A “relocation” for the Raiders might be more “painful” than it was for the Rams or potentially for the Chargers. The Rams paid the NFL more than $600M for the privilege of picking up and moving from St. Louis to LA. Stan Kroenke could handle that because his net worth is estimated to be in the neighborhood of $7B and his wife is the niece of the late Sam Walton who founded a company you may have heard of – – Wal Mart. Let’s just say she does not need to count pennies…

Raiders’ owner Mark Davis has no such access to those sorts of funds. If estimates of his net worth are accurate, he could not pony up $600M because he does not have it. And that presents a hurdle for Davis and for the other owners in the NFL. They will surely want their relocation fee paid; Davis will not get a free ride here. However, they may be leery of him taking on a partner with deep pockets if that partner happened to be a casino owner/operator. The league as an entity and the owners individually may be coming to a point where legalized gambling is not seen as the demon it once was but I really wonder if they are ready to have a casino owner as part of their exclusive club.

The Raiders’ fans in Oakland are caught in most uncompromising position. Their team plays in a venue that needs a $400M upgrade just to be classified as “woefully sub-standard”. At the same time, the city is in no financial state that would allow even a reckless custodian of the public coffers to spend something north of a billion dollars to build a new stadium for the Raiders. In San Diego, people talk about the absence of “political will” to spend tax revenue on a stadium for the Chargers. In Oakland, it is simpler than that; the tax revenue base simply is not there. Absent a “manna from Heaven” situation, the Raiders need to move out of Oakland. Maybe that is in the very near term; maybe it is in the intermediate term. But the team needs to move and the fans in Oakland need to deal with that reality.

Here is another comment from The Commish that adds some gravitas to Mark Davis’ flirtations with cities other than Las Vegas:

“There are several cities that have a tremendous interest in the Raiders. I’m hopeful also that Oakland will be one of those and that we can avoid any relocation to start with. Those are ultimately decisions about where they go and the impact that the potential gambling that we’d have to deal with. We’d have to understand it, we’d have to understand what the impact is on us and ultimately each owner would have a vote on that.”

Translation: You folks in St. Louis/San Antonio/Tidewater, VA/Birmingham who might want an NFL team in your area can start to dig deep into your pockets. If you do, we will keep your phone numbers on our speed-dial list.

Obviously, nothing has been decided yet and the NFL has not yet begun to put the squeeze on the cities that might want to have the Raiders as their own in the future. Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that the Raiders are a franchise that is “in play” for any city that Is willing to spend the money to bring the team to its area. Most importantly, the reason that the Raiders are ‘in play” is that the cost of maintaining an NFL franchise is not an insignificant sum for a city these days. And Oakland is not a city with anywhere near the financial reserves to be able to afford such “team maintenance costs” without having to do some painful “other things” like close libraries, curtail transportation costs, keep police and fire departments funded at appropriate levels, … you get the idea.

Now if you think that the Raiders’ situation is complicated enough as it is and that there are too many balls in the air for now, just consider that the NFL could someday decide to expand to 36 teams. If that is the case, then international venues come into play and all sorts of other manipulative factors will become paramount. The fat lady has not yet sung; in fact, the fat lady may not be in the building yet warming up her pipes for her song.

Stay tuned…

Finally, in a previous incarnation, the Raiders took pride in populating the roster with some players who had a few anti-social tendencies. However, Al Davis is no longer among us orchestrating that sort of roster-mix. But if he were, he might take a close look at the person described here by Brad Dickson in the Omaha World-Herald:

“Kentucky fullback William Collins faces charges after police caught him and another guy walking down the street carrying a parking meter. He was actually preparing for another weird NFL combine event — the two-man parking meter shuttle.”

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

Predicting the MLB Season – 2016

Here in Northern Virginia, the signs of Spring are all around. Birds are building nests; trees have leaf buds; crocuses are in bloom; the sun is in the sky more than 12 hours a day. However, here in the confines of Curmudgeon Central, Spring awaits one more thing before it can officially announce itself. And that would be:

Opening Day for MLB

If I had a countdown clock running – which I do not – there would be less than 100 hours remaining until the first pitch of the first game on Sunday afternoon when the Pirates host the Cardinals at 1:05 PM EDT. Therefore, I guess it is time for me to make my predictions for the upcoming season.

AL West:

Astros

The Rangers will challenge the Astros and finish second. If Yu Darvish finishes his rehab on schedule and is the pitcher he was prior to surgery, they could make the AL West race interesting.

The Mariners should finish third. They have 3 solid starters in Hernandez, Iwakuma and Walker. Kyle Seager is a really good third baseman but he may be only the second best player in the Seager family. (See below…)

The Angels have Mike Trout (perhaps the best all-around player in MLB) and an aging Albert Pujols and decent starting pitching, but they do not have enough to be serious contenders this year.

The A’s do not have anywhere near enough pitching to keep up.

AL Central:

Royals

I will take the Tigers to finish a distant second here on the assumption that their starting pitching holds together. The Tigers should score runs with the likes of Justin Upton, Miguel Cabrera, Victor Martinez and Ian Kinsler in the lineup. The starters have good pedigrees but recent performances have been less than expected…

I guess I like the Indians to finish third in the division. They are sort of the mirror image of the Tigers – solid pitching but should struggle to score runs. Michael Brantley opens the season on the DL; the Indians need him back in the outfield ASAP.

In a coin flip, I’ll take the Twins to finish fourth here. There is just not all that much to like about the Twins.

Losing the coin flip puts the White Sox last in the AL Central. Chris Sale is a top-shelf starting pitcher; after him, the Sox have nothing but question marks. Offensively, the White Sox have Jose Abreu, Melky Cabrera and a bunch of other guys.

AL East:

Blue Jays

I’ll take the Red Sox to finish second in the division by a nose over the third place Rays. The Red Sox should score runs and the addition of David Price to the starting rotation cannot hurt. Nevertheless, the rest of the Sox rotation is not much more than ordinary and they have huge question marks at the corner infield positions. Pablo Sandoval at third base and Hanley Ramirez at first base could make infield plays more exciting than they need to be.

I’ll put the Rays in third place as a mirror image of the Red Sox. I like the Rays pitching but they might struggle to score much.

The Yankees will finish fourth in the AL East because I think that Father Time is going to pay a very unwelcome visit to the Yankees’ clubhouse. A-Rod is 41; CC Sabathia has his own issues; Mark Teixiera is not nearly the player he was. The starting pitching is OK but nothing more than that. The Yankees’ bullpen is very good with Aroldis Chapman and Dellen Betances.

The Orioles will trail the field here. I love Adam Jones in centerfield and Manny Machado at third base. The bullpen is very good too. Other than that…

NL West:

Giants

I like the D-Backs to finish second in the division because they have Zack Greinke and Shelby Miller to head their starting rotation and Paul Goldschmidt in the middle of their lineup.

I have the Dodgers finishing third here. The Dodgers’ starting pitching was great last year; this year it is Clayton Kershaw and a bunch of guys. I am not a Scott Kazmir believer… Corey Seager at shortstop is even better than his brother on the Mariners and that says a lot. Yasiel Puig is a head case; if he figures out how to play the game consistently, he can be a star.

I like the Padres to finish a distant fourth in the division. If both Wil Meyers and John Jay bounce back from bad years in 2015, the Padres’ offense might be half-decent; otherwise… Oh, and their pitching staff is nothing to write home about either.

I’ll take the Rockies to finish just a hair behind the Padres here. I just do not think the Rockies can score enough runs to keep pace with the number the pitching staff will give up.

NL Central:

Cubs

I like the Pirates to chase the Cubs in the NL Central. If Gregory Polanco plays up to his hype, the Pirates will have an outfield that matches any in the game. Their pitching is solid. Their biggest problem is that they are in the same division as the Cubs.

I’ll take the Cardinals to finish third here. If you want an example of a deep starting rotation, look at the Cards. This is the Lake Woebegone of starting pitching; they are all above average. I think the Cards will not score enough to win enough to match the Cubs or the Pirates.

The Reds will finish fourth in the NL Central simply because they have Billy Hamilton, Joey Votto and Brandon Phillips at the top of their lineup. That is not nearly enough to make them contenders but it is enough to keep them out of last place.

The Brewers will finish last in the NL Central.

NL East:

Mets

I like the Nationals to finish second in the NL East. The Nats need a big year from Jayson Werth who is 37 years old and they need the injury bug to stay away from Anthony Rendon. Bryce Harper will put up big numbers but he needs help. The Nats starting rotation needs Stephen Strasbourg to pitch to his reputation consistently and for Gio Gonzalez to pitch better than he did in 2015. Jonathan Papelbon is a very good closer – but I wonder what might happen if he takes a loss because Bryce Harper makes an error in the outfield…

I’ll take the Marlins to finish third in the NL East for a very simple reason. They are not nearly as good as the Mets or the Nats and they are not nearly as bad as the Phillies or the Braves.

I’ll take the Phillies to finish fourth in the NL East because I think they are a year ahead of the Braves in the “teardown/rebuild” process. The Phillies’ future is still in the minor leagues but at least they have a couple of their young guys on the main squad getting experience like Maikel Franco, Cesar Hernandez and Aaron Nola.

I think the Braves will finish last in the NL East and may lose 100+ games this year. They have recognizable names in the lineup – but the players attached to those names are on the downside of their careers like Erick Aybar, Nick Markakis and AJ Pierzynski. The Braves are a work-in-progress.

Play Ball!

Finally, in keeping with the theme of the day, here is a baseball item from Dwight Perry in the Seattle Times:

“The Savannah, Ga., Bananas will become the 16th team in the Coastal Plain League, a summer circuit for college baseball players. So obviously the team MVP award will be known as the Top . . . nah, too easy.”

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

Bad Ads – 2015

The Earth has journeyed around the Sun yet one more time. As it proceeded on its way, I passed plenty of time watching sports on TV. The beauty of retirement is doing what you want to do when you want to do it – – and I am retired. What I often want to do is to watch a sporting event and so that is what I do.

The downside is that I have to watch/pass through loads of commercials on TV that are the funding source for my ability to watch those sporting events. I recognize their necessity; that does not mean that I have to like them. And, I most certainly do not like lots of them. As a Boy Scout one learns that one must take the bitter with the sweet. However, there is nothing in the scouting experience that precludes one from trying to make the bitter into something marginally sweet – or at least less bitter. That is what I try to do here.

I keep a set of notes on particularly annoying or stupid ads that I see on TV and compile them here as the final rant of the year. They may be annoying to watch, but at least I get some writing material from them. Before I start in on my list, I do want to take note of two dates:

October 20th

I saw my first two “Christmas automobile sales ads” on November 5th. Audi showed a car with a bow on the hood in a driveway and VW had an ad for leasing a car where the couple took the car and went hunting for a Christmas tree during the test drive.

Ho, Ho, Ho…

Anyhow, here are some of the bad ads you and I were subjected to last year…

Beer companies sponsor lots of sporting events and that means I saw loads of beer ads making it rather probable that I would see some bad ones. The folks at the beer companies and their ad agencies did not disappoint:

Budweiser

Bud Light maintained their ad campaign saying that you should drink Bud Light if you are “up for whatever”.

Memo for Bud Light:

Miller Lite would not be outdone in the quest for annoying TV ads this year. Recently they have paid good money for TV time to inform me that their swill now comes in the original short necked bottle that it came in when it was first introduced. And I should care about the packaging for what reason…?

There are categories of ads that put fine print on the bottom of the screen. These are disclaimers that seek to indemnify the sponsors for saying things in the ad that are not the whole truth and nothing but the truth and/or for showing something that might be deceptive in some way. As a rule of thumb, look at the amount of fine print at the bottom of the screen and recognize that the length of the message there is directly proportional to the degree of fibbing or exaggeration that you have been subjected to in the ad. Basically, there are two categories of here:

Don’t be an ass! Don’t even think of doing this yourself.

Ads where there are restrictions on the offers/claims made in the ad you are watching/listening to.

Websites that can get you “cash in your checking account tomorrow” are not lenders or brokers and do not make lending or credit decisions. And they are often illegal in a string of states. No wonder the print is so small; anyone who read that stuff would be really leery of contacting those folks.

Law firms who want you to call them if you – or a loved one – has taken some medicine and suffered one of a series of dire consequences including death. That firm will probably not represent you but will refer you to a law firm in your area – which you could find for yourself if you tried.

A T-Mobile ad had a disclaimer at the bottom of the ad that negated much of the benefit that was touted in the ad. T-Mobile claimed that other cell phone companies “steal your unused data” at the end of the month after you paid for it but T-Mobile will roll it over into the next month. Sounds good, no? The problem is that you only get to use that rolled over data after you run out of the allotted data in the next month – and if you did not use it all in January, why is it a certainty that you might use all of it and then some of the roll-over data in February? But even more problematic is that after one year of rolling over all that data, you lose it if you do not use it. Here is the bottom line:

Somehow, that does not sound like such a great deal anymore…

Zaxby’s Chicken had a bunch of ads on during March Madness last year. They had one of the goofs from Duck Dynasty in the ads. In a particularly stupid and annoying one, the “Duck Dynast” could only place his order for the chicken in a series of grunts exchanged with the genius at the cash register. In another, he dressed in “chicken camo” so no one could see him eating his chicken. On the stupidity scale from 1 to 10, those rate a 12.5. I do not recall ever seeing a Zaxby’s Chicken here in the Northern Virginia area but I will say without reservation that those ads would keep me from trying the food there rather than enticing me into the place.

DirecTV tried to convince me to use their satellite TV service with a series of ads showing Hannah and her talking horse. Their pitch was that DirecTV rated higher than Cable TV in each of the last however-many years. Wonderful! DirecTV also probably rated higher than used car salesmen, cops setting up speed traps, child abusers and people who rarely bathe. If you say that my comparisons are irrelevant, my response is that they are as relevant as a woman and a talking horse are as spokes-creatures for a satellite TV company. And for the record, the idea of a talking equine specimen is not novel; anyone besides me recall Francis the Talking Mule from the 1950s?

KFC ads feature the reincarnation of “The Real Col. Sanders”. Here is the message that I get from those ads:

The folks in “creative” at the ad agency simply have no good ideas at the moment.

I heard an ad on the local sports radio station for one of the online universities. I do not know if that is a national ad or just one put on the air here to annoy the inhabitants of the DC metro area. The ad is based on the premise that some industrial leader once said:

“If you don’t control your own destiny, someone else will.”

The message of the ad is that you should take control and call this school and enroll immediately or suffer the consequences of someone else controlling your destiny. Sorry, but either the industrial leader got it wrong or the enlightened folks who will be instructing you at the online university have it wrong.

Neither you nor anyone else can control your destiny or any other destiny. If it were controllable, it would not be destiny.

Should you call the number and think about paying those people to instruct you in courses leading to a college degree, recall that they got your attention by trying to convince you to control something that cannot be controlled. So, how smart must they be…?

TD Ameritrade touted its investment tools in an ad featuring Andrew Luck. He offered folks a “piece of Luck” by plucking a few hairs from his beard and dousing the people with it. Some of the folks said that TD Ameritrade had given them those investment tools so they were confident in their planning for retirement. Finally, they tell you don’t need luck when you have confidence.

So, if I am confident that I am going to win the $300M Powerball Lottery this week, I don’t need luck?

I don’t think so…

This year seemed to be one where the auto companies all got together and decided that they would bombard viewers of TV sporting events with stupid ads. There were so many that it strains credulity it could have happened totally randomly.

Scion

“Scion; what moves you?”

On one hand, it might be considered an interesting play on words. Scion is a car; cars move you from Point A to Point B. Clever? Not really. The first time I heard the ad pose the question here was my answer:

“Prune Juice”

The Ford Edge ads tell you to “Be Unstoppable”. Well, if I am in my Ford Edge I am not sure that I want to be unstoppable. I think I would prefer that the brakes worked properly.

Lincoln had to have decided to creep out a minimum of 75% of the viewers with those ads with Matthew McConaughey driving along on a dark night with not another car on the Interstate. I can imagine the meeting between the folks at Lincoln and the folks at the ad agency:

Ok, no other car maker has gone after the very-rich, the very-aloof and the clearly-creepier-than-Hell demographic. So, here is what we came up with for you…

For Volkswagen, harken back to the days when they touted Fahrvernugen – the joy of driving one nominally got from a Volkswagen. Well, in 2015 we learned that some of the “pep” in the engines of some of those VWs came from software that allowed the cars to pass emissions inspections but then drive in higher pollution mode to improve performance. Sure, I’ll believe the next round of VW ads…

Oh, and Audi had some “software shenanigans” too. For several years now, Audi has been flogging us with the slogan “Truth in Engineering”. I wondered if they might amend that this year to be “Truth in Engineering Plus Emissions Software Hijinks”. No, they did not…

People who buy cars also need to buy auto insurance so the demographics of sporting events tells insurance companies that they should spend some ad dollars there. Sadly, they do so and put bad ads in front of us.

Progressive Insurance

If Flo were drowning in a swimming pool, I would throw her a bowling ball.

Liberty Mutual seems intent on capturing the naïve segment of the insurance market. Several of their “spokesfolks” opine into the camera that they are outraged when they “use their insurance” [file a claim] and then learn that their rates increase. That is how insurance works. That is why you will pay more for life insurance if you smoke 3 packs of cigarettes a day or are 500 lbs overweight.

There is another Liberty Mutual genius who is shocked to learn that if he totals his new car, he only gets the depreciated value of it from the insurance company. Obviously, he lived in a cave until the moment he went to the car dealership to buy that car that he immediately wrecked.

Memo to Liberty Mutual spokesthings:

You can pay me now or you can pay me later.

Allstate has a particularly annoying ad featuring a couple sitting in a restaurant. The woman asks if the man recalls saying that women are not as good at driving as men; he acknowledges that he remembers that. At that point the woman gets out her “safe driving reward check from Allstate” and proceeds to flaunt it at him for the rest of the ad. The only way to save that ad would be for the man – who is obviously a chauvinistic idiot in the first place for making the broad generalization that started all of this – to take his plate of food and smash it into the face of the preening schmoo of a woman he is with.

Geico has had some good ad campaigns over the years and a few that have surely outlived their utility. I did not think I would ever be in this position but indeed I am:

Every time I see “Peter Pan” fly into the reunion hall with his classmates who have aged while he has not, I say to myself, “Why can’t Geico bring back the cavemen?”

Cialis now comes in a low-dosage form that men can take every day. Cialis likes to say that it allows men with Erectile Dysfunction to be ready anytime. If they left it at that, I would think that the ad campaign was sensibly directed at the aging male demographic and move on. However, Cialis also tells us that it is sometimes effective in treating the symptoms of BPH – Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia – or an enlarged prostate that is not caused by prostate cancer one of which is frequent need to urinate both day and night. And so to cover all the bases, the ads begin by saying:

OK, I guess. Spontaneity is a good thing… Unless of course it happens in a crowded restaurant or a movie theater or a church service…

And why stop to look for a bathroom?

Another important reason to “stop and look for a bathroom” is that we spend time and energy teaching children that it is not socially acceptable to wet themselves whenever they feel like it wherever they are. When an adult “stops to look for a bathroom” he is behaving like a socially adjusted adult instead of an annoying rug-rat in need of potty training.

These ads are even dumber than the vintage Cialis ads where couples in parallel bathtubs held hands while staring off into the horizon.

Napoleon Grills had an ad last year that showed a neighbor sneaking into a guy’s backyard to use the neighbor’s Napoleon Grill to cook a bunch of food. Even when confronted in the act and reminded that he could get his own grill, the guy keeps cooking. What is the message I am supposed to take from this?

I don’t think that is the message they want…

Until there were some legal issues with some state regulatory authorities and/or attorneys general, we were bombarded with ads for daily fantasy sports websites, Draft Kings and FanDuel. Mercifully, those seem to have abated in the past several weeks. I have 2 questions for the folks who are in charge of marketing those sites – leaving aside the questions of legality that will be settled in a totally different realm:

2. If I did not respond to the two ads you did make the first 1569 times I saw those ads, what makes you think I will respond to the 1570th time?

One of the fantasy draft sites had an ad where Victor Cruz asked Odell Beckham, Jr. if he (Cruz) should start Beckham or Julio Jones that week. The catchy part of the ad is obviously supposed to be that Cruz and Beckham are teammates in real life and that is nominally an awkward moment. There is another message there and it paints Cruz as someone who is dumber than a paper clip.

Fantasy football teams start 2 WRs.

If Cruz were lucky to have both on his team, why would he even think of only playing one of them?

When the ad bombardment for Daily Fantasy Sports sites was at its crest, there was a potential danger facing our country and our civilization. Look at all of those ads; they all said the same thing. Sign up, put up some money and you – Joe Flintwhistle sitting there at home – can win big money and we will take video of your celebrations there in your home and put it on the air. What is the potential danger in that?

1. If anyone ever made such a monstrosity of a show, might I suggest they call it “Survivor: Insufferability”.

2. We need another Reality TV show like we need an outbreak of rectal boils.

Blue Buffalo Dog Food shows an ad where a pet owner is sitting in a chair and is presented with the ingredient list from three different dog food brands. He says that he would select the brand of food for his pet based on the ingredient list. OK, that makes sense; if they stopped there, this ad would not be stupid. Here is what comes next:

Really?

Suppose the first ingredient listed – the one in the greatest quantity in the dog food – is “Mule Snot”. You understand what that is if you have an IQ greater than a hunk of cheese, but that does not make the product good dog food.

The folks at Fairfield Hotels tell me that their guests include marathon jugglers, Olympic gymnasts, a “balancing wizard” and an American Ninja. Moreover, these folks do their act in the lobbies and halls in the Fairfield hotels. This does not make me want to stay there for fear I might encounter one of more of these goofs.

Wells Fargo Bank has a Christmas ad showing a stage coach traveling through a snow-covered terrain when it stops so that the horses can eat carrots offered to them by snowmen by the side of the trail. Then the stagecoach goes on to deliver presents to a child.

Question: What in the name of Figgie Pudding does any of that have to do with banking?

Way too many ads tell us at the outset that these are “real people” and “not actors”. Given that the majority of those “real people” are being compensated for doing what they do, the distinction is sort of “blurry”. In any event, here are two messages for the folks who make those commercials and give us that disclaimer:

2. Since when are actors not “real people”?

I do not know if hhgregg is a national company or a local one here in the DC area; they sell kitchen appliances and some electronics and things like that. Yesterday on the NFL early game shown here, they ran an ad for a one-day sale on the Saturday after Christmas. They paid to run an ad on Sunday for a one-day sale on the day before. I never took the course, Marketing 101, but somehow, that does not seem like a good idea to me.

Finally, dumb ads are not restricted to television. As I was browsing on one Internet site looking for stuff to use in my website rants, I ran across an ad along the right side of the screen with this “headline”:

An overlooked method to pay off your credit card balance.

No, I did not go and read what that ‘overlooked method might be simply because I have a foolproof method for doing that which works every time:

Step 1:

Step 2: If that fails and you find yourself with a balance carried forward, then pay more each month than you spent on that credit card in the last month.

Step 3: In short order, the balance will go to zero and then you can stay there by following Step 1.

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

University Of Missouri Football Boycott

Surely, you have read and heard about the resignation of the President of the University of Missouri, Tim Wolfe, amidst protests over racial incidents at that institution. Clearly, the decision of the football team – players and coaches – to abstain from any football activities (practice and scheduled games) had a lot to do with forcing that resignation. The team has properly received accolades for their action here. In his statement announcing his resignation, President Wolfe urged the university folks to “stop yelling at each other and start listening and quit intimidating each other.” Whether or not you like President Wolfe, those words represent good advice.

There is an adage:

Fools rush in where wise men fear to tread.

I am going to be a fool today and pose some questions regarding the pragmatic outcome(s) of this forced resignation. Let me set the stage for just a moment:

Reports on this subject refer to a history of “racial incidents” on campus that have not been addressed to the satisfaction of the protesters. I do not know what those earlier racial incidents were; therefore, I have no way to judge their severity. It is not possible to imagine a racial incident that would fall in the “good” category; nonetheless, there are varying degrees of “bad incidents” and I have no way to categorize how bad the earlier incidents may have been.

I did see an interview with the student government president – a black male – on one of the news programs; he indicated that at a campus meeting, he had been the target of “racial epithets” including the “N-word”. I read reports that someone smeared a swastika on the wall in a dormitory using human feces. That act is disgusting on so many levels that I will not even try to understand what the perpetrator might have been thinking. That less than artistic expression came soon after campus protesters blocked President Wolfe’s car in the Homecoming Weekend Parade in protest of the “earlier incidents”.

In none of the reporting have I seen any indication that anyone involved in the protest thinks that President Wolfe was involved in any of the “earlier incidents” nor that he was the “fecal artist” who decorated the dormitory. Therefore, I guess I do not understand the vehement focus on his resignation as the prime objective of these protests. Now that he is no longer associated with the university, does that mean that the persons who confronted the student government president with racial epithets are gone? Has the “fecal artist” moved on to another campus somewhere?

Unless someone can demonstrate that President Wolfe was one of those miscreants or that he has been harboring those miscreants and shielding them from identification and punishment, those miscreants are still somewhere within the university community – unless of course these incidents have been perpetrated by outsiders from the start. I am currently about 800 miles east of Columbia, MO; from this vantage point, it seems to me that the “really bad guys” have not been “smoked out” of their caves.

The protesters got what they have been demanding. Now what?

Many news outlets have raced to proclaim that there is a new day dawning on campus here and that this is only the beginning of positive change on campuses around the country. Before I get caught up in that euphoria, let me point out that many of these news outlets are the same ones that proclaimed the joy of Arab Spring four or five years ago as a movement that would usher in a whole slew of democracies in North Africa and the Middle East. That was wishful thinking that never came close to reality; frankly, until I see what the newly created environment is at Missouri and how that newly created environment minimizes any racial incidents on the campus, I will merely hope that all the change at Missouri is for the positive.

Politicians at the state and national level have jumped into the fray proclaiming – obviously – that they are the side of everything that is right and good. I have not heard any of them intimate that they have any information regarding who is responsible for the acts on campus that they decry so prolifically. Frankly, they sound to me as if they are merely opportunists grabbing at a chance for face time in order to take a “proper position” on an issue they really do not have any knowledge of or involvement with. Call me a cynic if you wish but I would think a lot more highly of these politicians if they took to the microphone with declarations of facts and specific actions they are taking to make specific changes here. All I have heard to date is platitudinous pabulum…

Having experienced in the past mandatory diversity sensitivity training sessions, let me say that I am skeptical that any such activity will do anything meaningful to humanize the thought processes of the “fecal artist”. Real change, significant change, permanent change is not likely to emerge from diversity training sessions that end with the participants singing Cumbaya. Such diversity training sessions will not hurt anything but if they are the totality of the change ushered in by the change in leadership at the university, then the protest outcomes will likely be cosmetic and not meaningful.

The onus is on the protesters now. No one is going to start a “movement” to get any of the protesters to drop out of school. However, now that they have had their say, one needs to change the focus of accountability.

Who is “the fecal artist” and what is to be done to/with him/her?

One potential outcome from this matter in a completely different dimension may be that college athletes in the revenue sports will recognize the influence they can have on university policies. This protest had been ongoing for a while but what brought it to a head was when a large fraction of the football team took sides in the protest and announced that they would boycott practices and games until the protesters’ demands had been met. According to reports, the cancelation of the game against BYU this week would have cost the Missouri Athletic Department $1M. The players should learn from that quick response to their stance that there is truth in the adage:

Money talks; bulls[p]it walks…

Should the student-athletes choose to push this pawn a way down the path, they might see a different avenue toward payment for their athletic services. Instead of trying to get “employee status” by having a national labor union certified to represent players’ interests, perhaps the way to achieve that goal – if that is truly a goal the players want to achieve – is to wait for one of the major revenue events to commence and for the players at that moment to choose to withhold services. It would take Herculean coordination effort to make the following happen but imagine for just a moment the following scenario:

The media is focused on who got snubbed and who got a seeding they did not deserve. Monday morning arrives and that frenzy of outrage is fully expressed.

Then, comes the announcement that the players on the 68 teams are not going to take the floor. There will be no games; there will be no television; more importantly, there will be no television revenues…

The University of Missouri faced a loss of $1M for failure to show up to play BYU. The NCAA Tournament generates close to $1B for the NCAA and its member institutions.

It is probably too large an undertaking to get 68 teams to agree to such a boycott to make my scenario even close to a reality. However, there are bowl games in football and even the College Football Playoff where the occurrence of the event involves the cooperation of far fewer players at far fewer institutions. Maybe, this is the most important lesson about effecting change that comes from the action(s) of the Missouri football team in this matter. Maybe this action will demonstrate the levers and the fulcrum that players can use to force negotiations on things they want to have happen.

And like the campus protesters who have won their point now, if the players choose to use those levers, are they ready to accept the consequences and the accountability that will come from their success?

I think the resignation of President Wolfe is not much more than a symbolic happenstance. Without concrete steps that actually change things for the better, it will be a footnote of history. I think the football players at Missouri demonstrated to athletes at other schools that perhaps it is time for the players to take heed.

Money talks! Bulls[p]it walks!

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

The Washington Nats Dugout Scuffle

The grand sports issue here in the DC area as of this moment is the dugout scuffle between Jonathan Papelbon and Bryce Harper. The Washington Nationals had a disgraceful season. Fanboys in the area will cry crocodile tears lamenting injuries to various players on the team as an excuse for the team’s miserably embarrassing performance this year. Nonsense. The problem with the Nats is pretty simple and it was expressed by one of the SF Giants players – do not recall which one – last year just as the Giants and Nats were getting ready to play each other in the NL Playoffs. Even last year, people revered the Nats’ lineup and thought it was an unstoppable juggernaut. This “mystery Giants’ player” said they had loads of good players but – as he grabbed his man-zone – he suggested that they did not have anything “there”.

That may not have been the most articulate expression of his analysis/opinion but it was much closer to right than it was to wrong. Moreover, the roster for 2015 suffers from similar problems that one might express in the same crude fashion. The Nats have at least a half-dozen – and more likely 10 – bona fide stars on the roster right now – – if all you look at are individual stats. What they also have are a bunch of guys who are stars AND are front runners. When things go their way, these guys just pile on the stats and make it appear that they are the reincarnation of the 1927 Yankees. However, as soon as something starts to go wrong and the Nats need a clutch hit or play in the field – – not so much.

The weakest link on the Nats this year was the bullpen. More specifically, the least productive part of the team was the setup men who got the team through the 7th and 8th innings of games to usher in the closer. With the Nats this year, one of the most famous Yogisims was fully applicable:

The game was never over until it was over.

At the trade deadline, the Nats acquired Jonathan Papelbon from the Phillies and anointed him as their closer. The previous closer was “demoted” to being the 8th-inning set up guy. Hey, if you were good enough to have been the closer, you ought to be able to get through the 8th innings of games instead of the 9th innings, right? Well, that did not work and people ascribed it to an ego bruise. Please; spare me; you are getting paid millions of dollars to pitch one inning per game about 3 times a week; suck it up, buttercup.

Papelbon will receive exactly no votes in the “Mr. Congeniality Contest” nor will anyone ever nominate him for “Clubhouse Chemistry Guy of the Year”. However, no one can realistically challenge his competitiveness. He is one of those guys who seems to be a pain-in-the-ass; but if he is going to be in the league, it is probably better to have him be your pain-in-the-ass as opposed to the other guy’s pain-in-the-ass.

I wrote last year that I think Bryce Harper is one of baseball’s most polarizing players; I continue to believe that. Harper is incredibly talented; anyone who disputes that statement either has not watched Harper play or knows nothing about baseball. Harper is also one of those “frontrunners” I referred to above. As talented as he is and as dedicated to getting better year over year he is, if I needed a clutch hit to win an important game, I would much rather have Jayson Werth at the plate than Harper despite the fact that Harper is hitting about 100 points higher than Werth this year. Moreover, Harper will get only token acknowledgement in a putative “Mr. Congeniality Contest”.

If there had to be a dugout fight in the Nats’ dugout the day the team was eliminated from the NL Playoffs – after they were the pre-season favorites to win the World Series – the odds-on favorites for the combatants would have to have been Harper and Papelbon. The proximal event(s) that triggered the scuffle do not really matter; the scuffle has to be seen by the folks who run the team as a fundamental issue with regard to the roster they have built. They have individual “stars” on the team who seem to exist in their own orbits and only acknowledge the existence of other “stars” on the team during “mandatory walk-off victory celebrations”. That does not work in team sports; the Nats need only look at their NFL DC brethren to see how that formula for roster building produces little in terms of championship results.

What is the solution here? I do not know what the team will do but I think there are several fixed points in the environment that cannot be ignored:

2. The team is on the hook to pay Jonathan Papelbon $11M next year; they picked up that contract option when they traded for him in July. Moreover, Papelbon has a no-trade clause in that contract that he has to waive in order for the Nats to move him elsewhere. The Nats can trade Papelbon if they are willing to pay much/most of that $11M salary AND if they agree to take nothing more valuable than a liverwurst sandwich in return.

3. Other members of the bullpen will recognize that they are set up to be the scapegoats for this season’s collapse and any of them who can sign elsewhere would be wise to do so. Any who choose to stay here will be under a microscope for any flaws starting the week before Spring Training commences in February 2016.

4. The knee-jerk “fire-the-manager” option could well be invoked here. Matt Williams is described in the local press as being “all-business” and “stern” while the common wisdom is that the players would like someone who will pat them on the head once in a while. Maybe even pass out juice boxes and participation trophies… Nothing cures overly-indulged entitled individuals more than getting rid of a “no-nonsense” manager and replacing him with “Dr. Feelgood”.

For the record, what this particular roster needs least is a manager who will let the players do whatever it is they want to do. The team appears to have plenty of spoiled kids/brats on it; they need no encouragement to continue to live their lives in such a fashion. What this roster needs most is a significant restructuring. Some of their frontrunning “stars” need to be moved on to teams who will be enamored with their individual stats; and in return, the Nats need to acquire a few guys who – for lack of a more eloquent description – have something down in their “man-zone”. The problem with that avenue is that it will require the folks who assembled the roster – the activist owner and the GM – to acknowledge that THEIR roster and THEIR decisions were not so good. I just doubt that is going to happen…

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

Predicting The 2015 NFL Season

For new readers, this is another of the annual features where I purposely – and purposefully – embarrass myself in public. What will follow here is my forecast for the NFL team-by-team where I predict the final standings in all of the NFL Divisions and the team records for each team. I will try to explain/justify/rationalize my selections knowing full well that many of them will be off target by astronomical distances. I do want to make something clear before launching into this essay:

Therefore, when it happens – as it always does – that a team that I have picked to have a 3-13 record winds up with a 9-7 record and perhaps sneaks into the playoffs, please do not tell me that I owe that team and its fans an apology for disrespecting them. That is not what happened and I will not apologize for something that did not happen.

What did happen was that I made a huge mistake in terms of analysis and forecasting and I will indeed admit that I was wrong.

Before getting to the individual teams and their records for the season, let me begin by identifying 5 coaches who are – or ought to be – on a hot seat already. I will list them alphabetically lest anyone try to derive some priority order from the list that is not there.

Gus Bradley (Jax):

Jay Gruden (Washington): I know, he has only been in the job for one year but in Washington under Danny Boy Snyder’s regime, two years is long time in the job. Gruden’s “calling card” as a coach is that he is a “quarterback-whisperer” and he came to DC in hopes that he might bring RG3’s performance to mythic levels. RG3 will be the clipboard-holding #3 QB as the season begins… Now, if the two QBs ahead of RG3 also play poorly, Gruden’s “calling card” may decline significantly in value.

Joe Philbin (Miami): Expectations are high in Miami this year; Greg Cote of the Miami Herald ranks the Dolphins as the 6th best team in the NFL. I do not agree with that assessment but that is some of what Philbin needs to deliver against in South Florida. Philbin has been in Miami for 3 seasons and has posted a cumulative record of 23-25. A repeat of that kind of record is not commensurate with the “6th best team in the NFL”.

Lovie Smith (Tampa Bay): Like Jay Gruden, this is only his second year on the job. Nonetheless, the Bucs were as bad last year as they had been under Greg Schiano and Raheem Morris. Like in Jax, there are plenty of empty seats in Raymond James Stadium. The Bucs need not win their division for Smith to stay on the job, but another year near last year’s 2-14 record and he may be collecting on whatever remains in his contract starting in January 2016.

Ken Whisenhunt (Tennessee): He took the Arizona Cardinals to the Super Bowl after the 2008 seson and to the playoffs after the 2009 season. Since then, his teams have not been above .500. Like Lovie Smith above, the Titans went 2-14 in Whisenhunt’s inaugural year there. The team has to do better than that.

There are two other coaches in the league who might endure fan pressure or media pressure should their teams “under-perform” this year. I do not think either coach ought to be on a hot seat – let alone fired for a bad season in 2015 – but I will mention them here just because…

Tom Coughlin (Giants):

Nonetheless, the Giants have missed the playoffs for 3 straight years and in those 3 seasons the team record has been 22-26. In the last 2 seasons the Giants have been 13-19 but that less-than-stellar record is inflated to a degree with a 4-0 record against the Skins – meaning against real competition, the Giants are only 9-19. The Giants’ fans and the NYC tabloids may not take kindly to another slightly less than mediocre season.

Chip Kelly (Philly): He has been with the Eagles for two years and has won 10 games in both of those seasons. So why might he be on a hot seat? Well, in those two years, he has released or traded or lost to free agency some of the team’s best and best liked players. If the 2015 season craters, the fans in Philly will be in full throat…

Enough preamble… Getting down to business here, I shall begin with the AFC East. I believe the Pats will win the division again this year and that the Jets will finish last. I think both the Dolphins and the Bills will do well and that this will be one of the strongest divisions in the league as measured by the total wins by the teams there.

Patriots 12-4:

Did the Pats’ defense take a big step back from last year in losing Darrelle Revis, Brandon Browner and Vince Wilfork to free agency?

Losing two really good CBs from the defense puts the pressure on the front 7 to generate pressure. It is difficult to imagine that Bill Belichick and defensive coordinator Matt Patricia have not already figured that out and have been working on ways to do just that. The Pats get an early Bye Week (October 4) and return from that Bye Week to play Dallas and Indy both on the road. That is a speed-bump in any schedule.

Dolphins 10-6: If I am correct, Joe Philbin will keep his job in Miami and the Dolphins will be an AFC Wild Card team. The centers of attention for the Dolphins will be QB Ryan Tannehill, DE Cameron Wake and free agent signee DT, Ndamukong Suh. The Dolphins’ OL allowed 46 sacks last year; that was the worst in the league. Like the Patriots above, this is another case where a DL needs to generate pressure to prevent its DBs from being exploited. That defense – and particularly those DBs have time to work on their game because here is the schedule for the Dolphins from the start of the season until October 29. No matter how hard you look there are no great QBs the defense will have to contain:

The defense needs to use those games as learning experiences because in its last 3 games it will face:

Despite his prediction that the Dolphins would be the 6th best team in the NFL, Greg Cote of the Miami Herald did have this cautionary note for fans in Miami:

“An AFC East study by StubHub of fans who bought tickets to both NFL games and concerts reveals that Jets and Patriots fans tend to like Billy Joel, Bills fans go for Garth Brooks and Dolphins fans prefer Ariana Grande. Based on that, Miami clearly is going to finish last in the division.”

Bills 9-7: Rex Ryan will indeed keep it interesting and the presence of Richie Incognito and Percy Harvin on the roster portends interesting storylines in Buffalo. Ryan takes his “ground and pound” offense about 350 miles northwest from East Rutherford, NJ to Buffalo NY. It’s a good thing he likes to run the ball because after a training camp competition, he settled on Tyrod Taylor as his QB with EJ Manuel as the only backup on the squad. The Bills acquired LeSean McCoy from Philly last winter and they are going to need McCoy to gain at least the 1300 yards he did in Philly last year so that Taylor is not in the position of having to win games on his own. The Bills had an excellent defense last year; Ryan is a good fit to coach a team with that kind of defense. The schedule in not all that kind to the Bills in September; here is how the start the season:

It gets a lot lighter in October and November.

NY Jets 4-12: New head coach Todd Bowles earned his stripes as a defensive coordinator and he takes over a team that is strong on defense. In addition to a solid DL, the Jets have reunited CBs Darrelle Revis and Antonio Cromartie. You might be tempted to wonder if this pair who were in NY together from 2010 – 2012 can still play; after all, CBs have a shelf life in the NFL. Absent injury, both of these guys can still play… The Jets’ problems are on offense. Ryan Fitzpatrick is a journeyman QB at best; when Geno Smith’s jaw heals, the Jets can only pray that this is the year when Smith rises up from being a miserable NFL QB all the way to being a slightly-below-average NFL QB. When Geno Smith was coming out of college into the draft, there were questions about his throwing accuracy and his leadership. His first years in the NFL seem to have confirmed that he is not the most accurate thrower ever and the fact that his coach and his teammates have not rallied behind him in the aftermath of “the sucker punch” sort of says he is living down to his “lack of leadership” expectations. Look for the Jets to continue to be a “run-first team” again this year.

Moving along to the AFC North, I do not think this division will be as strong as the AFC East but I do believe it will be a closely contested division race with the Ravens as the class of the division.

Ravens 11-5:

Steelers 8-8: Yes, James Harrison is still playing LB for the Steelers but truth be told the Steelers’ defense had gotten old as a unit and needed help. In that sense, the Steelers added by subtracting Ike Taylor and Troy Polamalu during the off-season; they both had very good careers but both had gone past their sell-by date. Football-lifer, Dick LeBeau also left town to take up the head defensive chores in Tennessee. The Steelers will have to win on offense this year until the defense rebuilds itself. To that end, the 2-game suspension for LeVeon Bell and the loss of center, Maurkice Pouncey are not a good things but the presence of Antonio Brown to haul in passes from Ben Roethlisberger is indeed a good thing for the Steelers. In games outside the division, the Steelers will face top QBs who will test that defense:

Given that scheduling fact, the Steelers had best be prepared to outscore their division rivals quarterbacked by Joe Flacco, Andy Dalton and whomever the Browns feel like playing whenever.

Bengals 8-8: The good news in Cincy is that the Bengals have made the playoffs for the last 4 seasons and no other team in the AFC North can make that statement. The bad news is that in all four of those years, the Bengals have been one-and-done in those playoffs. I think this year will break the cycle because I think the Bengals will be watching the playoffs on TV this year. Last year, the Bengals’ defense was more porous than it had been in prior years. If that was due to the aging process, that is not a good omen for 2015. On the other hand, maybe the decline in the defense last year was merely due to the loss of LB Vontaze Burfict who should be back this season.

Browns 5-11: The Browns open the season:

Those may be the “Barking Dog Games of the Week” three weeks in a row. Josh McCown arrives in Cleveland in his mid-30s to serve as a placeholder at QB until the Browns can either decide that Johnny Manziel is their guy or they go out and acquire their guy. Somehow, the Browns never seem to be able to find “their guy” at QB no matter how hard they try. Here is their history of high QB draft picks since the re-launch of the franchise in 1999:

The Browns won 7 games last year; I just do not think it was skill and cunning that achieved that record. It still seems to me like “smoke and mirrors”. Hence, my prediction of a regression for 2015. Realize that the Browns were the worst team in the NFL in rushing defense last year giving up 142 yards per game. The Browns may have something going for them on offense for at least the early part of the season. New offensive coordinator, John DiFilippo, has never been an offensive coordinator before so his opposing defensive coordinators will have no “book” on him. The schedule is a difficult one notwithstanding those opening 3 games and they will have 6 difficult in-division games. I think the Browns will take two steps back this year.

The AFC South is a division of “Haves” and “Have Nots”. It is not the only division like that but it is the one where the distinctions are the starkest. The AFC South is also the weakest division in the NFL this year counting the number of predicted wins by teams in that division. I believe the four teams will only win a total of 28 games.

Colts: 11-5:

Offensive Line:

Defensive Line: The Colts do not get nearly enough pass rush without blitzing a couple of linebackers.

Those issues may haunt the Colts when they face top-shelf competition/playoff teams but make no mistake, the Colts are one of the AFC South’s “Haves”. Look for them to get off to a fast start with the first month of the season looking like this:

There is a tough patch in the middle of the season but just in case the Colts need a win in the final weekend of the year to secure a Bye Week in the playoffs, they can close out against the Titans at home.

Texans 9-7: I think Bill O’Brien has the makings of a good coach in the NFL meaning he may have what it takes to get his teams to overachieve. There is little doubt that he a no-nonsense fundamental-football guy. He has a team in Houston that has a very good defense and an offense that desperately needs a QB. The Texans had a training camp competition and Brian Hoyer beat out Ryan Mallett for the job. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the most positive thing on both of their résumés is this:

Both QBs were in New England as understudies to Tom Brady and under the tutelage of Bill Belichick.

An injury to RB, Arian Foster in training camp will not help the Texans’ offense at all. The Texans get to play the Colts twice; if they are going to win, the defense – stronger this year with the addition of Vince Wilfork and a potentially healthy Jadeveon Clowney – will have to keep Andrew Luck and company under control. I mentioned how the Colts have a soft landing in the final weekend of the season should they need it; well, the Texans have soft games for the last two weeks facing the Titans on the road and then the Jags at home. Like the Colts, the Texans are one of the AFC’s “Haves”.

Jaguars 5-11: That prediction may not look like much but it is significantly improved over last year’s 3-13 mark. The Jags signed former Broncos’ TE Julius Thomas as a main target for QB, Blake Bortles. In the buzzard-luck tradition of this franchise, Thomas broke his index finger and needed surgery about a week ago meaning he will not be available for the first 4 or 5 games. Bortles can use a reliable pass catcher; this is his second year in the league and that is a key developmental season for guys who ultimately develop into something other than long-term straphangers in the league. None of the Jags’ WRs will cause defensive coordinators sleepless nights so it falls to the other TEs on the team to carry the load for a month. Those TEs are not superstars but they are capable enough to fill in:

The Jags running attack will need to up its game too; they have decent if not eye-catching talent there. Defensively, the Jags are pretty good and they added Jared Odrick from the Dolphins to a D-Line that has Ziggy Hood and Sen’Derrick Marks. I see improvement in the Jags for the season but they still remain one of the AFC South’s “Have Nots”.

Titans: 3-13: The Titans were 2-14 last year so it is not surprising that there were few if any bright spots on the roster. The defense was terrible; the offense seemed lost at sea. The Titans bright in 77-year old Dick LeBeau from the Steelers to try to get the defense up to slightly-below-average – which is all that one might really expect in one year. LeBeau has been around the block a few times; he came into the NFL as a defensive back in 1959; Dwight D. Eisenhower was President at that time. To goose the offense, the Titans drafted Marcus Mariotta virtually assuring that whatever play they get at QB this year it will not be consistent from game to game; such is the way of rookie NFL QBs with very few exceptions. They signed a couple of WRs in free agency and drafted Dorial Green-Beckham one round after Mariotta. Green-Beckham is one of those guys with lots of talent and an equal amount of off-field baggage. Since the season has not started and everyone still sees the glass as half-full, let me point out that my prediction of 3-13 is a 50% improvement over last year. Big deal; the Titans are definitely one of the AFC South’s “Have Nots”.

The AFC West has three good teams and an improving fourth team. Measured by the yardstick of total wins by the 4 teams, I have it ranked as one of the top three divisions this year. I like the Broncos to win the division but it will not be easy.

Broncos 11-5:

Chiefs 10-6: People like to chirp at Chiefs’ QB, Alex Smith, because he never throws any TD passes to WRs. Make no mistake, I am not going to try to convince you that Smith is a top-flight QB; he is not. However, the Chiefs have not had a great corps of WRs recently either. This year, in free agency, they picked up Jeremy Maclin from Philly and he should make a difference in KC. Recall that Maclin was in Philly with Andy Reid so he does not have a steep learning curve when it comes to his “new offense”. As long as Jamaal Charles is healthy and running the football, the Chiefs will not need to win games solely through the air. For the last two years, the Chiefs’ defense has been really good and there seems to be plenty of rubber left on the tires of that unit. Last year, the Chiefs lost LB Derrick Johnson and DL Mike Devito in the first game of the year. Surely the injury bug will find another team to bite this year, right? The schedule for the Chiefs is very tough especially at the beginning:

I see the Chiefs as a wild card team in the AFC.

Chargers 8-8: The injury bug bit the Chargers in the offensive backfield last year to the point that the team saw their 3 top RBs miss a total of 25 games. Presumably that will not happen again this year. Early on, the Chargers may need to rely on running the ball more than usual because TE Antonio Gates will serve a 4-game suspension through 4 October and drafting Melvyn Gordon last May gives the Chargers a featured back. Fortunately for the Chargers, that portion of their schedule is not as tough as other parts:

Even with Gates in civvies in the stands, the Chargers could be 3-1 when he makes his way in to the locker room for Game 5 at home against the Steelers. Actually, the offense is not what concerns me about the Chargers. Last year they only had 7 INTs as a team and only sacked opponents 26 times. Unless the ball always bounces in your favor, that kind of defense is going to lose games for you. I like the Chargers this year – it is just that I like the Chiefs and the Broncos more…

Raiders 6-10: Since the Raiders lost to the Bucs in the Super Bowl back in 2003, the team has been a hot mess. Twice they finished 8-8; in all the other seasons they never won more than 5 games. In the last 3 seasons, the Raiders are 11-37. Nonetheless, I see the Raiders as a team on an uptick; 6 wins this year would double their total from last year. They are not going to contend in the division; they are not going to the playoffs; however, they are better than they were and they are not going to be walkover opponents this year. The additions of Michael Crabtree and Amari Cooper to play with Derek Carr were good moves. The additions of Curtis Lofton and Nate Allen will improve the defense where the presence of Khalil Mack should start to get some national attention. Putting a no-nonsense guy like Jack Del Rio in the head coaching slot has to help too. Most importantly, the Raiders OL seems to be improving to the point where QB Derek Carr is not in mortal danger every time the offensive coordinator calls a pass play. The Raiders’ schedule is brutal especially at the end of the year; here are their last 5 opponents:

One other miserable feature of the Raiders schedule is the distance they have to travel for their road games. They have 4 road games in the Eastern Time Zone and none look to be “national games” meaning they will begin at 1:00 PM EST which is 10:00 AM on the Raiders’ biological clocks.

So, to recap the AFC I see the Playoff Structure looking like this:

Patriots

Ravens

Indy

Denver

Miami

Moving over to the NFC, I will take the divisions in the reverse order from the AFC for no particular reason than that is how I listed my notes on my clipboard. If anyone reads something of cosmic importance into that choice, please let me know because I think it is unintentional.

I think the NFC West joins the AFC East and the AFC West as the three best divisions in the NFL for this year. If I am correct, all three divisions will house teams that win a total of 35 games for the year.

Seahawks 12-4:

Rams 10-6: I think this is a big step forward year for the Rams. The Rams’ defense is keyed by its defensive line where there are 5 first round picks on the roster and the oldest one is only 30 years old. Nick Foles is 14-4 as a starter and Jeff Fisher obviously does not think he was a “system guy” in Philly. A big plus for the Rams will be a healthy Todd Gurley at running back. He comes off a knee injury last year at Georgia but he is a horse at 225 lbs and he can break big runs too. Second year back Tre Mason will provide an interesting change of pace from Gurley. What the Rams need is for a WR – say Tavon Austin – to develop this year into a reliable lead receiver. The Rams have experience and stability on the sidelines; Jeff Fisher is an excellent coach and this year could put him into the playoffs. A game on November 8 may decide the Rams’ playoff chances; more on that later.

Niners 7-9: The changes on this team are too numerous to mention so let me just name a couple:

You get the idea; this year’s iteration of the Niners will bear little resemblance to the teams in recent years. Moreover, I do not see the replacements for the missing players as upgrades. Yes, the return of NaVorro Bowman from injury is a plus and an upgrade; the same goes for the return from injury of Glenn Dorsey but the numbers just do not add up in favor of the Niners. The first nine games of the season – leading up to their Bye Week – are difficult. If they are 4-5 at that point in the season, it will be a good thing. What they must avoid is being 2-7 at that point.

Cards 7-9: I am just not a believer in the Cards this year. I know they played well last year before Carson Palmer got hurt and that Palmer is back now and says his leg is better than before the injury. Here is my problem in a nutshell:

So, I have to decide if the cards are going to win 13 games this year because they have their #1 QB back and that will lead to more points and more wins – OR – will the Cards regress to the mean in terms of having the ball bounce their way.

I choose the latter outcome here.

Todd Bowles no longer runs the Cards’ defense; he is now the head-guy for the Jets. His replacement is a promotion from within meaning that new coordinator James Bettcher is familiar with the talent and what it can and cannot do. There is one other inescapable fact; Bettcher has never been a defensive coordinator in the NFL. Like the Raiders, the Cards have 4 games in the Eastern Time Zone presenting “biological clock challenges” and the Cards’ schedule has 5 tough games to end the season:

The NFC South was an embarrassment to the NFL last year. Carolina made the playoffs with a record of 7-8-1. Three teams will be bunched together in this division again this year and the Bucs will be looking up at them all.

Saints 9-7:

That adds up to 11 indoor games plus a possible 12th one if the weather in Houston demands.

Carolina 9-7: The Panthers reupped Cam Newton to a long term deal worth something north of $100M in the offseason. He is not a bad QB but he is not one of the Top 10 in the league either. The loss of WR, Kelvin Benjamin, for the season is not a positive portent for the Panthers. The current stable of WRs headed up by Ted Ginn Jr., Corey Brown and Jerricho Cotchery is something less than “inspirational”. Jonathan Stewart is the feature back but he has been in the league for 7 years now and has about 1100 carries; if Father Time catches up with him, there is not much else to turn to. Luke Kuechly is an outstanding defender and – put simply – is not replaceable by anyone on this roster. Like the Saints, I do not think much of the Panthers as compared to some other squads but they do have some easy division games and someone has to win those games. The Panthers have a very tough run in the middle of the season:

Note that three of those games against good opponents are in Carolina. The Panthers need to win at least two of them…

Atlanta 7-9: The good news for the Falcons is that their defense this year just cannot be worse than the defense was last year. New coach Dan Quinn has the reputation as a defensive guru having been the defensive coordinator of the Seahawks for the past couple of seasons. Before getting too carried away here, Falcons’ fans need to recall that before Quinn had that job in Seattle, it belonged to Gus Bradley who has been toiling in Jax for the last two seasons without sterling results. The best of the DBs on the Falcons last year was Desmond Trufant; he will turn 25 early in the season and the questions about him are very simple and very direct:

If he has that capability, is this the year he might demonstrate it?

The Falcons offense last year was pass-dominated; it featured Matt Ryan and Julio Jones so that is not such a big surprise. On the other hand, the running game stunk to be blunt about it. That will have to improve for this year; how much it improves will determine if the Falcons can still harbor non-miraculous playoff thoughts past Thanksgiving. The schedule is not all that fearsome for the Falcons and so I will propose a modest one-game improvement for this year.

Bucs 4-12: There is no way to sugar-coat this; the Bucs were downright awful last year and they took Jameis Winston with the top pick in the draft with the idea that he is the cornerstone of their rebuilding effort. Winston’s physical skills are not now – and never have been – in question. The uncertainty about Winston remains:

Is he 21 going on 25?

Or is he 21 going on 13?

NFL fans will observe and derive the answers to those questions from afar; the Bucs and their coaches will live through the answers. The Bucs start the season at home against the Titans with their new rookie QB who is supposed to turn the franchise around. If the Titans lose, they can say it was a road game and postpone their dealings with reality. If the Bucs lose at home to the Titans, it will be the mirror image of a moral victory; it will be a gut-wrenching defeat. The schedule for the Bucs is not horrendous; at one point in the midst of the season they look at the following:

That is not like facing “Murderers’ Row”… I am predicting a 100% improvement for the Bucs this year based on a gentle schedule and the fact that even as a rookie, Jameis Winston will have games where he outshines what Josh McCown and Mike Glennon did last year.

[Aside: Do you realize that in the recent past the Bucs have had Josh Johnson, Josh McNown and Josh Freeman all start at QB? Seriously, I am not joshing…]

Moving on to the NFC North, I see a two-team race there but it may surprise you to know which two teams they are.

Packers 11-5:

If the Packers lose another WR or two to serious injury, Aaron Rodgers will be throwing to “JV players”; that would be like asking the best NASCAR driver ever to win the Daytona 500 driving a Dodge Minivan.

Nevertheless, do not forget that absent a brickheaded play on an onside kick in the NFC Championship game against Seattle, the Packers would have been in the Super Bowl. Absent a calamity of injuries to the offense, the Packers will score points; the question is how many points will the defense give up? Dom Capers is the defensive coordinator in Green Bay and his reputation is that he comes up with creative ways to use the personnel on hand. Fans in Wisconsin have to hope that reputation has a basis in fact for the 2015 season. I have gotten all the way into this team analysis and have not yet mentioned Eddie Lacy who is a quality running back that adds a run dimension to the Packers’ offense. The schedule for the Packers is interesting right out of the gate:

Later in the season, the Packers play 2 Thursday games which is not quite as bad as it sounds. On Thanksgiving night, the Packers play the Bears for the second time in the season and then on the next Thursday night they take on the Lions.

Vikings 10-6: The Vikes are my team to take a big step forward in the NFC this year. Last year the Vikes were 7-9 but it sure did not seem as if they were that close to being a “break-even team”. My optimism here is based on the fact that Teddy Bridgewater will take a; significant step forward this year on his path to becoming a good NFL QB; his play at the end of last year was significantly better than it was earlier in the year; I like to think of that as a positive omen. Moreover, the addition of Adrian Peterson to the backfield – even with a year of “football rust” on his chassis – can only be a plus for the offense. Here is a Vikings’ question with potentially negative implications:

Will Cordarelle Patterson show this year that he is something more than a fast guy who is a return man?

The Vikings lost a stud on the OL – tackle Phil Loadholt – to a season-ending injury in training camp; somehow, they need to find a way to replace him with someone more skilled than a guy who was a piano-mover two weeks ago. The schedule is relatively kind to the Vikings but I foresee that their key game is on November 8. More on that later…

Lions 6-10: The Lions had a fearsome defense last year that kept them in games until the offense could figure out what the offense was there to do. Then in free agency the Lions lost Ndamakong Suh and Nick Fairley and replaced the two of them with Haloti Ngata and a rookie. With no offense to Ngata who is a quality player, he cannot fill in for two guys who were standouts as DTs. And that is not all that is missing from last year’s Lions’ defense that ranked second in total defense in the league. Also gone are George Johnson and LB, CJ Mosley. The Lions were 11-5 last year; my prediction for this year represents a precipitous if not calamitous drop. Yes, Matthew Stafford and Calvin Johnson and Golden Tate are still in Detroit but with Reggie Bush having moved on to SF, can you name any Lions’ RBs without peeking? You are correct, the Lions drafted Ameer Abdullah last May and he may need to be a key part of that offense this year. The schedule is not a killer but there are two small segments that might prove challenging:

And…

Bears 4-12: The collapse of the Bears in 2014 cost the coach and the GM their jobs. Last year the team went 5-11; I think this year is going to be worse. One of the offensive “improvements” the Bears are touting is the reuniting of Jay Cutler with WR Eddie Royal; they had a grand old time of it when they were teammates in Denver. The problem is that grand old time happened in 2008; in NFL terms, that is Paleolithic. The good news is that new coach John Fox has been successful in Carolina and again in Denver. He showed that he was adaptable in Denver when he took a Tim Tebow-quarterbacked team to the playoffs and won a game there. He will indeed need that kind of magic touch in Chicago this year just to aspire to a .500 record. Let me explain why I say that. If Jay Cutler falters or gets injured, the #2 guy on the Bears’ depth chart is Jimmy Claussen. There are currently two guys behind him on that chart which is a frightening thought. Vic Fangio was cut loose by the Niners in their housecleaning at the end of the year and he found a landing spot with the Bears as defensive coordinator. He may provide a spark – but he does not have the ability to rush the passer or provide tight pass coverage. An important element in Fangio’s success with the Bears’ defense will be how much gas Jared Allen has left in his tank. In the first three weeks, the Bears have to face the Packers and the Seahawks; later in the season they have this scheduling stretch:

Finally, we arrive in the NFC East as our circumnavigation of the NFL world completes itself. This division will have a highly contested two-team race at the top which the Cowboys will win and a pretty-much guaranteed bottom feeder down the line.

Cowboys 12-4:

Eagles 10-6: Chip Kelly has had his Eagles teams go 10-6 in each of his first two years with the club. I do not see any reason this year should be different. In the offseason, Kelly seemed to be morphing into the NFL version of Dr. Frankenstein by trading quarterbacks with the Rams, trading away his most productive RB, losing his top WR to free agency and letting a Pro Bowl guard become a cap casualty. Nevertheless, it looks as if the team is not crippled by any/all of that. Sam Bradford takes over the controls here; the Eagles’ offense involves lots of quick throws and lots of speed; will that game fit Bradford’s style? It sure was not what he was asked to do in St. Louis. Moreover, can he stay healthy? In those first two 10-6 seasons, Kelly has won games with Mark Sanchez and Nick Foles at QB. Not to be too snarky here, but no one in Canton is taking measurements for either player so they can get a head start on casting a bronze bust. What the Eagles need to do to improve their record is to improve their defense. The Eagles gave up more plays of 20+ yards than any other team in the league. Adding Byron Maxwell and rookie Eric Rowe to the secondary will hopefully reduce that number; adding Kiki Alonzo to the linebacking corps should help too.

NY Giants: 6-10: The Giants were 6-10 last year and I do not think they are going to be any better or worse this year. Here is an unabashed bottom line analysis for the Giants:

If it doesn’t get a LOT better this year, the Giants will be mired in this level of mediocrity.

One way to address that needed improvement is to change defensive coordinators and the Giants went back to Steve Spagnuolo who had held that job with the team back in 2007. That may have been a big addition for the team but the hand injury to Jason Pierre-Paul was a big subtraction for that defense. In the secondary, the Giants had to go out and sign Brandon Merriweather as a safety; Merriweather could not make it on the Skins’ roster so you sort of have an idea what his level of productivity might be. The Giants will win games where they get into shootouts with other bad defensive teams who cannot also keep up with the likes of Eli Manning, Odell Beckham, Jr. and Victor Cruz. The schedule is not that bad for the Giants but the prediction of 6-12 assumes that the team breaks even at home and wins two road games – against Washington and Tampa Bay.

Skins 3-13: It will be a long and winding road to rebuild this roster. New GM, Scott McCloughan, began the process last year but the amount of “has-beens” and “never-weres” on the roster means it will take multiple seasons to get to a competitive state. The Skins have 3 QBs and all of them have flaws. Kirk Cousins will start the year and he has the best chance of developing into a serviceable QB in the Jay Gruden offensive system. Behind him are Colt McCoy who is a career backup and RG3 who could not be a poorer match for the Gruden offensive system without undergoing at least one amputation. In the event that Cousins shows well this year, the Skins will have an interesting dilemma at the end of the year; Cousins’ rookie contract is up then. What to do…? On offense, the Skins will employ a power running game with two big backs; Alfred Morris is also in his walk-year and Matt Jones is a running back who seems to like contact so much that he goes looking for it whenever he has the ball. On defense, the Skins will give up big pass plays with receivers running in broad open spaces in their secondary. The Skins have a 3-week stretch in October where they may be able to catch their breath;

When the Skins get that Bye Week they will have played 7 games. I think their best scenario is a 2-5 record but 1-6 is more likely. That home game against the Bucs might be a win going into the Bye Week which might engender talk of momentum and all that stuff. Well, just look past the Bye Week and you will see that after stewing for 2 weeks on their lousy record, the Skins get to travel north to pay a visit to the Patriots in Foxboro. Hello, momentum…

In order to make my prediction for the NFC Playoff structure, I need to explain the significance of “the November 8 game”. On that day the Vikings will play the Rams in Minnesota. That game will provide the tie-breaker between those two teams each with 10 wins. Only because the Eagles are not going to play either team will I concede them a wild card spot and declare that the other wild card spot will go to – – the St. Louis Rams.

Therefore the NFC Playoff Structure is:

Seahawks

Cowboys

Packers

Saints

Eagles

Rams

So, let it be written; so, let it be done…

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

Judge Berman Has Spoken…

Today, Judge Berman overturned the NFL-imposed 4-game suspension for Tom Brady. I have not gone online to read any opinion pieces about that decision yet. The reason is that I am confident that the people who had opinions on the matter before Judge Berman’s decision will not have changed their minds before their fingers hit their keyboards.

For the record:

For me, there were procedural inadequacies from start to finish in the case that should have rendered it moot. Most important in those inadequacies was the fact that The Wells Report – paid for by the NFL with the intent of showing wrongdoing in the matter and costing somewhere between $3M and $5M – could only come to the conclusion that Tom Brady might have been generally aware of something that it had to use pseudo-science to determine had happened. Ted Wells is an attorney and has to consider his reputation and the reputation of his firm even in light of the $3-5M he was getting in billable hours for this report. He could not/would not put his name on the line to say “this guy did that thing because here is the evidence.”

With regard to the refusal to turn over the phone to the investigators, let me point out that if you are charged with something, you do not have to turn your phone over to the police just because they ask for it. They can get a warrant to confiscate if from you, but you are not required to just hand it over because they said “pretty please”. Somehow, the NFL seemed to think that they had a right to ask for Brady’s phone and that conferred some obligation on his part to give it to them. Obviously, Judge Berman disagreed.

I know that there will be some folks out there calling for Roger Goodell’s head on a stick. While I believe he was way out of line here, I am not going to be one of those people. Back in September of last year – more than 4 months before anyone ever heard of deflated footballs in the AFC Championship Game – I wrote this piece on this website. I believe then and continue to believe that the NFL and the NFLPA set up an untenable situation in their last CBA with regard to the way discipline would be meted out. Because all of this is in the CBA, that means that both parties are to blame; there has never been a CBA without at least two parties as signatories.

My argument is that a sports commissioner needs to do two things to be successful:

Roger Goodell has been hugely successful at those two things; the NFL will bring in about $11B in revenue this year and projects to more than $12B by 2017. His “problem” is that he is also “The Disciplinarian” and that “other duty” puts him in a position to do things that make the league look stupid (does not grow revenue) and makes the union go berserk (does not maintain labor peace).

In my rant 4 months ago, I said the solution here would be for both parties to the CBA to admit they have an internal flaw here and for both sides to amend the CBA to create a Disciplinarian who is not part of the league or the union. Both parties should fund the Disciplinarian and whatever staff is needed; both parties should define what degree of cooperation all parties to the matter would owe to the Disciplinarian. If mature adults could put their egos in another room for 4 hours, this kind of agreement should be forthcoming. The problem here is that will not happen – and that means that there will be some “scandal” will come up in the future to which someone will attach the suffix “-gate” and it will turn into a glorious mess.

Why do I predict that? Because the NFL is going to appeal Judge Berman’s decision and that is nothing more than an ego-driven reflex. And because the NFLPA is already gloating about their winning streak in courts to overturn/reduce the discipline decisions of the Commissioner and that is nothing more than ego-driven posturing.

So, Tom Brady will be on the field for Game 1 next Thursday night – as he should be. Just as certainly, there will be some other brouhaha in the next year or so that will spin out of control – and likely it will be founded in the same CBA-driven morass as was Deflategate. However for the moment, we can take solace in the words of former President Gerald R. Ford spoken just after he was sworn in as President in the wake of Richard Nixon’s resignation:

“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”

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

Pete Rose – For The Last Time?

Long-term readers know well that I have believed that Pete Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame for the accomplishments of his career on the field. I have never liked his off-field behaviors but I thought that Bart Giamatti at first took a hard stand on those behaviors and then Fay Vincent piled on. What bothered me the most about his off-field behavior is that it took him years upon years to admit what he had done. As with many “scandals” the cover-up and the denial magnify the iniquity.

Nonetheless, I am still willing to have Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame and to include on the plaque bearing his name a direct statement of the fact that he bet on baseball games while managing the Cincinnati Reds in the late 1980s. However, new evidence seems to have surfaced that indicates that Pete Rose bet on baseball games while he was a player – in a time that preceded his managerial position. Now, that changes everything…

The new evidence was uncovered and announced by ESPN’s Outside The Lines. There is no question that Outside The Lines has earned a prestigious standing in the arena of investigative sports journalism. The fact that the folks there put their names and the reputation of the program on the revelation renders a high degree of credibility to the report. If the same report had come from some “click-bait website”, I would be skeptical.

The timing of the emergence of this new evidence – originally obtained/discovered 26 years ago in 1989 – is strange. It has been sealed and stored in the National Archives for all or most of that time and just now a copy of it has surfaced. Were I given to conspiracy theories – and I am not – it would not be all that difficult to see some nefarious hidden hand at work here moving to leak new evidence just as Pete Rose has applied for reinstatement to baseball with a new Commissioner. Frankly, I think the Bilderbergs and the Trilateral Commission have bigger things to worry about than whether or not Pete Rose is reinstated into the good graces of MLB.

Let me explain why the new information presented by Outside The Lines crosses into a new and dark place. To do that, let me present to you some fictional events in the life of the winningest jockey of all time – – Joe Flabeetz. Everyone who ever went to a racetrack where “Beetzy” was riding knows that was always a threat to win the race when he was on a horse in the starting gate; he was just the best. So, when he retired, it was a sure-thing that he would go into the Racing Hall of Fame; after all, he had won more races than anyone in history.

Now suppose we learned – after his retirement – that Joe Flabeetz had a long history of gambling. After all, gambling and horseracing are inseparable activities; should that be disqualifying? Well, I think it all depends:

If “Beetzy” bet on the Super Bowl every year, I would have no concern about that at all if he did that through a sportsbook in Las Vegas or through some off-shore book that took such action. Once again, if I were prone to conspiracy theories, I might be just the tiniest bit concerned if he made that bet with a local bookie because – perhaps – it might tie him to organized crime and that is not a good thing for racing. Nevertheless, I would ignore it…

If Joe Flabeetz bet regularly on football and/or baseball and/or soccer and/or hockey games, I would have the same reaction to his wagering on the Super Bowl. I just do not think this is any bigger of a deal than if he played poker every Saturday night with a group of friends who had nothing to do with horseracing. I just do not think this matters…

Looking back over “Beetzy’s” career, he won just about all of his races in the US and in Canada. Every once in a while when he had a “super horse” he would go to Dubai to ride that steed in the annual top-shelf race there. So, what might I think about a new revelation that Joe Flabeetz regularly bet on horse races in Australia? Not only had he never raced there, he had never even been to Australia… I am very uncomfortable at this point because jockey’s betting on horse races erodes significantly the confidence in “the integrity of the sport”. Lord knows; there is a significant fraction of horse players who are ready to believe that the only reason they lost that last race is because of some “hidden hand” that turned the outcome against them. At this point, I am very uncomfortable with “Beetzy” and his behavior(s) when he is not in the saddle; but still, he did win more races than anyone in history…

One more revelation indicates that Joe Flabeetz bet on races at the tracks where he was riding – but only on races where he had no mount. I am off the Joe Flabeetz Train at this point. Gambling and jockeys are too closely related in terms of the sport to let jockeys get this close to gambling on the races themselves. This would disqualify Joe Flabeetz from the Racing Hall of Fame in my mind. And that is where it would seem that Pete Rose is with the new Outside The Lines information.

Let me take this clearly fictional analogy one step further:

Let us suppose that we just learned that Joe Flabeetz bet $100 to win on every horse that he rode in every race in his career and that he absorbed all the losses while donating all the proceeds from the winners to the noblest charity you can imagine. Moreover, he kept all those records and the IRS itself has audited and determined that every dime is accounted for properly. Even in that situation where Joe Flabeetz has clearly done some splendid good, he disqualifies himself from recognition in the Racing Hall of Fame. There has to be a clear line that separates jockeys from betting on races close to them and the nobility of the outcome from crossing the line does not justify the crossing of the line.

Obviously, the new information obtained and revealed by Outside The Lines will need to be vetted/corroborated and we do owe Pete Rose and his attorneys the opportunity to rebut or challenge the accuracy of that information. However, if at the end of the vetting and rebutting it turns out that Pete Rose bet on baseball games while he was a player, I will – sadly – change my call for him to be in the Hall of Fame.

If the information is valid, then Pete Rose belongs NOT in the Hall of Fame but rather in my fictional Just Go Away Club.

Finally, let me leave this topic with two thoughts that seem appropriate to this entire messy situation:

“There’s one way to find out if a man is honest — ask him. If he says, ‘Yes,’ you know he is a crook. – Groucho Marx

And …

“It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.” – H. L. Mencken

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

Cards Hack The Astros – Initial Thoughts

The big sports story of the moment is the “hacking” of the Houston Astros’ computer systems/databases by folks employed by the St. Louis Cardinals. I put quotation marks around “hacking” here because if the reports out there are correct, this is not equivalent to what was done to break into the Sony databases. It seems as if the Astros’ GM – formerly with the Cardinals – had a favorite set of passwords that he used when with the Cards and he did not change them when he moved on to the Astros. Well, if you know someone’s passwords, it is not exactly “hacking” to get into the systems.

None of that is to try to justify what folks with the Cards allegedly did. If I find a key to your house in a parking lot and I wait until you are gone to let myself in, my entry into your house is not justified. I do not know if that analogy would hold water in the legal realm, but that seems to be a valid comparison for here.

Because the Cardinals have been a very good team for a very long time now, fans of opposing teams are experiencing a sense of schadenfreude. That is a fun sensation for a while; what is more important is to learn about what happened and to assess its implications and then move on to some kind of resolution.

I will refrain from schadenfreude for now until the legal folks decide whether they are going to charge anyone high up in the Cards’ organization with a crime in the matter. Unlike some other baseball cheating scandals, this one also seems to violate Federal Law – the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 as amended. This seems to me to be a case of corporate espionage at the very least. For me the key question now is:

Who in the Cards’ organization knew what – and when did they know it?

It may not matter to the FBI and the DoJ whom they indict in this matter and what position those folks held in the Cards’ organization, but it matters to me. If the Cards’ GM knew this was going on and turned a blind eye, that makes this a whole lot worse. If an underling told him that (s)he thought (s)he could break into the Astros’ databases because (s)he thought (s)he had the passwords and he gave a nodding approval, that makes it even worse than a whole lot worse. From an overview perspective, there is a significant difference between a “rogue IT guy” doing this and “executive suite involvement.” Both situations are bad; one is outrageously bad.

Commissioner Rob Manfred seems to be doing the right thing here. He has said MLB is cooperating with the FBI in the investigation – I should hope so! – and he has not jumped the gun with regard to punishments. Moreover, he is not going to need to hire an investigator to weed out what happened. The FBI with subpoena power and needing to interrogate people who may choose to have their own legal representation will provide him with better information than a private investigation could. When the FBI and the DoJ are done, he can act. At the very minimum, there are going to be some folks banned from ever working in baseball again.

Taking a longer view, I find it interesting to try to place this hacking incident into the landscape of baseball scandals. In a sense, this is signal stealing on steroids which may be an apt description given baseball’s history with steroids. I am not a baseball historian by any measure, so consider what follows as something a high school kid might write for his junior thesis and not what a professor might write for a peer-reviewed journal.

Scandals that were worse than the current “hacking” investigation seems to be:

The Black Sox Mess in 1919: This involved fixing games in the World Series. Surely we can agree the current mess is nowhere near as bad as that.

The ’51 Giants stealing signs from their scoreboard: Stealing signs happens; denying that it does would be stupid. However, sign stealing at the level that the Giants practiced it was an affront to the game and surely affected a pennant race and a World Series participant. That was worse than this mess.

BALCO/Biogenesis: These illegal and corrupt activities affected the stats that form part of the foundation for baseball’s history. I cannot see how the current mess will come close to doing that.

Racism: After integration in the 40s, baseball still suffered outrageous racism in the form of death threats to Henry Aaron as he approached Babe Ruth’s home run record and in the form of Marge Schott as a franchise owner. The current mess is not good, but it is not nearly as pernicious as racism.

Scandals that were bad but not as bad as this one looks to be:

The 1980’s Free Agency Collusion: This was not cheating to win games; this was cheating to save money. It was a stupid idea and it was even more stupidly executed. In the end it did not save money; it cost owners $300+M.

Pete Rose: There is no evidence he bet on games involving his teams nor that he bet on games while he was playing. His jail sentence was for tax evasion which is not a baseball scandal.

Since this investigation is not yet finished – and often these Federal probes take a lot of time – there will be plenty of time for folks to ruminate on where this scandal fits into the landscape of scandals in the sports world outside baseball. Surely, someone will try to draw a comparison between this matter and “Deflategate”. There is an attractive reason to do so in that the Cards and the Pats are top-shelf teams/franchises and it might be fun to demonstrate their feet of clay. When you read that kind of thing, consider it nonsense. Even under the most nefarious scenario you might imagine for “Deflategate”, no one is in danger of going to jail based on the air pressure in a dozen footballs. Someone – some ones – here might do some time.

No matter how all of this shakes out, there is a baseline issue that Rob Manfred will have to deal with. Someone in the Cardinals’ organization cheated; there is no way to sugar-coat that. Someone used an improper – seemingly illegal – means to gain an advantage for the Cardinals that an opponent (the Astros in this case) did not have access to. I do not see any way around coming to the conclusion that cheating is involved here. Now, if the “integrity of the game” and the “best interests of baseball” mean anything other than bluster, Rob Manfred is going to have to take some definitive action(s) when we get to the bottom of all this.

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