I think your cloud of dreams is making you forget Ahmad Brooks, thank you Bengals, we sure appreciate it. Oh yeah, Bustin Smith too. No BWI’s for him in the Bay Area.
The Jets are playing their starters on offense and defense against the Eagles’ backups in the 4th preseason game. On their first series, the Jets’ offense was utterly emasculated, going 3 and out. On defense, they got pushed around and pushed around until a 5th string WR ran the wrong route and the Eagles failed to convert a 4th and 4.
Then, bringing their starters back out on the second offensive series, their 38-year-old starting QB got absolutely destroyed, and looked like he had broken a rib, if not all of them. Turns out, he may have only had his wind knocked out.
So the Jets brought their starting QB back in after a play. They can’t block for him, he’s been hit or hurried on every drop back longer than 3 steps. They can’t run block (6 carries for 6 yards). He promptly threw a pick 6 that the DB dropped.
0-16, calling it now.
They do play Buffalo twice…
Is it going to be a race to the bottom between the Browns and Jets this year?
Nope. Browns are improved enough to win 4-5 games. Jets–good luck.
There is going to be a lot of awful football this year. Maybe the NFL will wise up and quit suspending players left and right. Between awful football, endless reviews, anthem protests, and not having the best players on the field, you’re going to see the ratings continue to decline.
Osweiler is cut.
We’ve gone from “The Browns effectively paid 16m for a 2nd round pick” to “The Browns actually paid 16m for a 2nd round pick.”
The ratings can decline a bit and the NFL will remain profitable. Maybe players should follow the rules, especially the good ones you want to see on the field.
My personal hope is the entire stadium joins the anthem protests, and maybe we can just do away with it (and the God Bless America BS at baseball games)
Which actually is a good thing for this Browns regime. I believe the Browns are way under the minimum salary, so they paid $16 million, they gained a second round draft pick and made a “chunk” move on salary requirements.
It’s cuts day in the NFL. Teams have to get their rosters down to 53 by 3:00 CST today. Rough day for a lot of people.
Some big names cut so far: Brock Osweiler, Joe Haden (who immediately signed with the Steelers), Chris Johnson, Tim Hightower, and Victor Cruz. It will be interesting to see how many teams pick up guys after other teams cut them.
Prior to cut day, there was a pretty active trade market. Seattle picked up Sheldon Richardson for Jermaine Kearse and a second round pick. The Vikings got Tramaine Brock for a seventh round pick (good news for the Vikings, bad news for Packers). There may be more coming as teams round out their rosters.
And to lighten the mood on a rough cut day, LeVeon Bell, fresh off an offseason holdout against the Steelers, applied to work at a local Dairy Queen.
Fuck, every time I hear god bless america I want to puke.
So the “final” 53 man rosters are in. What surprises were there with your team or around the league?
The Bears were bizarrely keeping 5 TEs AND 1 FB on the roster. Totally weird. I can only imagine that they didn’t think Daniel Brown and Ben Braunecker would make it through waivers. A bunch of the Bears TEs can line up split, especially Shaheen and Brown, but this is still a weird roster constriction.
After waivers, this changed, the Bears ended up cutting Braunecker to presumably make room for new WR Tre McBride who came over from Tennessee. This makes more sense and I suspect Braunecker will get to the practice squad in this second phase of cuts. Don’t know anything about McBride but after 2 uneventful years in Tennessee I’m not seeing much value there. The bloggers wanted the Bears to grab WR Kasen Williams, but apparently the Browns snapped him up. Unclear if that was in the first round of claims (meaning the Bears had no shot) or later.
The Bears originally kept 4 RBs, Howard, Cohen, Langford and Cunningham but ended up waiving Langford when they picked up Taquan Mizzell after Baltimore cut him. I don’t know much about Mizzell, but I think Langford is a better player right now than Mizzell. But Mizzell is a rookie with more long term upside.
The Bears are finally giving up on Lamarr Houston. He’s been a good player when he’s been on the field, but that is a really rare occurrence. He got dinged up late in the preseason and the Bears put him on IR pending a injury settlement. Pernell McPhee is being activated from PUP so he’ll basically be taking Houston’s spot.
I really like the Bears front 7 this year, I think we could be legitimately good if healthy. Floyd, McPhee and Young all can get after the passer and Acho is good depth. The inside guys are rock solid with Freeman, Trevathan, Jones and Kwiatkowski. Jones is especially rounding into a potential star. Hicks had a career year and Goldman and Bullard look like actual draft successes on the interior. I worry a little about interior depth but Unrein has been effective when on the field.
The Bears apparently upgraded at LS following the injury to Scales, grabbing Tampa’s former starter who didn’t win back his spot after injury. Let’s hope this move didn’t cost us a better WR like Williams.
All in all, the Bears feel like they are pointing in the right direction. The passing game will be a massive question mark. The WRs are pretty terrible and who knows how long Glennon keeps his job. The Bears certainly plan on running the ball a lot. The Bears have been one of the most injury prone teams for the last 2-3 years, so that’s remains the biggest variable. 2/3rds of the Bears roster has the “injury prone” label now.
Just learned that the NFL doesn’t work the way fantasy does. Each team gets to make as many claims as they want, there’s no resequencing after a claim. So yeah, the Bears had no shot.
There were a few moves by the Cowboys that were odd. DE Cedric Thornton played so poorly last year and this preseason that they cut him despite his $3M salary guaranteed.
Also, the decided to go with undrafted Cooper Rush as their backup QB. I think Redskins WR has more experience at QB than the entire Cowboys team (Dak Prescott’s one season). They don’t have a QB on the practice squad, either.
Kasen Williams was an absolute star for the Seahawks at wide receiver this preseason. He was extremely productive, made many big plays and scored a good amount, and made many difficult catches (successfully fighting for the ball on multiple occasions).
And the Hawks let him go and now he’s a Brown. That was definitely unexpected to me. Instead they kept Tanner “I Forgot He Existed” McEvoy.
If you were asked who is the highest paid player in NFL history, how many guesses would you have to go through to get to Matthew Stafford?
Honestly, in any given season you just look at which QBs just renewed their contracts, and you know one of them will be it. That’s pretty much all it boils down to.