As I’m sitting here listening to my Royals likely lose their third straight to the Rays, I find myself thinking about the NFL. I guess I’m ready to move on. Stop listening to my Royals lose, and start listening to my Chiefs lose.
Any NFL fans out there? Just a couple weeks away from camp.
Yup…we’re, what, three weeks away from preseason now? Can’t wait!
Now I just have to get my ass in gear with getting my football pool site prepared for the new season.
As I always say: I hate to wish my life away, it goes by too quickly anyway - but damn I am ready for some football!
It’s hard being a football fan in the Bay Area. Sundays are dominated by watching the marginally miserable Niners and the abjectly shitty Raiders. It’s literally made me top watching football entirely the last couple years.
That said, I’m going to try to get back into it this season. And I loved the OP. It’s rough being a Royals fan. At least you’ve got a great sportswriter out there (Podanski, I think? Spelling might be wrong, but I really like that guy)
I am so ready for the NFL to begin. Unfortunately, the Bengals are generally not a good panacea for watching the Reds!
I’m a Niners fan living in St. Louis, so at least you get to see their games. Anyway I think they will contend for the division this year. Arizona was lucky to keep Warner healthy most of the season, and with Boldin unhappy production could be down.
The Niners addressed what I consider their most pressing need with taking Crabtree. I would have liked to see the O-line depth addressed , but as a whole I really liked their draft.
Take heart - us Tampa Bay area fans put up with the historically bad Buccaneers, and then just as they got good, we get the equally historically bad [del]Devil[/del] Rays. Now they’re both pretty good - although my beloved Bucs are going to have quite the down year if Luke McCown isn’t as good as I think he is.
I’m always excited for football even though I know it’s just going to be a 16 week long kick in the balls.
On the plus side, my team (Browns) one of the worst coaches in NFL history.
On the other side, the team probably sucks. It’s hard to say because the coaching was dragging them down. The game day coaching was so ridiculously inept - I say this as someone who rewatched and broke down games and knows at least a decent amount about football, not just “the team sucks therefore the coach sucks”.
The new guy has a rep for playing authoritarian games, locking people down, and creating an atmosphere of mistrust - but I hear good things about his actual coaching abilities.
Cautiously optimistic. Everyone wants to write off any year the team gets a new coach as a rebuilding year, but young aggressive coaches performing well out of the gate is becoming the norm.
I’m really excited this year. I don’t think the Eagles will do as well as everyone is suddenly predicting (this team isn’t ready for a serious run, they lucked into even making the playoffs last season). They’re too injury prone at their skill positions (McNabb, Westbrook, Curtis), and at each of those positions the youngster behind them isn’t exactly proven (Kolb, McCoy, Maclin). I posted my prediction in an earlier thread when the schedule was released. I stand by it, even with the major changes that occured after my post. Still, the team should be pretty good, and with some luck, could contend for the Super Bowl. That’s all you can ask for.
With Madden coming (I’m interested in the game for the first time in five years), fantasy football warming up, and training camps about to start, I’m as deep in football as I have ever been. And it’s only July!
Mangini’s definitely lacking. It was like night and day watching the ineptitude of Eric Mangini compared to the polished field general of Tom Coughlin every Sunday. As much of a petty douche as Coughlin is off the field, that guy is only a step or so behind Belichick when it comes to in-game management.
However, with Mangini you’ll definitely notice an improvement over Romeo Crennel just as I did over Herm Edwards. That isn’t saying much, though. (I think those two may have been the worst ever, rivaling Marty Schottenheimer’s post-season efforts.)
Would you mind giving me some specifics? What he’s good and bad at? I’d like to have a better idea.
From what I hear, he’s extremely well prepared and detail oriented to an obsessive compulsive degree, which is probably a good trait for someone in his position.
As for my beloved Giants, this season will be interesting. For years I bagged on McNabb for choking in the big game, handwaving away excuses about bad receivers by pointing to Tom Brady’s success without any good receivers.
So now Eli has no receivers. gulp My own logic has painted me into a corner where I can’t make excuses for him. I’m cautiously optimistic, though; he passed fine after Plax went down. It was the running game that tanked. With an offseason to scheme, I’m sure the coaching staff will be able to put something together.
At least with no clear #1, every receiver on the field becomes a legitimate threat. To put it another way, I think most of the plays that included Plax had a couple receiving options that were pure decoy, and it’s not hard for opponents to figure that out on film. That’s fine for a superstar receiver, but when you only have second-tier receivers you can’t be running 2- or 3-man patterns. If you do, the defense can either blanket the primary receiving threat or stuff the run.
With this offseason to prepare I’m hoping to see a lot more 4 receiver patterns where all four options are real. Basically, lots and lots of single back, be it 2 TE or 3 WR. I have full confidence in Eli to read the defense and find the open man.
Oh he’s definitely that.
He’s bad at clock management, and play selection for down and distance, especially on third and fourth down. He’s also bad at challenges, and whether or not to go for it on fourth down or try a 2 point conversion. You know, game management.
He’s not nearly as bad as Herm Edwards at that stuff, though, and judging by past posts of yours, Romeo Crennel was on Herm’s level of utter incompetence in that regard. Mangini will probably seem great at all that stuff simply because you’ll be remembering all the times Romeo would have fucked it up and Mangini will instead do the right thing, and the number of times Mangini fucks it up will seem almost inconseqeuential in comparison.
I would have thought that too, but Coughlin has spoiled me. That friggin’ guy seems to instinctively know what the right decision is without having to think about it at all, every single time. For example, Coughlin has the highest challenge success rate in the league, and he never hesitates before throwing the red flag; the second the whistle blows he’ll be charging out onto the field and whipping the flag directly at an official, screaming like a madman. Mangini gets that “on the crapper” expression a lot, where you can tell he’s overthinking the hell out of the game situation. He’ll usually get it right if a bit slowly. The question is, is “usually” an acceptable standard? For example, he might take a timeout and then throw a red flag. You’d never catch Coughlin or Belichick doing that.
In short, he’ll seem fine unless you also watch the Patriots every week, in which case you’ll think Mangini is an incompetent fool by comparison.
Ran out of edit time. This bit is out of order. It should read:
He’ll usually get it right, if a bit slowly. (For example, he might take a timeout and then throw a red flag. You’d never catch Coughlin or Belichick doing that.) The question is, is “usually” an acceptable standard?
The two words in this thread that always ring a bell this time of year are:
“Cautiously optimistic”.
Last year was quite a bizarre one for the Packers. Going into the year, I was “cautiously optimistic” about Aaron Rodgers and thought the Pack would win the division and a playoff game. Ends up they go a disappointing 6-10, yet Rodgers had a great season. So much for cautiously optimistic. I hadn’t planned on the complete collapse of their defense in big games. And 6 of their 10 losses were by less than 4 points. It was a tough year.
And now they are switching to a 3-4 defense (in part due to their lack of a talented DE to play opposite Kampman). So it’s another off season with big changes.
BUT, I’m once again “cautiously optimistic” going into this year. The Packers were one of the youngest teams in the league last year, and it showed. Now their QB has another year of experience, their defense will hopefully play to their strengths (a good LB corp), they drafted well (I’m excited to see Raji and Matthews have immediate impacts), they have some young guys I hope will finally take a step up and make a big impact (Harrell, Nelson, Spitz, Colledge), their running game will hopefully improve (Grant is healthy and the line may gel better), and they got a fantastic coach in the offseason (Capers as DC). So, once again, I am
cautiously optimistic.
I’m a Bills fan. I’m prepared for a disaster of epic proportions. There’s no way TO can stay sane for long with our QBs. I hope that Trent Edwards will step up now that he has two decent targets, but I’m not at all optimistic.
Dude, we know you hate Crennel, but “one of the worst coaches in NFL history”? Really? There are a hundred coaches in NFL history who never won 4 games in a season. Don’t tell me your '07 squad was so talented that a monkey could have coached it to 10 wins, because it wasn’t.
It may be an exaggeration because I’m not familiar with anywhere near all the coaches in NFL history. He was among the worst coaches in the time I’ve watched football.
'07 was something of an anomoly. They recognized by the end of '06 that Crennel was worthless, but they didn’t want to get the reputation of a team that fires its coach every few years. So they kept him, but as a lame duck. They brought in a new offensive coordinator who was given control of the offense - Crennel was relegated to controlling his specialty, the defense. Only… the defense regressed to 32nd in the league while the offense, mostly free from the shackles of Crennel’s control, blossomed.
Not only that, but after a disastrous opening game, Kellen Winslow (the ringleader) and a few other players organized a player-only meeting in which some of the players essentially decided to, to some degree, take over the team and self-motivation and self-coach. They went from a disastrous 7 point scoring blowout in week 1 to scoring 51 points in week 2.
Even so, the head coaching was pretty atrocious all year. Bad game time decisions were made all the time. The defense regressed from middle of the road to the worst in the league with no major loss of talent. There were several games in which the offense had to keep scoring to win, because the defense played was so loose and so fundamentally shotty that it wasn’t going to stop anyone. The prime example was the game against Miami - we were up something like 27-3 in the second quarter, at which point Crennel started calling the “let’s let Cleo Fucking Lemon look like Peyton Manning” defense and Miami tied the game shortly. It was only after the offensive coordinator pulled out all the stops again that we scored enough to beat them. It was as if Crennel made a bet with Chudzinski that he could lose the game no matter how many points the offense scored.
So, you combine a resurgent offense outside of Crennel’s control, an easy schedule, and a bunch of wins the offense pulled out of their ass on the last drive of the game, and you get a fluke of a season. I knew, on some level, going into 2008 we were looking at dissapointment due to Crennel - I don’t know if I said as much on the boards, but I remember talking about it in the chat leading up to the draft in one of our FF leagues.
So that’s what happened. The owner/GM of the team said “hey, 10 wins! Crennel must be onto somethong”, not realizing that the team was succeeding despite of him, and loosened the reins and gave him more power. So that, combined with a tougher schedule, and the team fell apart.
I can say only this: Singletary could probably convince me to beat an old lady and steal her purse. Dude is intense and weirdly inspiring while saying nothing of substance. I’m wary of the “This is OUR YEAR!!!” culture that pervades Bay Area sports (Warriors, especially, but the Niners and Giants are no strangers to this), but I’d love to see the team squeeze into the playoffs.
The Raiders, meanwhile are lost. The Crypt Keeper has lost his brains.
They managed to find a map just long enough to knock the Bucs out of a guaranteed playoff spot last year. :mad: