I would love to see a new rule in the NFL where teams are allowed to pay players they draft anything they want. It is always a shame to see a new player come in from the college ranks, develop on your team, then just when they are reaching their peak are traded or let go due to salary cap restrictions.
It gets harder and harder each year to remain loyal to a team when all the people change! At some point it seems like we are just supporting laundry! It would be nice to follow a rookie draft choice thru their development and become a great player you can support…ala Darell Green.
I used to watch pro football, but find I agree with many of the points made by the OP. Its very boring to me. Too slick with too much “attitude” by the players. A guy will make a tackle for a 2 yard loss in a game his team is losing by 40 points and he’ll dance around like Ben freakin’ Vereen! Get over yourself, Holmes! Also, all the teams/games seem to be pretty much identical. Run on first, pass on second/third, punt on forth. If all the teams had solid white uniforms, you couldn’t tell one from another. Dull, bland and no fun to watch.
I like college football. Kinda rough on the edges and they do some unpredicable stuff. They keep it interesting. Most teams have characteristics that distinguish themselves from other programs. Of course, it helps when my alma matter is ranked #3!
Go 'SC!
She told me she loved me like a brother. She was from Arkansas, hence the Joy!
I don’t really blame most players for tyring to get the most for their brief years in the league. Are they overpaid? Not any more so than any other entertainer in the country. Top actors and actresses make $20 million per film, but you won’t see them get hit by a 330 pound lineman or go over the middle and get drilled by a linebacker at full speed for that money. As far as top notch entertainers are concerned, at the very least they sacrifice more for their money than most. **
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That’s why the only pro sport I really like is NFL, because it is dangerous. Neither the NBA or MLB are near as dangerous as football is.
I wouldn’t worry too much about Aikman or Thiesman going to the poorhouse anytime soon either.
Hey, that’s all the actions of one Daniel Snyder. As a Redskins fan, I’ll tell you straight up that he is poison to the sport of football. Hate the owner, not the team.
Besides, aren’t we supposed to join hands and hate the Cowboys together?
I like parity, so I would hate to see the cap go away. Very quickly the Redskins would become the Yankees.
If that is how you feel, you should be a Giants fan. With the exceptions of Kerry Collins (QB), Michael Barrow (MLB), and Kenny Holmes (RE), every starter (and primary backup) on both offense and defense was drafted by the Giants and played their entire career as G-Men. (Oh yeah, Omar Stoutmire…he’s growing on me.)
Considering only players who actually take the field during games, which includes starters and primary backups, the Giants may be the best team in the league at cultivating and keeping talent.
Starters/backups who played entire career as G-Men:
Special teams players are not typically that close to the fans’ hearts, though I am personally a big fan of the True Giant kicker Matt Bryant, who inexplicably hurt himself kicking against the Patriots. Due to their miraculously awful special teams last year, this season the Giants abandoned their “keep it in the family” philosophy and acquired proven entities for special teams. They, of course, continue to flounder on special teams. :mad:
I bolded the impact players…players whom most coaches would consider very good or elite. Of these 15 guys, 12 spent their entire careers as Giants. (If you don’t know who David Tyree is, he’s the guy who made almost every tackle on kicks and punts, and caused just about every fair catch so far this season. The Vikings were the first to gameplan him…they doubled him on every punt return. The Giants drafted him in the 6th round this year exclusively for special teams.)
It is very easy to be a fan of the New York football Giants. They are a class organization - “old school” in the very best sense.
Second- Before anyone carps about NFL players being disloyal, keep in mind that in pro football there are no (or almost no) guaranteed contracts. Management can demand a player take a pay cut, or be cut, any time. The media (and agents) love the Headline- Billy Joe Rottencrotch signs 6-year, $48mil Contract- but usually doesn’t report that BJR is guranteed nothing but his signing bonus and the first year, he’ll never see all that money. Nobody should feel sorry for 'ol number 12, but he’s not making as much as you think he is.
Jamaal Anderson of the Falcons was scorched in the local media for holding out after his monster season in '98. He had time left on the contract he signed as a rookie, he should honor his commitments, blah, blah, blah. The fact is, he had way outperformed his contract, and he knew it could all go south on the next hit. So he held out, eventually got his new deal, and promptly blew his knee out in the second game the next year. If he hadn’t re-negotiated, the Birds would have given him a few bucks and sent him packing- See ya Jam, thanks for the Super Bowl run.
The Giants are old school because Wellington Mara served in the Civil War. I did notice the absence of Jeff Feagles I also think you are being a little generous on your boldings.
And with the way they blew those games to the Cowboys and the Eagles, it is NOT very easy to be a fan of the Jersey Giants. But I try…
Couple points…Lance Legree got the game ball after the thrashing of the Vikings.
Mr. Mara served in the American Revolution, not the Civil War.
I excluded virtually all special teams, pointing out that few fans hang their hat on special teams players. Feagles, Hollis, Mitchell, the new kicker…wait, I did say something about those guys:
Whom did I overrate? I’ll give you Tyree, though I have every game this season on tape and in every game up to the Vikings, that guy was a monster on punt coverage. He’s the main reason Feagles has performed so well.
Possibly Shaun Williams, though he is solid. (And Madden rates him a 90 for what reason I have no idea.) Perhaps the Giants organization is more impressed with the two Wills than opposing coaches.
But if you look at SI’s NFL season preview rundown of all the teams, where opposing coaches in the division rate the teams, most of the bolded guys got mentioned. Yes, crazy as it may seem, I have a cite for them. hehheh.
Probably the best thing about the Giants is that every other year, like clockwork, they give you a playoff game that makes you puke blood. sigh
Re the OP it is different now, than when my dad, my granddad, & I were kids.
Partially I think it is we see the change so fast: I think the game has changed more in the period first year of free agency 93-03, than it did from 68-93.
PROS
We have 'riods and/or training and/or scientific diet and weightlifting making players bigger faster meaner – the NFL is, overall on an athletic level, a better football athletic product than our ancestors ever witnessed.
CONS
re “greed” :We have seen two strike shortened seasons in the past 15 years which has eroded fan support some. We have seen long-time franchises move over money and we have seen favorite players leave “our” teams for money
re the G-man: There is nothing even remotely “classy” about the only Giant who has anything approaching a national profile (save Collins) Jeremy Shockey unless you are a Giants fan, & yes I can see me taking an “Aw shucks that’s just Jeremy” if he were on my team, But I think the Giants were eating up the image he was giving them [WMara mr. burns voice: “oh what a scamp”] until he went too far …
In this corner: billionaire crybaby owners (Dan Snyder would be the prototype) that are more annoying than anything else.
In the other corner: millionaire cocky athletes with talent that are at least fun to watch.
In the lesser of evils selection I hedge slightly towards the players. Acutally, in football, I lean heavily towards the players. They don’t have guaranteed contracts, get hurt all the time, and have to play for the Raiders when they get old. Sorry. That was totally unnecessary.
I like all football. One thing I did not like about old school football is the spiking on the ground, late hits near the cheerleaders, punching, gouging, etc.
Mothers everywhere thought allowing their sons to play football was tantamount to sending them off to war. Which, metaphorically and symbolically is true. Back then the “casualties” were about the same also.
OK, I’ll admit that my previous link about how the citizens of New Jersey subsidize Giants Stadium was a little oblique. I thought that merely linking to the NY Sports & Exposition Authority site would be sufficient proof of the existence of a subsidy. I was wrong.
Some parts of “old school” football which I thought were better:
Only 40 players to a team.
No wussy “sliding” allowed for QBs.
No spiking the ball.
Grabbing and extending the arms were considered holding.
No signalling a first down ala Cris Carter–I would flag the player
for unsportsmanlike conduct or taunting every time for that.
Defensive backs could actually tackle instead of just running into/pushing guys.
Games were done in less than an afternoon.
QBs called their own plays.
No Randy fricking Moss.
And BTW, Bob Hayes still has the record for the flying 100; he is still faster than anyone today.
I have no defense for Shockey. I do love his talent on my team.
8.3 million, eh? That’s what you call a tax burden? There’s slightly more than 8.3 million people in New Jersey. A buck per year is your cost for the prestige of hosting Women’s World Cups, virtually every big music tour, (Pink Floyd & The Who were my personal favorite Giants Stadium concerts), the friggin’ Pope visit, not to mention an MLS team, and, oh yeah, two NFL franchises. You’re right. What a horrible burden that no citizen should be forced to bear. Should I mail you a dollar and call it even?
Compare that to the tax burdens that other NFL teams impose, and I think my point is demonstrated.
I can’t stand player celebrations, and the “signalling a first down” is the one that annoys me the most. Sadly, my team is one of the worst offenders.
Old school football had tackling. That seems to be a lost art in today’s game. Don’t limit it to d-backs…sometimes entire teams seem to not know how to tackle. (Just Employ Tackling Skills)
Not allowed? Out of curiousity, was that actually a rule or just a custom? Personally, I think it just makes sense. QBs seem to get knocked to the ground a lot, whether they get the ball off before the hit or not. Those hits are bad, but I’d imagine a QB running full steam into a defensive player charging towards him would be far worse. Does it really make sense to risk losing a multi-million dollar QB for the two or three extra yards he would have gained without sliding?
One thing others have mentioned in this thread that I really like about the NFL these days is the sheer athleticism of the players. TV doesn’t do it justice, either. I attended my first NFL game last month (watched my poor Eagles drop almost every pass that McNabb didn’t overthrow in Dallas) and was simply stunned by what these guys can do. You’d see a player in what looked like open field and think he’d go all the way, then some safety streaks out of nowhere like a blur and delivers a perfectly-placed hit. A fifty-yard punt looks pretty damn impressive in person, as well. I’d been to high school and I-A college games before, but these NFL players simply put them to shame on every level.
QBs always were allowed to slide. The (new) rule states that defenders cannot hit a QB that slides, and to keep it fair, the ball is spotted where the slide began.
In the old days, QBs never slid because they would have been pounded into the dirt.
Ellis, you are unreasonable. The same source I cited earlier says that Giants Stadium was built in the mid seventies at a then cost of $ 68,000,000, which would be about 4 times that in current dollars. So the Giants got a $250,000,000 stadium for free plus $8 million per year.
Earlier you said the Giants didn’t get any subsidy and challenged me to document the existence of a subsidy. I did so and now you change your tune and say the subsidy isn’t much. I say taking a dollar a year from each resident of New Jersey, most of whom are not Giants fans (especially those in south Jersey) and so get no return on the investment, is an unwarranted subsidy. The NFL in general and the Giants in particular are big enough and rich enough not to put the arm on any citizens, even at only a buck a year.
I also note that the Giants’ lease of the stadium is up (at least according to Quirk and Fort’s book) in 2006. It’ll be interesting to see how much the football Giants try to extort out of New Jersey and or New York at that point. Of course, it is possible, in theory, that the Giants won’t want any government subsidy but it is much more likely that Miss America will come to my door tonight and beg me to sleep with her.
Maybe this hijack should be in the Pit, but the NFL has awarded the 2008 Super Bowl to Phoenix.
So all of 23.351 fans show up at the Desert Rats game against the Bengals to celebrate their good fortune.
Yeah, good weather is the most important criteria for the Super Bowl. But rewarding the most incompetent NFL owner to ever to inherit a team is ridiculous.
I’ll give you that. My original point was not that the Giants didn’t impose any expense from taxpayers. My point was that it couldn’t be considered a tax burden.
That point only makes sense if nothing happens at the stadium other than Giants games. The State of New Jersey has gotten a huge return on investment for the $250 million. The concerts alone would be worth it. Throw in a Pope visit, 2 NFL franchises, an MLB franchise, Women’s World Cup, and it seems like NJ got a pretty good deal.
I trust that any NJ resident who complains has never been to a concert at Giants Stadium, and never will, because if they used the facility and complained about the taxes, they are being hypocritical.
Get your facts straight about Big Blue. The lease that is expiring is the Jets, not the Giants. (And it expires in 2008, not 2006.)
Cite: The Giants, by contrast, had a mere 11% operating profit margin. That owes in part to Wellington Mara’s terrible lease agreement (which runs until 2026) for Giants Stadium, a 1970s facility in a 21st-century business.
It is the Jets who are suing for more taxpayer money, not the Giants.
Cite: The New York Jets are suing the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority…NJSEA executive George Zoffinger says…"This suit is an attempt to squeeze more taxpayers’ money out of us…"
Tell me again about the Giants screwing the good citizens of New Jersey. It’s comical in its fallacy.
Now, given the wonderfulness of the Giants in regards to the stadium deal and NJ taxpayers cited in this post, add in the cite from earlier in the thread, and I defy you to defend your position that the Giants in any way pose a burden to New Jersey.
I would remind you that attracting a Super Bowl has nothing to do with the Giants; they intentionally avoid scheduling Superbowls at venues where there is even a remote chance of the home team making it. (Which explains the Arizona deal.)
Oh hey, look at that. Not only does this (previously quoted) cite support the 2026 date for the lease expiring, it gives me data for the argument I made above. To reiterate:
The Authority will continue to be able to attract and schedule the spectacular kinds of non-NFL events that brought in nearly a million people in 2003 alone.
Look at that. A million patrons have already attended non-Giants events at the stadium this year. Yeah, you’re right. The people of NJ got no return on investment for their one dollar. :rolleyes:
I also think you are being a little generous on your boldings.