cowboys
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So putting things together, I read this article this morning and just got an e-mail from Pinellas County, Florida, which is the Gulf coastal side of Tampa Bay with the beaches,
of a mandatory evacuation order by county government by noon today for much of the county.
The Eagles happen to play in Tampa on Sunday, so we shall see how this shakes out from Hurricane Helene, which took an odd route to be hitting Florida today via the Yucatan in Mexico.
Hurricane Helene was just upgraded to Category 2 but more dangerously and though not hitting Tampa, there is an anticipated very heavy storm surge for much of coastal Florida on the gulf side.
I would not be surprised to see this 1PM game moved to a new time even if is still played on Sunday, which strictly as a fan I also would not mind, but if the stadium is used as a local evacuation shelter, this game won’t be played in Tampa but at another venue perhaps inland in Florida (i.e. Orlando) on another day.
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In anticipation of tonight’s game, this is one heck of a stat for Daniel Jones and quite the bad look.
Jones is 1-12 in prime time games in his career.
Overlooked all too often though is the fact that the ONLY reason the Giants have even played 13 such prime time games in the career of Daniel Jones with such poor performance,
and not counting games in which he did not start,
and this goes also for the Jets as well whoever has been their quarterback in the same timeframe,
is because they are in the New York City media market, the largest in the US.
A crappy quarterback in any other media market does not make it to prime time TV unless of course like tonight, the opponent has akin to the draw of the Cowboys.
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Daniel Jones is about to go 1-13
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Former Stampeder and CFL defensive MOP Alex Singleton is out for the season. He has quietly had a significant NFL career after leaving the CFL yet rarely gets mentioned.
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Tough break for him. He had recently been named one of the team’s captains.
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When you read headlines like these already by the end of September amidst the mounting and notable injuries, wow it seems like the carnage has arrived earlier than usual this season.
Kareem Hunt is only 29 years old, but his best play is behind him.
Jason Peters is 42 years old, and he would be the oldest player in the league.
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So uh, after playing not only to win but with such excellence like that, maybe the Lions should make their cool black uniforms on display last night their new primary uniforms?
Those were pretty sharp looking colours on the lions last night…sadly my ‘hawks couldn’t defense anything last night and the metcalf fumble was the turning point hole that Geno couldn’t dig his team out of…exciting game tho…
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Replay Review: When the Old School was Right
As overheard from Mike Pereira on Fox during Eagles at Bucs on Sunday was this cool anecdote, and as attached was this evidence from last night.
Pereira is a former NFL executive with a lifetime of experience in officiating, and Pereira has been a rules analyst at Fox for many years now.
He’s still around for some games after having stepped back a few years ago, with lead honours going to Dean Blandino.
So Kevin Burkhardt and Tom Brady were on the call for that game, and a question came up with regards to a common challenge of an incomplete pass out of bounds on a catch by the Bucs receiver because the coach felt the receiver indeed did get two feet in bounds. Or it could have been an automatic review towards the end of the first half.
During the review, for which indeed the challenge was successful and the call on the field overturned such that it was a catch, Perreira commented before the replay review that from his early days, when still young decades before replay reviews, a grizzled veteran told him along these lines:
“Listen fella let me you something. When it’s close at this level, it’s a catch. These guys don’t miss.”
Well for the most part that old wisdom seems to be true, but thankfully we do have review, although as noted here, replay review did NOT work last night.
The replay review process is broken in this regard too in my opinion, for if it’s a potential scoring play reviewed as not a score, those should be reviewed automatically too and not simply when it’s called a score.
But how CLOSE was this call on this catch by DK Metcalf? Let me tell you, I don’t think one could likely see it in real time even on replay. Only the last still shot in the Twitter post seals it for me as a catch.
In the old school with no replay review on plays like this one, they likely would have call it a catch and gotten the call right. And sadly we would not even see good replays later in highlights, especially when it was a bad call.
Please note that slow motion video reviews for the sake of the instant when a receiver actually possesses (is not merely touching with both hands) the ball, as opposed to confirmation of the position of body parts, are NOT confirming evidence much of the time.
If the replay officials could not see clearly and obviously that it was a catch inbounds on video replay, including via slow motion video, it is likely that the call on the field of incomplete pass would have stood.
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More games outside of the US in future NFL plans. Sorry to those hanging on to the pipe and dreaming, but no mention of Toronto anywhere.
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A summary of what has occurred under the new kickoff rules over the first four weeks including some stats as to what happened previously and what was expected.
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“Injury data on the kickoffs – a key driver of the rule change – is not yet publicly available”
Classic. I am increasingly frustrated with the lack of evidence to support the NFL’s claims that kickoffs are the most dangerous play in the game. I want to see the numbers!
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I’m not a data guy like you, but I have no doubt that kickoffs are the most dangerous part of football. They have been studying that for years so I am surprised that the info isn’t available. There may even be some independent studies done by neutral parties with nothing better to do such as academics.
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For what it’s worth I don’t doubt they are one of the most dangerous plays of the game. I just want to see what kind of data they’ve collected lol
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By chance a few of us were discussing this last night. The opinion was unanimous.
Kickoff returns are certainly the most dangerous plays in football. The NFL maintains it is 3-5 times more dangerous than any other play. Whatever the numbers may be, the NFL is trying different things to make kickoff returns safer. I don’t think what we see today will be the end product and I think most would agree that the current rules are not inspiring love among the fans.
On the other hand I don’t think free for all kickoff returns with numerous injuries in a Spartacus type setting is the answer either. Harking back to the old days is not a fair comparison when most players were slower and 50 pounds lighter. The carnage just didn’t take place at the same level it does today. Just like in the NHL, the playing field has effectively shrunk due to the increased size and speed of the players.
I think that the position the NFLPA takes could be a factor. Presumably they haven’t presented huge opposition to the changes over the last decade or so. I don’t know that they will take the position that kickoff returns should be reinstated by adjusting the rules so that they are commonplace once again. What we agreed on is that if that is what the players want, they all need to sign some sort of super waiver or agree collectively that the players can’t sue the NFL for injuries sustained on kickoff returns. Because of past rules and lack of attention to safety, the NFL has paid out over a billion dollars. No business can be run with that type of continued exposure to liability.
It also seems that many fans, probably even the majority, want to see more kickoff returns. I would say that this is one of the rare issues where the opinion of the fans is irrelevant. It’s a player safety issue. I also think that the CFL will ultimately end up close to where the NFL eventually ends up on this issue, although likely with a more liberal interpretation given the bigger field. The CFL can’t afford to ignore the liability issues and certainly less so than the NFL.
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Last week, I put forth as linked in the following an initial draft for what I see as the best of all worlds, which I think is for more kickoffs and POTENTIAL returns when it actually matters more, as in the 4th quarter, but the same number or less returns than now in all other quarters.
Win-win.
The NFL owners are generally a very conservative bunch such that this trial was indeed a radical idea for them.
We shall see the rest of the sample size, for chances are higher, starting especially in outdoor games in November, for more returns.
The excellent article that you link makes clear that the owners are aiming for only a certain maximum percentage of kicks returned.
My proposal is a slight move back to the status quo, before this year’s trial, that otherwise in aggregate would likely slightly decrease returns yet slightly increase competitiveness later in the game.
One stat that also I would love to see is the ratio of returns outdoors versus indoors, which is yet another factor on kickoff returns and other special teams play in modern times that is not as comparable to decades ago, much as you described.
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There is information available on this front,
though perhaps given the passage of time it now can be harder to track down, which led the NFL to make the first changes to reduce the number of kickoff returns and elimination of certain tactics on kickoff returns,
such as wedge blocking in 2009 (for which the fundamentals were over 100 years old back to the roots of rugby and gridiron football and like in rugby long ago, should have been eliminated all along, such as the flying wedge!).
Note that the first concussion lawsuits were in 2011, and by 2009 the NFL foresaw they had a growing problem such that they knew already to take steps to mitigate potential damages, including especially REDUCING the number of kickoff returns.
Of course the data flow accelerated to the disfavour of the NFL as more players were diagnosed to have suffered and be included in the class of plaintiffs.
Here’s a rather good timeline of the sinister history of concussions and head trauma in the NFL:
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