Tag Archives: nfl

Scrutiny of the Bounty: A prequel

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We’ve been quiet here lately, though not for a lack of notable sports events, even if they are coming in the one sport that’s currently in it’s offseason. Two big NFL stories have been developing in fits and tumbles over the past week or two: 1) Peyton Manning leaving the Indianapolis Colts, and 2) Gregg Williams and Bountygate. There isn’t much to say about the first story yet, or maybe ever. He’ll go to a team. It won’t be the Titans. And we’ll get some variety of Joe Montana in Kansas City or Brett Favre in New York. He won’t have teammates like Marvin Harrison, Jeff Saturday, and Dallas Clark who are on his level, and we’ll probably see a lot of sad Manningfaces peering out of an unfamiliarly colored helmet.

As for the second story: first, a nod to Deadspin for the title tag to this post, and very quickly second, this:

That out of the way, how much can one really say about the bounties Williams and certainly other coaches paid to players for big hits on important players, and how much does one really want to say given the at least tiresome and likely nauseating cliche-laden moral hand-wringing on the part of the sports media?

Instead, we’ll offer a short, derivative series on the bounty story through the eyes of the evolving media reaction. As usual when I start a series of posts without fully mapping it out, the first post is the best (e.g., here and here), and this is likely to be no exception.

This first item is interesting because it was a profile of the New Orleans Saints’ defense under Williams published just before the bounty story broke. Untainted by the news of the bounties, the NFL’s investigation, or the media reaction to it, The Classical’s Charles Star offers up an innocent (from the writer’s perspective) take that’s telling upon retrospective re-read:

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Mundane Monday

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For the first time ever, rain delayed the Daytona 500 such that no laps were run yesterday. NASCAR announced that the race would resume at noon today, although early indications today are that it’s unlikely to start until tonight. (UPDATE: The race will start at 7:02 pm.) A thank you to those readers who joined the thrilling live blog of the rain delay yesterday.

In college basketball, Vanderbilt fell again to Kentucky, this time at Rupp Arena, which is the only place in the SEC where Vandy’s seniors have not won. Not too many visiting teams win at Rupp, though, and the game was a close one. On Saturday night, Michigan State got all over Nebraska, beating them 62-34 in a game in which Draymond Green became just the fourth Spartan ever to record 1,000 career rebounds. Elsewhere in the Big Ten, Wisconsin beat a free-falling Ohio State in Columbus, and Michigan’s Jon Horford is out for the season with injuries.

This past weekend was the NBA’s All-Star Weekend, something I find largely unwatchable. I saw a headline that said that Kobe Bryant broke his nose in the live-action slam dunk contestAll-Star game last night, and apparently LeBron James passed up a shot at the end, which surprised no one.

The NFL draft combine was this weekend as well, and Robert Griffin III ran the forty-yard dash very quickly.

The Runaway: Ricky Williams in Australia (via Esquire)

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That’s one of Ricky Williams’s $2 million legs being pulled inside the tent. And that’s his tent, his home, actually, at a campground in Australia. Everybody was looking for him in the months after he bolted the NFL last summer and before he abruptly returned to America this fall. But it turns out he was never that hard to find. … Read More
 
(via Esquire)
(HT: Deadspin)

Wrapping up the 2011 NFL season

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With Super Bowl XLVI three days rotten, it’s time to bag and tag the 2011 NFL season. Before tossing it on the heap of sports seasons past, a quick retrospective, weighted heavily toward recent events and the gimmicky.

First, in case you missed the Super Bowl for some reason, here’s the whole thing in ninety seconds:

(HT: It’s Always Sunny in Detroit)

Second, our coverage of the Big Game®:

After the jump, an infographic, a motion graphic, snipers, and more.   Read on…

Breaking Up is Hard to Do

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I’m taking ALDland in a different direction here this evening, just stick with me…

You know that feeling when you go through a break up? You wake up the next morning. You feel tired despite hours of sleep. You check your phone hoping for a text that will make you realize that what happened the night before hadn’t really happened; it was just a bad dream. You drag yourself out of bed, and put on the clothes that make you feel the most comfortable and secure (sweat material, a big scarf, and a glamorous pair of sunglasses are always in the mix). You tell yourself it will be ok, and haltingly pull yourself together and get out the door. You go to your favorite coffeshop, in hopes that a cup of your favorite dark roast will wake you up and make you productive once more. But as you sit, trying to avoid songs that inspire memories, occasionally accidentally stumbling upon photos, you get flashes of sadness and hurt, maybe even an occasional tear. You rehash everything, and think to yourself, “If only we had done ____ differently, things would be so different.” You sigh deeply, and your friend walks in and says, “You look…..sad.” You drop your head on the table in a way that you think Carrie Bradshaw did once, and make some absurd sound and make the conjecture that you’re likely doomed to a lonely future of multiple cats and maybe some Golden Girl-esque roommates. The whole day passes by in a woosh of general malaise. Oh that doesn’t happen to you? Yeah, me neither…

This is how the day has passed. The low level nausea, the sadness, the strange groans. However, this time, it wasn’t attributable to a relationship gone south, but rather the demise of my beloved Patriots. Three plays. Had three plays turned out differently, I think it would have been the Pats to win; however, as it played out, the right team won and my heart is a little broken. For the next million years, I will shield my eyes from the butt slide seen round the world. I’m grieving this as I do any break up, with a few glasses of wine, some retail therapy, and bad reality television (seriously, y’all, that Alicia Keyes back up singer can SING, right?). Pretty soon, it will be onto Phase 2: my favorite outfit, hottest heels, and a little extra swagger with which to confront those who offer you a sympathy, “Oh, I’m so…sorry?” Yep, I will mourn and I will move on. I will always have love in my heart for the 2011 squad though.

The good news is: pitchers and catchers is so so soon. AND we got a Beckham commercial and TWO Tim Riggins sightings, so the night wasn’t a total wash. Oh, and I got a solid chuckle when my dad called in earnest at halftime to ask me if Vince Wilfork was on stage with Madonna (granted, this is the same man who asked me after last year’s Grammy’s who was on stage with “Christina Pullthrough”–yep, that’s right, Gwyneth Paltrow.) In the end, it’ll be ok, but I am secretly hoping that this break up with the 2011 season comes with a bit of a break-up diet too.

Super Monday

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Winner: The New York Giants. They scored first, with a technical safety on the Patriots’ opening drive, when Tom Brady stood in his own end zone and intentionally grounded the ball, and they scored last, when Ahmad Bradshaw carried a little more momentum than he probably expected on a largely undefended running play, to beat New England 21-17.

Loser: The New England Patriots. Despite going down 9-0 early in the game, they took a lead into halftime, thanks for a field-traversing drive on which Tom Brady was 10-10 in passing. The Pats suddenly looked like their old, domineering, mechanistic, enemy-vaporizing selves. And they got the ball to start the second half! I sent a text message to Bdoyk at halftime: “Tide has turned.” Her response: “Don’t say that.” To the hyperstitious greater Massachusetts sports community, I’m sorry if that in-game prediction of victory caused your players to develop stone hands on the final drive.  Keep reading…

Words I never thought I’d Say

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“I’m super bummed not to be going to Indianapolis this weekend.”

But seriously. I am. At the conclusion of highstepping through the middle of my local watering hole, celebrating the shank heard ’round the world, I high-5ed my New England brethren and we declared, “We’re going to Indy!” Our hopes were shattered, however, when a Kayak search yielded $500 rooms at the Days Inn. Therefore, you’ll find us at a local duplex, unbothered by non-Patriots fans. A modern day foxhole of gametime anxiety and unfettered love for TB12.

As the youngest of 8 kids, my dad instilled a love for Boston sports early and often. However, his one true love are the New England Patriots and I have to say that I think I agree. I spent many Sundays in my younger years watching the atrocious squad get devastated over and over and over again. Then, something awesome happened. They got great (and I got accused of being a new, bandwagon fan. I mean, my favorite player used to be Tom Tupa, so…there’s that.). It’s been a good ride, and I’m  so so so so so excited to be heading to SB46. However, the last 10 days have been brutal. The Ravens victory locked up, I immediately turned my attention to how nervous I was for this game. I’m talking about literal nerves. Can’t sit still, can’t focus, feel a little grab in my chest every time I breathe, nerves. You see, I haven’t quite recovered from the last postseason match up of these two squads. I consider it to be the Voldemort of Superbowls. After the Balitimore game, I got the following email from my former (Boston loving) roommate, with whom I watched the disaster unfold (from our friend, Luke’s, apartment in NYC):

fyi – under no circumstance should you and I watch this Pats/Giants Super Bowl game together….and you should prob tell Luke not to have people over to his apt for a watching party…and none of us should spontaneously move back to NYC in the next two weeks.
I feel better getting that off my chest.
Go Pats.

 

I laughed. Seriously though…I will be sure that none of those things happen.

Every time I sit down at my computer and prepare to do work, , I think to myself, let me just check my Twitter feed one more time…it’s a time sucking cycle that’s led to infinite articles, Spotify playlists, image galleries, video clips, etc etc. I just cannot wait. I love this team. It’s hard not to (yeah, yeah, I know a ton of you disagree). Even the stars started as down on their luck guys with a chip on their shoulders and something to prove. I really, really hope that they prove it on Sunday. In the meantime…..eeeeeeeeks.

Pro-style Monday

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At some point in the middle of the American night, Novak Djokovic beat Rafael Nadal to win the Australian Open in a five-set match that nearly ran six hours, the longest ever Grand Slam singles final. With the win, Djokovic became only the fifth man to win three consecutive Grand Slams (the others being Nadal, Sampras, Federer, and Rod Laver). Nadal, on the other hand, became the first to lose three consecutive Slam finals.

The Sunday before the Super Bowl is reserved for the Pro Bowl, reviled as the worst all-star game of any professional sport. I heard that the AFC “won.” I also heard that this was the worst playing of the non-game yet, even drawing fan booing early on. In a related story, national commentators continued to praise the NHL all-star game apparently without realizing it too was played on Sunday.

Finally, the Winter X Games came to a close last night, and snowboarder Shaun White scored a perfect 100 on the superpipe to win his fifth-consecutive gold medal in that event.

Special teams Monday

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On Friday night, the Minnesota Timberwolves hung around long enough and took advantage of a Los Angeles Clippers’ offense that, despite dominating most of the game even without Chris Paul, stagnated after Mo Williams, who couldn’t miss, got himself ejected. Minnesota won the game on a Kevin Love 3-pointer off an in-bounds play with 1.5 seconds remaining. The 101-98 game-winning margin was the T-Wolves only lead of the night after going up 2-0 to start the game.

In college action, Michigan State was all over Purdue in East Lansing, 83-58, the Boilermakers being a much better team in West Lafayette than on the road. Vanderbilt, meanwhile, hasn’t quite been able to right its ship, dropping a tough one in overtime to #15 Mississippi State, 78-77. Other notable games included Virginia Tech upsetting UVA in a low-scoring affair (47-45), Notre Dame upsetting previously undefeated #1 Syracuse, and Florida State salvaging its season with an upset of Duke in Durham just a week after it blew out free falling North Carolina. There also was this neat fact:

Sometime Saturday night or Sunday morning, former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno died after a battle with lung cancer.  Beyond the longevity of his tenure, recent information about his handling of the Jerry Sandusky situation has obscured and clouded Paterno’s legacy. One has to wonder, though, whether Paterno would be alive today if he had been allowed to remain in his post. It isn’t a sensational suggestion: he and others addressed this very question in years past (in an article, probably in Sports Illustrated, for which I spent a good amount of time unsuccessfully searching on Sunday). The other footnote on this story right now is the mishandling of the death announcement by the media– particularly CBS Sports, which lifted a premature story without attribution from Onward State, a PSU student site, and then attempted to blame that site when the error was revealed.

Sunday featured the NFL playoffs’ final four and saw New England and New York advancing to the Super Bowl. In each game, the losing team appeared to be in control at the end, only to commit crippling special teams errors that delivered the victory to their opponent. When the teams meet in the Super Bowl, Eli Manning will have the opportunity to double his brother’s championship total, while Tom Brady could join Terry Bradshaw and Joe Montana as the only quarterbacks to win four Super Bowls. Super Bowl XLVI will be a rematch of Super Bowl XLII, which the Giants won 17-14, thanks in large part to a fourth-quarter catch by WR David Tyree.

In the Australian Open, Serena Williams lost 6-2, 6-3 to Ekaterina Makarova. Williams was the last American alive in the tournament.