RedRamage

Mostly from baseball-reference.com

Obviously, it's going to depend on the foot. If the Lions' docs look at it and conclude that he's healthy to play now, then I'd definitely say go for it. To be totally cold and analytical about it: If this is a situation where the Raiders are saying: "We're concerned that if you don't get the second surgery you'll re-injure the foot and be out for an even longer period of time." Well, that's not so much an issue for the Lions if they sign him to a one-year "prove it" deal. For the Lions they need short term help until Alim is back. If Wilkins plays for 6-8 games, re-injures the foot and out for the season... well, that's about the time that I'd expect Alim to be thinking of coming back, as well as some time for Tyleik to learn the NFL and possibly be ready to step up to a bigger role. Now, putting a little humanity back on: I'd hate to the Lions to go into a situation like this with the idea that they could "use up" Wilkins and then just spit him out. I would want my team to look out for the player first. But the reality is that the Lions are in a position where it'd be great for some short term help at DT without major concerns if the help only lasts 1/2 a season.

I tend to agree... but I'm also gonna defer to people much smarter than I when it comes to football and the OL. If the staff things Ratledge can cut it and do it better than Glasgow, then obviously go for it. Still it seems like it's be easier on Ratledge to not have to learn the NFL AND learn a new position in the same year.

Van Andel I agree with everything you said except that Van Andel Arena can't do football*. It's a hockey/basketball sized place. *Okay, technically it can do Arena football. Fond memories of the Grand Rapids Rampage... but that's not UFL football.

Perhaps... but it also lent some appearance of legitimacy to the team as well. Just using my Grand Rapids example: Where would they have played? The best football stadium in the area would be GVSU, but as mentioned that's quite outside the metro area of GR. The other real possibility would be Davenport's stadium... I forgot that Davenport had a stadium in my earlier post. That's actually further away than GVSU from downtown GR, but closer to many of the suburbs of GR which sprawls more south than west, east or north and its also VERY close to the airport. Anyway, you're either in a Div. II stadium or worse, a High School stadium, if you center yourself in GR. Playing in a stadium like that is going to very much brand you as a very minor league team. Compare that with playing in Ford Field. Obviously no one is going to assume a team (or league) is a major player just because it plays games in an NFL stadium, but at the same time they're playing in an NFL stadium: That means they're not just some fly-by night thing, right? I mean NFL stadiums don't just open their doors because someone comes up and asks nice. They have to have some important people behind them to even get a stadium to listen to their pitch, right?

How close is your finger to the panic button? I gotta saw I'm starting to move a bit. Look, I get that we're only a half game out of the top of the AL. I also get that we're 8 games over the Guardians. So I'm not even close to pushing the button yet. But, I've at least looked at it and judged what direction I need to move my hand if I'm going to push it. If we go back to July 1 to avoid looking at too much recency bias we're 7 and 11, and our run differential has dropped like a rock: What's troubling to me is that we already saw a huge decline in June and now we're seeing even a steeper decline in July. Again, I'm NOT pushing the panic button yet... but I'm starting to twitch a bit.

Saw that last night too. Here's a news story on it. https://www.woodtv.com/sports/report-ufls-michigan-panthers-to-relocate/ Sad but as you said @MichiganCardinal not super shocking. The story mentions that they are looking at other places like: "Boise, Idaho, Columbus, Ohio and cities in Kentucky and Florida as possible new homes." I guessing they are thinking that markets with NFL teams are preventing people from showing up from for "minor league" football games. That makes some sense I guess... but not so sure about Florida with three NFL teams and concerns that Jacksonville not being able to stay there themselves. Anyway, it would be cool if Grand Rapids was considered... but I don't know if it's quite big enough here and we also don't really have a great football stadium in the city. GVSU is probably the closest one that would be decent enough, but then that's 15 miles outside of GR so makes it even less likely.

Can we request Benetti for regular season games too??

I agree with you for any sport where a contract is guaranteed for the player as well as for the team. If a team can't cut a player for under performance and not pay him, then a player should live up to his deal even if he over performs. But in the NFL, where teams can and do cut players all the time before they aren't living up to their contracts I have no real problem with a player trying to "cut" his team when he over performs.

This is starting to feel like an old school Lions game... getting screwed by the refs.

While I agree 100% with this, I doubt we're gonna see major changes any time soon that address this. But, there is a minor change that could address this: Players who are on their first HOF ballot and receive at least 5 votes (not 5%) will not be dropped from the list. We really should get rid of the silly notion that a player is HOF worthy, but just not first ballot HOF worthy... but I don't see that disappearing anytime soon so the alternative is just don't drop players from from the ballot the first year if there's even a low level of people who vote for a player.

I almost wonder if there shouldn't be some sort of petition system where candidates who think they are HOF worthy prepare a case before a panel of baseball experts (managers, players, writers, historians, etc.) Honestly I'm imagining a court room sort of thing. The "jury" is a mix of various experts. The "judge" is someone from MLB who ensures rules are followed. The prosecution provides the evidence and the witnesses to support the claim that the player/person is HOF worthy while the DH (designated hater) is the defense trying to challenge the accuracy and/or relevancy of the evidence presented and poke holes in any comparisons to existing HOF members. That's probably way to elaborate of a system but it seems like it'd be more accurate than the current system and less prone to snubs because of less known players from smaller markets or biases against/for teams or players.

I think the theory was that journalists would be the most knowledgeable while being the least biased. Obviously it's not a perfect system but the hope would be that journalists would be less likely to vote for someone just because he was a good teammate or in the hopes that that person would then vote for you as well. (Or that you might withhold a vote because you didn't like a guy or because that guy always seemed to have success against you/your team.)

Referencing my previous post about trying to think of some way to signal "I give up" other than the slide, I actually mentally debated having some sort of LEDs built into the QBs uniform that he could trigger. I mentally rejected the idea but not for the reason you're probably thinking. As much as it would be an abomination to see a QBs jersey start blinking on the field, it actually would solve a lot of problems. Having the jersey light up would allow defenders from any angle see the QB was giving up. The QB could assume any position during this time (to brace for any late hits) while still clearly signaling his intent. And replay could clearly show where the QB was when he first signaled allowing for accurate marking of the ball AND being able to determine how far away a defender was when the QB signaled to judge if a defender hit the QB late or not. So yeah, as ugly and awful as it'd be to see this in a game, it actually solves a lot of problems. But I threw out the idea because I couldn't think of an effective way that the QB could trigger the LEDs. How do you get a trigger or button that the QB can easily activate that's always very easy to access in a split second but also (nearly) impossible to accidentally set off?

Where's Skubal on this list? I don't think he's in the 100% lock at all, but I think he's in that mix of reasonably good shot. Expanding on Oblong's categories: If they retired right now, are they a HOFer. The way they are going they are almost there. They have the talent and the track record to have a HOF career, but need more seasons at this level. I view line 1 as 100% (obviously). Line 2 is maybe 90%+, does that sound reasonable? Then Line 3 is 70%+. I guess what I'm trying to identify in line 3 is players who aren't new on season... they've been at it for a while and have shown the talent and have the the stats and great seasons to indicate they are top tier players. These are different than players like Meadows, for example, who seem to have the potential to be all-star players, but don't have the track record or the service time that we can reasonably extrapolate from. And these are different than players like Bobby Higginson, for example, who have had many solid years but were never a top tier guys. I'd put Skubal in my new Line 3 category. He has amazing talent. He's been in the league for 4.5 seasons and he's had 1.5 seasons of HOF level of play. He's headed to the HOF but has to accomplish a lot more yet vs. players in Line 2 who just have to just not fall off a cliff to get into the HOF.

Just 22 days later and the Rockies season has had a 180 degree turn! Wait... sorry, forgot the decimal point. It's been a 18.0 degree turn! Okay, jokes aside the last three weeks or so since I started this thread have seen the Rockies gain some traction. In games since my post they've gone 8 and 11... a much more respectable .421, including TWO 3-game winning streaks. Now, it certainly helps that two of the teams they faced in this time where the 29-44 Marlins and the 31-44 Nationals. (In fact both of those three game winning streaks happened against those teams.) Regardless of opponents faced, the Rockies have nearly doubled their wins in three weeks and raised their season winning percentage to .227. Now, as detailed in my opening post this is still pretty bad. Both the '24 Sox and the '03 Tigers has WPCT over .250 at the end so this is still epically bad right now. But again both the Sox and the Tigers had those late season boosts (finishing 5-1) that helped them get over the .250 mark. At 75 games into the season, here's how things compare to the other two seasons: Obviously the Rockies are sitting right there with the other two teams so things are not looking nearly as historically awful as they were at the end of May. There's still a lot of season left and I think there is every chance in the world that the Rockies will end up surpassing the '24 Sox in terms of total losses. But at least right now they don't appear to be on pace to shatter that record.

I disagree with this. Especially in the NFL with so few games, it's impossible to truly rank teams. Factors like injuries to key players at different points in the year, non-common opponents, potentially uneven home-away status even among common opponents, and schedules made specifically matching uneven opponents depending on last years record... these all add up to making it very hard to really say if Team A, that finished with a better record than Team B, who won their division, would really have had the better record if they'd played the same schedule at Team B. Because of this winning your division, were your schedule is very, very similar to all division mates, and where you've saved each division mate twice, should be rewarded with a high seed. Winning your division is what matters, the wild card slots are just for teams that also had really good years, but weren't good enough to win their division. It's a consolation prize for coming in second (or third). Now of course there will be instances in system where "unfair" playoff seedings happen. Last year was a good sign of this where the 10-7 Bucs got home field and the 14-3 Vikings went on the road. The Vikings played in the toughest division in the NFL while the Bucs were in one of the worst (two 5-12 teams, and a third team that finished under .500). But any system used to rank teams will occasionally have weird instances and this is even more true in the NFL with it's super short schedule. So again: Win your division and you get a home playoff game. If you're not good enough to win your division but you still had a good year you might be good enough for a consolation prize.

I guess maybe I figured that was too big of a chance and people might be more accepting of a "half measure" that didn't go right to to TD/Safety territory. But as I think about it... yeah... I mean sure, why not? The biggest fear I guess would be a ticky-tacky penalty that gets a team a Safety/TD, but how is that any different than a ticky-tacky penalty that gets a team 1st down or even just 10 yards one direction or the other? We should change rules because we don't like the possibility of a questionable call giving a team a reward, instead we should work to reduce/eliminate questionable calls. Heck if the concern is that much over ticky-tacky calls leading to TDs or Safeties, give the coaches a "super challenge" like they do in the UFL... only don't implement it the same way please!

It's gotta be the off season if RedRamage is speculating about rule change, right? Well, here's another: Let's get rid of the 'half the distance to the goal' on penalties. I always though this was majorly unfair. Imagine a situation where the offense is on the 3-yard line... backed up against their endzone. They do a hard count trying to get the defense to jump. What happens here? If the offense flinches it's a false start the offense loses 1.5 yards. If the defense screws up it's a 5 yard penalty. Now if the the offense tries it again and screws up they lose just .75 yards... but if the defense does they lose 5 yards. Or consider the other end of the field. The offense just got a first down at the 4 yard line and runs a play. If there's offensive holding the defense gets awarded 10 yards. But if there's defensive holding the offensive gets awarded 2 yards. My change to the rule would be this: Any penalty that occurs when the original line of scrimmage is outside of the 1 foot line and would move the new line of scrimmage into the endzone instead moves the new line of scrimmage to the 1 foot line. Any penalty that occurs when the original line of scrimmage is at or under the 1 foot line and would move the new line of scrimmage into the endzone results in a TD or a Safety depending on the offending side. In short: If you get a penalty that would move it to the endzone, instead you go right outside of it. If you get another penalty it's the same as if the team crossed into the endzone.

I'm trying to think of an alternative to a slide and I just can't coming up with anything. This is purely just a thought experiment here as I'm quite certain that the NFL isn't searching through message forums for rule change ideas, but... If we go with the premise that the slide is: Unfair as it limits how defenders can try to tackle a QB (for fear of a late slide and a big penalty) Unsafe for QBs as it leaves them in a undefendable position if they do get hit then what's a possible solation? Can we come up with some method to signal to a defender that the player is 'giving up' that: Can't be easily faked -- that is, it can't look like the player might be juking or evading the defender. It's a clear "non-football move" that signals "I'm giving up." Can be easily seen/detected from all directions -- defenders might be coming from all directions after all. Doesn't leave the QB in an exposed/undefendable position in case a hit comes in late. I just can't come up with something that doesn't boarder on either absurdly silly and/or doesn't protect the QB any better and/or doesn't seem practical at all. Which makes me come back to the idea of eliminating the slide all together. And I don't totally love that either because defenders will jump at the chance to lay the heavy hit on the QB any chance they get. I want there to be some level of protection vs. straight up: "You're a ball carrier now... have fun!" The only thing I can think of is maybe double penalties and automatic heavy fines to any illegal hit on a QB beyond the line of scrimmage. Any hit that's legal... no problem. Any hit that's helmet to helmet or late or whatever... double yardage on the foul.

This is true and also brought up in the video. However the video (I think correctly) pointed out that it's not only super, super rare to see a player outside of a QB sliding, but also that if a player does slide and gets hit hard and/or late, it's unlikely to draw a flag outside of being an absolute egregious foul... WR, TE, RB are all EXPECTED to take hard hits. It's part of the game. But QBs are so protected that any we treat them with kid gloves.

In theory I like that idea... but yeah I'm not sure how it would work in practice. I guess we sorta-kinda already have a rule like this in terms of hitting the QB late. A defender can't hit the QB after he's thrown the pass, but this is usually allowed if it's a otherwise legal hit and it's a split-second after the throw. The refs can essentially say: "There's no possible way a defender could stop in that limited time, so no flag." But I think this would be super hard to officiate.

That's pretty much the opinion expressed in the video: QBs these days aren't at the same size disadvantage as they were in 1985. Add in restrictions on tackling and there just isn't the same huge risk to the QB that there used to be.

December 24, 2000 - Ross quits nine games into the season. Under interim HC Gary Moeller the Lions rally a bit and go 4-2 over the next six games. The now 9-6 Lions face the 4-11 Bears at home. A win probably gets them a wild card spot (I think they had the tie breakers over the 10-6 TB Bucs). The games starts out great. 3 and out for the Bears... Lions get a FG on their first drive. Bears fumble the kick off and Lions score a TD on the next play, 10-0 Lions. Then things start to fall apart. Two drives later Batch is sacked by Urlacher and injured. In comes Stoney Case who can't get us any points thru the 2nd and 3rd quarters. Bears get two FGs and TD to go up 13-10 as the 4th quarter starts. Case finally finds the end zone... Lions up 17-13. Bears go 3 and out... Lions driving down the field, less than 7 minutes left in the game. A TD should seal this game up an--- oh no... oh no, no, no... Case thows an interception that is returned 71 yards... Bears up 20-17, six and a half minutes left. Okay, not a problem... we just need a TD and we're fine. Lions drive down the field, taking a LOT of time off the clock. First and goal from the 10... we got this. Stewart picks up 3, then 2, then... aw crap Case is sacked for a loss of 2. Lions settle for a FG. Not great... but at least we're tried 20-20. Maybe we can stop the Bears and get back into FG range in the last two minutes? Bears go three and out. Okay, 1:29 left on the clock, let's get that FG! NOOOOO!!! Case fumbles on a sack. Okay, okay... only 40 seconds left, just bleed out the clock and lets try overtime I guess. Bears pick up a few yards but now there's only 7 seconds left and they're trying for an insane 54 yards FG... yeah, like they have any chance of that workin--- Oh ****... it's good. Oh ****. Game lost... playoff shot lost... season over. And of course, we all know the horror that happened after this: Lions decide to really shake things up after another lackluster season and bring in President and GM Matt Millen.

This video was in my feed today: The TL;DRW version is this: The slide rule made sense when in 1985 when defenses has very little rules regarding how they could hit/tackle a ball carrier. But in 2025 stricter rules regarding how defense can tackle, and specific rules regarding how QBs can be tackled, make the slide rule far less necessary. Further, the video makes the case that the "side effects" of the slide rule out weigh the last lingering benefits. Specifically the video argues two points: 1. It's very hard for a defender who is already in tackle mode to make a split second adjustment if the QB slides. This means the QB may still be hit hard but the sliding position leaves him open for more injury vs. if he prepped for a "normal" hit. 2. The slide rule is being taken advantage of by QBs. Defenders don't know if the QB is going to slide or not so can't go all out for the (legal) tackle because if the QB slides a half second before you hit him it's 15 yard penalty. It's an interesting idea that I think has some merit to it. Given the very mobile QBs in todays NFL... I just don't think the slide rule was envisioned with them in mind. I don't blame the QBs for taking advantage of the rules if they can. That's definitely part of the game. But it makes for a less enjoyable game, imho, when you see a defender stop short of a full tackle because you know he's thinking about that possible penalty.