RedRamage

I still want it to be the groundhogs... why else announce it on an otherwise meaningless Wednesday?

In case you didn't see my post after yours, I think it shows that the Giants had all but hired a white guy as their coach BEFORE interviewing a minority, which is a violation of the Rooney Rule. One could argue that the Giant played by the letter of the law instead of the spirit of the law and thereby skirted rules intended to provide opportunities for minorities. One could also argue that the NFL is aware that their rule is easily skirted and therefore is lip service only in attempting to provide opportunities for minorities. However, I don't think that either of those things proves racism.

So if I'm understanding the proof correctly it's that the Giants picked their guy, unofficially, BEFORE they interviewed the minority candidate. A few thoughts on that: 1. This highlights what many of us have thought about the Rooney Rule: It's kinda dumb and often followed only to the letter of the law instead of the spirit of the laws. 2. If the idea of the Rooney rule is to give a candidate a chance, one could argue that he had his chance to change their minds... that's a pretty weak argument, but I've been involved in a few hiring situations and I do recall one where I was pretty convinced that one candidate was going to be the answer until another came in changed my mind. Of course, this assumes that the Giants were open to their minds being changed, which they very well might not have. 3. I don't think this proves racism. It potentially proves that the Giants violated NFL rules, but the reason for the violation was not necessarily racism. Take, for example, when "He Who Shall Not be Named" hired Steve Mariucci. The Lions didn't interview any minority candidates because they all knew the Lions fired 'Weg just to hire Mooch. It wasn't that HWSNbN was necessarily racist, just that he had in mind the guy he thought was the perfect fit. This just isn't a smoking gun for racism to me. Please understand that I'm not saying racism wasn't involved, just that this isn't proof of it imho.

I'm a little surprised any NFL coach is fired after one year unless there's some scandal and I didn't hear anything re: Culley. But as Motown Bombers said Houston doesn't get a pick for hiring Culley, Baltimore would get that pick. (On a side note, I wouldn't mind seeing a team get a lower round pick for hiring a minority if said team kept the coach for x-number of years. If the complaint is that minorities don't get hired as much because they don't have experience then this is one way to lean towards them getting that experience.) For Flores it's hard to make the case that he was bounced because of race if you also are saying he was bounced because he didn't get along with the QB "star" who's also a minority. Wilks doesn't look like he lit up the world but again it seems odd that a coach would get canned after only one year. Part of the problem, imho, of trying to draw too many conclusions re: NFL head coaches or GMs is that the sample size is very, very small. 32 teams just doesn't mean a whole lot of available jobs and it doesn't take much to shift things around. I'd be far more interested in seeing what the stats are for HC, OC, DC, maybe even though it special teams coordinator as well. I also think it's unfair to say that because the NFL has x-percentage of minority players than if it doesn't have close to x-percentage of minority HCs it's because of racism. We don't know what percentage of players are interested in becoming coaches and why they are or aren't hired.

Not that I want to defend the Rooney Rule cause I think it has some serious problems, but the rule is only that a minority needs to be interviewed, not that a minority needs to be hired. The narrative when the Rule was put in place was that minorities could get hired if given a fair shot but NFL only interviewed white guys (mostly retreads) so they never had a shot to showcase themselves. Now, my opinion at that the time is that forcing a minority interviewee doesn't make much sense HCs are usually hired from OCs and DCs (or assistant HCs) so I'd rather see the Rooney Rule applied there. Personally I think the rules that rewarding teams for developing minority coaches and executives is a better solution, though also somewhat imperfect.

Thanks for that info @Tiger337.

I think the a problem with XFL 1.0 was that it was marketed to WWF fans, not football fans. It was flashy, it was sexy, it was taking the NFL head on and boasting about it's victory before the fight even started. It was going to get rid of all the things that football fans hated in the game and replace it with better! But I think they sorta forgot to actually check with football fans and see what they wanted.

IIRC he even ... well, encouraged is too strong of a word ... but certainly didn't seem to be actively upset by the fouls. He seem to accept them as a consequence of playing aggressively.

I don't think there is anyway that the USFL will ever be as big as the NFL. I think the NFL of today is just way too big of a juggernaut. I don't think the USFL will be able to come close to paying the players what the NFL can and so any decent talent will go to the NFL. Now obviously 20 years is a long time and things may shift during that time but I'd be shocked if it happened.

I'm reading a book on Mickey Cochrane and the '35 Tigers and there was a reference to a tie game, which really surprised me so I thought it would be an interesting trivia question to see when the last time the Tigers had a tie. I was blown away that it was 1980. I'm was like @Jim Cowan in thinking it must have been way back in the past. What's even more shocking is that the most recent tie in MLB is less than two decades old: 2005 between Houston and Cincy: https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CIN/CIN200506300.shtml

Not including exhibition games, do you know in what year the Tiger had their last official game end in a tie?

I'm not saying only hire from good teams, I'm saying that I want to see more from a guy that one seemingly successful year as a DC. Vrabel obviously was successful, I'm sure there are other examples of one-year coordinators who became successful HCs. But I suspect that over all there are a higher percentage of multi-year coordinators who became successful HCs vs. one-year coordinators.

That's a good point... Maybe that's why he's retiring... Campbell must of have the real brains and drive behind the success they had in NOLA and now that he's gone it's too much work on Payton.

Not sure if anyone mentioned this or not, but I think the coach has to have been with the team for at least two years in order for compensation to be given.

Not to be a debbie downer, but if I was a Front Office guy I'd be wary of hiring a guy who only have one year of DC experience, especially on a 3-13-1 team. Don't get me wrong: I've very happy with the job that Glenn has done and I want him to stick around. I just think looking at it from outside that I'm not sure there's enough evidence that Glenn will be a long term good guy. But the NFL is a very "what have you done lately" sorta place so it wouldn't surprise me if Glenn is hired.

I just finished reading a biography of Dutch Clark and I was surprised as how often extra point attempts were missed back then. It did make things a lot more interesting score wise. I know they moved the extra point kick attempt back a while ago to make it less automatic, but it's still pretty automatic. I just looked up the numbers and last there there were 1000 successful attempts on 1083 tries... obviously 83 misses or about 7.5%

Blasphemy!

100% agreed on everything, except the 10 minute thing. I wouldn't be opposed to it necessarily, but I worry that 10 minutes could get used up by a team that is good at ball control. Again, I wouldn't fight too hard on that cause then you could always bring up: Play better defense... if they are doing a 7, 8 or 9 minute drive they're not getting some lucky shots here or there for big chunks, but methodically moving the chains... you had amble chances to stop 'em. But I'd rather see 15 minutes.

Getting off topic a bit... I really can't say how good or bad Team Video is cause I haven't used it that much, but I do like some of the other features, like shared files. That part is nice.

FTFY.

I guess this is what really bugged me when it happened. I mean I get that if the offense has an injured player they need to do a run off cause otherwise it's like an extra time out. I understand... I'd hate it if my team lost on something like that, but I'd get it. But this is totally the refs fault and the Lions got punished because the refs screwed up their call and then fixed it and took time away. (Just for the record: The refs applied the rules correctly... I'm not arguing that they didn't. I'm arguing that the rule is dumb.)

Good catch. I didn't realize it was 3rd down on that play.

Part of me wanted to see the Rams lose for the better draft pick. But at this point I'm not sure if it's really matters that much. The pick will be at best 28 and at worst 32, right? I think at this point I'm just gonna root for Stafford. If he makes the SB then I'm definitely rooting for the Rams. 31 vs. 32 is a pretty small difference.

GPS isn't that accurate... you wouldn't be able to know that precisely where the ball is. However, other technologies could surely be used to get very accurate. The problem though wouldn't be knowing where the ball was, but knowing where the ball was when it mattered. For example, take a guy that's being tackled from behind and falls forward and reached out with the ball to try and cross the first down line. When all is said and done the ball is across the line, but where was the ball when his knees touched the ground? It would be pretty hard to be able to get that exact moment on a camera, know the exact split second on the clock, then check that against the position recorded at that exact split second by the computer. This could work for things like forward progress or know if the ball actually cross the goal line (but again you wouldn't know if the runner was down or not before that).

Hmm... that could be interesting. It might really change how teams handled the end of the 4th quarter. I'm not sure I like as I do love the drama of the final minutes of a game and we might lose some of that. What I mean is if the game is tied with only like a minute left the team with the ball wouldn't have any urgency to rush down for a FG try. I get that it kinda stinks that there's sudden death in overtime on a TD, but it's also supposed to be hard to score a TD, right? I'm not as against a sudden death on TD as I was sudden death on a FG. Really I wouldn't mind seeing a full 5th quarter played in the playoffs. If after 5 qtrs it's still tied than go to "normal" OT rules in the 6th qtr to make sure the game doesn't go on forever. (On a side note: I still advocate that the rule in OT should be the first team to be head by more than 4pts wins.)