OvrOfficiousJerk
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Posts posted by OvrOfficiousJerk
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Yes, you can argue about NFL timing rules, but in the end the official clock is up there for all to see...fans, coaches, players and refs. When it hits :00 it's GAME OVER! There is no ref deciding to give the Pats a few more seconds to win a game.
I can see where you are coming from: the NFL official clock gives everyone involved, spectator and team alike, some degree of transparency. My issue of having a game clock that operates with :00 = GAME OVER is like having the chain system for first downs. The chains have the trappings of EXACTLY TEN YARDS to make everyone feel better. However, given the variability of how the ball is placed on any given spot, demanding such precise measurements seems pretty arbitrary.
Your overarching point though is still valid -- too much power is placed in the hands of officials to decide a game. It was a minor miracle that we have goal-line technology at this World Cup, and I'm waiting for offsides to be decided similarly. If baseball can adapt with the times, soccer will too in its own time.
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PTR, I made this point before, and no one really addressed it. Basically, except for hockey, all timing rules in sports are pretty bunk, and to call out soccer for having bad timing rules isn't really fair. You can run out of bounds in football in the first quarter and the clock keeps running; the time keeps running after a shot in basketball. BUT both these rules magically change for some arbitrary time in the fourth quarter? I'll admit the red card rule and penalty kicks are both rather quite draconian, but honestly every sport has issues with time keeping. I'd much rather let a ref let a couple seconds go to let an attack finish at the end of the game (because maybe someone took an extra second or two with a free kick or throw-in).
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And yet today a Brasil player flopped and got a Croatian player a yellow card and a free goal out of it. (Though Brasil did spot Croatia a goal earlier.) They are making my point. Fool a ref, get a goal, likely win a game. Not my idea of sport.
Which is why I'm not a huge fan of international games. If that were an EPL game, the Brazilian would've gotten a yellow for simulation without prejudice. Granted this is the biggest competition in the world, but I still maintain the EPL is better for those getting into soccer.
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To be blunt our football is only watchable on DVR delay. Play --> review during commercial --> score --> review during commercial --> PAT then kickoff --> commercial --> next play. And this isn't boring how? For one, the Ravens game this year was absolutely painful.
Institute instantaneous review from a war room in NY and cut the TV timeouts in half. Recoup the ad revenue with jersey and on the field advertisements. And to be honest the NFL should probably have jersey advertisements soon anyway; not sure if anyone saw the Sideshow Bob looking guy for Brazil today, but a team in Paris just bought him for roughly half the average NFL payroll (>$60mil). Lot of cash being tossed around over in Europe.
Then there's penalty time. A ref arbitrarily decides how much time is left to a game. A team is down by a goal and the ref can just let the game go on and on and on. To me that's insane. Do they not have countdown clocks in Europe?
Then there are the red and yellow cards mostly handed out because the other team is better at acting like a player broke every bone in his body, then gets up and scores a goal and leaps 10 feet in the air a minute later.
The whole flopping canard is getting quite old. They've started to clamp down on diving in a lot of leagues, especially the EPL (which is top to bottom arguably the best in soccer, and is the only league worth watching regularly at this point).
In regard to the timing thing, many of the sports we watch (hockey excepted) have convoluted timing rules that change depending on how much time is left on the clock. If a team is on the attack in soccer, the ref generally lets the play finish before blowing the whistle, which is fair when you think how arbitrary timing tends to be. That's my favorite argument in favor of the running clock.
Don't get me wrong, bad soccer is pretty bad, but the best games are just as entertaining as football.
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Seeing as they are including away games I am surprised the game at Cleveland in 2007 wasn't on there. That game was BRUTAL
Ehhh.... Cleveland never really gets THAT cold. Been here since 2008 and this is the first time I've experienced temps consistently below 20 degrees (Jan/Feb 2009 possibly excepted), which what you'd need to crack the top 10 coldest games. Sure enough, profootball reference has Bills-Browns '07 game time temp at 31 degrees.
But other than temperature jeez that game was brutal with snow. 2 FG and then Moorman having to bat the ball out of bounds for a safety. Funny thing is that ESPN the Magazine had a Bing advertisement with a panoramic of Brownies stadium flush with snow. You can barely make out the Bills away jerseys, but it's from that game. Saved the ad; probably the only time I use Bing.
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Once this ends I'm sure Bills fans will pack the house in December.
YEAH, RIGHT!
PTR
I do like the prospect of a guaranteed late-season sellout in case of a terrible season. But Atlanta loses if that game's in Orchard Park, Bills stay in playoff contention and so that Miami game sells out.
You always like to throw out the lack of December sellouts during the successful 90s when the capacity was clear over 80,000. But since the renovation made the capacity more reasonable you can't make that correlation. You can only really point to maybe Titans 2006/2011 and Jax 2012 as meaningful late-season games that weren't sold out. And if you consider sellouts like Brownies/Steelers 2004, Fins 2007, SF 2008 and ironically Rams 2012 (among a couple others), it really is a wash. Not gonna say December sellouts are guaranteed if the Bills are alive but you can't claim they aren't a decent possibility.
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It's funny because Snyder does all the things that fans say an owner should do: be passionate and involved, willing to take risks like trading up for a player, spend big money bringing in big name coaches and players, etc.
PTR
And sue people who question him. And sue grannies who get behind on their PSL payment. You can be passionate and involved without creating a circus and cult of personality around yourself.
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A dolphins fan was talking to me about his at the game. He said that the lg would tap the center to tell him to snap the ball. I have seen a lot of teams do this including the bills(not very much recently) I never understood why they would do this because it allows the d to know when you will snap the ball.
Agreed. Along the same lines, in the college game, Tommy Rees and Joe Licata would clap their hands to snap the ball. And they didn't seem to even switch it up with a dummy slap now and then. Great idea fellas.
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Yep, I've heard of Aereo. My interested blunted when I realized it was only available in select cities, but I have to imagine it's only going to grow. And another reason why the NFL's broadcast partners might have an itchy trigger finger to go cable is because Fox Sports 1 and CBS Sports Network are hanging on by a thread. As opposed to the other newcomer -- NBC Sports Network with NHL and EPL, among many others -- Fox and CBS only have token properties to populate those networks. I'll pass on the normal fare on CBS Sports Network -- Eastern Wyoming St. vs. Air Force -- but Patriots-Broncos? Yes please!
On the other hand, the NFL is going to lose a LOT of leverage when it comes to blackouts and public funding of stadiums. If I'm dropping ~$130 per month to Time Warner Cable, I should be able to watch the Bills game regardless if it sells out. And if NFL games are no longer free for the public to watch in a team's market, why should the public pay for stadia? Aside from SF, NYC and Dallas, public funding is not going away anytime soon (see Vikings, Minnesota and Falcons, Atlanta).
Ultimately, though, what might happen is a compromise where all home games may be over the air still subject to blackout while away games will be cable TV.
But the best way for cable TV survive to the 21st Century is a weekly NFL explosion. All markets get all games. Instead of CSI: Cheektowaga reruns on TBS, how about NFL coverage? CBS already does that for March Madness (I don't think I've ever watched TruTV outside of NCAA tourney regionals), so there's already precedent for sports to take over these stations. Show the game of the week on CBS Sports Network and then in decreasing importance: TNT, TBS with the Bills-Jags clunker/Spero Dedes special on TruTV. I'd pay TWC double if that ever happened. Thanks for playing Direct TV, but Sunday Ticket's a dinosaur and the cable companies need some leverage to stay relevant. The NFL can provide just that.
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It's not just buffalo. It happens to every team in the league that doesn't sell out games. The "threats" don't happen in those cities tough because they know people don't care. They have better things to do than go to football games.
And to that list I would add Cleveland; not that they don't care, but that threats don't happen. The NFL probably would bend the rules in their case because of the Modell robbery but each time I've been to Brownies stadium, I've been underwhelmed by the attendance. The crowd I saw in 2008 was pretty good (the year after they almost made the playoffs) but I've been to a game per year since then and there were blocks of empty seats every time. Once they got my phone number (after the US men's soccer game there, no less), they've been hounding me to buy tix. Yet, there hasn't been a threat of a blackout since 2009.
I wouldn't be surprised if most NFL markets fudge their numbers, and I really don't hold it against Buffalo that the Bills have been close to blacking out.
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What goes unreported is the huge number of concussions suffered by soccer players. I don't remember the figures but compared to Pop Warner, it was much higher. I don't know of studies on hockey, lacrosse, rugby, field hockey, etc., but they must up there too. You can add boxing, MMA, et al. Fact is, head injuries are wide spread throughout sports and many other activities. For some reason I don't understand, football has been singled out.
Ehhh soccer does have a concussion problem, but it's not as major as football by any stretch. Women's soccer, maybe, but there are significant differences (both physiology and psychology) between male and female concussions. Here's some numbers to back it up:
http://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/22287642
Not sure how generalizable the data are, and if the journal is reputable, but saying that football is responsible for the majority of concussions in HS sports is a good reason why it should be singled out.
RE soccer
It was the early 90's that soccer fields popped up everywhere. Kids 4-17 were all playing. It was the social thing to do. It still is. Its a low risk and very social game that is easy for children to feel succesful. My niece and nephew play. Its fun for them. The big expensive travel teams exist because parents pay a crap ton for it. I knew 4 girls on the junior Olympic team in the late 90's. The soccer foundation whatever it was knows it was vital to get a youth program started to develop youth and draw interest. And now its been 20+ years since those fields were made. The acres and acres of fields are still there. And yet the fan base did not grow equally with respect to everyone who played. And many of those fields are now being converted to LAX. Because that is the next soccer. So spare me soccer fans. Its a great fun sport but it does draw what football does attention wise.
Fan base is growing bit by bit. NBC paid Corleone money to get the English Premier League on its networks and it seems to be paying off decently enough. And in certain markets the MLS teams are doing quite well. Heck in Seattle the Sounders arguably outdraw the Mariners.
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Legit quesiton...and the answer is yes. The old QB Rating was so irrelevant that no one ever used it when evaluating a QB outside of media and fans. No scouts, GM's, coaches, etc put any stock into it what so ever as it had no analytical value of a QB's true impact in a game. That being said, the QBR ESPN developed is definitely looked at and referenced a lot by people who judge QB's for a living. Again, no one rating is the end all be all of evaluation, however, the QBR has a lot of value as a single stat for a glimpse into how a QB impacted a game on an individual level.
Media almost always references it now when comparing QB's too and its quickly becoming the most accepted stat to look at QB productivity. A lot of fans who have yet to familiarize it, mostly don't because they dont know enough about it nor do they give it much thought because ESPN developed it. ESPN however has developed quite a few statistical trackers in multiple sports that are quite a bit more accurate and important than any stats that existed before.
The difference between EJ and Thad's QBR is actually substantial. Again, I dont say this to knock Thad, because I am impressed with what he has done so far given the circumstances. But at the end of the day, Thad has clearly not outplayed EJ and the QBR certainly shows that. I would say Thad has filled him in a comparable fashion, which is a good thing. But definitely not in a way to take EJ's job. And if we beat NO, that does not mean we only did because of Thad being our starting QB. We have been in every single game this year under EJ too, and were a few plays away from him being undefeated. Our team PPG are about the same under both QB's. WIns and losses will not be what separates the two QB's as EJ played well enough for this team to be undefeated, just like Thad did enough for him to be 2-0 (even though we are 1-1 with him). Thad is going to have to grossly out play EJ to take the job from our number 1 pick the staff is VERY high on. And stats show that that has not happened yet, nor are there signs its on the horizons that he suddenly starts taking over games.
Thanks for the info. I always thought it was self-serving when ESPN would reference it in their reports and such, but I do agree its a better measure than the old passer rating. My only problem with it from a conceptual standpoint is that it marks a 50% dropoff from EJ to Thad, which I think is excessive, but maybe will dissipate as we see more from T-Lew.
But I also agree by any quantitative - and qualitative - measure EJ is superior to Thad. For me, the question is how many games does Thad need to lose until you rush EJ back. Last year the Fighting Irish QB Everett Golson had a concussion during the Stanford game, and his backup Tommy Rees finished that game admirably. Next week ND were able to give Golson a week off without rushing him back and without a significant dropoff in QB quality, and I see some parallels with EJs situation as well
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But for Sh*ts and giggles, let me just point out that the QBR is WIDELY considered the best barometer for measuring the overall effectiveness of a QB in todays NFL. No system is perfect, but this one is pretty much accepted as the most in depth and most accurate measure available in a single statistic by a mile.
EJ QBR 42.2
Thad QBR 22.2
Thats all I have to say because anyone who actually believes this to be a real possibility is just trolling or fooling themselves. There is no chance in hell Thad takes this job THIS YEAR from EJ unless Thad suddenly turns into Kurt Warner and starts taking over games.
PPG with Thad and EJ are almost identical...EJ is their guy, so Thad would have to really out play EJ...not some BS nit pick situational BS you always try and peddle to make a worthless and meaningless point. Thad is not doing this and there is no reason to believe Thad is suddenly going to start dominating games. I really like Thad being here, but hes not taking EJs job this year based on his existing body of work.
Does anyone outside of ESPN actually use QBR? Not a sarcastic question, just wondering if its gained traction among sports writers and other media outlets . Maybe Tim Graham has alluded to it, not sure. And also let's not forget the sample size on Thad is still n=2 for both the QBR and traditional passer rating (which has EJ at 79 and Thaddeus at 84). The 42-22 difference don't impress me much.
Back to the original question at hand, I say Thad would really have to pull an upset in NOLA for me to even think twice about him starting for longer than he has to. And then I'm okay w EJ taking his time coming back.
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And if we're discussing hockey realignment, I'd be pretty upset if the Sabres got realigned out of the Adams division. Mayday over the Bruins and nowadays the 2010 playoffs plus Chara; 06 and 07 playoffs w the Sens plus Chris Neil; Tie Domi/Darcy Tucker and the 99 cup run agst the Leafs; getting rolled by the Habs for the longest time until beating them in 98. I legitimately hate all of the Sabres division rivals. Those are rivals.
The Jets? We happen to play them twice a year.
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Nope. For one, the Bills, Pats and Jets have been AFL rivals since 1960. For two, the Steelers-Ravens were the best rivalry in football until this year. Plus you have the Ravens-Browns-Art Modell thing, which will never die. You're upset because Buffalo is a few hours closer to Pittsburgh and Cleveland (not really Cincinnati) than it is New York and Boston? Well a few extra hours drive and a few extra minutes on a plane does not trump rivalry. Just think how you'd feel if you were a Dallas Cowboys fan. The NFL divisions are absolutely perfect just the way they are.
Really can't compare the rivalries between Dallas and NYG/Washington and whatever rivalries the Bills had in division. Those games have been relevant for longer than what the Bills have experienced. Jets rivalry died out w Bill Simpson's INT and when they moved from Shea Stadium. Pats and Bils have rarely been good at the same time save for AFL days and late 70s. Only the Dolphins have had a sustained rivalry in recent memory w Kelly-Marino. Heck Kelly-Kosar meant more than what Kelly-Eason? Kelly-O'Brien? I can understand how moving a team from the AFC north could be difficult but jeez the Bills could be an easy move.
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Yeah, we should have kept Kolb and Leinert.
If not one of those two maybe even Tavaris Jackson. If you don't understand the importance of having even a mediocre QB w NFL experience come in to manage the game you must've shut off the TV when the Bills went on defense.
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Atlanta
New Orleans
St Louis
Don't they all have that type of done as well?
Nope, nope, nope. Atlanta is cable supported Teflon so close to carrier dome but I don't think it has the revolving door set-up to maintain negative pressure.
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And if you build it right on Lake Erie what do you do about the gale force winds? How do you keep a roof on when the gusts are 60+ mph?
PTR
Don't think that'll matter with the new domes that are built. Hypothetically we'd be closer to Lucas Oil Field than the Carrier dome. Ask the Epic Dome / Epic Center off Wehrle and Transit what setup is better. When the Metrodome gets replaced, the Carrier Dome is the last major roofed stadium with the negative pressure/inflatable roof set up. All other roofed stadia in the NFL are built with a solid/metal/non-inflated dome. Then it's no different than say the roof at the FNC.
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Water main breaks are hardly a reason for a new stadium.
Dome schmome. Those things have limited half-lives; the superdome is the only one to have lasted more than 30yr as an NFL venue. The Ralph is still young by any other credible standard; college football and European soccer venues have "life cycles" of centuries, not half-decades. Replace the upper decks, widen the concourses but save the lower bowl indefinitely.
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Its also funny how older venues like Wrigley & Lambeau are easy to sell out. Meanwhile NFL attendance with an abundance of newer stadiums is finding it harder to sell tickets.
Agreed. For the amount I've paid at 80+ year old Notre Dame stadium to sit on 12 inches of splintered wooden bench (for the lowly Purdue game, mind you), I could probably get club seat season tix at EverBank Stadium.
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The most valuable sports franchise world-wide is Manchester United. The age of their stadium? 103 years old. OLD Trafford. That predates commercial radio, television, most countries worldwide... Just losing to the last Cubbies World Series win. Ditto for the rest of most of the Premier League, with many dating from the 1880s. Doubtless they went through some renovations through out the years, but in many respects the same structure remains standing. So hearing about "obsolete 30yr old football stadiums" in this country is downright insulting. The multiuse abominations (3 rivers, riverfront, etc) and domed stadiums (astro, metro, king, etc) had every right to be replaced. But football-only stadia like Bank of America and FedEx fields have another couple decades before owners can complain
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I was there about a month ago for the fifty yard dash, and there was definitely some construction going on, especially at the entrances to the seating area. Other than that (eg, bathrooms, grand entrance), not sure
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Go figure, the Bills sign a lease and December games disappear; in Years Six and Nine of the lease, don't be surprised if all home games are after Thanksgiving.
I like it. No bye week for the Pats before they play us. SUcks to have so few home games late but no one goes anyway.
PTR
Away agst TB and Jax may as well be home games; scheduler certainly did us favors there.
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If SUNY wants to create a flagship "New York State University" school it needs to be in the central part of the state - not in the extreme western (or eastern LI) end of the state.
Both Univ of Florida and Florida State are hardly the population/geographical centers of Florida and they do okay for themselves.
Having this in Buffalo will never generate any kind of fan base east of Rochester - even if you make the playoffs. Fans in the metro NYC area will NEVER pay attention to a college team 400 miles away.
Notre Dame would like to have a word with you: the Irish don't play home games at Yankee Stadium for the heck of it. I'd say the mascot confusion with the local soccer team would be a bigger problem.
New sale of team thread
in The Stadium Wall Archives
Posted · Edited by OvrOfficiousJerk
He can, since they are in the same market. That was the issue with Jacobs, and why Kroenke had to sell off the Nuggets/Avs before he bought the Rams.
Edit: Real life example - Wayne Huizenga (sp?) owned both the Dolphins and the Marlins in the 90s.