Red Squirrel

I thought it was pretty humorous how he got ALL the credit for the Toronto game, too. He got so much positive press from that game, you'd think he was covering TO and Evans at the same time.

We forgot about that dimwit Jeff Triplette, who threw his flag (and they are tied in a knot and filled with ball bearings, for those who didn't know) at Orlando Brown and just about put his eye out. He's one of the worst refs in the game, and always has been. I can't remember any specific bad calls from him, but often have felt that he is one of the refs who falls into the Marv Levy created category of "over-officious jerk".

Olympic boxing used to be HUGE, and this fight killed it.

I think the ref's name was Ben Dreith.

My worst bad call: in the mid '80s, I used to get these betting tickets where you pick 3 games, you get 5-1 odds, 4 games, 10 to 1, 5 games, 20-1, etc. Anyway, I had picked all my games right with one left and was about to win $200; I only needed the Falcons to lose (I don't even remember who the other team was). The game had less than a minute left when Billy "White Shoes" Johnson catches a pass and dives toward the endzone and gets smashed at the goal line. No call. Then White Shoes extracts himself from the pile, hops up, and does the dance. Ref's arms go up. Replays later show White Shoes was WAY short of the goal line. This is about 25 years ago; no replay reviews. I'm out $200. And to this day, I want to kick Billy "White Shoes" Johnson in the cubes.

Paterno I'll give you, but you don't know much about Holtz if you think he hasn't done worse than this. My sense is there are losers all the way around here. Both Craig and Adam James look like crybabies, and Leach comes off like a boss's nightmare. And as others say, the timing of this with the bowl game bonus coming due makes Tech look bad.

Johnson's biggest downfall was his many fall-downs. Including once when he...gasp...landed on the football.

I was in the process of writing this same post. Darn you and your fast fingers!

I never, ever believed this, and frankly, an awful lot of what I heard about the state of the locker room was from the geniuses on this message board that are so gosh darned smart about how a QB should look, and who knew how all-fired important QB rating is (seemingly not knowing that sacks aren't a part of the equation.....or conveniently ignoring it). And the part about Wilson overruling Wade? Marcellus Wiley has stated this on ESPN about a thousand times. I think he probably knows something about this since he, Doug, and Wade all wound up together in SD.

You've argued well enough that I'll drop my own grade from a 5 to a 4. I didn't see the post suggesting we look at Russell as a 1, so the way I looked at it is how would I grade Edwards or Fitz if they played like that, and then I added a couple points due to circumstances. Honestly, we learned little, other than that the guy didn't poop in his pants.

I tried to make this point 2 hours after the game ended, and didn't get anywhere. Another point: on the deep ball to TO, the announcer, a former QB, jumped all over TO and everyone else has followed. It is a reasonable argument that TO had a shot to prevent the INT; it is unconscionable to not mention that the pass was friggin' horrible. You cannot throw that ball inside and short. If you miss it, it HAS to be long and toward the sideline. Beuerlein is an awful announcer (it seems to take him two tries to correctly identify any non-brandname player), and he led everyone right off the cliff on this one. Now having said that, Brohm was better than a 1.5. Just look at the guy on the Colts to see a 1.5. Come to think of it, we've seen a lot of worse performances against the Bills than what we got out of Brohm.

Like I said in my post, I understand giving him credit for not being with the team very long, and that's how he gets a 5 from me.

He gets a 5 from me; it would be much worse if he had been there since training camp. I can see giving the guy credit for how he handled himself, but when I see people here giving him a 7 or 8, I'm wondering what game they watched. Seriously; what would you give him if he threw for 250 with 2 TD's and 2 pics? A 14? And if they won? A 22? We're rating him on a scale of 1-10, aren't we? And one more thing...he had more time in the pocket today than either Fitz or Edwards have had recently.

The Cowboys total yardage stat is deceptive. They scored more points two out of the three years TO was there, and it was more than just one or two per game. Last year they scored .2 per game less, but keep in mind, Romo got hurt and his 73 year old backup Brad Johnson made TE and Fitz look like Montana and Elway. IMHO, the Bills are handling this situation correctly. Trent had his chance; the team plays better with Fitz. I think it really is that simple.

....and while I typed, Harbaugh signed a contract extension with Stanford. Well, maybe Gill gets the KU job now.

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on Stanford, but I do follow the Pac-10 pretty closely. My understanding is that Stanford's athletic program is in a lot of debt, and as with every other school with high profile sports, the faculty has been squawking about how the priorities have gotten skewed. On top of that, Harbaugh made the tone-deaf decision of having a gazillion dollar bathroom installed in his office. He has certainly done a fantastic job turning around that program. My ties to the Pac-10 go back to 1995, and the '06 Cardinal (Trent Edward's sr year) were the worst team I have seen in that conference until this year's Cougs. Having said that, I would also point out that he has long been known as arrogant (the bathroom thing being a good example) and mouthy: long time Bills fans might remember him and Jim Kelly getting in a fight the year after JK retired. And he alienated people at Michigan a couple years ago by shooting his mouth off about their academics. And in my own opinion, he made some strange decisions during games that may have cost his team a win or two this year. I would have to respectfully disagree with the poster who suggested his recruiting in the West is hampered due to his mid-west ties; he also coached 1AA U of San Diego before Stanford and he is getting better players than everyone out there but Carroll. Anyway, wherever he winds up, I won't be surprised. And also, his QB is Andrew Luck; Oliver is Andrew's dad.

I'm sorry, but this is utter nonsense. Running the ball into the end zone in that situation is completely fair game. Passing with a 10 point lead, or running a trick play....that might not be cool. I think there is a misconception about kneeling down....nobody does this because it keeps the other team from getting angry. They do it to minimize ball-handling, and thereby minimize risk. It could be said that what the Bills did was unnecessarily risky; I disagree, but at least respect that kind of logic. But really; the only way what the Bills did could be construed as poor sportsmanship would be if they weren't letting the clock tick down between plays.

You seem to be angry because I lumped you in with all the clowns.....think about why that happened. Somebody posts that the board is a mess; I posted that I agreed with him; you then criticized me. Are you really unable to connect the dots as to why I'd lump you in with the cretins? And now, oddly, you seem to agree with me that the board is a mess. Whatever. As for the breaks vs fractures thing....yeah, you still sound condescending. That has been just about the most benign topic broached in this thread.

Once again, what I asked was this: why is it so easy for you and others to ignore good posts that make real attempts to advance a quality discussion, but it is apparently hard for you and others to ignore idiots (thereby overloading the thread with nonsense). Since your post that I quoted from, someone else starts a comment like this: "without having to read through this entire thread..." The reason why he asks this is because the thread is overloaded with crap! And if it weren't, it would have been quite easy for him to either read the first hand accounts of those who had a tib-fib compound fracture, or to click on the links I provided which describe what is going on in the rehabilitation of two other players who have had an injury and surgical procedure that is very similar to what is being reported about Wood. And since it would probably take him six years to sort through all the crap to find those two links, I'll just tell him that Leon Washington and Jordan Gross have been told that the best case scenario has them on a practice field next spring, but of course there are no guarantees and no one knows if Wood's situation is better or worse than those two guys. And BTW, you sound pretty lofty yourself by making a big deal about people not knowing the difference between fractures and breaks.

I'd rather you join me (at ground level) and stop bottom feeding with the moron. Here's another article about a guy who recently had a similar injury: http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=4682873 Of course, you can ignore it, like you did with the story about Leon Washington, and continue to talk about the moron....or the one poster's medical qualifications....or c--k sucking....or "pwned" vs "owned"....or "mute" vs "moot"......or Dr. Andrews.....or whether or not DJ's soft practices contributed to EW's injury. Or maybe you can talk about how "Lost" is going to end.

Regardless of the guy's misuse of the word, "mute", his larger point was correct. This board does suck, and this thread is a perfect example of it. There are ten pages here, and only about 2 messages per page are even remotely worth reading. And the saddest thing is the long time posters are just as bad, if not worse, than the the newcomers. I posted what I thought was a worthwhile and informative link to an article about another player who had a similar injury.......not a single comment on my post. That's fine. But one would think that the few posts here that rely on logic and reason would get SOME responses. Instead, it is a train wreck. One suggestion to all: if you are capable of ignoring good posts, then why on earth is it so hard to ignore an idiot like the one who wished Levitre got hurt? Seriously....all of you should go back and look through this entire thread and count how many posts are just effing worthless.

Leon Washington of the Jets had a compound fracture of the tibia/fibula against the Raiders on 10-25, including having the bloody stump poking out, teammates on the verge of hurling, etc...this is a pretty recent article that details his progress: http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianp...e7J5eqy_CWXiHKg It doesn't sound so bad (easy for me to say); in a nutshell, he says the risk of infection is the most serious obstacle, and at just less than one month, he is just about past that being an issue. And he was told he faces a 6-12 month rehab, with the six month target being very possible if he works his tail off. Hopefully, Bad Santa will bring The Kid a Christmas present....being able to take a shower on Christmas morning.

I'm not a big fan of labeling guys based on where they come from. I think blaming what happened to Sanchez on his reaction to poor weather is missing the point. The thing I would be concerned about if I were a Jets fan is every time he screwed up, he seemed to get even tighter. I saw this happen to him vs ASU last year (in sunny So Cal, BTW), and even though his team was good enough to overcome his sucking, that game really stuck in my mind when the draft approached. I would never criticize the kid for taking the chance on coming out as opposed to risking what happened to Crawford and Tebow, but the Jets reached for him in the draft, rushed him too soon into the starting spot, reveled in the attention brought to the organization by his pretty boy looks, and were active participants in over hyping the kid's poise. The Jets are going to sink like a rock after this game, and they deserve it.

I'm vaguely remembering a play when Booker's helmet fell off and he still lowered his noggin and crashed into somebody. He was a tough dude, and one wonders how he would have done as a player if not for the Guillain-Barre. Regardless, it is sad he is gone but also nice to hear he was well liked and respected in his second career.

I thought it was Rob Johnson that had all the concussions.