eSJayDee

I've noticed often on national highlight shows, they show angles of plays that were never shown on the initial feed. I'm guessing that many of those may have come from this local coverage. From a fans perspective, I think this is a bad move as it will detract from our overall enjoyment. From a business perspective, presumably, the NFL &/or the networks owning the broadcast rights will be able to rcv more royalties, but somehow I don't that will be reflected in the product we rcv (like being able to get every game in HD ).

I'm a zero. Story of my life.

I'd be more concerned w/ their ability to conficate the pet & give it to the Humane Society. What right do they have to do that? Evict you &/or give you notice, yes definitely (you're breaking the terms of the lease). Fine you, maybe, I don't know. But I don't think they can take your pet & for that matter, I wouldn't think that the HS would be a willing partner to such an act.

I don't know if this is true or not (us losing more than our share of talent). Certainly, I (& probably most of us) am of the opinion that TD was more reluctant than most to pay to retain top notch talent. But had we managed/chosen to retain the likes of Winfield & Jennings (add Wiley and perhaps Fisher & maybe a few others to the list) and it only goes to show that we didn't do that poorly in DRAFTING. Our weakness was apparently in how we chose how to use available cap space. (And here again, TD was 'judicious' in cap space usage; seldom mortgaging the future for the present like Butler did & the likes of Snyder does now. If there hadn't been such a large jump in cap $ this year, how do you think we'd be sitting relative to other teams? I'd bet we'd be in a much better postion to add talent rather than lose it. In hindsight, a few million spent each year might have been the difference in being able to retain these guys & letting them walk.) W/ respect to our overall talent level, I think most of us thought we had a decent chance of the playoffs last year. Our Dee had been top notch the previous 2 years, largely based on talent (albeit, vet FA talent recruited from elsewhere.) The general consensus was that we underachieved.

I think he's a WR that used to play for the Vikings.

Well, considering that the avg NFL career is less than 3 years, these results probably aren't too atypical. You fail to mention how our drafted players that are no longer on the team have faired. (In this era of FA, you can't expect to hold onto all of your players.) We've kept a VERY high %age of our younger players (2003-2005); I think that's very good although granted the overal talent level of the team makes it easier for them to stay. Any player from 1999-2001 drafts would be what you call an 'established veteran'. We've managed to retain 2. This is certainly below what you would want, but again, it fails to take into consideration how many are contributing elsewhere. And although it is low, taking into consideration typical distributions, I don't think you can conclude we did poorly.

re: K-9s response to me. I merely used the punter example as I think he's indisputably among the best at his position. (We can't say that about too many other positions on our team .) However, what makes punter different than a 'positional' player? His contributions certainly are significant. For that matter, the Radiers took Guy in the 1st round & I'd be willing to bet that there's very few, if any players that were available after him in the draft that you'd rather take in hindsight. Perhaps the next best example for us would be CB, although it certainly is true that having 3 quality CBs is highly desirable. re: Best ATHLETE vs FOOTBALL PLAYER. I agree w/ you on this, I was just using the often used phrase 'best available athlete'. W/ respect to your Bush vs awesome G query, again there are MANY factors to be weighed, but I'd assume the prudent choice is the G. Let's assume that Bush is really that great (which, IMHO is open to debate), or at least more importantly, expected to be. The primary reason for choosing the G is that that we already have a fairly good RB and also that it appears that decent RBs are easier to come by than decent Gs (i.e. if McGahee gets injured or fails to perform up to expectations). IMO, the vast improvement that our offense would reap by replacing our mediocre at best Gs would far exceed the marginal improvement we would see from the slight improvement of Bush vs McGahee.

No, I've gotta disagree w/ that. I will concede that you never know when or if injuries will occur so that the person you projected as a 2nd string will become a starter & have the opportunity for significant contributions, what you want to maximize is the UTILITY (an economic concept) of each player, that is, take the player w/ the highest utility. Let's ignore the issue of the accuracy of your assessment abilities & assume you can realistically determine a players future ABILITY to contribute. Bear in mind, if he's stuck on the bench, he's not contributing much. When you evaluate players, you take into consideration their liklihood of increasing the teams overal ability by a certain amount relative to other options. Take for example in our case weighing a certain good but not pro-bowl caliber OG relative to the 2nd coming of Ray Guy. (For those who don't know, likely the best punter of all time w/ deference to Sammy Baugh as he was well b4 my time.) We already have one of the best punters in the league and we have every reason to think he will continue to excel. Replacing him w/ someone better will improve the team, but not as much as upgrading our horrible interior line play. Assume you have the equivalent of Brady & Peyton Manning on your team. Would it make much sense to draft another top notch QB who almost certainly will rot on the bench for several years? If you have a need at G but there's no good candidates available but a few excellent players where you don't have a need, do you reach for the G? Not likely. You also have to take into consideration what other players will be available when you draft later. If you have 5 G all ranked roughly the same, but there's a player at a much thinner position that you want, you take him, figuring that you'll likely be able to fill the G need later in the draft almost as well as now, but you won't have that luxury at that much thinner position. Basically, your decision matrix is multi-dimensional, taking not only 'best available athlete', but also need. (Along w/ other factors such as character.)

One of the (few) things that you could commend Mularkey for was hyis emphasis on ST. Let's hope it continues.

Ditto. W/ respect to mispronunciation, I hate it when I'm axed a question.

I'll mention 3. 1st, when people (mostly on this board) refer to 'teamates'. 'Teamates' are people who sit together over a pot of Darjeling or some Assam blend while nibbling on crumpets. TeaMmates are people that are on the same team. 2nd, people who don't pay attention when they play a sport. I'm speaking particularly of volleyball which I play. We're not professionals, so I don't really care if you're not that good or not very athletic, but is it too much to ask for you to remove your head from your butt for the few seconds that a volley lasts? Finally, the above discussion on Orientals bring to mind the term 'Afro-American'. I don't like it 'cuz it's not adequately descriptive, and in most cases is actually inaccurate (which of course you don't know merely by the subjects appearance).

That sounds terrible. You make your son take ice skating lessons.

I thought there were 2 planes. The 1st one had a logo on the back that looked like Oceanic. The 2nd one was too dark & fast for me to tell what it was. (I only watch the show once & I'm going off memory, so I could be mistaken.)

Well, if it's anything like "Babe of the Day" we're all gonna learn about what, 3 words a month? BTW, FYI, members of Mensa are called Mensans.

Except that her name is/was ursula. So much for that theory, or can you 'splain that?

I'm largely speculating here, but a couple of things - 1st I'm assuming that the down by contact that you are referring to does NOT necessarily come into play w/ respect to possession, only whether or not a runner can continue his progress after he is down, or allegedly so. Perhaps if a runner doesn't 'give up', he's still fair game, i.e. you can hit him if he's moving. If I'm not mistaken, "way back when", you could continue your progress even after you were down. That must've been messy; a lot different to the QBs in skirts rules that they play under today. If the rule pertains to whether or not a ball is fumbled, perhaps players will be permitted to pursue a loose ball if it is seen, but no advancement is possible after recovery. The refs will then sort out whether the fumble occurred b4 or after the runner was down.

The only bad thing out of this is that if CBS AGAIN opts not to have many games in HD (although I'm not a fan of the F-U emoticon, I think it would be appropriate here), we're SOL. Personally, I'm a creature of habit & anything other than a 1pm Sunday kickoff bothers me. W/ respect to why we're not on prime time, we sucked last year and the few times we are the top &/or nationwide game, we typically put forth a very poor effort.

Interesting fact, but I think an argument could be made that it's incorrectly assuming cause and effect. Often the reason those guys made the PB was that their teams were very good which in turn made them look good. I will concede that it is difficult to make the SB w/o 'decent' QBing, but I think w/ an adequate support either Holcolm &/or JP would fit that bill. (I don't recall seeing Nall at all so I reserve judgement on him.)

Nice work compiling info. I'd like to point out that w/ the cap figure now at $104m or whatever, avg cap per player is over $1.8m, which means all we've signed so far is below avg players. (I realize that distribution of cap hits is far from normal, more like log-normal w/ a few players getting big chunks & the majority all 'near' the mean. But this still means that we haven't made ANY blockbuster signings, although I'm optimistic that Tripplet will be a significant contributor.)

Geez, looks like I'm one of the more experienced of the bunch. My sole coaching experience was 1 season of volunteer coaching HS kickers & punters. My involvement basically entailed my standing around playing w/ myself for about an hour & 50 minutes, then about 10 minutes having about 6 kids vying for my attention trying to do 3 different things (KOs, punting & PK).

See my avatar for Pooch Wilson. He just turned 4. And he's about 100 pounds heavier than when that pic was taken.

Depends on the term of the contracts. Once you sign a player, it's just like they were already on your roster. We would not be responsible for any salary hits, but would be stuck w/ any bonuses they were already paid out. For instance, if Josh Reed really did sign a contract w/ a $2.5m bonus, his cap hit would be either $2.5m or optionally $1.25m if we cut him after June 1 and elected to carry the other $1.25m forward to next year. If this really is the case (which I doubt for this very reason), it would be more costly to cut him than to keep him on the roster. (Assume he has a relatively minimal salary for this year like $500k, so his cap hit would only be $1.125m if he signed for 4 years if he remained on the team.) Please note that the new CBA agreement may have changed how things work slightly, I don't know.

From the article linked above: That's BS. W/ the news of Hayes quitting due to his link w/ Scientology, the Scientology episode would be a far bigger draw. From a personal perspective, once I saw it was the "Salty Chocolate Balls" episode, I changed the channel.

If you were basing that the intended episode was based on the guide that I get through Time Warner, I know that they frequently have errors. FWIW, TP & MS happended to be very briefly on Letterman last night. They mentioned that when they did the episode, they thought that Isaac Hayes might quit, so it seemingly wasn't that much of a surprise & they appeared quite indifferent to it.

Marv wasn't the 1st to say it. When Marv used it in his acceptance speech or whatever, I looked up who originally said it. I don't recall whom, but someone else also found the quote attributable to another (3rd) person. So crediting Marv wouldn't have been appropriate.