DCOrange

Not sure why anyone would really be surprised. There's not much else going on in the sports world right now since we're in this no man's land of no games being played but also no real offseason news to talk about. So yeah, a top 10 QB (and specifically, a top 10 QB that fosters a ton of debate) potentially playing on the franchise tag is as close to a big story as there is right now. I'm not really sure why anyone would be all that annoyed; it's pretty easy to just ignore the story if you want to. It's not like there's any real reason to tune into ESPN and accidentally see them discussing Dak right now. The Dak debates are admittedly boring at this point as everything that can be said has been said many many times but I'm not mad at the media for trying to latch onto anything at all that they can talk about right now.

I think one of those NFL aggregator accounts on Twitter had said that Josina Anderson said nobody wanted to say anything before WaPo publishes it because lawyers are already involved and nobody wants to get in that mess.

DC fans might not be the most diehard out there but it’s still a large market in general and the football team itself has a ton of fans around the country. As of this past year, Forbes ranked them as the 14th most valuable sports franchise in the world (5th highest NFL team). Certainly the current environment wouldn’t be selling at the peak of its value but it’s still a team a lot of people would love to own and whoever replaces Snyder would instantly be the most popular person in the DC area.

Won’t be UnderArmour. They’re struggling as is and trying to get out of their own licensing deals. They got a PPP loan to pay for roughly 480 employees and then got down to 480 employees. They were at least honest about their intentions with the loan unlike a lot of other companies. They didn’t do anything wrong (at least as far as the PPP goes). They’re just a struggling company right now.

He's a DC/Baltimore based reporter, and more importantly, it's EVERYONE in the DC area talking about it. He wasn't the first.

I don't think any details have been made public yet, but this article includes a bunch of the people talking about it: https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2020/07/15/buzz-grows-of-a-looming-report-about-the-washington-franchise/

If that story is true, then it seems pretty straight-forward. The team name that they want to go with is already trade-marked and they're trying to acquire the rights. What LaCanfora and many other DC-based media people are talking about is something criminal. I'm not going to speculate about the rumblings I've heard just in case they're wrong, but if they're right, it's pretty horrifying. Last I heard, the Washington Post is expected to break the news at some point this week, possibly tomorrow.

Again, that has nothing to do with JLC's tweet.

That isn't related to the name change. Sounds like they have some internal stuff going on, possibly related to the personnel they fired this past week.

Some of the rankings that jumped out to me personally: Patriots at 20. I guess he REALLY likes their RB stable, but it's hard for me to fathom ranking them this highly when he says from the jump that the WR position is the most important part. Seems like he has more faith in Sanu and Edelman than I do (mainly the Sanu part, I'm sure Edelman will be fine). Colts at 26. I'm probably higher on this supporting cast than most. Hilton is obviously great and I think Pittman will be good from day 1. Pascal/Campbell is whatever. Doyle/Burton is a solid TE duo and Mack/Taylor looks like a good RB tandem. In general, it seems like you could pretty much order the teens and 20s a ton of different ways and still make a decent case for it. Rams at 11. I know Higbee blew up the last few weeks of the year, but I have a really hard time ranking them nearly in the top 10 with two good WRs, a maybe good/maybe flash in the pan TE, and complete unknowns at RB and WR depth. Giants at 7. I'm not sure if this is totally wrong...their supporting cast is undeniably talented and deep. But it's weird to me that throughout the article, lower rated teams are specifically knocked for having a lot of talent but a lot of injury questions, and then he puts the Giants at 7 while saying they literally didn't get a single snap last season where everyone was on the field together due to all their injuries.

They've already said they're won't be any native american imagery in their logos and merchandise, so seems unlikely to me that it'll be related to native americans at all. I think if it were going to be Warriors, we'd already know about it. I don't really foresee them picking one of the fan concepts either.

Based on the recent scuttlebutt of them supposedly wanting to totally scrub themselves of the Native American heritage, I doubt they would keep the same logo. Does seem like that’s the odds on favorite for the new name though.

I think that’s probably mostly about their route profile. Evans is used far more as a downfield target. And while his true catch rate is still dwarfed by Thomas, his true catch rate this past season was higher than Julio for example, though both were outside the top 40. I still wouldn’t put him on the same tier as the top 2, but just pointing out there’s a lot of context in the catch rates.

I was glad to see Chris Godwin getting some love, though I think I'd personally have him ranked even higher than 9th personally. I think this points to multiple possibilities: Maybe he helped a whole lot but that team just wasn't good enough. Maybe WRs just aren't THAT big of difference makers (though they certainly are in the right hands). Maybe he somehow isn't as impactful as other elite WRs. I would tend to lean towards it being mostly #1. Beckham certainly has his issues between his health and his personality, but I think he's undeniably an elite talent when he's playing at 100%. One of the 50 league guys described him as being maybe the best all-around WR in the league in terms of being able to literally do it all. I think that's probably true though it was certainly more clear early on in his career than it was this past season.

https://www.espn.com/nfl/insider/story/_/id/29400333/ranking-nfl-best-wide-receivers-2020-execs-players-coaches-debate-top-10 Figured this one could potentially drive some discussion as we finally have a player worthy of being considered for one of these articles. The top 10 according to the 50 league personnel panel ESPN is using (followed by their highest and lowest ranking) Julio Jones - 1st - 7th Michael Thomas - 1st - 6th DeAndre Hopkins - 1st - 6th Odell Beckham - 1st - 10th Tyreek Hill - 3rd - 11th Mike Evans - 1st - 12th DaVante Adams - 1st - 12th Keenan Allen - 2nd - 10th Chris Godwin - 4th - unranked Amari Cooper - 5th - unranked Honorable Mentions: Stefon Diggs - ""Would go to battle with Diggs all day. Dude is a beast. And he has that No. 1 WR dog to him. I love that." -- NFL offensive assistant; "He could have a career year in Buffalo by the way they will use him. He's a true No. 1 but he seems constantly unhappy and frustrated." -- another NFL assistant" Adam Thielen Kenny Golladay AJ Green Courtland Sutton

Big 10 commissioner also said they might end up canceling all fall sports including football.

Not sure it really warrants another thread, but for those that are interested, they published their top 10 RBs today: https://www.espn.com/nfl/insider/story/_/id/29399166/ranking-nfl-top-10-running-backs-2020-best-big-3 1. Saquon Barkley 2. Christian McCaffrey 3. Ezekiel Elliott 4. Alvin Kamara 5. Derrick Henry 6. Dalvin Cook 7. Nick Chubb 8. Joe Mixon 9. Josh Jacobs 10. LeVeon Bell Honorable Mentions: Aaron Jones (lost to Bell on a tiebreaker for 10th) Chris Carson James Conner Melvin Gordon Leonard Fournette

I'm sure there are many cases of companies abusing the system, but with New Era for example, they got their PPP loan based on keeping 488 employees. Laying off the 117 employees that Polancarz mentions brings them down to 488 (or within like 1-5 of that), so they actually did exactly what they said they'd do (so far).

Agreed. And if she had an attendance policy, then yeah, feel free to punish me for not attending (though I would have attended if it was necessary and just figured out another way to get the rest of my ***** done). But you can't openly tell us that attendance is optional and then try to fail kids for not attending. It was pretty much the only time I've ever gotten in trouble in school at all (the only other time was a lunch detention back in 7th grade for shooting a basketball when we weren't supposed to lol). It was one of the most stressful times of my life since I was trying to apply for jobs after graduation while dealing with that and I had to try to explain to potential employers why I had nearly failed a math class while applying for math-ish jobs without trying to come across like I was making excuses for myself (even though I was completely in the right).

Yeah but how many red zone stops did he get on defense?

Yeah. I generally think you can make a case for a handful of guys after Mahomes, so there's some tweaking I would do, but this is a pretty good list. Surprised Kyler Murray got so much love already, though I tend to think he was very promising this year and will prove to be very good soon. There's some individual votes that are really weird though. One voter put Brady #1 and Mahomes #4 for example. Someone else put Wentz #2.

https://www.espn.com/nfl/insider/story/_/id/29394204/ranking-nfl-top-10-qbs-2020-follows-patrick-mahomes Edit: To be clear, they're ranking QBs as they expect them to be in 2020. Not trying to project them 5 years out or anything like that (but in the case of Darnold for example, the guy that voted for him said that he expects him to take a leap this year). The Top 10: Patrick Mahomes Russell Wilson Aaron Rodgers Deshaun Watson Drew Brees Lamar Jackson Tom Brady Carson Wentz Dak Prescott Matt Stafford Also receiving votes: Matt Ryan - 14 votes out of 50 voters Ben Roethlisberger - 8 votes Kyler Murray - 5 votes Kirk Cousins - 2 votes Jimmy Garoppolo - 2 votes Derek Carr, Ryan Tannehill, Jared Goff, Sam Darnold - 1 vote each

Granted he's not in the athletic prime of his life or anything, but a family friend of mine had no prior conditions that would suggest he'd be at an elevated risk of suffering long-term from Covid. He tested positive and after being on life support for weeks and his family being told that he likely wasn't going to make it, he pulled through. But he lost like 50+ pounds and had to spend roughly 2 months re-learning how to walk and eat again.

This same thing basically happened to me as a student, though it wasn't racism, just a professor trying to protect their own. It was in my statistics class my senior year of college. I admittedly took advantage of my professor's non-existent attendance policy/our grade being entirely based off of exams and one project and just didn't go to class outside of exam days so that I could use that time to get work done on my other classes that were more difficult for me. My professor was incensed because she knew I was blatantly skipping her classes every day and then I'd walk in on exam day and get somewhere between a 95-100 on her exams. Then came the project. My partner and I followed all the instructions, did everything just as well as I had done on every exam and she came back to us with a 0, at first accusing us of turning the project in after the deadline. After I confirmed with a handful of other students that we had actually turned it in on time, she stuck us with a 0 anyways and accused us of cheating. The project's weight on our overall grade was high enough that we had failed her class and would have to go to trial for academic integrity to see if we'd be kicked out of school. My partner and I were able to pretty easily prove that we hadn't cheated (or at least prove that she couldn't prove it which is all we had to do since innocent until proven guilty) and the school agreed to have another professor grade our project. That professor happened to be a friend of our professor and despite insuring us that he wasn't being biased at all, he gave us like a 25% or something like that. Thankfully for me that was still enough to narrowly pass the class with a D and graduate (though it did cost me my Dean's List and ***** Laude status). My partner however hadn't aced the exams like I did so he had to re-take the course his last semester in order to graduate with us. Our beloved professor ended up being fired a year later. She remains one of maybe two people in this world that I feel comfortable saying I legitimately hate.

I assume this is sarcasm?