finknottle

Definately DE. Today's best offenses flood the defense with 3+ good receivers instead of one great one. You put your shutdown corner on their best receiver and their dropoff is not that much. That means - as we so painfully saw a few seasons ago - your pass defense is really only as good as your #3 corner. Better to get a dominant DE and have solid if unspectacular depth in the secondary.

Then let's get one instead of throwing money and a roster spot away on Matthews. I have nothing personal against him - it's just that I've seen Matthews play during his Redskin stint. IMO we'd be better off having a NFLE qb come in as #3.

Yeah right, I suppose when you go you wouldn't mind dying getting flayed alive in front of your family, or boiled alive... death is death. I bet you would have been real stoic, a real tough guy, in a Bosnian refugee camp.

All 55 of them? That's quite a trade! But I don't think we'll have room on the roster. Ironically, there actually is precedent, and it even involved Arizona! During the eighties the USFL's Chicago Blitz traded their entire active roster and head coach (George Allen) to the Arizona Wranglers for most of their players. The lucky coach of the new-look Blitz? Marv Levy of course!

The downside of this is that people will become less-inclined to care about rivalries outside their own. We in Buffalo manage to muster a moderate bit of interest in a MNF Dallas-Washington game without truely caring about the teams. In many cases it's because the rivalry offers a symbolic choice about region (like Buffalo-Miami) or culture (Raiders-Chargers). You take that away and there is no reason the watch. I don't care how great the Cleveland-Pittsburgh or Green Bay-Minnesota rivalries are, I can't get excited about one team over another and wouldn't waste a Primetime evening on them. And ultimately the strength of the NFL lies as much with the willingness of people to watch the entire league - think MNF, Thanksgiving games, etc - as the intense support of fans for their own teams.

The more I look at it, the more I think you are right. After sorting the teams by record, and using tie breakers to sort the teams with the same records, they cycle through the order of tied teams. So SF always picks first each round as the only 2-14 team. Clev and Miami (4-12) pick #2/3, with Miami winning the tiebreaker so it gets #2 first. The 5-11 teams from worst to least worst are Clev, Chi, TB and Tenn, so they pick in spots 3-6 as Clev - Chi - TB - Tenn, Chi - TB - Tenn - Clev, TB - Tenn - Clev - Chi, Tenn - Clev - Chi - TB, and so on.

Wierd - I don't know. I looked at the first 5 in each round (before trades), and noticed the orders cycle - meaning the order in Round 5 is the same as in Round 1, Round 6 as in Round 2, etc. (I didn't look higher than five, so I might be wrong...) Round 1: SF - Miami - Clev - Chi - TB -... Round 2: SF - Clev - Miami - TB - Tenn -... Round 3: SF - Miami - Clev - Tenn - Oak -... Round 4: SF - Clev - Miami - Oak - Chi -... Round 5: SF - Miami - Clev - Chi - TB -... Round 6: SF - Clev - Miami - TB - Tenn -... Round 7: SF - Miami - Clev - Tenn - Oak -...

Something like 9,500 for their opener, according to the story about the Bills players there. NFLE does not exist to make money. It exists for one reason: so that the NFL can perpetuate the idea in the US that football is going global, that the world thinks football is great, and that rugby - the de facto global 'football' - doesn't exist. Another example: remember the first exhibition games played in Japan a year or so ago? They made a big deal, frequently repeated in the booth, that they had to play in baseball stadiums because there were no regulation football fields. Funny, but they could have used any of the fields of the professional rugby teams there. But then the announcers would have been talking about rugby in Japan instead of baseball, which is not considered a competing sport. So why does the NFL do this? Rugby is a big sport internationally, but it's not going to make professional inroads in the US - they've got short-sighted clowns in management/ownership that would make MLB and the NHL blush. However, the NFL didn't get to #1 by being complacent - it thinks very long-term. Part of their strategy against rugby inroads here is discouraging any discussion of rugby. So my theory is that the NFL considers NFLE to be a sort of inexpensive expeditionary force which lets them keep the initiative against world rugby and influence the overseas coverage by american media. [For what it's worth, Germany is the most successfull country for NFLE. There are several reasons for this, one of which is that in contrast to the UK, France, and Italy, I believe there is no professional rugy played there.]