Tag: sports

I’m cautiously optimistic about the hiring of Zimmer, which is more than I can say for every hire since Denny Green was hired after turning around Stanford. The proof is in the pudding, but hiring an experienced and respected defensive coordinator, who produced top 10 defenses three years in a row, is a big step forward for a franchise that hired third-rate coaches like Mike Tice and Brad Childress in succession. Dallas fans still miss him; he had the top defense in the league with them and they haven’t had one since.

Leslie Frazier might be a second-rate coach; jury is still out on him since his two primary problems were a) being too conservative, and b) Christian Ponder. He had to go, no question, but I’m not convinced he can’t be a successful head coach in the NFL if he learns from his failure with the Vikings. See: Bill Belichick.

When the whole coaching carousel kicked off, my preferences were Whisenhunt, followed by Zimmer. So, I’m pleased that the Vikings hired one of the sane candidates. And the fact that they didn’t hire Jim Caldwell AND get the benefit of playing against a Caldwell-coached team twice a year, is a bonus.

I hope that the playoff games to date have shut up the foolish advocates of re-seeding the playoff systems. I mean, with three games on the first weekend going right down to the wire, can they honestly pretend that anyone would have benefited from not granting home games to the division champions?

And the ease with which both New England and Seattle dealt with the winners of the wild card round further demonstrates that it doesn’t really matter who is playing on wild card weekend, as the home teams on the divisional round are the better teams anyhow.

I was impressed by both the New England running game and the Seattle defense. I hadn’t seen much of Seattle, and let’s face it, it didn’t take much to shut down Air Frazier this year. But their linebackers and secondary attack the receivers in a way that I haven’t seen since the 2000 Ravens. They can definitely beat the Broncos; the Patriots might actually prove the more difficult challenge.

Some will complain that Russell Wilson didn’t do much, but he did what he had to do when he had to do it. He looked like Fran Tarkenton at times, although to be a true Tarkenton scramble, the ball has to either end up a) a two-yard completion, or b) a touchdown. And while I’m glad that the Vikings got a nice bounty of draft picks in exchange for Percy Harvin, I couldn’t help but feeling bad for the guy. He’s a great player, but he just can’t seem to stay on the field.

Everyone is expecting a Seattle-Denver Super Bowl, but both teams have vulnerabilities that could appear at the worst possible time. I think I’d like to see Brady and Belichick get one more ring myself. I’m just glad to see the Packers out of it, and it would be nice to see the 49ers lose this weekend too.

In any event, this is an NFL Open thread.

The bravely outspoken Chris Kluwe is rapidly retreating from his
previous comments about the moral imperative to blackball Mike Priefer
and render him unemployable now that current Vikings are speaking out against him.

Harrison Smith came to the
defense of special-teams coordinator Mike Priefer on Friday, calling the
accusations made by former punter Chris Kluwe “a shame.”

As
a rookie in 2012, Smith said he attended many special-teams meetings
with Priefer and Kluwe. “In my experience with Coach Priefer, he has
been nothing but a
classy guy,” Smith said in a phone interview. “He’s been respectful for
everybody’s views, whether you’re black, white, Mexican, any religion.
… I just think it’s a shame to take a shot at a guy when he can’t
defend himself. I just don’t think it’s very fair that you can say
whatever you
want that somebody said something to you and you don’t really have any
person to back it up. I don’t think that’s good. I just think it’s a
slippery slope.”

The article also notes that Vikings kicker Blair
Walsh has also spoken publicly in defense of the special teams coach.
Underlying Sparklegate is the fact that there isn’t a single sane player
in the NFL who wants the league to get into the business of politically
policing the views of its players and its coaches. Even if Priefer did
say it would be a smashing idea to put all the gays on an island and
nuke it until it glows, not only is that his perfect right to express
his opinion, but I guarantee it is a more moderate view than that held
by many of the black players in the league. They’re not exactly what one
would call keen on “that sweet stuff”. Can’t be in there with that,
nah.

As an NCAA D1 sprinter, I competed against several
future NFL players. And believe me, merely being a) white, and b) under
200 pounds was enough to provoke suspicious stares and the occasional
interrogation about your sexual preferences. From what I observed, elite
black athletes really do not like the “little white faggots” who
fetishize them.

Remember, the NFL does not only consist
of educated white coaches who speak in hyperbole. As politically
correct as the league is, it also has to be coldly realistic about the
possibility of groups of 75 IQ steroid-addled physical specimens
reacting to an inappropriate pass in the locker room by beating someone
to death. The Hernandez case is bad enough; like it or not, the NFL has
very good reasons for wanting to keep homosexuality tightly locked in
the closet and none of them involve religious white conservatives.

It appears Sparklepunter is finally beginning to realize just how deeply he has put his foot in it. If he doesn’t continue to rapidly backtrack, he’s going to come out of this looking more racist than a card-carrying Ku Klux Klan member.

I was amused to see all the Eagles fans taunting the Chiefs fans and welcoming them to Andy Reid Hell, only for Chip Kelly’s team to go out and lay an egg at home against the outdoors-challenged Saints.

I assume the Bengals will have little more trouble with the Chargers than the 49ers do with the Packers, but then, I assumed that a 28-point lead in the third quarter was safe too.

Chris Kluwe continues to insert his hypocritical foot into his mouth while garnering absolutely no support from anyone in the National Football League:

“I don’t know if the team would have kept me if the message was different. I think it is really unfortunate that in the NFL it seems like you can do a wide variety of awful things but if you speak out on a social issue then that’s what appears to be the bright line. The ‘hey you can’t cross that’. What does that say about our priorities? We’d rather have felons and racists and abusers then someone speaking out on issues.”

Those thoughts make Kluwe question if he even wants to come back to the National Football League.

“I don’t know if I want to deal with the unreality of the NFL anymore. It really is this bubble of people who think actions have no consequences and they can act however they want.”

If he did want to come back Kluwe isn’t sure if anyone would want him, now.

“I don’t know if there are any owners or head coaches out there that are willing to deal with everything that comes along with (signing me).”

Kluwe isn’t surprised no other players have come to his defense.

I draw your attention to that last part. The homosexual advocates are constantly trying to claim that those who are opposed to normalizing and institutionalizing sexual abnormalities are outnumbered, but the fact is that we remain the majority and we always will. The Left will cite its cherry-picked polls and point to the youth, making the same static mistake it makes about everything, ignoring the fact that a) the youth are stupid, and, b) most of them grow up eventually.

The ironic thing is that while the idiot punter likely fancies himself an “anti-racist”, but there is nothing, short of a complete ban on African players, that would have more racist consequences than banning criminals and abusers from the league. This guy is even dumber than he first appeared.

Kluwe has no support from the players and I daresay he has even less from the coaches around the league in light of his statements about the Vikings coaches and general manager. Leslie Frazier, for all that he failed as a head coach, is a very well-respected defensive coordinator, and has already been hired by Tampa Bay. And after openly declaring his intention to see that one of his coaches is never employed again, Kluwe is the very last person who can complain about being blackballed.

And let’s not forget that Chris Culliver of the 49ers was publicly criticized by the team for expressing his views on homogamy.

Jerry Jones wants to turn the NFL into the NBA. Why not, when Roger Goodell appears to be intent on turning it into the WNBA?

If Cowboys owner Jerry Jones had his way, more than 12 teams would be in the postseason right now. Jones was asked on 105.3 The Fan (via ESPN.com)
whether he would support expanding the playoffs from six teams per
conference to eight teams per conference, and he said he likes that idea
because it would allow more teams to enter the playoffs and give more
fan bases a reason to get excited about the NFL in January.

This is so mind-bogglingly stupid. I don’t know if Jerry is a liberal or not, but his reasoning certainly is. Liberals are binary thinkers who believe everything is static, and that the situation will remain the same except for whatever changes they introduce to it. They don’t deal well with complexity and they don’t understand that the act of introducing those changes intrinsically changes the previous situation.

Jones assumes that because twelve fan bases are (supposedly) excited about their team making the playoffs, increasing the number of fan bases to sixteen will increase the overall excitement. But that isn’t true, because increasing the percentage of teams that make the playoffs from 37.5% to 50 percent will reduce the perceived value of making the playoffs.

In fact, it’s been obvious to me that the value of the playoffs has already been watered down, as no one really starts to think their team has a chance to make the Super Bowl until the divisional round of the playoffs anyhow. The difficulty teams are having in selling out their tickets to the wild card round can’t be entirely blamed on this, as I suspect the economy and the New NFL rules are at least partly responsible. Regardless, the fact that three of four home teams are already having a tough time selling tickets with four games this weekend only underlines the idiocy of the idea of further expanding the playoffs.

The fans obviously realize how bad the idea is. In the PFT poll with 16,398 voters, 75 percent are against it.

Many people are rightly responding contemptuously to the hypocritical, self-serving, and poisonous article that Chris Kluwe wrote on Deadspin, in which he called one of the top special teams coaches in the NFL a “bigot” and called Leslie Frazier and Rick Spielman “cowards”. What a lot of people don’t know is that Kluwe also called Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, Logan Mankins and Vincent Jackson “douchebags” back in 2011. He is a nasty little piece of work.

Now he’s spewing venom in public about the fact that he lost his job not because he was an overpriced, mediocre punter who finished 22nd in the league, cost more than 4 times more than his replacement, and then lost his job again when he was beaten out by a rookie in Oakland, but because Mike Priefer is a bigot. Seriously. And yet, who would you rather pay $1.63 million for the season, Kluwe’s salary or the cumulative salaries of Jeff Locke, (whose 2013 punting stats were nearly identical to Kluwe’s 2012 stats), Blair Walsh, (one of the best kickers in the league), Cordarrelle Patterson, (All-Pro WR with a legitimate claim to offensive rookie of the year), and Xavier Rhodes, (a mediocre, but improving cornerback).

It’s my belief, based on everything that happened over the course of
2012, that I was fired by Mike Priefer, a bigot who didn’t agree with
the cause I was working for, and two cowards, Leslie Frazier and Rick
Spielman, both of whom knew I was a good punter and would remain a good
punter for the foreseeable future, as my numbers over my eight-year
career had shown, but who lacked the fortitude to disagree with Mike
Priefer on a touchy subject matter.

That’s quite the sentence there. He doesn’t write any better than he punted. If you cut through all the cheap shots and name-calling, Kluwe is saying that he believes he was fired. This is news? We all know he was cut and justifiably so. He wasn’t terrible, but he wasn’t a particularly good punter either. He also had a serious downside; going back to 2002, no punter in the league gave up more return touchdowns than Kluwe. In fact, in the last 384 team seasons, not a single team gave up as many punt return touchdowns as the four (4!) that Kluwe did in 2008. Among Vikings fans, Kluwe was much less notorious for his mouth than for frequently outkicking the punt coverage and kicking untimely touchbacks when the team had the chance to pin the opponent deep in its own end.

I saw every game in which he punted and at no point did I think it was surprising that Kluwe lost his job. There were fans who wanted to get rid of him after 2008 and 2010. Was it surprising that the Vikings drafted Jeff Locke in the 5th round? Sure, but not as surprising as drafting Christian Ponder in the 1st round or the Jaguars drafting Bryan Anger in the 3rd round. Don’t forget that a few months later Kluwe lost the Oakland job to an undrafted free agent, Marquette King. We’re not talking about Ray Guy here, or even Andy Lee.

Furthermore, Kluwe is actually dumb enough to argue that the Vikings would have been fully justified to cut him for his immoral beliefs:

If there’s one thing I hope to achieve from sharing this story, it’s to make sure that Mike Priefer never holds a coaching position again in the NFL, and ideally never coaches at any level. (According to the Pioneer Press, he is “the only in-house candidate with a chance” at the head-coaching job.) It’s inexcusable that someone would use his status as a teacher and a role model to proselytize on behalf of his own doctrine of intolerance, and I hope he never gets another opportunity to pass his example along to anyone else.

In other words, Kluwe thinks it is absolutely fine to deprive someone of a livelihood on the basis of their beliefs. So, what is he complaining about then? If employers have the right to fire people for their beliefs, then the Vikings’ coaches were right to cut Kluwe. If they do not and the coaches were wrong to cut Kluwe, then how can he possibly call for Mike Priefer, who coached the Vikings special teams to fifth and sixth-place DVOA rankings in 2012 and 2013, to never again hold a coaching position at any level. If the NFL is going to take such a radical pro-homosexual position, it had better realize it is going to lose most of its fans.

As the Vikings themselves stated: “Any notion that Chris was released from our football team due to his
stance on marriage equality is entirely inaccurate and inconsistent with
team policy. Chris was released strictly based on his football
performance.”

Kluwe is the scrawny, shrewish public face of left-wing totalitarianism. He demonstrates how if you permit a leftist into your organization, he will attempt to destroy you if you do not allow him to dictate your actions, your words, and even your thoughts. Obviously, by Kluwe’s own standards, he should never have been permitted to play in the NFL in the first place.

Just shut up and go away, Kluwe. We Vikings fans never thought much of you anyhow.

Someone needs to punch Mike Florio in the mouth for being so abjectly stupid and trying to break what isn’t broken:

Today, the NFC West has a trio of 10-win teams; the fourth-place Rams have the same record as the Seahawks did when they won the division in 2010. But winning the division, no matter how bad a division may be, continues to carry a playoff berth and a home game.  While it would be unfair and impractical strip a division winner from a berth in the postseason, why does the best of four bad teams deserve a home playoff game?

The league has shown no inclination to take the automatic home game away from the division winner, but there’s no reason to continue to reward the best of four bad teams with a home playoff game.  Home-field advantage in the postseason should be earned not via six divisional games but by all 16.

Fortunately, the NFL has shown in recent years that it understands what so many media idiots do not, and that is the value of the divisional rivalries. The single reason there have been so many good games at the end of the last two seasons is that the NFL has finally gotten wise to the notion of ensuring that teams play a divisional rival on Week 17. This increases the chances that a Week 17 game will matter; three of the four NFC divisional championships were determined yesterday.

Here are the two primary problems that all the “seeding” criers fail to recognize. First, it would absolutely not be more fair to ignore the division winners and seed each conference by record. Because each team plays each divisional rival twice while not playing some teams in the conference at all, the schedules are not directly comparable. Within the division, the schedules are much more evenly matched, since each team not only plays each other twice, but also plays against teams in the same division. Each of the division races are therefore qualitatively different.

Second, even if we ignore the schedules and decide that the regular season records are the only things that matter, then how can it be argued that conferences are important when divisions do not?  If it is unfair for San Francisco to have to play at Green Bay when the 49ers have the better record, how can it be denied that it is even more unfair for a 10-6 Arizona team to miss the playoffs when an 8-7-1 NFC North champion Packers and a 9-7 San Diego wild card team qualify? If records matter more than divisions and conferences, but “it would be unfair and impractical strip a division winner from a berth in the postseason” then shouldn’t Arizona not claim the last seed in the AFC playoffs?

In fact, if we stick with the logic being cited, it should be obvious that it is unfair to permit a single game to decide the NFL champion rather than 16 regular-season games. In addition to getting rid of divisions and conferences, record-based fairness demands getting rid of the playoffs. Sound ridiculous? That’s precisely how Serie A awards Lo Scudetto. That’s how the English Premier League settles the English championship, along with every other European and Latin American country.

The NFL isn’t broken. People like Florio should stop trying to fix it. There are legitimate some problems, such as the officiating and the concussion/tackling issue, but there is absolutely no problem with how teams qualify for the playoffs. The move to four divisions per conference was a good one and the importance of the divisions, and winning a divisional championship, should not be reduced.

The Minnesota Vikings are in the market for a new coach.

While the Browns got a head start on Black Monday last night, we have our first firing of the day, as Leslie Frazier has been let go by the Vikings. The Vikings announced the move via their Twitter feed moments ago.

“Unfortunately, we did not achieve consistent success and did not achieve the progress we expected,” Vikings General Manager Rick Spielman said in a statement. “We believe a coaching change is needed to help build a successful team moving forward.”

The Vikings fell off a cliff this year, following an impressive playoff run with a 5-10-1 mark. That left Frazier 21-32-1 in three years and change with the team.

I thought Frazier would be fired since the first quarter of the second game of the season. I couldn’t believe he chose to start Christian Ponder after it became perfectly clear, in the first game, that Ponder is a backup quarterback. Combined with some serious coaching cowardice that demonstrated his inability to play the percentages as well as some truly strange player selections, I never saw any reason to keep him as a head coach besides the fact that he is a good and decent man.

One of the more remarkable things about the NFL is the inability of coaches to make reasonably quick decisions. They always seem to have to wait until something is inescapably obvious to even the most casual fan before making a decision. It’s eminently clear that many of them are not as intelligent as their quarterbacks.

I don’t have a strong opinion on any of the potential candidates except Jack Del Rio. It would be a huge mistake to hire him, as he is not only a previously failed coach, but a man of suboptimal character as well. One can perhaps excuse that sort of thing if you’re getting a Darth Hoody, but Del Rio is hardly Belichick.

Ken Whisenhunt struck me as a pretty good coach when he had a quarterback. Of course, after his post-Warner experience in Arizona, he might be less than enthusiastic about the situation in Minnesota.

Some think Spielman should go, but I don’t think so. He made some brilliant roster moves, including dumping Percy Harvin at precisely the right time. He blew it on Ponder, (a pick that was completely inexplicable at the time), but he’s neither the first nor last to miss on a first-round QB. I very much like that he isn’t overly enchanted with the Vick-style Quarterback 2.0 types, so it won’t surprise me if he gets the next one right.