So, Any Chance the Indians Blow This Thing?
September 9, 201610 Bold predictions for the 2016 Browns season
September 9, 2016Happy football Friday with the impending season opener for the Browns! I’m forcing the excitement because honestly, I haven’t been less geeked for the opening of a Browns season in a very long time. Maybe this team will shock and surprise me with competence and competitiveness, but I truly expect them to lose a lot of games. Despite the expanded interest in playing the lottery and betting on the Browns to win the Super Bowl, I think it’s as close to a zero-percent chance as I’ve ever seen. I was more delusional about my team before the 1999 season to be perfectly honest. I was so innocent back then. Regardless, we have a football game to watch, and I will do so out of duty. Until then… while we’re waiting…
Last Chance U was the real Hard Knocks this year…
No sooner did we punt on this latest L.A. Rams season of HBO’s Hard Knocks than someone recommended the Netflix docu-series Last Chance U. For the lack of excitement for Jeff Fisher’s L.A. entrance, I replaced it with fascination in Scooba, Mississippi with coach Buddy Stephens and his talented JUCO title teams at East Mississippi Community College. Rather than push through another of the familiar NFL storylines regarding bubble players, stars and training camp hijinx, my wife and I watched kids trying to navigate the scholastic stepping stones and barely pretending to check enough boxes to qualify as students as well as athletes. It’s well worth the watch.
The players we meet are fascinating. Wyatt Roberts is the incumbent quarterback who has been there, only to see Florida State transfer, John Franklin III, enter the scene and try to take his job. We have talented running back D.J. Law who flirts with scholastic disaster via attendance requirements that should be easy to achieve. The real star to me was Ronald Ollie. His life story is fascinating and tragic as we learn about a kid with a giant heart and massive, yet understandable, trust issues.
I won’t spoil any of the show, but I will say that the series opens with a bench-clearing brawl. This brawl ends up becoming a major fulcrum to the entire real-life storyline that played out on a major media stage for this little team out of Mississippi. Other than the players, the biggest star to emerge from the series is the team academic advisor Brittany Wagner, who also serves as the team’s big sister and mother figure. She’s a lovable single mother who refuses to let these giants push her around, even as they occasionally try to fight off her help.
These players, coaches and personnel are both heroes and anti-heroes at times throughout the series, which is some actual reality on television. It’s this imperfectionΒ that makes Last Chance U so appealing in a world we know isn’t always so cut and dry. These are kids that mostly just want to play football and they’re using this school as a way to leap to a better program. Yet some still find some nobility in how they carry themselves and try to get themselves to another level personally.
Podcast with Harv
For the second time I reached out to Harv to talk about the Cleveland Browns. On Wednesday night we turned on the ole Skype machine and talked about everything from what kinds of inefficiencies the Browns might be trying to exploit with their “moneyball,” to whether or not they are actually tanking. It’s a great podcast conversation because tanking means such specific things toΒ different people and in that format you can actually find some common ground, which I think we did.
Hope you enjoy it.
Your weekly moment of soccer zen…
Just. put. it. on. net. Good things could happen. (Watch how the defenders barely react or look at this keeper after he fails to effectively block this shot. Everyone knows he boned it.)
Music of the week Sigur Ros…
It’s always a good time of year for Sigur Ros, but as we officially move into Autumn I really like it as a soundtrack to falling leaves and season’s change. It’s not necessarily sad music, but it’s thematic and wistful. This might be my very favorite version of Vaka, originally from the ( ) album. This was from their movie, Heima, where they played their songs in various forms all across their native Iceland.
49 Comments
The knocks on Cam Newton’s helmet (all uncalled, of course) really put an immediate damper on the NFL season. Welcome back to rationalizing gladiatorism.
And yet, I’ll be watching.
I agree some of them probably should have been called, but I think overall the refs did a decent job last night. Helmet to helmet is going to occur at times. It is just going to happen. Hard to distinguish if a player is trying to avoid doing it or not if it is borderline.
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I think part of the problem is that Cam immediately whines the first time he’s hit. Last night, he did it in the 1st Quarter, when it wasn’t a late hit or helmet to helmet. That, coupled with the fact that he’s the biggest guy on the field (which shouldn’t matter, but it does), I think causes the refs to slacken. I’m not saying it’s right (it isn’t), but these guys are human, too.
What really cheeses me off is that Tom Brady can also whine the first time he’s hit and immediately get rewarded with a late flag. (I have no real evidence, but I’m CERTAIN it’s happened – anyway, you know what I mean.)
Wow. You got spammed within 10 minutes of commenting. That’s a record. Nice work, Virginiatbledsoe1.
Hard to be too tough on that goalkeeper. Drogba put a crazy knuckle on that ball.
They’ve been quick this morning. They have way too much free time on their hands if they spend all day posting on message boards.
Wait a sec…
Beat me to it. Yes, it should have been stopped. But yes, it was harder than it looked at first watch. You can really see it on the slo-mo.
Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers probably whine more than any QBs in history. There’s no way to sugarcoat it, those refs were awful at watching the QB last night.
I saw 7 comments when I arrived this morning and got all excited for the Last Chance U and Sigur Ros chatter that was sure to be awaiting me!
Bronco defenders stopped even worrying about having their head up and just watched his cleats as they drilled him. This is a textbook penalty:
https://twitter.com/PhilHecken/status/774092445025902596
Another thing that hurts Cam is that when he does run, the helmet-to-helmet rule is lessened a ton. I think refs are way too quick to assume he’s running or get it programmed that he is at times.
Regardless, the NFL needs to find a way to fix it. It was really bad last night.
(1) After 8+ years, you should know better
(2) Sorry (sort of)
Haven’t seen Last Chance U, but if it helps, I’d like to. Your review convinced me.
I don’t know Sigur Ros from Ra’s al Ghul. Otherwise, I’d jump in.
Love the Soccer Zen, as always.
Oh, and I look forward to the podcast.
Part of the problem is that you brilliantly clued us into a couple of things that we have to check out in the future. Hard to chatter over the unknown. (Although I guess that won’t stop us from gabbing about the 2017 NFL Draft. Probably on Monday.)
I met an early 20’s Bernie after a big game on Sunday. Incredibly bright, articulate and personable across a large crowd. Early 50’s Bernie, not so much. More than a little irony here.
Occasional trolls? “Everything but Trump”? Gotcha covered!
I make my first official, non-comment reference to the 2017 NFL Draft today. I’m not waiting for Monday cuz that’s all hindsight π
Good for you. You have to stay out in front of these things.
Drogba Zen is always welcome! π (I was just looking at the new Chelsea kit online, 78 quid for a jersey, oy.)
I tried the Sigur Ros. I kept waiting for it to get good, and it just didn’t happen. But if it rocks someone’s boat, great. I was gonna tee up season 2 of Wayward Pines, but now I’m listening to the podcast instead.
The NFL could stop this on a dime if it was truly their priority, just like the NHL could stop the fights: suspend the offender for the season, thereby leaving his team and teammates to pay the price of his absence. But the NFL has a problem that maybe is impossible to solve. Can you permit some head shots which may cause horrific damage and justify it as “part of basic football,” while parsing others away as “unnecessarily dangerous” or whatever?
One issue is that the players and league worry about how to modify instinctive, ingrained violent player behavior and still keep the violence fans crave. Meanwhile, fans sensitive to players’ futures see the above – what possible diff does it make if there were offsetting penalties? Will the league happily process every athlete like a cow in the stockyard?
Meanwhile, a growing segment of fans decry the NFL’s concussions but pay to watch ultimate fighting’s non-stop head injuries, a cognitive dissonance I cannot understand. Poor Goddell – he is the ultimate pinky to the wind Reactor, and profit motive cannot show him a clear path out of this. He’s just going to keep lurching from one crisis to another, putting out weekly fires rather than taking a chance on a new path.
Typically I ignore podcasts, but I saw the special guest, and was like, oh yeah…
Thanks for treating us with one of our fellow inmates.
Great job gentlemen.
As with the catch rule, what fans truly crave is consistency in the calls. If the NFL were calling it consistently, then everyone could make a judgement of whether to watch. If you did, then it is part of the action (like UFC).
But, huge push for Heads-Up football, penalties specific to those types of hits, referee perfectly placed, no call. Brady or Peyton? They get that call. It’s tough.
It’s never to early to talk Browns draft.
http://i.imgur.com/RYYZlS9.gif
Videocast with RGB?
I think it should be audio-only with a random assortment of GIFs rolling throughout. At least you think they were random but the audio proves they were telling a story all along.
Why the league can’t update the helmet so that it is solely protective rather than a hard shell weapon is beyond me. I am no physicist, but if they could only make the outer layer softer, it might prevent the damage that the hard outer shell inflicts.
http://gifsec.com/wp-content/uploads/GIF/2014/07/HAHA-NO-GIF.gif?gs=a
I know that I should not get upset at the goalkeeper, but as a defender, I am upset at this goalkeeper.
Good point. But as goalkeeper’s advocate, he almost assuredly did not do whatever was done to give the free kick!
UFC is brutal, but it’s specifically designed to be that and everyone knows it full well going in. The problem with the NFL is that we’ve all kind of signed on for the less violent version of the sport with beautiful athletic catches over corners who aren’t allowed to play very physically. And yet with a forever-violent line of scrimmage and inconsistent refereeing of headshots, the real cognitive dissonance is between what we see play out in the NFL versus what they say their priority is. The UFC never pretends to place a priority to reduce headshots, so even if you don’t like it, it’s hard to identify unwilling victims. The NFL storyline is one of unwilling victims who were lied to, and the NFL can’t escape that narrative, which I think leads fans to their inconsistent reactions to head trauma in the two different sports.
I’ve always liked the idea of using large inflatable helmets, think beach balls. Not only would the player’s heads be protected, but it would look like a battle of bobblehead teams.
uptick for HARV … i think most of us look forward to his posts … he’s got that certain je ne sais quoi.
uptick for the soccer zen …
Saturday…Stipe defends his UFC heavyweight championship!
nice job on the podcast , HARV … u-da-man.
So, I-AA Charleston Southern has 30+ players suspended for their game at FSU. Including the entire starting OL and starting RB.
Good luck.
So were you suggesting that the Cody Kessler selection in the 3rd Round was a smart move or not? How did that relate to Prescott?
At least in pre-season Prescott has looked far more prepared for the NFL than Kessler, who right now looks like the game is being played at a speed his brain can’t process.
thx, Tiger
Having the Dallas OL in front of you will do that though
most? It better be all.
Now saying 7-10 players
The same process keeps getting repeated here, which goes even farther than +mgbode says. You have these QBs getting trotted out with just piss poor protection as well as bad supporting position players. That’s what happened to Tim Couch in Cleveland. At least some guys like Derek Carr in Oakland have gotten improved supporting casts since they were rookies. It just doesn’t seem to happen in Cleveland.
“The NFL storyline is one of unwilling victims who were lied to, and the NFL can’t escape that narrative …” That may be one storyline, but the linemen, just like the fighters, sure look eyes wide open to me. The long-term implications of football head trauma turns me off regardless of the league’s concealments. Maybe punch drunk older boxers desensitized us to not think through the implications of UFC brutality. Maybe I’ve watched one documentary too many, but watching the fighters take those shots looks as awfu to me as cheering someone get voluntarily lobotomized.
The cast certainly makes a difference but not sure that’s applicable here. Hue’s had Kessler deep down the list with third stringer reps since shortly after he arrived, way before anyone was hitting him or even rushing him full speed. There was mild league-wide surprise that he was drafted so high, and it’s possible he can’t play. We’ll see.
I think they should have the NASCRAP race and the football game at the same time at the Bristol Hootout this weekend.
Google is paying 97$ per hour! Work for few hours and have longer with friends & family! !mj133d:
On tuesday I got a great new Land Rover Range Rover from having earned $8752 this last four weeks.. Its the most-financialy rewarding I’ve had.. It sounds unbelievable but you wont forgive yourself if you donβt check it
!mj133d:
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