RedRamage

While I agree that a NFL "minor league" could work, honestly the NFL doesn't need it. Colleges provide an excellent avenue for teams to be able to watch players develop without any of the risks of paying a big contract for a guy who ends up a bust after a few years in the minors or has a career ending injury. I supposed one possibility is for NFL teams to put in long shot type players and have the team pay their salary. Maybe even expand the draft for another round, expand the practice squad and allow NFL teams to put as many practice squad players as they want into the USFL. NFL teams would need to pay these players the USFL salary on top of the NFL practice squad pay, but any player who played in the USFL gets protection for the up coming year... sort of a "restricted" practice squad where a team can choose to reject another teams attempt to sign a practice squad player, but then must double that players salary for the remainder of the season. The other options is to target the guys who are first or second year college players who want to make money now rather than wait until they are eligible for the NFL. But how many good players are they going to be able to find who fit in this category?

Surprising to no one, Campbell is confirming that Lynn is out: https://www.detroitlions.com/news/campbell-confirms-lions-are-parting-ways-with-anthony-lynn Who's up next? Ben Johnson?

Fairly high chances imho.

Are you suggesting that if the Lions get the ball first that it will then be easier to stop Rodger on the GB next possession? I suppose one could make the argument that if the Lions march down the field and get a TD that it will build momentum and let the defense feed off that to have "better energy" or whatever to stop Rodgers. But one could just as easily make the case that had the Lions had to punt, or worse fumble or give up an INT, that it would have built momentum for the Packers and allowed their offense to feed off from that.

Deferring the opening kick extremely common.

While I agree with this, I expected it to be from the other direction... that Lynn would want to move on sooner than the Lions wanted him to leave... that he'd start getting HC looks. Instead it seems to be the Lions who are ready to move on.

200% agree (That is... I wanna see 'em at least 4x per season! 🙂 )

I mean, in a perfect world I'd like the coordinators to be great fits who work out well for the team, so yeah... if one already essentially failed half way through the season sure... that's a bit of a mark on Campbell. But I guess it's a relatively small mark. As someone else said, Coordinators change regularly and it's hard to know why this partnership failed. Without knowing more I'm not ready to put too much weight on this, especially given that the offense seemed to improve under Campbell's play calling and there doesn't seem to be any friction with Campbell and Aaron Glenn. (This seems to me to point out that it's not an ego thing. It's not Campbell saying: "I want to me the guy calling the plays regardless of whether that hurts the team or not!") On an interesting side note, Lynn was only an OC for 14 games with the Bills in 2016. Other than that he's been Assistant HC and/or various position coaches. I'm not sure if he called offensive plays when he was HC for the Chargers from '17-'20).

So I'm in the middle of reading a biography of Dutch Clark, and of course one of the interesting things about football back then was that players were two-way players... you had to play both defense and offense. It made me wonder: Would you more more interested in a football league if players had to be play both offense and defense? Obviously there would need to be some thoughts on the rules for how to handle this, but I'm just curious what people's thoughts are. Back when the Arena League was a much bigger thing I remember they had this and I thought it was an interesting twist.

Honestly I'm just disappointed that he isn't a CB. I mean, can there be a more perfect name for a cornerback?

Given that it's being announced on Feb 2nd, I'm holding out hope that it will be the Washington Groundhogs.

Ain't nothing wrong with that if your getting the value you want out of it. There's something to be said for the simplicity of having it all in one place. That's certainly a big reason why I've stuck with it for so long... that plus the land line. For a long time my wife never wanted a cellphone because she didn't want to be accessible all the time. Even after she finally caved we still kept the land line cause as a school teacher she didn't want her parents to have her cell number. We'll probably be dropping the landline now finally.

Yeah... there's always the Skull and Crossbones option for people of course.

If anyone else has a deep seated dislike of the Packers and wonders why... well, look no further than 1931. That was the year that the Packers and the Portsmouth Spartans have a game scheduled to end the year. The Spartans were 11-3, the Packers 12-2. But the game was marked as "tentative" because of the possibility of bad weather. If the two teams played the the game and the Spartans would it would have triggers a play off to see who was league champs. The Packers, citing the "tentative" status of the game declined to play, thereby not risking their chance at a league championship.

Yeah, I see that there's not many options there and Bally is supposedly looking to launch their own streaming network with a rumored price around $20 a month! Not sure what I'm gonna do with that but right now it seem like it would be cheaper to not get a plan that includes Bally and then just subscribe April-Sept. I don't watch the Pistons or RedWings really.

The NFL does not have it listed, but I believe that GB has locked up home field advantage. Obviously if they win, they're 14-3 as both TB and LA can only get to 13 wins. Furthermore if they lose and both TB and LA lose again, most wins. There's three tie options if GB loses and ends with 13-4: Here's the NFL tie breaker procedures: https://www.nfl.com/standings/tie-breaking-procedures. This page says to use Wild Card tie-breaker procedures to determine homefield for division champs. Option 1: GB and TB: Head-to-head - They did not play each other. Best record in conference: GB: 9-3, TB: 8-4. Result: GB gets Home Field. Option 2: GB and LA: Head-to-head: Green Bay beat the Rams in week 12. Result: GB gets Home Field. Options 3: GB, LA, and TB all tied at 13-4: Not Applicable (used to eliminate multiple teams in same division) Head-to-head sweep: LA did play both GB and TB, but won once and lost once, so can't be used. Best record in conference: LA and GB both would have 9-3, TB 8-4, TB is eliminated This this point it reverts to tie breaker between just GB and LA, and that's already shown to favor GB. Result: GB get Home Field. If I'm doing everything right, there's no way GB does NOT end up with home field advantage here so I think they should be shown at clinching home field, but whatever... On the opposite side of the ball, the Lions nearly locked into picking second. It's possible that Jacksonville upsets the Colts, but the Colts need to win to stay in the play off hunt. I think there may be a convoluted way that they could tie with Jacksonville and still end up in the playoffs but I don't wanna work that all out. The upshot is it's highly unlikely that the Jags will win. Assuming that they lose the Lions get the #2 pick regardless of whether they win or lose.

With the changing landscape in media I've all but decided to cut TV service from Xfinity. Just too expensive for too many channels that I never use. I'm probably sticking with Xfinity for Internet because they are the only cable provider in the area AND we use Xfinity mobile so we get that dirt cheap if we keep internet service. I'm leaning towards YouTube TV right now, but I'd be very curious to hear from others what they use and if they are happy with it. Questions: 1a. What do you use for streaming media? 1b. Are you happy with the quality of streaming? Any issues with connectivity or buffering? 1c. Do you have a cloud DVR service with it and thoughts on that? 1d. Does the service include On Demand content? 2a. What speed Internet are you using? Does it meet your needs well? 2b. How many separate streams does your family typically do? 2c. Have you ever run into issues with using too much data from your internet provider? (Xfinity gives 1.2TB per month) Thanks in advance for any knowledge you can share.

This submarine commander has a pretty cool name.

It's not as simple as bad teams don't get markets, good team do. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that that definitely comes into play, but there are plenty of teams who aren't "Lions Bad" who didn't get a market, and most glaringly the Packers did not get one.

Yeah, that might be part of it... I think it's about marketing and doing things overseas to try and expand your fan base, so I suppose there has to be some level of commitment to working in those areas and it's entirely possible the 14 either didn't want to do that or didn't seem like they were be able to do it to the NFL's standards. But even beyond that I'm trying to understand if a team is awarded a country... is that the entire country? And do the countries that have multiple teams, do they get different geographical areas? It just seems odd. Not that I expect the NFL to sit down and explain their marketing strategy to individual fans, but I just have so many questions...

Kinda a weird thing... I don't understand how all this is supposed to work given that many teams have multiple areas and many areas have multiple teams. And yeah, the Lions don't have one, but neither do the Falcons, Ravens, Bills, Bengals, Browns, Packers, Colts, Chargers, Saints, Giants, Eagles, Titans or Washington... so nearly half the league.

So are they saying that Jacksonville basically didn't want to keep around anymore and searched for a reason to fire him that would let them get out of the contact? If we assume that's true (and honestly, I believe it) then it all depends on whether they reason they found was a good enough reason to stand on it's own. I means it's a tricky thing because we all know that if the kicked a player (let's assume it's true for the sake of argument) AND the team was doing really well, they'd probably find a way to sweep it under the rug. So on one hand Meyer could argue that this wouldn't have been an offense that a good coach would get fired for, therefore this is a witch hunt, and therefore pay me my money. But on the other hand, physically attacking an employee is certainly big enough of an offense that it would get a lot of people fired. If a company wasn't looking to fire a person, then found out he kicked someone and fired the person for that, most people would say: "Yeah, I get it. Can't have that in the work place." Not too many people would try to sue their employer and claim being fired for kicking a coworker was too stiff a penalty. The Jags may have been looking for an excuse to get out of Meyer's contract. But unfortunately for Meyer, he gave them a really good excuse in my humble opinion.

Remember when Denver was like a RB paradise? No matter who they had back there seemed to just light it up every year? I don't want to jinx anything, but it feels like our OL right now is doing that for our RBs. Now obviously some of this is on the RBs themselves, but I think part of the success on the ground needs to be given to the OL as well.

Yeah, that's how many now? I'm not sure I want to trust this guy moving forward. With all the other RBs we've got who are doing well (when not injured of course) I don't think we should carry a guy who can't carry the ball safely.

Honestly, just fire the coach now. Who would do such a thing??