Like many of you, I’m sure your exposure of this week’s media attention to the Denver Broncos has been much more about the demise of Peyton Manning (including this little gem) than the #3 Ranked team in the driver’s seat of their division.
Missing in much of the national attention to the NFL and in particular the Denver Broncos narrative, is a lack of discussion on what I’ve found to become a very frustrating and quite literally, ‘game changing’. Continue reading When is a ‘catch’ a catch?
You smell that? That’s the smell of 6-0, or your own farts. One of the two, or both. The media still can’t stop talking about how horrible our offense is. Yet, we had 21 first downs, 36:44 of possession, and 442 total yards. Sure, you could talk about how poor the Browns defense has been this year, but I like to focus on the positives. Our defense made a clutch stop at the end of the 4th quarter and in overtime, while the offense made a clutch win. You can’t ignore that the offense traveled 72 yards in the final series of the game to setup the game-winning field goal. Moving on…
Continue reading Broncos at Browns: The 10 Things I Liked and the 10 Things I Didn’t
Injuries that Denver Broncos players suffered against the Cleveland Browns were not serious, although Shane Ray will miss a couple of weeks.
OLB Shane Ray’s knee injury was not as severe as initially feared. Kubiak confirmed that Ray suffered a sprained medial collateral ligament in his right knee in the second quarter.
Ray will miss some game action as a result of the injury, since MCL sprains usually require a multi-week recovery.
Lerentee McCray is expected to see more snaps and Kenny Anunike could see time at OLB as well.
Emmanuel Sanders and Corey Nelson are considered day to day with a shoulder and a knee injury, respectively.
According to the Broncos official site, Kapri Bibbs was waived and TE Richard Gordon, which was just released over the weekend, has been re-signed to the roster.
Continue reading RB Kapri Bibbs waived; TE Richard Gordon re-signed
The NFL announced today that it will conduct public hearings later this month in Oakland, St. Louis, and San Diego as part of the league’s procedures for evaluating possible franchise relocations. The hearings will take place on October 27 (St. Louis), October 28 (San Diego) and October 29 (Oakland).
The purpose of these hearings is to provide an opportunity for fans and others in the community to ask questions and express their views directly to the NFL before any decisions are made about potential relocation of a club or clubs from a current market. Members of Commissioner Goodell’s executive staff will be in attendance to listen to comments and answer questions from the audience.
If you’ve ever watched John Oliver’s takedown of stadium financing boondoggles, the portion starting at 13:52 is highly relevant to how I think this will go down. Rapaport also says these hearings will be streamed live. If so, October 29 should be some must-see streaming, because, although Raiders fans are typically lacking in many types of characteristics, one area that they decidedly don’t lack in is passion.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone but Broncos’ fans, blinded by childlike enthusiasm for their team, who doesn’t believe that to be true.
As LaCanfora writes http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/writer/jason-la-canfora/25345119/inside-football-as-bad-as-peyton-is-now-its-only-going-to-get-worse:
But if you strip away the fact that this team is still winning games — I think most smart football fans long ago figured out that quarterback wins/losses is an absurd stat — and the fact that it says Manning on the back of his jersey and simply assess the body of work for a highly paid franchise quarterback on a team in Super Bowl-or-bust mode, the only conclusion would be this: The Broncos have a big quarterback problem.
There is no easy fix here. The idea that the shotgun would save Manning has been debunked. He’s one of the worst shotgun passers in the league. Even screen passes have the potential for great misadventure for Manning at this stage, and even with a plethora of gifted weapons he can rarely deliver the ball in a position to tap into much of what they can do.
He cannot make things happen on balls that travel more than 20 yards downfield. He leads the NFL with 10 interceptions and has become one of the more likely pick-six candidates from week to week, especially on anything thrown to the sideline. He’s looked every bit as bad as his quarterback rating of 72.5 would suggest.
Continue reading Jason LaCanfora: “It’s Only Going to Get Worse.”
Steelers defensive end Cameron Heyward is not going to be deterred by the NFL’s fine police. For the second straight week, Heyward adorned his eyeblack with the words Iron and Head, honoring his father who died of cancer. Per Mike Pereira, this will cost him $11,576. Heyward’s personalization comes off the heels of his teammate, running back DeAngelo Williams, being denied a request to wear pink all season to honor his mother who died of breast cancer.
And since this wouldn’t be the NFL without some inconsistency, Williams’s pink-tinged hair ends up being OK. More strikingly, I’m trying to understand how Heyward and Williams can face fines, but Ronnie Hillman can continually get away with his unique and intimidating mouthpieces (which are also breast cancer aware in October!).
Instead of making clumsy attempts of suppressing the personality of players on game day, I feel that the NFL should instead create a uniform (pun intended!) standard to allow players to express a little bit of themselves in their most public moments. The league should create a small space somewhere on the uniform to allow personal messages.
Continue reading The NFL Should Create A Personalized Uniform Space
We’ve talked all season about needing to protect Manning and the ability to run the football. Against the Browns, the offensive line didn’t give up a single sack, allowed only two QB hits and plowed the way for 150 yards rushing (though strangely [EDIT: only Evan Mathis] graded positively, per PFF).
So why is everyone so unhappy?
Tonight’s Patriots-Colts game featured probably the most laughably bad play anyone has seen in the NFL in the last decade, if not longer.
The Colts tried a gadget play on fourth down, seemingly in an attempt to draw the Patriots offsides, and two guys were left alone against five Patriots.
However, the Colts snapped the ball when they weren’t supposed to and, of course, the Patriots got the tackle. On top of that, the Colts were called for illegal formation, which the Patriots declined and got the ball in great field position.
Here’s Chris Burke with the screen shot.
I just want to know how this was supposed to work, hypothetically. pic.twitter.com/cctR6QwzBQ
— Chris Burke (@ChrisBurke_SI) October 19, 2015
The Patriots scored several plays later to go up 34-21.
Care to weigh in, Chris Harris?
What type of play call was that lol
— Chris Harris (@ChrisHarrisJr) October 19, 2015
Yeah, that sums it up. LOLColts.
I don’t have any particular thoughts about the game because I had to listen to it on KOA, but here are a few tweets worth sharing.
* Shaq Barrett had quite a day.
#Broncos Shaq Barrett: 9 tackles, 6 solo, 1.5 sacks, 3 TFL, 1 PD, 2 QB hits while filling in for Ware
— Greg Linton (@agentlinton) October 18, 2015
Continue reading Quick Broncos-Browns Game Stuff From Twitter