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You are here: Home / Open Threads / NFL Open Thread

NFL Open Thread

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I’m watching but this game is just boring. And I don’t mean this Steelers/Browns game in particular, I mean the sport in general.

When does hockey season start?

Hurricane Florence continues to gain strength and it has rained nonstop for 72 hours here and I have standing water everywhere in the backyard EXCEPT by the willow tree. So I got that going for me. It has rained so much I had to go drill holes in the bottom of all my planters on the back deck so they could drain.

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65Comments

  2. 2.

    swiftfox

    Yes. Too many teams, not enough good players, teams too tired to play on Thursday night, bad games on Monday night and in London, ambiguous rules and a commissioner that does not know what is good for the game. Almost stuck with the American History TV lecture on slavery from CSU-Pueblo instead of Raven-Bills.

  3. 3.

    TaMara (HFG)

    Rockies and Dodgers are neck and neck for first place in the NL West and Red Sox are in first place AL East. So I’m happy.

    Not that you asked, but if you don’t have room for another full-size willow, pussy willows are a great addition as a bush and soak up their share of water. Fast growing, attract a truckload of bees in the spring.

  4. 4.

    raven

    Oh don’t you know that someone could get hurt? Thilly Thavage.

  6. 6.

    MobiusKlein

    What is ‘rain’?
    Asking for all of California – the forecast is uncontained oxidation of plants.

  7. 7.

    Corner Stone

    One thing I have noticed about the game of football, and it seems to be consistent. It’s increasingly difficult to defeat the other team when they are scoring TDs and you are scoring field goals.

  8. 8.

    jharp

    I don’t know what happened but I too lost interest in the NFL.

    A few theories.

    Way too many games.

    First three and a half quarters are meaningless.

    Way too many instant replay reviews.

    Not enough defense.

  9. 9.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    My DH is in his element right now, we subscribe to SkySports channel which costs us extra but means that he can watch the NFL games. My only gripe is that we pay for it for 12 months but he only gets to use it for however long the season is. (5 months?) It is extra fun though cause BIL loves the NFL and comes over when games are on for a couple of beers and a game which is nice cause it means Sis and I get to natter and annoy the treacle out of them :)

  11. 11.

    Corner Stone

    I have also found it helps to not throw a 40 yd floating jump ball pass to a WR who is double covered in the end zone.

  12. 12.

    FlyingToaster

    We gave up on Football a couple years ago (even though HerrDoktor grew up in season-tickets-to-the-Dolphins land, and I grew up too poor for that so we’d go over to William Jewell College on Thursday nights to see the Chiefs open practice).

    My beloved minivan (it was brand new 11.5 years ago!) died. It started putting out steam as I was parking at Wegmans, put it out all the way home, and then when I hit the redlight two blocks downhill, just fucking died. Two light cycles later, I was able to restart it and get it to the driveway, but something is spewed all over the engine on the driver’s side, it knocks like a jackhammer, and Sunday hours at both the towing company and the dealership means that I’m getting up early to get it towed (6:45 call, 7am Toyota opens). 6 months too early for me to trade it in on a hybrid Sienna, FFS.

  14. 14.

    Doug R

    Maybe a shorter play clock would help things. Considering the size of rosters, it’s not like anyone’s getting winded.

  15. 15.

    suffragettecity

    Speaking of hockey. It’s not looking good for Crawford and I really feel bad for him. Get the impression he is having real issues w after affects of concussion. Seems pretty strange to me for a goalie.

  16. 16.

    Eric U.

    I like watching football, but give me a highlight reel most of the time. When I really followed the game, I would just tune in for the espn recap. Although, I just watched a PSU-Pitt highlight reel and they played all the good pitt plays at least twice and didn’t cover most of PSU’s 55 points. Which is weird. And yes, I both cheer PSU football and harbor some regret that they are doing well.

    I don’t know what to do about instant replay. I was in favor of it before we had it, but now it’s a boring mess. They need a guy in the booth that says that something was obvious and decided correctly on the field. Who cares if they spotted the ball exactly correctly?

  17. 17.

    Doug R

    @Eric U.:

    I don’t know what to do about instant replay. I was in favor of it before we had it, but now it’s a boring mess. They need a guy in the booth that says that something was obvious and decided correctly on the field. Who cares if they spotted the ball exactly correctly?

    This could be one of the applications of Google Glass? Could also help in baseball.

  18. 18.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    Ha Ha OT my new favourite Farm Foods ad, Hoff is sat on the couch with Welsh wife, both are reading the Farm Foods flyer. Hoff: “oooh Persil pods 6.99 I’ll have to tell the maid” Wife coughs, Hoff “Oh wait we don’t have a maid do we” Wife “no” Hoff “I like it”

  19. 19.

    trollhattan

    Thursday night opener with Philly and somebody who didn’t win the Superbowl. was ugly, ugly, ugly with more penalties than points and all those penalties assured it lasted a looooong time. “You want even more bad football? Then here it is!”

    In sports nobody cares about, the NWSL is headed into playoffs with an absurdly dominant North Carolina and three feisty challengers. Have tickets for the final in two weeks not knowing who will be in it, but counting on home team Portland being one. The Providence Park crowd is the most fun I’ve encountered in any sport.

  20. 20.

    trollhattan

    @Eric U.:
    My formula for football now is to DVR the game and start watching 90 minutes in, fast-forwarding through the fluff and catching Q4 in real time while staying off the interwebs.

  21. 21.

    Cowboy Diva

    @FlyingToaster: having graduated from WJC almost 30 years ago, your post is giving me great nostalgia for autumns in western MO. Sorry to hear about the minivan though; may you be able to eke out another 6 months of use.

  22. 22.

    geg6

    I’m so sick that I don’t give a shit about football, at least today. And this goddam cold and rainy weather after days and days of 90+ degree days isn’t helping. Good news is that they postponed the alumni golf outing tomorrow at which I was assigned to drive the beverage cart. Not surprised since we have to have gotten at least 5-6 inches of rain in the last 24 hours.

    And I agree with you Cole. Bring on hockey season. It is currently my favorite sport.

  24. 24.

    Amir Khalid

    @swiftfox:
    There’s plenty wrong with op-flight pro team sports in America. They are structured wrong, with those closed-shop leagues. The NFL — and American team sports leagues in general — should be a multitiered league with promotion and relegation between tiers, rather than a closed competition for a couple of dozen extremely wealthy teams whose place in the league is never at risk no matter how badly they perform. Teams owned by billionaires shouldn’t have the power to make city governments build them big fancy new stadiums, or the right to move to where it’s easier to shake down City Hall.

  25. 25.

    PaulB

    I stopped watching the NFL several years ago. Spoiled millionaires playing for spoiled billionaires and all of them trying to pick my pocket. And now with CTE, I’m even more determined to never watch again. I’d not lose any sleep at all if the game were to die out.

  26. 26.

    Ked

    I have the colts game on the second tv, but I’m not super interested.

    The main TV has the first (I still think of it as qualifier) round of the London CS:GO major streaming from my PS4. Esports isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I can at least get in a CS game, where the closest I came to football was some bad jr. high flag about 30 years ago. About six hours behind, so I’m still watching Tyloo vs Spirit from this morning. Tyloo is almost the only Chinese team I’ll cheer for – what they did yesterday against Renegades was really inspirational. Anyone who has the guts to try a full-loop T-side Inferno defense has my support.

    CS doesn’t have the biggest money of the esports scene, but it’s not the Overwatch USFL experience (I almost wrote XFL, but that’s not quite fair) nor the slow-burn games of the two major MOBAs. And the top ten or so play-by-play talent are really good ASMR.

    I’m starting to like the developing PUBG pro scene (check out the VODs for the Starladder event a week ago for a really good comeback win across the 4-day event, see https://www.twitch.tv/videos/304932636, though the commentary and sideline talent was… iffy), and I still don’t understand the appeal of Fortnite. (Fortnite as PvE, I would probably enjoy, but the strategy of the battle royale mode just completely escapes me.)

  27. 27.

    trollhattan

    @Ked:
    Confess you’ve literally hit a perfect score in acronyms and jargon I do not comprehend. And yes, I do keep an onion under my belt, which was the style at the time.

  29. 29.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Amir Khalid:

    Teams owned by billionaires shouldn’t have the power to make city governments build them big fancy new stadiums, or the right to move to where it’s easier to shake down City Hall.

    In your dreams.

  32. 32.

    Litlebritdifrnt

    @divF: David Hasselhoff, he started dating a girl from Wales years ago. Has since married her and moved into to her home in Wales. It is precious watching him navigate his way through living in the UK.

  33. 33.

    patrick II

    @Eric U.: for those of you who just like Chi-Lites NFL puts out a 10-minute highlight reel of each game on YouTube on Sunday nights. I found it to be a very good way to watch game without investing three hours.

  36. 36.

    FlyingToaster

    @Gin & Tonic: It’s at nearly 60K; in my previous minivan (the 35-year-old VW Transporter), the engine rebuild was at 60K. I sold it on at about 112K, and bought this one new when I was 5 months pregnant.

    My van does (now, as the kid gets older) ~6K miles per annum; school/music school commuting, summer day camp commuting, me in household procurement mode, 1-2 trips outta Bwahstin into New England per year. If it’s further than NE, I’m taking the Acela or flying.

    I just moved it around to the front of the house; no noise (well for moving 75 feet, I should hope not), but the CEL going and it felt underpowered. The tow guy should have no problem grabbing it off the street rather than trying to get it out of the driveway.

  38. 38.

    Martin

    I agree. I started watching eSports a few years ago and its way more exciting. I think it’s a combination of things:

    1) Pro sports is entirely too dependent on ads and networks and the whole thing to function. It’s constantly taking attention off the sport. We’re increasingly accustomed to Netflix and other services such that our tolerance for commercials is going down.
    2) Esports is much more dynamic in terms of play, something that’s difficult to impossible for conventional sports to do in the sense that you have an overarching strategy throughout the game that allows a team/player behind to catch up. The NFL can adjust their play a bit and sub some players around, but there’s no upgrading your quarterback, etc midgame. It allows a team that’s struggling to change their strategy to be stronger late game and come back. You do see aspects of that in conventional sports, but not to that degree.
    3) Esports are perfectly tuned to provide heaps of tactics throughout the game that can change the trajectory of the game and keep things balanced. Conventional sports just can’t respond in that same way.

    The first one is a problem that the NFL could solve, but the 2nd two aren’t, but are just changing expectations of what sport can look like.

  39. 39.

    debbie

    @Amir Khalid:

    It’s not just football. The owner of the local MLS team (Columbus Crew) wants to relocate the team (which was born here and has cultivated a rabidly fanatical fan base) to Austin, after more than twenty years of tax abatements and city-paid-for stadium. I’m not a fan, but I think at the very least, the prick could pay us back for all the taxes we’ve wasted on him and his team.

  40. 40.

    Amir Khalid

    @Gin & Tonic:
    America is the only country where a profitable sportsball team owned by the richest person in the city can demand financial support from City Hall and threaten to leave if it doesn’t get it. How come, and why should it be allowed to go on?

  43. 43.

    CliosFanBoy

    never been a football ban, it always bored me. but in my defense, if I WERE to be a football fan I’d have to cheer for either the Bengals or the DC Racial Slurs, so, really, what’s the point???

  44. 44.

    AThornton

    @Amir Khalid:

    tl;dr answer:

    US local and state governments are run and staffed mostly by morons, idiots, grifters, racists (see Water, Flint,) the Mob, and incompetents with the decent people are hamstrung by the previous.

  52. 52.

    JPL

    I just saw the final score. NBC sports online is so slow, but it appears that the Browns need a field goal kicker.

  53. 53.

    Martin

    So how do you count this? Browns didn’t win but also didn’t lose. Streak broken or no? Do we get shitty beer?

  55. 55.

    gene108

    @Amir Khalid:

    Jury Finds Against NFL In Raiders Antitrust Suit
    By Mark Asher and
    Leonard Shapiro
    May 8, 1982
    The National Football League violated federal antitrust laws by refusing to allow the Oakland Raiders to move to the Los Angeles Coliseum, a six-member jury decided yesterday in a federal court in Los Angeles.

    In this second trial of what also had become a personal confrontation between National Football League Commissioner Pete Rozelle and Oakland owner Al Davis, the jury deliberated for 5 1/2 hours after 21 days of testimony before returning its verdict favoring the Raiders and the Los Angeles Coliseum Board, which originated the suit in 1978.

    The jury found that Section 4.3 of the NFL constitution, requiring a three-quarters vote to approve a franchise move, violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by unreasonably prohibiting competitive movement of teams.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/05/08/jury-finds-against-nfl-in-raiders-antitrust-suit/8b34f54f-10bc-43b0-951c-71867635987a/?utm_term=.b72b3044e3cd

    Answer is in the above article, from 1982, Amir.

  59. 59.

    p.a.

    Bill Russell: “Football isn’t a contact sport. Basketball is a contact sport. Football is a collision sport.”

    You can legislate fighting out of hockey and the sport is still exciting. They are trying to legislate excessive violence out of football, but everything about it is violent, so virtually every play becomes an adjudication. And there wasn’t actually that much action anyway: about 60 offensive snaps/team/game, 8-10 seconds of action/play. And of course, TV controls the pace of play to sell commercials.

    I don’t watch much college football, but at the highest level at least, it is a superior product, with a lot of coaching innovation compared to the NoFunLeague.

  61. 61.

    gene108

    @geg6:

    Competitive video game playing leagues. Several player-versus-player video games have professional leagues, where players/teams compete against each other for money.

    TBS broadcasts E-League games Friday night at 11:00 pm. 1st place cash prize is $500,000, second place is $250,000, and the money goes down from there. Total prize money is $1 Mil.

    Players even have sponsorships from various video game aligned product manufacturers, such as for controllers, keyboards, etc.

  62. 62.

    maya

    I blame the demise of football on the Dutchman, Norm Van Brocklin. After he left the Rams and Eagles as THE prototype pocket QB, (couldn’t run and didn’t have to) he eventually wound up as coach of the Atlanta Falcons in late 60s. There he introduced the heretical concept of calling plays from the sideline and the resulting shuffling of players in and out of the game on almost every play. Before that, the QBs (like him) called all the plays out in the huddle with essentially the same 11 guys. This sideline QBing slowed down the game considerably. That was 50 years ago and here we are.

  64. 64.

    Digital Amish

    Record the games and start watching about an hour or so in. Skip the commercials, timeouts, replays, all the delays that make 14 minutes of action last 3 and a half hours. Catch up to watch the last 5 minutes (the only time that actually matters) live.

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