VITO'S VIEWS

Jim Harbaugh’s return to the NFL has suddenly gotten more difficult.

When Harbaugh took the Los Angeles Chargers’ head coaching job after winning the national title at alma mater Michigan, he seemed set at quarterback with Justin Herbert as his starter.

That all changed early in camp when Herbert was sidelined with a plantar fascia injury in his right foot. The Chargers put the best face on the situation, saying he would be in a boot for two weeks and then make a gradual return and be ready to play in the season opener against the Raiders.

That is the optimistic report. But the injury, which is an inflammation of the fibrous tissue along the bottom of the foot that connects the heel bone to the toes, can cause intense pain and take a lot of time to heal.

Meanwhile, the quarterback instead will be Easton Stick, who threw one pass in his first four seasons. Last year he came in after Herbert suffered a broken finger on his throwing hand in the second quarter of a loss to Denver. Stick then started and lost the final four games while throwing three touchdown passes and one interception.

While Herbert had started the previous 62 games, he often played hurt with bruised ribs, a torn labrum on his non-throwing shoulder and a broken finger on his non-throwing hand before missing the last four games last year with the broken finger on his throwing hand.

Last July, he signed a five-year $262.5 million extension, so the Chargers are committed to him.

The quarterbacks behind Stick are second-year pro Max Duggan and undrafted rookie Casey Bauman.

Herbert’s injury is the first major one suffered by a quarterback in the NFL this year. The timing isn’t good because the Chargers have a virtually new cast of wide receivers, running backs and tight ends, and he won’t have much time to get in sync with them if he does manage to return for the start of the season.

The Chargers can only keep their fingers crossed and hope this isn’t the start of another star-crossed season.

The Las Vegas Raiders are holding training camp outside of Los Angeles this year.

That seemed to be a routine announcement, but it was not.

By training in Costa Mesa, which is about 40 miles south of Los Angeles, the Raiders are infringing on the territorial rights of the Rams and Chargers. Those clubs have the rights for 75 miles around Los Angeles.

So the Raiders can’t advertise they are training close to Los Angeles and can’t invite fans or the Los Angeles media to their practices. Only members of the Las Vegas media that make the trip can attend.

The Raiders played in Los Angeles for 13 years and still have a big fanbase there, so the Rams and Chargers don’t want the Raiders building on that fan base and are enforcing that obscure rule.

Coach Antonio Pierce wanted the Raiders to train away from Las Vegas as a bonding experience. But the Raiders aren’t getting any promotional benefits, so it will be interesting if they keep training there in the future.

The Cowboys have been training in California for years, but since they were doing that before the Rams moved back to Los Angeles and the Chargers moved from San Diego, they are grandfathered in. 

Meanwhile, this year will be like a secret camp for the Raiders since they aren’t allowed to promote the fact they are in Costa Mesa.

Raider owner Mark Davis didn’t protest.

“The Chargers and the Rams have the ability to to block us from (promoting),” Davis told ESPN. “That’s fine.”

No word on whether a Los Angeles media outlet could hire a Las Vegas writer to report on the camp for them. Or whether Los Angeles or the Los Angeles media even cares.

Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh doesn’t mind putting a lot of pressure on his quarterback, Lamar Jackson.

He recently said Jackson can be the GOAT.

“The vision that we have together is Lamar Jackson is going to become and be known and be recognized as the greatest quarterback ever to play in the history of the National Football League,” Harbaugh said.

Wow. That is quite a goal.

“That’s the vision,” Harbaugh said. “It’s going to happen by Lamar, his work ethic and his brilliant talent, by all of us pouring into that effort, together as a team, teamwork, and by the Grace of God and God’s goodwill.l That is how it is going to happen. And I believe it like we’ve already seen it.”

They’ve seen it in the regular season because Jackson has won two regular season MVP titles including last year. 

Still, Harbaugh has heard the critics who question Jackson’s 2-4 playoff record and that he is more of a runner than a passer.

“Lamar’s a guy, all his life, who’s been answering these same questions,” Harbaugh said.

“He’s got a growth mindset,” Harbaugh said. “He’s going to get better and better no doubt.”

Now Jackson has to prove he can be as good as Harbaugh thinks he can be. 

Last year, the Ravens lost to the Chiefs in the AFC title game by a 17-10 margin. This year, they open the season against the Chiefs, who are going for an unprecedented third straight Super Bowl win, on Thursday night Sept. 5 in prime time.

The opener will be a big test for the Ravens and Jackson and for what Harbaugh thinks of Jackson.

The NFL 18-game regular season schedule train seems to have left the station. Now it seems to be a matter of time before it reaches its destination.

Commissioner Roger Goodell has been talking about it in the offseason and he usually gets what he wants.

He said in May they want to keep making the game safer and said they have to make an agreement with the Players Association.

And Stephen Jones, the son of Cowboy owner Jerry Jones and a member of the competition committee, recently said an 18-game schedule is inevitable and that the players will go for it because it means more money for them.

The players should oppose the idea because more games and means more chance of injuries and increases the chances of a player getting CTE after they retire. 

But since they are likely to agree to it, they should make a lot of demands. Joe Burrow has already suggested an 18-game schedule include a second bye. But they should get a lot more than that, starting with a bigger share of the percentage. Starting with at least 50-50, if not more. They are taking the injury risk.

This will be the first big test for new NFLPA director Lloyd Howell. The NFLPA has a history of caving because they don’t want to give up paychecks.

But Howell must convince the owners they have to pay more for labor peace.

When a business is hit with a $14.1 billion antitrust verdict, it is usually big news.

But it got little notice when a lawsuit filed on behalf of subscribers to the NFL’s Sunday Ticket were awarded $4.7 billion in damages that are trebled to $14.1 billion because of the antitrust violation. Commercial subscribers were awarded $96 million.

The crux of the case was that the NFL was overcharging for the service to protect the Fox and CBS Sunday packages. In effect, the NFL was selling the rights to the games twice and kept the price high so Fox and CBS didn’t lose too many viewers.

The NFL made a deal last year with YouTube to sell the package of all the games for $349 million. ESPN offered to sell customers one team a year for $70, but the NFL rejected that idea. They also did not want to sell single-game packages.

The NFL still has three shots at an appeal to the presiding judge, the circuit court and eventually the Supreme Court.

If it could lose all the appeals, the NFL teams could have to pay $440 million each, which is a big number even for the NFL.

If they lose the appeals on the first two levels, they still may have a good chance to get it overturned by the conservative Supreme Court.

The NFL already has an antitrust exemption to sell league-wide packages and when the Supreme Court declined to hear the case the first time, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that if each team had to negotiate individual contracts it could mean “substantial tension” with antitrust principles.

On the other hand, if the NFL loses the appeals, the owners will be unhappy. Whether commissioner Roger Goodell would get some flak if they have to pay $440 million remains to be seen.

Although it may have gone back to Mark Twain, Harry Truman popularized the phrase that there are three kinds of lies – lies, damn lies and statistics.

A fourth category could be NFL quarterback contracts.

Quarterbacks are getting big contracts these days, but they always aren’t what they seem.

The five-year contract extension that Trevor Lawrence signed for $275 million raised a few eyebrows because he suffered four injuries last year and lost his last five starts after an 8-3 beginning. The Jaguars’ only victory the last six weeks came when they beat Carolina with C.J. Beathard at quarterback. It showed the Jaguars still have confidence in him that he will become an elite quarterback.

At first glance, it tied the $275 million deal that Joe Burrow got for a five-year extension for the best deal.

But at a closer look the deal wasn’t as good as the one Burrow signed. Burrow got $219 million in guaranteed money while Lawrence got $142 million in guaranteed money, although injury guarantees bring it up to $200 million.

On top of that, former Green Bay executive Andrew Brandt did a breakdown on the cash Lawrence is getting and it is generally at the bottom of the recent quarterback contracts.

First year: Lawrence gets $39 million while Jared Goff got $80.6 million, Lamar Jackson $50 million, Kirk Cousins $62 million, Daniel Jones $46 million and Burrow $45 million.

Second year: Lawrence gets $76 million the first two years. Jackson and Burrow get $111 million, Goff $98 million, Deshaun Watson $92 million and Cousins $90 million.

Third year: Lawrence gets $114 over first three years. Jackson gets $115 million, Goff $153, Burrow $146 million, Jones $160 million and Herbert $157 million.

Fourth year: Lawrence gets $155 million over the first four years. Jackson $207 million, Golf $193 million, Burrow $181 million Jones $160 million, and Herbert $157 million.

Lawrence still got a good deal  considered considering he was coming off a disappointing third season, but both sides decided to make it look better than it really is by adding two non-guaranteed years at the end worth almost $104 million. There is no guarantee Lawrence will ever see that money.

Now it will be interesting to see what kind of contracts quarterbacks like Tua Tagovailoa, Jordan Love and Dak Prescott get going forward.

Whatever they get, ignore the overall figure. Check the guarantees and the year-by-year cash figure to determine how good their deals are.

There were rumors during the draft that the Minnesota Vikings might take a receiver on the first round and trade John Jefferson.

The Vikings denied that and it never made any sense to let a player of his talent get away.

And they proved they were going to keep him by giving him the best non-quarterback contract ever – a four-year, $140 million deal at $35 million a year.

That will not only reset the wide receiver market but the market for all non-quarterback players. Tyreek Hill is now the fourth-highest paid receiver at $30 million and his agent, Drew Rosenhaus, was quick to notice it is a new market now.

It also changes the narrative that in this passing era teams don’t need high-paid wide receivers. The Chiefs traded Hill and won two Super Bowls without him. Now more receivers are likely to aim for more than $30 million.

It will also make it easier for the players to accept an 18-game schedule. Even though it will not be good for them physically, it will mean more money in their pockets.

There are likely to be a lot of ramifications caused by the Jefferson contract. We can only wait to see how it plays out. 

The siren call of getting a head coaching often lures assistant coaches into taking bad jobs and getting fired a few years later.

Ben Johnson isn’t one of those coaches.

Johnson has been a hot commodity on the coaching market after his success as the Lions’ offensive coordinator. He was courted by the Panthers a year ago and was a candidate for both the Washington and Seattle jobs at the end of the last season.

He decided to remain to remain in Detroit to see, in his words, if he can “reap the rewards a little bit longer” in Detroit.

 “I like the sunshine,” he said at a recent press conference according to NFL.com. “I like what we’ve built here, starting with ownership. the head coach, the GM on down.” 

“Something that really resonates with me is, OK, eight openings this past year. What would you set the over-under (at) in three years?  I’d put the over under at. 4.5 I would say. I would say there is a good chance that five of them will be out of jobs three years from now.”

Now we will see how this plays out. Will he go on to win a Super Bowl ring in Detroit and get to pick his job? Or will the Lions falter and he will no longer be a hot candidate?

Will he have any regrets or will it turn out he made the right decision? He will find out in the next couple of years. 

Meanwhile, you have to admire him for making a mature decision.

When Billie Jean King played Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes tennis match, Gloria Steinem was watching probably the only sports event she had ever seen in a Manhattan apartment on West 57^th Street shared by writer Jimmy Breslin and his wife, city councilwoman Ronnie Eldridge. That is the kind of detail reported in the new book, “The Big Time: How the 1970s Transformed Sports in America” by Michael McCambridge.

The cover shows six of the figures who played big roles in making the 1970s such an important decade in sports – King, Hank Aaron, Jack Nicklaus, Joe Greene, Julius Erving, and Ali-Frazier. But as the anecdote about Steinem watching the match shows, it is not simply explaining what happened in that decade, but includes a lot of original reporting.

It is a decade I am very familiar with because I started my sports writing career in the 1960s and covered many of the events chronicled in the book including the first Ali-Frazier fight and Greene and the Steelers of the 1970s. Also covered tennis at Forest Hills before the current stadium was built and covered Bill Bradley’s first game at Madison Square Garden and later interviewed him when he wrote his first book. And covered Immaculata College playing at Madison Square Garden at the dawning of the age of women’s basketball.

For anyone over 55, this book will bring back a lot of great memories of the decade when everything changed. For the younger fans, it is a good history of how sports changed.

You have to remember how different sports were before the 1970s. Baseball, college football, boxing and horse racing were in the dominant sports. The NHL had only six teams, now called the Original Six, until the 1967-68 season when it doubled to 12 teams and wasn’t really a national sport in the U.S. The NBA only had nine teams in the mid 1960s. Both sports weren’t money makers for the arenas like the circus and the Ice Capades and teams had to go on the road when the circus came to town.

The NFL had a team actually fold in Dallas in 1952 and finish the season in Hershey as a road team before becoming the Baltimore Colts. In 1958, the NFL took its first big step forward when the Colts beat the Giants in the first overtime title game as Johnny Unitas became a household name when he led a game tying drive in regulation and the game winning drive in overtime.

But the NFL founding fathers who barely survived the depression and World War II and saw the collapse of the team in Dallas in 1952 were cautious. As Art Rooney, the Steeler founder, once said, “The biggest thrill wasn’t winning on Sunday, but meeting the payroll on Monday.” So when Lamar Hunt applied for an expansion franchise, he was turned down so he started the AFL, which led to the merger in 1970 that played a major role as the NFL becoming the dominant sport.

And television had yet to become a big factor in sports. Although the number of households with TV sets had grown from 8000 in 1946 to 45.7 million in 1960 to 60.6 million in 1970 when virtually every household had one, the idea of sports in prime time did not interest the networks. After Pete Rozelle was elected as a compromise candidate to become commissioner in 1963, he tried to dip the league’s toe into prime time in  1966 by pitting the Baltimore Colts vs. the Green Bay Packers on a Saturday night season opener. The game had plenty of star power with Lombardi and Shula as the coaches and Unitas and Starr as the quarterbacks, but the game lost in the ratings to the Miss America Pageant.

Nobody could imagine that happening today.

So when Rozelle decided to try a Monday Night package, CBS and NBC said no. ABC was a struggling network and agreed to do it when Rozelle threatened to put together an independent group of stations and the network feared some of their affiliates would dump their viewing. And Roone Arledge, the head of ABC Sports, made the master stroke of pairing Howard Cosell and Don Meredith together in the booth with Frank Gifford joining the second year and it became a must view TV. And most households only had the three networks because cable TV was in its infancy and ESPN didn’t start until 1979.

Of course so much has changed since the decade of the 1970s that set the table for what today’s sports world is and the book is a sweeping panorama how everything changed from free agency to the rise of women’s sports fueled by the passage of Title 9.

The only time I think the author missed the mark was his description of how Joe Gilliam became the starting quarterback for the Steelers in 1974. In a discussion of how black quarterbacks struggled to get their due, the author said “it was clear” that Gilliam outplayed Terry Bradshaw in camp, it was a bit more complicated than that. As a young player, Gilliam crossed the picket line when the veterans struck and played in rookie games throwing to rookies named Lynn Swann and John Stallworth against rookie corners. And they lit up the scoreboard in those wins.

The author is right that coach Chuck Noll was colorblind and gave Gilliam a chance to start the season, but he was benched after six games despite going 4-1-1 although he was blanked in a 17-0 ;loss to the Raiders . Gilliam never started another game for the Steelers after being benced and his career didn’t survive a drug problem. Bradshaw took over, won two games, and was benched for a game after a loss to Cincinnati for Terry Hanratty, who played poorly in a loss in Cleveland. Bradshaw took over again and the Steelers went on to win four Super Bowls in a six year span to become the team of the decade. They became a big part of the sports scene of the 1970s and built a national following that they still have today even though they have won only two Super Bowls since 1979. The Steelers front four made the cover of Time, Bradshaw shared Sportsmen of the Year honors with Willie Stargell in 1979 and Joe Greene made an iconic Coke commercial that is still remembered today.

We take for granted what sprts is like today but to understand how it happened, it helps to understand the decade of the 1970s. This book captures what was the beginning of the modern era in sports.

The NFL often give lip service to the issue of player safety.

The ignore player safety when they play a full slate of Thursday night games and increase the schedule from 16 to 17 games.

But the NFL did pass two new rules to help make the game safer at the recent league meetings but they probably batted .500 on the issue.

The new kickoff rule inspired by the XFL kickoff rule is a good idea but the banning of the hip drop tackle probably will just create more controversy. It adds another layer of subjective calls by the officials for a play that doesn’t happen that often and caused only 15 players to be injured last year. There will be more controversies about when it is called and when it isn’t.

The new kickoff rule, though, looks like a plus. It will likely cause more returns but without an increase in injuries. It’s also a plus that the NFL is adopting an idea from another league. It is designed to have more returns and turn them kind of into a running play with the violent collisions.

For a standard kickoff, the ball will be placed on the 35 with 10 kickoff coverage players lined up on the opposing 40, five one each side.

The return team would have at least nine blockers lined up in the so called setup zone between the 30 and 35 yard line. Seven of those players have to be touching the 35. Two returners would be allowed inside the 20.

Any kick that reaches the end zone in the air can be returned or the receiving team could take a touchback and get the ball on the 35. A kick that went out of bounds in the end zone or out of the end zone would result in a touchback and possession at the 35.

Any kick received in the field of play would have to be returned. A kick that hits a receiver or the ground before the end zone and goes into the end zone would return in a touchback with possession at the 20.

The players can’t move until the ball hits the ground or is touched by the receiving team.

For free kicks following a safety, the ball will be kicked from the 20 and the kicker can use a tee.

In the fourth quarter the trailing team could declare an onside kick under last year’s rules.  There will no longer be surprise onside kicks in the first three quarters.

 The rule was passed on a trial basis which means it would have to get 24 votes to return in 2025. But the success of the play in the XFL is a sign it may work in the NFL. If nothing else, it’s worth a try by the league.