Knock Manning, but two Super Bowl rings will always speak loudly

The legacy of Eli Manning is obvious.

He’s won two Super Bowls rings – two more than Hall of Famers Dan Marino and Dan Fouts and one more than Brett Favre and Aaron Rodgers.

And he won both of them by pulling off fourth-period game winning drives against Bill Belichick and Tom Brady of the New England Patriots. And he cost the Patriots a perfect season in 2007.

But Manning hasn’t consistently put up big numbers over his career, and he’s led the New York Giants to just one playoff game in the last five years since his last Super Bowl appearance in 2011. The Giants lost that playoff game last year to Green Bay 38-13.

And just last week, his second-year coach Ben McAdoo publicly called Manning out for “sloppy’’ play in not getting a fourth-down play off in time and taking a delay penalty.

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Five things to watch: NFL Week 3

Five things I’ll be looking at in the third week of the 2017 NFL season:

1. Belichick vs. a rookie quarterback

The New England Patriots figure to have an easy one against Houston, but one thing to watch will be how rookie quarterback DeShaun Watson fares against Bill Belichick, who is 16-5 against rookie passers and 8-0 at Foxboro.

The five rookie quarterbacks to beat the Patriots were Ben Roethlisberger and Russell Wilson and three surprising players – Geno Smith, Mark Sanchez and Colt McCoy. The odds are against Watson adding his name to that list.

But can Watson at least be competitive against the Patriots?

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Cheapskate Brown family has the Bengals at a crossroads

I still remember the time I was waiting for an airport shuttle bus at a hotel outside Chicago a couple of decades ago after the NFL owners had just concluded a meeting.

The only other two people waiting were Paul Brown and his son, Mike Brown.

It was unusual to see NFL owners waiting for a shuttle bus since they usually travel by limo.

Paul Brown, though, said that wasn’t their style.

“We’re not limo people,’’ he said.

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Looks like union will remain a paper tiger against NFL owners

The NFL owners apparently can’t wait to get DeMaurice Smith back to the negotiating table.

After the players’ selection committee voted to extend Smith’s contract as the NFLPA head, league spokesman Joe Lockhart congratulated Smith (pictured) in a conference call and then talked about the 2011 negotiations.

“I think we had productive negotiations with him in 2011,’’ Lockhart said. “We believe strongly that it has worked for both parties, for owners and players.’’

Can you imagine a Major League Baseball spokesman ever making a comment like that about a deal that Marvin Miller negotiated for the baseball players?

The deal has worked out great for the football owners. The players? Not so much.

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Seahawks’ Sherman ill-informed about value of injury reports

Richard Sherman of the Seattle Seahawks is a smart guy with a Stanford education, but he couldn’t have been more wrong when he said this week that the NFL’s injury reports “are for gamblers.’’

They aren’t for the gamblers. They are to prevent gamblers from getting inside information.

Sherman vented on the injury reports after he was listed questionable Sunday because he missed two practices during the week with a hamstring injury. He then played every defensive snap Sunday against the San Francisco 49ers, as he’d done for 92 consecutive games after being listed as questionable.

“I guess from what I understand the rules are for gamblers, for Vegas to make sure the odds and everything are what they are supposed to be, which is apparently what the league is concerned about when talking about injuries and things like that,” Sherman said, according to the Seattle Times. “So maybe someone should look into that, because I thought we weren’t a gambling league or were against all of those things. But our injury report is specifically to make sure the gamblers get their odds right.”

Sherman also was listed as questionable the first weekt week after being listed as questionable in Week 1 because of a thigh injury.

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Taking a look back at the NFL’s Week 2

Five observations on the second weekend of the 2017 NFL season:

1. The New England Patriots are still the New England Patriots. As expected, the loss in the opener to the Kansas City Chiefs was just a blip on their radar screen. They bounced back by thrashing the New Orleans Saints, 36-20.

The opening-game loss prompted the Boston Herald to question whether the end is near for the Patriots. Granted, Tom Brady can’t play forever, but the end doesn’t appear to be near.

The Patriots appear a lock to win the AFC East (again) and make the playoffs (again). And the Patriots showed they’re still the Patriots when they benched Super Bowl hero Malcolm Butler.

Butler still played 75 percent of the snaps, but they seemed to be sending him a message that what he did in the past doesn’t count for anything in 2017. “It’s all about this year,’’ said defensive coordinator Matt Patricia.

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NFL teams off to 0-2 starts shouldn’t kid themselves

When an NFL team loses its first two games of the season, it always downplays the slow start and notes, among other things, that it’s a long season.

So it was not surprising that when New Orleans was one of nine teams to start off 0-2 this season, the Saints played the “long season” card.

“It’s a long season, but 0-2 doesn’t make you who you are,’’ said wide receiver Ted Ginn.

Well, in many ways it does — and the Saints know it.

They’re 1-11 in September the last four years, and this is the fourth year in a row they have started out 0-2. New Orleans finished 7-9 and missed the playoffs the previous three years.

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Elliott’s on-field situation now looks like a quagmire, too

The Denver Broncos defense did a much a much better job of stopping Ezekiel Elliott on the field Sunday than the NFL’s lawyers are doing to force him to serve a league-imposed suspension.

Elliott scored another court victory Monday when a federal judge not only refused to lift the injunction stopping the NFL from suspending the Dallas Cowboys running back, but took a slap at the NFL’s legal logic.

U.S. District Court judge Amos L. Mazzant noted the NFL is complaining that the court essentially issued a premature order by failing to wait for the arbitrator to issue his ruling, and therefore lacked “subject matter jurisdiction.’’

“Oddly, the NFL is now seeking expedited relief from the Fifth Circuit without first waiting for the Court to rule on the identical issue,’’ the judge wrote in his opinion. “The irony is not lost on the court.’’

The NFL is now appealing to the Fifth Circuit to force Elliott to serve his suspension while the legal process continues.

Continue reading “Elliott’s on-field situation now looks like a quagmire, too”

Five Things to Watch: NFL Week 2

Five things I’ll be looking at in the second week of the 2017 NFL season:

1. How will the Patriots respond?

You don’t want to overreact when the New England Patriots and Tom Brady have a bad game. In 2014, they lost at Kansas City 41-14 and coach Bill Belichick said it was on to Cincinnati. They routed the Bengals 43-17 and went on to win the Super Bowl. And the last three times they lost their opener, they won the Super Bowl.

Now they’ll try to bounce back against the Saints and Drew Brees.

The Patriots figure to win their division even if they lose this game, but it will raise some eyebrows if Brady plays the way he did against Kansas City and loses a shootout to Brees. The Patriots are favored by a touchdown.

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Quitting the dysfunctional Bills might work out for Marrone, Mularkey

Quitting an NFL head coaching job isn’t usually a good career move.

Yet of the seven coaches who have departed the Buffalo Bills since Wade Phillips was fired after the 2000 season, only two now have head coaching jobs. And both quit the Bills after just two seasons  – Mike Mularkey after the 2005 season and Doug Marrone after the 2014 season.

The two men will face each other as head coaches for the first time Sunday since they both quit Buffalo when the Jacksonville Jaguars host the Tennessee Titans.

Another interesting twist to this saga is that Mularkey, the Titans coach, was fired by the Jaguars after one season in 2012.

And even though it’s only the second game of the season, it’s an important game for both teams — the winner could be in good position to win the AFC South.

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