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.

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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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Taking a look back at the NFL’s Week 1

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

1. It isn’t a newsflash that the NFL is now a quarterback league. That’s why it is not surprising that of the 14 quarterbacks that had the best days, 12 of them won.

The only two losers in the top 14 were Drew Brees and Philip Rivers, who ranked seventh and eighth. Still, it was not a good day for scoring Sunday.

The NFL likes to average 41 points a game and they were at 46 last year. They were at 37 Sunday. But the low scoring Sunday probably isn’t a trend as the Thursday night game and the two Monday night games were high-scoring games. The Kansas City Chiefs beat the New England Patriots 42-27, the Denver Broncos beat the Los Angeles Chargers 24-21 and the Minnesota Vikings beat the New Orleans Saints 29-19.

So the Sunday results were probably an aberration as offenses are still tuning up.

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Colts suddenly looking hapless and hopeless again

It looks like the bad old days are back for the Indianapolis Colts.

After the Colts made their midnight move from Baltimore in 1984, they didn’t win 10 games until Peyton Manning’s second season in 1999.

They then posted seasons with double-digit victories 11 times and went to two Super Bowls, winning one.

When Manning was injured in 2011, the Colts went 2-14 — but that was a good year to get the first pick in the draft. It gave them a chance to start over with Andrew Luck.

Owner Jimmy Irsay released Manning, when went on to appear in two Super Bowls with the Broncos, winning one – and fired general manager Bill Polian and coach Jim Caldwell. He replaced them with Ryan Grigson and Chuck Pagano.

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Skinflint Kroenke continues to be the Rams’ biggest enemy

It is not exactly a secret that Los Angeles likes Showtime.

It is a market that craves stars. And wants its sports teams to win or it ignores them.

Not surprising the Los Angeles Rams don’t seem to realize that.

When personality challenged owner Stan Kroenke (pictured above) decided to move the Rams from St. Louis to Los Angeles a year ago to play in a new palace he’s building, he overlooked two things.

The first is that Los Angeles has a rather nonchalant attitude towards the NFL. It wasn’t particularly upset when two teams left two decades ago and isn’t exactly turning cartwheels over the fact that two teams are playing their now.

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LT and Chargers owners still clueless about jilted San Diego

Dean Spanos still doesn’t get it.

The Los Angeles Chargers owner, who ripped the hearts out of the San Diego fans when he moved the team to Los Angeles this year, still thinks the team has a lot of fans in San Diego.

“[We say] thank you,” Spanos said, when asked by ESPN about San Diego fans who still follow the team. “They’ve been great. They’ve been loyal to the team, and there’s a lot of them. I’m very appreciative — my family, players and the entire organization thanks them.”

I seriously doubt there are a lot of fans in San Diego who still follow the team. Some, but not a lot.

Spanos also hired Hall of Fame running back LaDainian Tomlinson as a special assistant. Tomlinson is supposed to reach out to the San Diego fans.

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Arrogant Patriots got a well-deserved comeuppance

The Patriots didn’t do any deflating Thursday night.

Instead, they inflated five Super Bowl trophy replicas that looked like they belonged in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and rolled them onto the field before their season opener against the Kansas City Chiefs.

They put on the scoreboard: “Atlanta 28 NE 3 2:12 3rdQtr”

That was a reminder of their Super Bowl comeback, and the announcer talked about the greatest comeback of all time.

They unveiled their fifth Super Bowl banner.

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NFL deserves credit for checking Brady concussion allegations

When Gisele Bundchen speaks, the NFL listens.

The supermodel who is Tom Brady’s wife said on CBS This Morning last May that Brady has had concussions pretty much every year and suffered one last year.

“We don’t talk about it, but he does have concussions,’’ she said.

When Brady was finally asked about his wife’s comments, he said it was not anybody’s business, which is not exactly a strong denial.

The New England Patriots had never put Brady on the injury report with a concussion, but then the Patriots aren’t noted for being candid in their injury reports.

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