Tag: Tom Brady

Brady is great, as usual, but can the Patriots survive their defense?

Much of the chatter about the New England Patriots in the offseason was whether Tom Brady would show any signs of slowing down at age 40.

As it turns out, Brady is as good as ever.

As the Patriots started out 2-1, he passed for 1,092 yards, the seventh-best figure for the first three games of any NFL season.

He’s already first (2011 with 1,327 yards) and fifth (2015 with 1,112 yards) in that category. And he led a game-winning drive in the fourth quarter of their 36-33 victory over the Houston Texans last Sunday.

But what is surprising is that the Patriots’ defense has fallen off a cliff.

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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.

Continue reading “Looks like union will remain a paper tiger against NFL owners”

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.

Continue reading “Arrogant Patriots got a well-deserved comeuppance”

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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Pursuit of Elliott is more nonsensical buffoonery from Goodell

Remember New Coke?

In one of the most bizarre marketing decisions in American history, Coca-Cola changed its century-old formula in 1985 to a more sugary taste, only to face a deluge of complaints from outraged customers.

Just 79 days later, the company brought back old Coke as Coke Classic.

All you could think of at the time was, what were they thinking?

Their explanation is that they were worried about losing market share to Pepsi. But nobody in the boardroom raised a red flag that changing the formula wasn’t the answer.

Continue reading “Pursuit of Elliott is more nonsensical buffoonery from Goodell”

Bowlen wouldn’t even be sniffing the HOF if he hadn’t inherited Elway

When the contributors’ committee met last week to select a candidate to be voted on at the annual Pro Football Hall of Fame selection meeting next February, they were looking at a strong field.

It included Denver Broncos owner Pat Bowlen, former general managers Bobby Beathard and George Young and scouting pioneer Gil Brandt of the Dallas Cowboys.

They could have easily just picked a name out of a hat.

Since there aren’t a lot of other slam-dunk contributor candidates at the moment, all four figure to be selected in the next three years.

There will be two nominated in 2019, then one a year after that.

Continue reading “Bowlen wouldn’t even be sniffing the HOF if he hadn’t inherited Elway”

Bortles’ garbage-time stats are another damning indictment

“Blake Bortles is the Tom Brady of Garbage Time,’’ blared the headline on the fivethirtyeight.com website.

The site is noted for crunching the numbers on political issues, but also covers sports. And Michael Salvino studied the numbers on Blake Bortles, the fourth-year Jaguars quarterback, for the past two seasons.

It turns out he was the best quarterback in the league in garbage time the past two years. Garbage time is defined on being down by nine or more points with four minutes or fewer left.

There has been a perception that Bortles tends to put up meaningless numbers in garbage time and Salvino’s research shows it is true.

Bortles completed 78 of 118 passes for 964 yards and 12 touchdowns and just four picks with a passer rating of 111 in garbage time. Tom Brady, who barely even knows what garbage time in a loss feels like, had a 112 passer rating for the season last year.

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Cutler move shows Dolphins still paying a price for past personnel sins

The Miami Dolphins’ desperation move to bring Jay Cutler out of retirement once Ryan Tannehill was injured is another example of how a team can be haunted for years by mistakes of past regimes.

That’s because neither Tannehill nor Cutler should be their quarterback.

Their quarterback should be Drew Brees, but the Dolphins bypassed him twice early in his career.

In the 2001 draft, they took cornerback James Fletcher with the 26th pick in the first round. Brees went to San Diego with the first pick of the second round even though Dolphins general manager Rick Spielman said before the draft that three members of his staff had looked at every college pass by Brees.

According to a story written in 2009 by Armando Salguero of the Miami Herald, who still covers the team, Spielman told him after the draft they didn’t feel Brees was that much better than incumbent Jay Fiedler. Later, the story changed that then coach Dave Wannstedt pushed Fletcher instead of Brees.

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Age will soon catch up even with the remarkably durable Tom Brady

When Gisele Bündchen married Tom Brady eight years ago, she said he told her he planned to play 10 more years.

The problem, she said, was that as the years passed, the number never went down. As recently as 2015, he was still saying he planned to play 10 more years.

Now Brady finally seems ready to concede 10 more years may be a bit unrealistic. He seems to be talking about five more years.

Brady turned 40 Thursday, and in his first press conference of training camp Friday, he was asked about Patriots owner Bob Kraft saying he could play until his 50s.

“I don’t think I’ve ever said the 50s,’’ Brady said. “Maybe once. You know, I just love doing it. Again, I’ve never thought about not playing, at least until my mid-40s, so that’s a pretty good goal in and of itself, and then we’ll see when I get there.’’

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Would Goodell’s father support NFL’s de facto Kaepernick ban?

I wonder what Charles Goodell would think of the NFL’s de facto Colin Kaepernick ban.

If you don’t recognize the name, he was named a U.S. Senator from New York in 1968 by Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to replace Bobby Kennedy after Kennedy was assassinated.

A Republican, Goodell alienated President Richard Nixon and conservative voters by coming out against the Vietnam War. He came in third in the 1970 election, as a conservative was elected in a three-way race. He also happens to be the father of current NFL commissioner Roger Goodell.

“That was a valuable lesson to me – taking that position he did would be the end of his political career,’’ Goodell told the New York Times in 2010. “He was hoping people would see it was the right thing to do, but against the president’s weight, the weight of the Republican party, it would be difficult, but he did it.’’

Would Roger Goodell have done the same thing his father did?

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