Category: NFL General

loves his agent

…I mean agents.

Carl Poston, the agent for Lavar Arrington will be suspended for 2 years for negligence, failing to cooperate with the union’s investigation of the matter, failure to report violation of the contract, concealing contract information from the player and fraud.  For those following the Redskins, you know that Lavar Arrington has always maintained that the Redskins owe him $6.5M in bonus money that ‘disappeared from the contract’.  Well, apparently, Poston never bothered to proofread the contract and poof goes Lavar’s $6.5M.  Somehow, Poston has convinced Arrington that it wasn’t his fault because Lavar hasn’t fired him yet. I guess athletes aren’t that smart after all.

In other news, one of Randy Moss’s agents was arrested for crack possession when police were called to his hotel room to investigate a disturbance. No word on whether Marion Barry was present at the time.  

[Washington Post]: Arrington’s Agent Faces Suspension

In the end, the owners weren’t stupid or arrogant enough to kill the NFL as we know it. The owners voted 30-2 to extend the CBA for another six years. The only votes against came from Buffalo and Cincinatti.

Details are filtering out about the new extension but here’s what we know so far:

1. Salary cap will be $102M in 2006 and $109M in 2007.
2. The players union apparently got at least some of what they asked for because Paul Tagliabue said about $900M will be added to players’ salaries over the life of the deal.
3. The extra $900M for the player pool will be funded by the top 15 revenue teams.

How quickly things change. As of last week, teams who were under the salary cap stood to make out big in the offseason because of the glut of veteran free agents expected to be on the market. However, with the new deal, teams find themselves with extra cap money and will be able to sign some of the players they were expected to cut.

All is right in NFL land again but this should be a very anti-climatic free agent season. Maybe LaVar Arrington can predict the future. There’s a lot more cap money now for him to sign a great deal somewhere else.

[NFL.com] : Owners approve six-year CBA extension

I will eat your young

Listen NFL and NFLPA, we don’t want to hear the propaganda spewing from your mouths about the latest negotiation and how far apart you are. We love football but this whole extension of the CBA is making us ill.

The worst clip I saw had Gene Upshaw complaining that the proposal the owners gave was worse than the deal they currently have. I’m going to go ahead and say that probably wasn’t true. Then, you have the weasely Jeffrey Kessler chiming in with ‘you know the villain in the movies you think is dead but he rises up and you have to shoot him again and then he’s really dead? Well, now he’s dead but we didn’t pull the trigger.’

Oh, surprise, suprise, they extended the deadline again so he’s not really dead. In the words of Homer Simpson, BORRRRRRRRRRRRRING!

Here are the rules for NFL labor negotiations:

1. Posture in the press
2. Warn of dire consequences as deadline approaches
3. Extend deadline
4. Repeat

When asked to spell disrespectful, Young said, “d-i-s-…respectful.”

At least that’s the impression I get when watching ESPN news. You’d think these guys were negotiating the future of the free world instead of the just trying to figure out if the players get 60% or 56% of a billion dollar pie.

Here’s what you need to know: despite the dire warnings of a “black thursday“, it seems that all they had to do was delay the free agency period so they moved it to Monday. And guess what? Everyone who was released to meet the Friday cap deadline isn’t really released. I assume that these guys can just keep extending the “deadline” whenever they want. Dire indeed.

One piece of good news coming out of the labor strife is that if there isn’t a new CBA, we’ll actually have more football games.

Barring a new CBA, the players either will be on strike or the owners will lock out the players in 2008. The union likely will decertify, and antitrust rules will apply.

If this happens, then the EA deal that gives them exclusive rights to NFL players would be voided. Hello NFL2k9! It’s a small consolation prize for the insanity surrounding the league right now.

[GamersReport.com]: EA’s NFL Exclusivity Contract May Be Voided

There is no way you’re
getting
50% of this football, Gene

I’m not sure if it’s posturing by Gene Upshaw but he left New York and returned to Washington because talks were “hopelessly deadlocked”. Although the current CBA doesn’t expire until the end of 2007, if there is no extension reached, it means that there is no cap for 2007. Sounds pretty good for the players right? Well, yes and no.

Because 2006 is the last year of the cap, it means that teams won’t be able to get relief by moving cap dollars to 2007 because they don’t know what is going to happen in 2007. So there could be a lot of players on the waiver wire by Thursday when teams have to be under the $95M cap. If your team is up against the cap, you’ll be crying. If your team has plenty of cap room, start looking into decent hotel accomodations in South Florida.

Finally, once you let the uncapped year out of the bag, there’s no way the NFLPA is going to go back to having one. And that means after 2007, there could be a lockout. I can’t believe that the NFL and NFLPA have gotten so greedy that they might find a way to kill this cash cow.

I wonder if I should get my Philadelphia Soul jersey now or later.

[AP]: NFL labor talks break off on eve of free agency

Remember when Dick Vermeil and Jon Gruden showed some stones this year and went for game winners this year? Turns out they not only did the ballsy thing, they made the statistically correct call.

A study by David Romer at Berkeley found that coaches were too conservative and “choosing to go for a first down or a touchdown would up the odds of winning by 3 percent.”

Romer did some complex math involving 700 NFL games and found that whenever the chance of a touchdown is statistically 18 percent, coaches should go for it. Of course, Vince Young didn’t need some high-falutin guy from Berkeley to tell him this. He knows you gotta scramble for a touchdown.

[MSNBC]: Scientist debunks football strategy

I am smart. S-M-R-T. Smart!

Can someone please set up a celebrity Jeopardy match with Vince Young, David Beckham, and Miss Howard Stern? I’d absolutely pay to see this. The winner would have a score of -5000.

Everyone is beginning to agree that VY’s wonderlic test was, in fact, not scored incorrectly but the story was just a coverup by the NFL because of how piss poor Young’s score of 6 was. Think about it this way, if you just went down the list and checked off the same answer for all 50 questions, you would probably get at least 10 right. It wouldn’t surprise me if Vince Young was illiterate.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, David Beckham admits he can’t even do his 6 year old’s homework and that he has to let Posh spice do it.

I think it was maths, actually. It’s done totally differently to what I was teached when I was at school, and you know, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t do this’.

Because you know, in the last 25 years, they’ve changed the rules of mathematics according to Radiohead principles: 2+2 always = 5.

[Yahoo]: Beckham: I can’t do six-year-old son’s homework

OK, so Vince Young isn’t as dumb as it was initially reported. But really, is there a big difference between scoring a 6 and a 16 on the wonderlic? Here’s a sample Wonderlic test with a timer. Based on your sample score, you can project out what your 50 question test score would be.

I think something is fishy about Vince Young retaking the test and getting a 16 because the first one was incorrectly scored. I think even if the proctor used the wrong scoring sheet, he would’ve gotten high than a 6 just on pure random chance.

Next time a ballplayer makes a boneheaded play, just remember that most of them score “equivalent to unskilled worker” or “moron”. Here’s a breakdown of wonderlic scores by QBs in the past decade or so. Nice to know that Ryan Fitzpatrick scored a perfect 50.

There can be no other explanation for admittting that he’s like Michael Vick.

We are similar. We both do what it takes. We’re both great leaders for our teammates. We’ve got much respect from our teammates, in a similar way as I can see, with keeping the game real balanced with running and throwing the ball.

If you want to be respected as a quarterback in this league and ready to learn a pro offense, perhaps comparing yourself to Ron Mexico isn’t the smartest thing in the world. Young is already taking a page from Vick’s book, saying that his critics don’t understand. Good start, Vince.

[Florida Today]: Young intriguing, but will he throw?

[Mercury News]: Young suffers by comparison to Vick