All sorts of football stuff happening. Very exciting.
Rex Ryan seems to have triumphed over lap-band surgery
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Category Archives: General Football
Jets aim to provide fans Super Bowl championship, much steamier morning commute
On the Metro-North train this morning.
Getting defensive with Brian Bassett
Smartphone application
This season, the New Meadowlands Stadium will offer fans free smart-phone applications that they can glance at to see video replays, updated statistics and live video from other games — and that will work only inside a stadium.
Over the next few years, stadium officials say, the applications will provide fans with statistics on the speed of players and the ball, and fantasy games that will allow them to pick players and compete against other fans.
– Michael S. Schmidt, New York Times.
That sounds, well, reasonably awesome. I find it sort of hard to believe that the Jets and Giants will have any trouble selling out games in the brand-new stadium, but then I myself have never been to a regular-season* NFL game since I became a big fan of the sport. I went to one when I was six or seven, before I appreciated football.
I haven’t been since, partly because it has never really come up, partly because I appreciate the comforts of my living room on NFL Sundays. Hard to justify freezing my ass off watching one football game when I can sit in my La-Z-Boy juggling several, pounding Buffalo wings.
I imagine I’ll make it out to the new place in due time, either with a credential or with a ticket, and I’m certain the experience is an enjoyable one. But I can’t be sure they have great wings there, nor that I’ll find a comfortable setting for eating wings, which require space and wet-naps and some sort of resting place for blue cheese.
Anyway, the other thing — and please excuse the ludditry — is sometimes I get worried that smartphones hamper our enjoyment of actual, analog life. This came up in the concert post a few days ago. Is having access to nearly unlimited information and a method of sharing it always a good thing?
Don’t get me wrong: I use the hell out of my iPhone. It makes my commute more bearable and ends arguments with rapidity. But there are times when I wonder if the constant connection to the Internet distracts me from the full breadth of certain experiences. Sometimes I just want to wonder about stuff, and I hope that my imagination is not hindered by knowing that answers to most questions are just a swipe of the keypad away.
Will the smartphone enhance the live NFL experience? Damned if I know. I’m just not sure I would even want to find out, lest it take something away from the sights, smells and sounds of a live sporting event I paid big bucks to see in person.
*- I went to a preseason Jets game when I was in high school. We sat next to Adrian Murrell’s family. Nice people.
Athletes, everyone else unable to resist donuts
Seahawks rookie wide receiver Golden Tate said Tuesday he was “very embarrassed” after police in the Seattle suburb of Renton, Wash., gave him a warning for trespassing into a gourmet doughnut shop at 3 a.m. last weekend….
He said a friend took a couple of maple bars from the shop, which is on the ground floor of the building in which Tate lives.
“They are irresistible,” Tate said of the pastries.
Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said he has talked to Tate and agrees that maple bars can be irresistible.
Right, right, right. “A friend.”
I’m actually not a huge fan of maple-flavored desserts — they’re usually a bit too sweet for me — but I understand the allure of a 3 a.m. donut. And heck, if I lived above a donut shop, with all that donuty goodness lingering in my nostrils long after the shop closed, I might be tempted to break in after hours.
I mean, if they didn’t want Golden Tate trespassing and “his friends” stealing donuts, they could have stayed open 24 hours. Did anyone really expect this guy to walk right past a gourmet donut shop to go buy lesser donuts at a Mobil Mart or 7-11, just because the shop is closed for business? C’mon. Have you had those donuts?
That’s not a rhetorical question: Has anyone been to TopPot Donuts in the Seattle area? Can someone confirm if they’re good?
As Tate himself points out, the entire episode has been good for TopPot.
But I should note that this is not the first embarrassing off-field incident involving a professional athlete and a donut. Kevin Mitchell, at the height of his awesomeness, once went on the Disabled List after injuring a tooth biting a donut he had microwaved too long.
Hat tip to Paul Vargas for the link.
Mark Sanchez learning handsomely
Offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer’s top priority this offseason was to improve Sanchez’s understanding of protections.
“Mark knew the protections last year, but he didn’t really know the protections,” Schottenheimer told me. “He didn’t really know all the issues that came with the protections. That’s not unlike most young quarterbacks. So we’re trying to make him get caught up with that.”…
Schottenheimer admitted that Sanchez would have received a 75-80 grade on that test last week.
Now, here’s the amazing part: “If you gave that test to Mark at the end of the season,” Schottenheimer said, “he probably would have gotten a 50 or a 40.”
– Manish Mehta, N.Y. Daily News.
If you thought Awesomestock was going to fly by without one mention of the Sanchize, well, welcome aboard, new reader. We’re talking about the quarterback OF THE FUTURE here, the white-pants wearing, boat-phone owning, celebrity bedding, potential secret Jonas Brother.
And if you thought Mark Sanchez would be content just sleeping with models atop big piles of money and enjoying all the spoils of a relatively successful rookie season, you’re wrong again.
Even while recovering from offseason knee surgery — ahead of schedule, of course — Sanchez has committed himself to learning. Handsomely learning.
All sports have their own unique set of intricacies, but I think the details of football — especially offensive football — are all too frequently overlooked by even the NFL Sunday Ticket set, the sport’s most hardcore devotees. The Mets can score runs with half their lineup not hitting and the Knicks can put up points with some scrubs on the floor, but no football team will ever move the ball reliably without all 11 men on the field executing on every play.
I’m biased because I played and coached football with more success than I ever did any other sport, but I can vouch for the fact that learning everything about a scheme — specifically every player’s assignment, as Sanchez is working to do — makes any football player much, much better.
Plenty of guys will always be content to know only their own responsibilities and with enough raw talent that should be enough to get them by. But those of us without overwhelming physical gifts stand to hugely benefit from a thorough understanding of an offense. Knowing not just what every player on the field should be doing, but why he is doing it helps a player better recognize what to do in the event something goes wrong, since plenty of plays fail to go exactly according to plan.
If Sanchez is really studying like this story makes it seem, he should have a better sense of how to adjust when a lineman misses a block and where to scramble when the protection starts to break down.
Sexily scramble.
Look at this man. He had to put down his flash cards just to answer this phone call. Stop disturbing Mark Sanchez, dammit! He’s got work to do.
The Super Bowl shuffle
The Super Bowl is the signature event on the NFL’s calendar and on the annual sports calendar, period. It is in the NFL’s best interest that it go smoothly — in fact, that it go brilliantly, and look perfect and spectacular to the world.
For that reason, I can’t fathom why the NFL would ever want to have it in a cold weather city in February. Made no sense to me to have it in Detroit or Minneapolis when they had it there. Makes no sense to me that it’ll be in Indianapolis in 2012. The week leading up to the game is at least as big now, if not bigger, than the game itself. You can argue all day about whether that should be true, but you can’t dispute that it is. People come from all over the world to spend the week being at the Super Bowl. If it’s snowy, icy, windy and cold — which it could very well be in the first week of February 2014 in New York and New Jersey — it’s going to be a far more miserable experience for the NFL’s thousands of guests than it needs to be.
All they’ve done by adding a dome-free stadium to the mix is add game day to the list of potential concerns. You can talk all you like about how the NFL and the community would do everything it can do to overcome the worst-case weather scenario should it happen, but my question is why would the NFL want to risk putting itself in position to have to do that. Why add that risk when you don’t need to? Why mess with something that works?
Dan makes a couple of points here I hadn’t considered, especially about the week leading up to the game, not to mention the “ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it” approach.
But I’m all for bringing the Super Bowl to New York (well, New Jersey). The Super Bowl is a spectacle most awesome. The week leading up to it is part of that spectacle. And this is a spectacular place, with the bright lights and the immense buildings and all that.
Yeah, the weather could be bad. It could also be good. And it’s football. Football teams prepare to play outdoor games in December in Buffalo and Green Bay and Foxboro.
If the weather means Peyton Manning (or the next Peyton Manning or whoever) can’t pass so well that day, who cares? That’s football. The Colts should have a plan in place for that, and it’s not fair to all the other teams in the league if high-flying offensive teams like the Colts can be assured of a picture-perfect day every year should they advance to the Super Bowl. That doesn’t accurately reflect the NFL regular season or playoffs. Mother Nature factors in football games, so she might as well factor in the biggest football game.
If lousy weather washes out all the events of the week before? Whatever. I, for one, won’t miss that stuff. Plus, I’m pretty confident the NFL will, by 2014, have figured out some method to broadcast its patented brand of nonsense regardless of the weather at media events.
Maybe due to the weather, some visitors will have less fun in Super Bowl Village, or Football-land or whatever they call the area immediately surrounding the event. But they’ll be right in the shadow of the cultural battery of Planet Earth. Go see a play or something. There’s got to be decent live music somewhere. Spread those tourist dollars around.
And while it’s true that the Super Bowl works out just fine every year in warm weather cities, the counter to that argument is simple: You can’t fail if you never try. Maybe bringing the event to New York will turn out to be a miserable decision, and the NFL will somehow lose money for the first time in forever, and the people will rise up and demand every Super Bowl be played in Florida for the rest of time. Or maybe we’ll see a cold-weather classic, a beautifully rendered 6-3 gem full of smart defense and bone-rattling hits, a game that ushers in a new era of casual football fans appreciating the game beyond what factors into their fantasy leagues.
We don’t know yet. But we can rest assured that whatever comes will be entertaining, and probably pretty spectacular to see, whether New Jersey’s first Super Bowl succeeds or fails.
NFL draft prospects in lunch meat
From the Daily News:
From left, that’s the lunch-meat Ndamukong Suh, the real Ndamukong Suh, the real C.J. Spiller, and the lunch-meat C.J. Spiller.
On the intersection of Taco Bell and sports
A number of readers have emailed me wondering why I haven’t weighed in on Joey Porter’s arrest in a Taco Bell parking lot yet. Since, as they’ve pointed out, it represents the intersection of sports and Taco Bell, it does seem like perfect TedQuarters fodder.
I’m not aiming to make light of DUI, though, nor am I willing to pass judgment on an arrest with such vaguely reported details: Conflicting online news stories have it that Porter was at the wheel of his car, at the wheel of a friend’s car, and in the passenger’s seat of a friend’s car when he slapped the police officer in question, and absolutely none of the reports I’ve read even specify whether or not Porter ate delicious Taco Bell, nor what he ordered if he did.
Regardless, since Porter will not face charges, he will certainly not face criticism here. Let he who has not been drunk and belligerent in a Taco Bell parking lot cast the first stone.
I will say this, though: There seems to be something about Fourthmeal that brings out the worst in humanity. I don’t really get it, either.
The town where I grew up maintains an inordinately stupid rule under which fast-food restaurants can not keep drive-thrus open past 11 p.m.
Taco Bell is the only fast-food restaurant in the town proper, and so to stay open for Fourthmeal, the Taco Bell must keep its dining room open until the wee hours of the morning. At some point around midnight, it becomes a downright terrifying place.
The solution, of course, is to drive right past that Taco Bell, to the much better Taco Bell in the next town over, where there is no stupid rule about closing drive-thrus at 11 p.m.
But if by some chance the people you’re with aren’t willing to go the (literal) extra mile, or they want the luxury or novelty of enjoying Taco Bell in Taco Bell at 1 a.m., you’re heading right into the damn Wild West. No joke.
To me, it makes no sense. We’re all here for tacos, right? And Taco Bell makes me happy, and puts me at peace with my surroundings, even if those surroundings are a dingy suburban fast-food dining room off Sunrise Highway in the middle of the night.
But it’s littered with lunatics. Not actual crazy people — this is Long Island, so they go to diners since there are no Denny’s around. I’m talking drunken, ‘roided-up madmen, who must be looking to Taco Bell for a late-night protein fix and as a good place to find some asses to kick.
Seriously, about 50% of the time you enter that Taco Bell, some meathead tries to pick a fight with you on your way in or out. It sucks. I’m here for Gorditas, guy, not an ass kicking.
Kerry Rhodes’ annoying behavior now just pathetic, vaguely endearing
“It’s hard to date someone who isn’t living my lifestyle — they don’t understand what comes with the job…. Having a girlfriend in the spotlight, like Reggie Bush did with Kim Kardashian, would actually be a pretty ideal situation for me.”
– Kerry Rhodes, Arizona Cardinals, via NY Daily News.
If Rhodes is looking for a girlfriend who understands his lifestyle, Kim Kardashian might be a perfect fit. She, too, knows what it’s like to be cast aside by an NFL runningback.
HEYOOO!
Seriously, though, Rhodes is so much easier to bear now that I know I won’t have to watch him not tackle people. What sucks for him is that he’s probably in the wrong town if he’s looking for a famous girlfriend. This Wikipedia page shows that most female celebrities from Phoenix have relocated.
Tedquarters 