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http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2015/10/19/nfl-week-6-cam-newton-panthers-colts-fake-punt
Calm Cam and the Indy Dolts
An inexplicable play call by Indianapolis against New England competed with a defining moment for Cam Newton and the unbeaten Panthers for top billing on a busy sixth Sunday of the NFL season. Plus the rebirth of the Dolphins defense, a Deflategate postscript, Week 6 awards and more.
by Peter King
Week 6, NFL, 2015. Memorable for the worst coaching decision since Grady Little left Pedro Martinez in the American League Championship Series about 16 batters too long in 2003. And for two drives that will change the narrative on Cam Newton. Or should.
A heck of a day, and night. The Jets are 4-1, all the wins by double digits, and are better than anyone but Todd Bowles’ mother expected. Seattle is 2-4, can’t block anybody and had another of its weekly late-game defensive meltdowns. Pittsburgh’s third-string quarterback, Landry Jones, beat a terrific defense, Arizona’s. The Broncos limped out of Cleveland, bordering on apologizing for an overtime win and being 6-0. In Green Bay, Philip Rivers threw for 503 yards and the Chargers lost; Eddie Lacy ran for three yards and the Packers won.
Five unbeaten teams. Zero winless teams.
Chiefs, Ravens, Lions: 3-15.
Jets, Panthers, Falcons: 14-2.
First, though, the Panthers had never won in Seattle, and Cam Newton had never beaten the Seahawks, and it sure didn’t look like that was going to change with eight minutes left in the Pacific Northwest and Carolina trailing by nine on Sunday. But Seattle isn’t Seattle anymore. And Cam Newton is better than you think.
The ball was perfectly thrown, hitting Olsen midway through the end zone. Accusatory fingers flew in the Seattle secondary, players pointing at each other. Like: I thought he was YOUR man! Touchdown. Carolina, 27-23.
Olsen found Newton on the sideline. “I wouldn’t want to roll with anyone other than you,” Olsen said
“This is probably as special a win as we’ve had,” Olsen said. “Playing such a good team, in a great environment, it means a lot to get a win like this. During the week, we were careful talking about it. It’s only one game, and even though they had our number and we really wanted to win it, there’s a long way to go before it really means anything.
But it’s a monkey off our back, no question. And it means so much to the guys here, and to the coaches and to the front office. We do things the right way here. We’ve got good community guys, and great chemistry, and everyone pulling for the same thing. So getting this win, it’s huge.”
* * *
Photo: Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images
After going 8 for 21 with two interceptions through the first three quarters, Cam Newton came alive down the stretch to lead the Panthers.
The tale of two Cams
For quarterbacks, the important time of games is always late. Bill Walsh once said he wanted a quarterback whose heart rate would measure late in the fourth quarter what it measured in a Wednesday afternoon practice. That’s the way Cam Newton played Sunday, when it got very late in the funhouse of CenturyLink Field, and the locals thought their recent bad fortune was about to turn, and the Seahawks were about to beat Carolina for the fifth time since Newton was drafted to win games such as this one.
“Calm,” said tight end Greg Olsen. “No conversation, really. Just business. We know what we had to do. Cam knew. He just called the plays and we played.”
“It would have been shame on me if I would have felt sorry for myself,” Newton said.
Down 23-14 midway through the fourth quarter, Newton looked at his receiver group. Six pass-catchers would rotate in and out of the lineup on the last two drives, including three who had a total of 14 catches all seasons—Jerricho Cotchery, Ed Dickson and rookie Devin Funchess.
Since Newton lost No. 1 wideout Kelvin Benjamin in training camp with a torn ACL, the receivers had been a crazy-quilt of new and vet. Catches by Dickson and Funchess on the first drive put the ball at the Seattle 33, and then Newton hit Olsen, his favorite target, with a seam rout about 20 yards downfield, and it took two Seahawks to drag him down at the 1. Jonathan Stewart bulled in from a yard out, and Carolina was a touchdown away.
Carolina’s defense stopped Russell Wilson (a familiar refrain for Seattle fans this year, a defense stopping Russell Wilson and the line that has been tormenting him), and fortunately for the Panthers, Jon Ryan’s 68-yard punt made it to the end zone. With 2:20 left, down 23-20, Newton took over at his 20-yard line. He completed five passes on this drive to five receivers, including a great third-down-conversion catch by Cotchery, with Newton facing a blitz. It was a wrestling competition between Cotchery and DeShawn Shead. Cotchery won.
Now it was Carolina’s ball at the Seattle 26 with 37 seconds left. Down three. No timeouts left. Logic said take a shot or two downfield, then settle for the equalizing field goal and overtime. First shot: sending Olsen up the seam, similar to what Newton had done on the previous drive. And that was the call—though it almost cost Carolina five yards.
“We were running out of time in the huddle because there was so much noise, and it was late coming in,” said Olsen. “Cam called it really fast, and we basically sprinted out of the huddle—there was no time to do much except get the play off. You just snap it and try to make the most of it. My job there is to go off the line, explode into the secondary and don’t predict what the defense will do—just run the route and get open.”
An incredibly fortunate thing happened: Seattle’s secondary was playing two different coverages on the play because the call from the sideline hadn’t reached all 11 players, and the noise was deafening; this is the one time when the crowd noise actually hurt the Seahawks. “There was a lot of room,” said Olsen. “I’m sure someone wasn’t in the right spot.”
The ball was perfectly thrown, hitting Olsen midway through the end zone. Accusatory fingers flew in the Seattle secondary, players pointing at each other. Like: I thought he was YOUR man! Touchdown. Carolina, 27-23.
Carolina took control of the NFC South with the win. The Panthers have a defense that makes it hard for foes to breathe. And they’ve got a quarterback who knows how to put some ugly series behind him, and play his best when the best is essential. The Carolina team that overcame Seattle in the fourth quarter is going to be a tough team to beat down the stretch.
* * *
Remember last week in this space, when I asked interim Dolphins coach Dan Campbell if he had a message he wanted to deliver to Miami fans? “We’re about to wake the sleeping giant,” Campbell said, with more than a touch of Vincent Price in his voice. (Or Freddy Krueger, for you youngsters.)
And so what happened after the stunningly brutish 38-10 vanquishing of the Titans in Nashville Sunday, in the first game for which Campbell—who’d never been anything more than a position coach—was in charge of an entire team? Owner Stephen Ross handed him the game ball and said, “The sleeping giants have awoken.”
Campbell—39, younger than Peyton Manning—accepted the game ball and said, with a touch of warning about keeping the pressure on foes for the next 11 games: “The sleeping giant is awake. But he can’t take a nap!”
(Last metaphors about huge men dressed in teal, not at all drowsy.)
Miami had six sacks (six times as many as they had in the previous four games combined), ran the ball better than it had all season, swarmed around Marcus Mariota menacingly and got a verbal salvo from Tennessee coach Ken Whisenhunt for, in his view, purposely trying to hurt Mariota when defensive end Olivier Vernon hit the rookie QB low. And, in general, Miami finally looked like the team that Ross felt he paid for, even with the biggest star, Ndamukong Suh, still playing just a supporting role.
When I thought was great about Campbell’s postgame talk to his team was that he recognized the practice-squad players and the backups whose job he has made it to give the starters a very tough week of preparation. Campbell is like one of his longtime mentors, Bill Parcells: You’d better practice hard and well or you won’t be playing on Sunday. “We know what the model is now,” Campbell preached after the game in Nashville. “We gotta go after each other again on Wednesday … offense versus defense.”
The biggest star Sunday was defensive end Cam Wake. It’s hard to get four sacks in a month. Wake got four sacks in the first half, and he and Vernon ratcheted up the heat on Mariota. After the game I asked Wake about what the past week with a new coach was like—and how that translated to Sunday’s blowout.
“One word I’d use to describe it: fun,” said Wake. “We’re running, we’re hitting, we’re playing with enthusiasm, and we’re carrying that enthusiasm over from the practices to today at the game. We had a great week of practice. I think Dan’s a guy we have respect for because he’s played the game, and he’s played it recently. He knows how players feel. He knows how practice makes players feel. The respect is there for him, because he’s got such passion for the game.”
The Dolphins played with a fervor Sunday unlike they showed for much of the season’s first four games under Joe Philbin. If you don’t play with consistent abandon under Campbell, he’s likely to yank you. It’s too soon to judge any player in the system yet—and so we won’t judge Wake or Ndamukong Suh on either end of the performance scale after one game—but Campbell will be judging.
“We’re five or six games into the season,” said Wake. (They’re 2-3, actually.) “People made a big deal of how far we were behind in the last couple of weeks, but quite literally anything can happen the rest of the year. We could win the rest of our games and win the Super Bowl. Or we could lose them. It’s up to us. No outcome’s off the table for this team.”
Tennessee is not a good team right now, to be sure. So Miami might have won this game with anyone coaching. But Campbell’s influence showed up in the intensity of the play. Few teams will be more intriguing than Miami for the next couple of months.
* * *
Photo: Mike Stone/Getty Images
Tony Romo's broken clavicle has left the Cowboys without consistent quarterback play for most of the season's first half.
Presented without comment.
Well, with a little comment.
I was looking at injuries across the league over the weekend and trying to come up with a metric or example of how eye-opening this spate of injuries this season has been. (And I doubt it’s any different from what it has been in the past few years; it’s just that when you’re in the middle of it, you just shake your head at the sheer volume.)
I thought: I bet I could make a pretty good team, maybe even a Pro Bowl team, of guys who’ve missed time due to injury in the first six weeks of the season. Then I thought: I bet I could make one of those teams in the NFC East alone.
And so I did. What follows is a starting lineup of players from the NFC East who have missed time with injuries, or are on injured reserve or the physically-unable-to-perform list, with number of games missed in parentheses following the name. (In the case of Eagles and Giants, I have added tonight’s game if they’ve been declared out, and not added it if there is a chance they will play.)
OFFENSE................................................................ DEFENSE
WR Dez Bryant, DAL (4)...................... DE Robert Ayers, NYG (4)
T Trent Williams, WAS (1).................. DT Stephen Paea, WAS (1)
G Ronald Leary, DAL (2)..................... DT Markus Kuhn, NYG (3)
C Kory Lichtensteiger, WAS (1).......... DE Randy Gregory, DAL (4)
G Shawn Lauvao, WAS (3)....................LB Junior Galette, WAS (6, IR)
T Will Beatty, NYG (6, PUP)............... LB Kiko Alonso, PHI (4)
TE Niles Paul, WAS (6, IR)................. LB Mychal Kendricks, PHI (3)
WR Victor Cruz, NYG (6)................... CB DeAngelo Hall, WAS (3)
WR DeSean Jackson, WAS (5)............ SS Duke Ihenacho, WAS (5, IR)
QB Tony Romo, DAL (3).................... FS Mykkele Thompson, NYG (6, IR)
RB DeMarco Murray, PHI (1)............ CB Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie, NYG (2)
......................................................................Nickel Orlando Scandrick, DAL (5, IR)
Except for Thompson, who was fighting for a job in training camp when he tore his Achilles, every one of the 22 other players is a solid starter, or, in the event of Scandrick, one of the best nickel corners in football.
* * *
“I said, ‘Hey, Steve, let me ask you a question. How many SEC championships can you win? Ten? Twenty? There's more to life than SEC championships, isn't there?’ He said, ‘I can get in my car right here and in 15 minutes I'll be at the beach.’ I said, ‘Hey, I can top that here in Green Bay. You can go out in your car and in 10 minutes you'll be at the beach. The difference is, the beach will be frozen.’ ”
—Former Green Bay GM Ron Wolf, explaining to Bob McGinn of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel how he twice tried to hire Steve Spurrier to coach the Packers—in 1999, when Ray Rhodes got the job, and in 2000, when Wolf went with Mike Sherman. Said Wolf: “He wanted no part of Green Bay. I’m sure it was the lifestyle.”
Steve Spurrier and Brett Favre. Now that would have been an interesting combo platter.
“We don't suck.”
—Seattle free safety Earl Thomas, after the Seahawks blew a fourth-quarter lead for the fourth time in four 2015 losses Sunday at home to Carolina.
“What do you want to talk about? Let's talk about another college. Let's talk about North Texas. I know you have an obligation, and I understand that it's going to happen [when] we're not successful and we're not winning. I came from college, [so the assumption is] I'm going to go back to college. I hope someday to be like coach [Tom] Coughlin and win enough games where I can stay around long enough without speculation. I understand you have to ask the question, but I answered it the same way a year ago and I answered it the same way my first year here.”
—Chip Kelly, to the Philadelphia media, on be asked if he has interest in the USC or South Carolina coaching jobs.
I didn’t even know North Texas had a job opening. But I would add one point: I remember nine years ago when Nick Saban told me he was staying with the Dolphins and don’t listen to the rumors, and a few days later he’s on a plane to Tuscaloosa. I know the questions have to be asked, and I don’t expect Kelly to leave for college football anytime soon. But it’s not going to generate many fruitful answers.
* * *
I think you’re blowing it, Johnny Manziel.
I think I’m empathetic with anyone who has a substance-abuse problem. But Manziel spent 87 days in a treatment center in the off-season. I’m sure he has pressure in his life (self-imposed and from the outside), but day-drinking and driving 90 mph on the berm of an interstate highway and having an altercation with his girlfriend are not signs that he’s in a good place with his recovery from whatever addiction he was battling in the off-season.
I’ve spent a total of maybe 40 minutes in my life with Manziel, so I can’t say that I know him at all. But there’s something about the way he plays football and his spirit that has me rooting very much for him—if not to show us he can play in the NFL at least to show us he can have a good life.
Last week, speaking to Josh McCown, who is playing above him with the Browns right now, it didn’t surprise me to hear McCown say, “I legitimately like Johnny. There’s something very likeable about him—he’s fun to be around. I think he’s got a really good chance to be a good quarterback in this league.” Not if he’s doing what he did last week.
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http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2015/10/19/nfl-week-6-cam-newton-panthers-colts-fake-punt
Calm Cam and the Indy Dolts
An inexplicable play call by Indianapolis against New England competed with a defining moment for Cam Newton and the unbeaten Panthers for top billing on a busy sixth Sunday of the NFL season. Plus the rebirth of the Dolphins defense, a Deflategate postscript, Week 6 awards and more.
by Peter King
Week 6, NFL, 2015. Memorable for the worst coaching decision since Grady Little left Pedro Martinez in the American League Championship Series about 16 batters too long in 2003. And for two drives that will change the narrative on Cam Newton. Or should.
A heck of a day, and night. The Jets are 4-1, all the wins by double digits, and are better than anyone but Todd Bowles’ mother expected. Seattle is 2-4, can’t block anybody and had another of its weekly late-game defensive meltdowns. Pittsburgh’s third-string quarterback, Landry Jones, beat a terrific defense, Arizona’s. The Broncos limped out of Cleveland, bordering on apologizing for an overtime win and being 6-0. In Green Bay, Philip Rivers threw for 503 yards and the Chargers lost; Eddie Lacy ran for three yards and the Packers won.
Five unbeaten teams. Zero winless teams.
Chiefs, Ravens, Lions: 3-15.
Jets, Panthers, Falcons: 14-2.
First, though, the Panthers had never won in Seattle, and Cam Newton had never beaten the Seahawks, and it sure didn’t look like that was going to change with eight minutes left in the Pacific Northwest and Carolina trailing by nine on Sunday. But Seattle isn’t Seattle anymore. And Cam Newton is better than you think.
The ball was perfectly thrown, hitting Olsen midway through the end zone. Accusatory fingers flew in the Seattle secondary, players pointing at each other. Like: I thought he was YOUR man! Touchdown. Carolina, 27-23.
Olsen found Newton on the sideline. “I wouldn’t want to roll with anyone other than you,” Olsen said
“This is probably as special a win as we’ve had,” Olsen said. “Playing such a good team, in a great environment, it means a lot to get a win like this. During the week, we were careful talking about it. It’s only one game, and even though they had our number and we really wanted to win it, there’s a long way to go before it really means anything.
But it’s a monkey off our back, no question. And it means so much to the guys here, and to the coaches and to the front office. We do things the right way here. We’ve got good community guys, and great chemistry, and everyone pulling for the same thing. So getting this win, it’s huge.”
* * *
Photo: Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images
After going 8 for 21 with two interceptions through the first three quarters, Cam Newton came alive down the stretch to lead the Panthers.
The tale of two Cams
For quarterbacks, the important time of games is always late. Bill Walsh once said he wanted a quarterback whose heart rate would measure late in the fourth quarter what it measured in a Wednesday afternoon practice. That’s the way Cam Newton played Sunday, when it got very late in the funhouse of CenturyLink Field, and the locals thought their recent bad fortune was about to turn, and the Seahawks were about to beat Carolina for the fifth time since Newton was drafted to win games such as this one.
“Calm,” said tight end Greg Olsen. “No conversation, really. Just business. We know what we had to do. Cam knew. He just called the plays and we played.”
“It would have been shame on me if I would have felt sorry for myself,” Newton said.
Down 23-14 midway through the fourth quarter, Newton looked at his receiver group. Six pass-catchers would rotate in and out of the lineup on the last two drives, including three who had a total of 14 catches all seasons—Jerricho Cotchery, Ed Dickson and rookie Devin Funchess.
Since Newton lost No. 1 wideout Kelvin Benjamin in training camp with a torn ACL, the receivers had been a crazy-quilt of new and vet. Catches by Dickson and Funchess on the first drive put the ball at the Seattle 33, and then Newton hit Olsen, his favorite target, with a seam rout about 20 yards downfield, and it took two Seahawks to drag him down at the 1. Jonathan Stewart bulled in from a yard out, and Carolina was a touchdown away.
Carolina’s defense stopped Russell Wilson (a familiar refrain for Seattle fans this year, a defense stopping Russell Wilson and the line that has been tormenting him), and fortunately for the Panthers, Jon Ryan’s 68-yard punt made it to the end zone. With 2:20 left, down 23-20, Newton took over at his 20-yard line. He completed five passes on this drive to five receivers, including a great third-down-conversion catch by Cotchery, with Newton facing a blitz. It was a wrestling competition between Cotchery and DeShawn Shead. Cotchery won.
Now it was Carolina’s ball at the Seattle 26 with 37 seconds left. Down three. No timeouts left. Logic said take a shot or two downfield, then settle for the equalizing field goal and overtime. First shot: sending Olsen up the seam, similar to what Newton had done on the previous drive. And that was the call—though it almost cost Carolina five yards.
“We were running out of time in the huddle because there was so much noise, and it was late coming in,” said Olsen. “Cam called it really fast, and we basically sprinted out of the huddle—there was no time to do much except get the play off. You just snap it and try to make the most of it. My job there is to go off the line, explode into the secondary and don’t predict what the defense will do—just run the route and get open.”
An incredibly fortunate thing happened: Seattle’s secondary was playing two different coverages on the play because the call from the sideline hadn’t reached all 11 players, and the noise was deafening; this is the one time when the crowd noise actually hurt the Seahawks. “There was a lot of room,” said Olsen. “I’m sure someone wasn’t in the right spot.”
The ball was perfectly thrown, hitting Olsen midway through the end zone. Accusatory fingers flew in the Seattle secondary, players pointing at each other. Like: I thought he was YOUR man! Touchdown. Carolina, 27-23.
Carolina took control of the NFC South with the win. The Panthers have a defense that makes it hard for foes to breathe. And they’ve got a quarterback who knows how to put some ugly series behind him, and play his best when the best is essential. The Carolina team that overcame Seattle in the fourth quarter is going to be a tough team to beat down the stretch.
* * *
Remember last week in this space, when I asked interim Dolphins coach Dan Campbell if he had a message he wanted to deliver to Miami fans? “We’re about to wake the sleeping giant,” Campbell said, with more than a touch of Vincent Price in his voice. (Or Freddy Krueger, for you youngsters.)
And so what happened after the stunningly brutish 38-10 vanquishing of the Titans in Nashville Sunday, in the first game for which Campbell—who’d never been anything more than a position coach—was in charge of an entire team? Owner Stephen Ross handed him the game ball and said, “The sleeping giants have awoken.”
Campbell—39, younger than Peyton Manning—accepted the game ball and said, with a touch of warning about keeping the pressure on foes for the next 11 games: “The sleeping giant is awake. But he can’t take a nap!”
(Last metaphors about huge men dressed in teal, not at all drowsy.)
Miami had six sacks (six times as many as they had in the previous four games combined), ran the ball better than it had all season, swarmed around Marcus Mariota menacingly and got a verbal salvo from Tennessee coach Ken Whisenhunt for, in his view, purposely trying to hurt Mariota when defensive end Olivier Vernon hit the rookie QB low. And, in general, Miami finally looked like the team that Ross felt he paid for, even with the biggest star, Ndamukong Suh, still playing just a supporting role.
When I thought was great about Campbell’s postgame talk to his team was that he recognized the practice-squad players and the backups whose job he has made it to give the starters a very tough week of preparation. Campbell is like one of his longtime mentors, Bill Parcells: You’d better practice hard and well or you won’t be playing on Sunday. “We know what the model is now,” Campbell preached after the game in Nashville. “We gotta go after each other again on Wednesday … offense versus defense.”
The biggest star Sunday was defensive end Cam Wake. It’s hard to get four sacks in a month. Wake got four sacks in the first half, and he and Vernon ratcheted up the heat on Mariota. After the game I asked Wake about what the past week with a new coach was like—and how that translated to Sunday’s blowout.
“One word I’d use to describe it: fun,” said Wake. “We’re running, we’re hitting, we’re playing with enthusiasm, and we’re carrying that enthusiasm over from the practices to today at the game. We had a great week of practice. I think Dan’s a guy we have respect for because he’s played the game, and he’s played it recently. He knows how players feel. He knows how practice makes players feel. The respect is there for him, because he’s got such passion for the game.”
The Dolphins played with a fervor Sunday unlike they showed for much of the season’s first four games under Joe Philbin. If you don’t play with consistent abandon under Campbell, he’s likely to yank you. It’s too soon to judge any player in the system yet—and so we won’t judge Wake or Ndamukong Suh on either end of the performance scale after one game—but Campbell will be judging.
“We’re five or six games into the season,” said Wake. (They’re 2-3, actually.) “People made a big deal of how far we were behind in the last couple of weeks, but quite literally anything can happen the rest of the year. We could win the rest of our games and win the Super Bowl. Or we could lose them. It’s up to us. No outcome’s off the table for this team.”
Tennessee is not a good team right now, to be sure. So Miami might have won this game with anyone coaching. But Campbell’s influence showed up in the intensity of the play. Few teams will be more intriguing than Miami for the next couple of months.
* * *
Photo: Mike Stone/Getty Images
Tony Romo's broken clavicle has left the Cowboys without consistent quarterback play for most of the season's first half.
Presented without comment.
Well, with a little comment.
I was looking at injuries across the league over the weekend and trying to come up with a metric or example of how eye-opening this spate of injuries this season has been. (And I doubt it’s any different from what it has been in the past few years; it’s just that when you’re in the middle of it, you just shake your head at the sheer volume.)
I thought: I bet I could make a pretty good team, maybe even a Pro Bowl team, of guys who’ve missed time due to injury in the first six weeks of the season. Then I thought: I bet I could make one of those teams in the NFC East alone.
And so I did. What follows is a starting lineup of players from the NFC East who have missed time with injuries, or are on injured reserve or the physically-unable-to-perform list, with number of games missed in parentheses following the name. (In the case of Eagles and Giants, I have added tonight’s game if they’ve been declared out, and not added it if there is a chance they will play.)
OFFENSE................................................................ DEFENSE
WR Dez Bryant, DAL (4)...................... DE Robert Ayers, NYG (4)
T Trent Williams, WAS (1).................. DT Stephen Paea, WAS (1)
G Ronald Leary, DAL (2)..................... DT Markus Kuhn, NYG (3)
C Kory Lichtensteiger, WAS (1).......... DE Randy Gregory, DAL (4)
G Shawn Lauvao, WAS (3)....................LB Junior Galette, WAS (6, IR)
T Will Beatty, NYG (6, PUP)............... LB Kiko Alonso, PHI (4)
TE Niles Paul, WAS (6, IR)................. LB Mychal Kendricks, PHI (3)
WR Victor Cruz, NYG (6)................... CB DeAngelo Hall, WAS (3)
WR DeSean Jackson, WAS (5)............ SS Duke Ihenacho, WAS (5, IR)
QB Tony Romo, DAL (3).................... FS Mykkele Thompson, NYG (6, IR)
RB DeMarco Murray, PHI (1)............ CB Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie, NYG (2)
......................................................................Nickel Orlando Scandrick, DAL (5, IR)
Except for Thompson, who was fighting for a job in training camp when he tore his Achilles, every one of the 22 other players is a solid starter, or, in the event of Scandrick, one of the best nickel corners in football.
* * *
“I said, ‘Hey, Steve, let me ask you a question. How many SEC championships can you win? Ten? Twenty? There's more to life than SEC championships, isn't there?’ He said, ‘I can get in my car right here and in 15 minutes I'll be at the beach.’ I said, ‘Hey, I can top that here in Green Bay. You can go out in your car and in 10 minutes you'll be at the beach. The difference is, the beach will be frozen.’ ”
—Former Green Bay GM Ron Wolf, explaining to Bob McGinn of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel how he twice tried to hire Steve Spurrier to coach the Packers—in 1999, when Ray Rhodes got the job, and in 2000, when Wolf went with Mike Sherman. Said Wolf: “He wanted no part of Green Bay. I’m sure it was the lifestyle.”
Steve Spurrier and Brett Favre. Now that would have been an interesting combo platter.
“We don't suck.”
—Seattle free safety Earl Thomas, after the Seahawks blew a fourth-quarter lead for the fourth time in four 2015 losses Sunday at home to Carolina.
“What do you want to talk about? Let's talk about another college. Let's talk about North Texas. I know you have an obligation, and I understand that it's going to happen [when] we're not successful and we're not winning. I came from college, [so the assumption is] I'm going to go back to college. I hope someday to be like coach [Tom] Coughlin and win enough games where I can stay around long enough without speculation. I understand you have to ask the question, but I answered it the same way a year ago and I answered it the same way my first year here.”
—Chip Kelly, to the Philadelphia media, on be asked if he has interest in the USC or South Carolina coaching jobs.
I didn’t even know North Texas had a job opening. But I would add one point: I remember nine years ago when Nick Saban told me he was staying with the Dolphins and don’t listen to the rumors, and a few days later he’s on a plane to Tuscaloosa. I know the questions have to be asked, and I don’t expect Kelly to leave for college football anytime soon. But it’s not going to generate many fruitful answers.
* * *
I think you’re blowing it, Johnny Manziel.
I think I’m empathetic with anyone who has a substance-abuse problem. But Manziel spent 87 days in a treatment center in the off-season. I’m sure he has pressure in his life (self-imposed and from the outside), but day-drinking and driving 90 mph on the berm of an interstate highway and having an altercation with his girlfriend are not signs that he’s in a good place with his recovery from whatever addiction he was battling in the off-season.
I’ve spent a total of maybe 40 minutes in my life with Manziel, so I can’t say that I know him at all. But there’s something about the way he plays football and his spirit that has me rooting very much for him—if not to show us he can play in the NFL at least to show us he can have a good life.
Last week, speaking to Josh McCown, who is playing above him with the Browns right now, it didn’t surprise me to hear McCown say, “I legitimately like Johnny. There’s something very likeable about him—he’s fun to be around. I think he’s got a really good chance to be a good quarterback in this league.” Not if he’s doing what he did last week.
