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Nothing on the Rams today. These are excerpts only. To read the entire article click the link below.
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http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2015/08/16/chip-kelly-philadelphia-eagles-nfl-monday-morning-quarterback
Perception and Truth in Philly
Chip Kelly has taken some hits, in the media and from former players, this offseason. Now it’s the Eagles coach’s turn to communicate his thoughts. Plus, how badminton helped Sam Bradford, an ironman in Cleveland, the 2014 playoff team that’s better than everyone thinks and much more
by Peter King
PHILADELPHIA — I asked Eagles coach Chip Kelly if he felt frustrated with the perception that he can’t get along with players, and isn’t a good communicator, even though those who’ve been around the Eagles for years will tell you the door to his office is mostly open, while Andy Reid’s office door was mostly closed. He gave me one of those wry smiles, which I took to mean: I wish I could tell you exactly what I think of this, but I’m going to filter it, because nothing good can come of me airing out people.
“Yeah,” Kelly said with that smile the other day, after a training-camp practice in south Philly. “But there’s nothing you can do about it. I think we do a really good job with communicating with our players. You can talk to guys on the team who say it’s the best communication they’ve had since they’ve been in the league. It’s just who do you want to believe? The players who are here understand that. At the end of the day you bring in 90 guys to camp and 53 are going to make it, so 37 people are going to hear something they don’t want to hear, and that’s the hard part.”
Then he quoted two people. He said Phil Jackson once said that if you want to be liked, don’t get into coaching. “Then there’s the Mike Schmidt quote,” Kelly said.
Which one?
“He said, ‘Philadelphia is the only town where you can experience the thrill of victory, then the agony of reading about it the next day,’” Kelly said. “It’s part of the territory, and rightly so. These people [media people] are awesome. It’s an unbelievably competitive market. New York has two teams so they gotta go to the Giants and the Jets. Here, there’s one team.”
Chip Kelly (Matt Rourke/AP)
Much to get to this morning around the league, from a New York courtroom to the broken jaw of the broken quarterback in New Jersey to, finally, some fruitful negotiations for the San Diego Chargers … as well as stories from the training camp trail.
My favorite story here? It’s about badminton—Sam Bradford becoming the first quarterback in NFL to rehab a torn ACL by playing badminton. More about that in a few paragraphs.
Today I journey to Renton, Wash., to see my 17th team, the Super Bowl runner-up Seahawks, the first stop on a seven-team trip out west. On Thursday, the east-of-the-Mississippi portion of The MMQB’s 2015 NFL training camp tour concluded—16 camps, 19 days, 5,042 miles in one over-ripe nine-seat van with WiFi and way too many 2 a.m. check-ins at Fairfield Inns—and I’ll bring you tales that piqued our interest with the Jaguars, Bears, Packers, Lions, Browns and Eagles.
There’s where I’ll start—in Philadelphia, the last stop on our East/South/Midwest tour. This stuff about Kelly and his relations with players reminds me of a coach who left Cleveland in 1995. Bill Belichick was a bad communicator. Ran Bernie Kosar out of town. Too dictatorial. Players hated him. Had one winning season and won one playoff game in five years. Finished a lousy tenure eight games below .500. Left Cleveland, and the perception around the league was he’d only be a coordinator the rest of his career. When Robert Kraft hired him in 2000 to coach the Patriots, Kraft got comments like, “Are you nuts? Belichick’s not a head coach.” In 15 seasons with the Patriots, Belichick has averaged 13 wins a year (including the postseason).
Not saying Kelly will be Belichick. The Eagles, under Kelly, have been 10-6 back-to-back, with a muddled quarterback situation, and 0-1 in the playoffs. He’s made hugely controversial moves this off-season, from gambling on the oft-injured Sam Bradford to dealing running-back star LeSean McCoy to Buffalo to signing a pair of backs—DeMarco Murray and Ryan Mathews—to replace McCoy. When he traded nickel back Brandon Boykin to Pittsburgh last month (for a fifth-round pick in 2016 that becomes a fourth if Boykin plays 60 percent of the defensive snaps for the Steelers in 2015), Boykin decried the lack of communication with Kelly, later saying he did not mean Kelly was racist.
It’s fairly fruitless to ask a man to defend himself against charges that he is racist. And because there is no evidence looking at Kelly’s personnel decisions with the Eagles that he is, I didn’t ask him either. I simply think it’s an unfair question if people might think there’s something to it when there’s no supporting evidence to say there is. Think of it: He traded a white quarterback for a white quarterback in the offseason.
He jettisoned two white veteran linemen with big price tags—Todd Herremans and Evan Mathis. He dealt an African-American running back whose running style he didn’t like and who would soon be due a big contract for a white middle linebacker. He signed two African-American running backs in free agency. His first five draft choices were black. His top six imports from other teams in veteran free agency were African-Americans (Byron Maxwell, Mathews and Murray were the big ones, with E.J. Biggers, Brad Jones and Walter Thurmond the complementary ones). In other words, next story please.
The next story here is Bradford. Four notable things as he tries to rebound from an ACL tear of the same left knee in 2013 and again in 2014:
• Bradford tore the ACL for the second time 51 weeks ago in a preseason game against Cleveland, and as a precaution, he sat out Sunday’s preseason opener against the Colts. I’d expect him to play against Baltimore on Saturday night.
• He’s not going to be wearing a knee brace. In practice Thursday, I watched him move without restriction forward and laterally with only a black elastic sleeve around the left knee. “It comes down to this: I’ve torn it with it both times with a brace on it, and it hasn’t stopped it. What good’s the brace doing? So I’m not going to wear it,” he said.
• He threw the ball well and with accuracy in the two hours I watched him, and those in camp say his arm’s looked very good.
• And the badminton thing. One of Bradford’s big rehab practices was playing badminton without a net, with a doctor and athletic rehab specialist he’d just met, Bill Knowles, from Wayne, Pa.
“I don’t really know how to explain it,” Bradford said, and then paused a few seconds, because what happened in June is not like anything he’d experienced in his rehabs from two ACL tears of the left knee.
“There’s standard rehab, where you have a sheet of what you have to accomplish every day in terms of exercise and rehab. Bill Knowles’ deal is, ‘Let’s play games.’ One day he said, ‘Let’s play badminton.’ We warmed up playing badminton. And then every day we were out here playing badminton. No net. He would hit it high and make me change directions and run. He throws all these PE games at you.
You don’t think about it being rehab until you look and see the positions your body’s been in, and you think, That’s pretty close to the positions and movements you’ve got to make as a quarterback. I’m sure people up in the offices are looking out and wondering, what in the world are they doing playing badminton? But, you know, you spend a year and a half doing the same exercises, and you get so tired of doing the same thing over and over, and [Knowles] came in and said, Let’s change it up—let’s play some games. I mean, I loved it. And that’s when I really felt the rehab took a big jump.”
Bradford spoke on the field post-practice. He’s always been a sort of unaffected optimist, a que sera, sera type. Asked about having any fear of it happening a third time, he said, “None. If it happens again, it’s just meant to be. It’s as ready as it can be. I feel great. I am confident in how I feel and how I can move and how the knee is. I’ve done what I needed to do in camp, and I’m ready. I can play. I’ve got a great opportunity in front of me.”
Kelly said the Eagle doctors told him there’s a 10 to 12 percent chance of Bradford tearing the ACL again. It’s a risk he’s willing to take. “What I’ve seen in Sam is what I thought we were going to get when I traded for him,” Kelly said. “Extremely accurate—he makes really good decisions with the football. He has as good an arm as there is in this league. He’s everything you want in a quarterback and he was before he was injured. He just has to stay healthy.”
Finally, an interesting note from Kelly on Murray. He had an almost inconceivable 449 touches last year in Dallas—392 rushing, 57 receiving—and the road is littered with backs who couldn’t follow up a season with such pounding with more great years.
Kelly admitted it worries him.
“I think there is a lot of validity to it,” he said. “But how do you manage him going into a season? Our plan all along was to get another running back with him. I wanted to have two running backs, and that’s why we got Ryan [Mathews]. I don’t think you can have a guy carry it 370 to 400 times per season and be successful. We’re going to run it a lot—we always do—but we’ll have more than one guy doing it.”
So the coach with the most pressure in the NFL this year east of Jim Tomsula seems happy with his team four weeks shy of opening night at Atlanta. The noise is okay too, mostly.
“I love the NFL,” Kelly said. “I think it’s awesome. We have a great bunch of guys here and an outstanding staff. The players want more everyday, they want to be coached, they want more information, they want everything. We have some really great leaders here—Malcolm Jenkins, DeMeco Ryans and now Byron Maxwell, who came over from Seattle; he’s been outstanding. I think everyone was concerned when you add this many people. But the guys we’ve added have been awesome. I like what I see.”
The crowd, and the city, will let him know soon enough if they like it too.
Philadelphia: The Tebow Watch is happening.
While I watched practice Thursday at the Eagles’ complex, there was this scene: Sam Bradford, his receiver covered in a seven-on-seven drill, tossed a ball harmlessly out of bounds, into the large bushes on the edge of the practice field. A few snaps later, Tim Tebow, the fourth-string quarterback battling Matt Barkley for the number three job, took a shotgun snap, looked at his options, saw none, and threw the ball into the exact same area of bushes.
“There’s Tebow’s intended receiver,” said a fan I was standing next to on the sidelines of practice. “The bushes.” He and his buddies got a good laugh out of that one.
No comment on Bradford’s throwaway, of course. He’s an accurate passer and deserves the benefit of the doubt. But not so Tebow. He has been so inaccurate in his brief career (47.9 percent) that when he makes a throw like that, it’s: same old Tebow.
In fact, it’s not the same Tebow. What remains to be seen is if the mechanically rehabbed Tebow can push Barkley out of a job. On Sunday, in his first preseason test, Tebow was marginally good, completing six of 12 passes for 69 yards while being sacked three times. He was hurried on almost every dropback behind a makeshift—and struggling—offensive line.
But the bad thing for Tebow was he showed very happy feet at times, probably because of the intense pressure. He won’t make it, though, unless he can set his feet, look over his options and make a good throw. In the offseason, he got Tom House, noted mechanics-fixer, to help him with his footwork and his arm slot, and both looked better Thursday at practice. But I repeat: If he doesn’t show well in the next three games, I think Kelly will thank him for the effort and keep Barkley. Conversely, if he shows well, Kelly won’t be afraid to keep him, and even put in a package or two the weeks he’s active to throw a scare into the opposition.
“Tim’s sequencing has really improved,” Kelly said. “Not just his throw motion, but how his arm is following his legs in the right order. I’m not too worried about his arm slot; you see a guy like Philip Rivers throw from different angles and be effective. Tim’s better at the overall throw now.”
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Chicago/Green Bay: A quick observation on the storied franchises.
Since the two teams met in that memorable 2010 NFC title game at Soldier Field—Packers 21, Bears 14—the Bears have had three coaches (Lovie Smith, Marc Trestman, John Fox) and three general managers (Jerry Angelo, Phil Emery, Ryan Pace). Green Bay has had one coach, Mike McCarthy, and one GM, Ted Thompson.
Since that game, the Bears have gone 31-33 and failed to make the playoffs four seasons in a row. The Packers have gone 47-17-1 and won one Super Bowl, and played in one other NFC Championship Game.
Since that game, the Bears have finished third, third, second and fourth in the NFC North. Green Bay has finished first, first, first and first.
Since that game, Jay Cutler has been involved in more melodrama than any other quarterback in the NFL. The only drama Aaron Rodgers has been involved in? I can’t think of it, unless appearing on Page Six of the New York Post because he’s been seen canoodling with Olivia Munn around North America counts as drama.
I feel for the Bears, because of the Kevin White news this weekend. White, the Bears’ charismatic first-round receiver, will be out for part or all of 2015 because he needs to get a rod inserted into his leg to correct a painful shin condition. He was going to be the speed weapon Cutler needed opposite Alshon Jeffery. Now the Bears will have Jeffery, Martellus Bennett and Matt Forte to take the pressure off Cutler, who simply has to cut down on the turnovers (24 last year, and it could have been worse; six more fumbles were recovered by Bears).
“We’re going to do things to help the quarterback,” GM Ryan Pace said at Bears camp in Bourbonnais. “We have a major commitment to the run, and that will take pressure off Jay. We have extreme confidence in the coaching staff, and we think Adam Gase can do a lot of things to help Jay. Adam can challenge Jay to be better, and also instill confidence in him. He’s an intelligent guy, and he works hard. We think Jay can be a very good quarterback in this system.”
Look, Pace is doing the right thing for his guy in propping up Cutler when the rest of the city wants him gone. I’d do the exact same thing. Say what you want, but if you were Pace, would you have fired Cutler and gone out and signed, say, Brian Hoyer? Or Ryan Fitzpatrick? No. You’d stick with Cutler and see if a third Chicago coaching staff could right the ship.
Meanwhile, five hours north of the Bears, Rodgers threw five interceptions last year. Four of them were on the hands of his receivers. And he threw 38 touchdown passes.
At Packers camp I became convinced that McCarthy decided to give up play-calling as much because he implicitly trusts Rodgers to be a coach on the field as that trusts the knowledge of Tom Clements in the offensive system. “Aaron gives me all the confidence in the world to do this,” McCarthy said on a rainy day in Green Bay. “I know how he thinks. He knows how I think. He can get us out of bad plays consistently. This offense is in great shape. If there was ever a time to get out of the play-calling, this is it.”
Two quarterbacks. Two different worlds.
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Detroit: Better than I thought.
All along, I’ve had this thought that Minnesota would be my surprise team of the NFC. Then I came to Allen Park, Mich., to watch the Lions practice, and saw rookie back Ameer Abdullah run through everyone on defense, and watched one of the two or three most intense practices of our tour, and saw a healthy Calvin Johnson shred the defense like the pre-ankle-injury days. And I imagine that Caraun Reid and others we’ve never heard of can play well enough in the middle of the defensive line to soften the death blow of losing Ndamukong Suh.
Then I thought back to the final game of the 2014 regular season. Twenty minutes left in Green Bay. Detroit 14, Green Bay 14.
Matthew Stafford (217 passing yards, three touchdowns, no picks) versus Aaron Rodgers (226 yards, two touchdowns, no picks) dueling at 10 paces. Rodgers led two touchdown drives down the stretch, Stafford one. And the Packers won the game, 30-20, and the NFC North.
“I don’t accept they’re that much the premier team in the division as everyone says,” Stafford said after practice one morning. “Just look at how we played last year. We split with the Packers and swept the rest of the division. We’re close. We haven’t taken a step back.”
The irony of Suh leaving? And taking his incredible run defense and sacking (a team-high 8.5 sacks) with him to Miami? In the off-season, he tutored Reid, working out with the second-year Princeton kid, and all in Detroit camp say Reid came back this summer a different player. More stout. Stronger, with a better interior rushing presence. At 6-2 and 306 pounds, Reid looks more lithe and penetrating than he did last year. How interesting that Suh, who has expressed nothing but love for the Lions after leaving for Miami’s riches, may have left a gift upon his departure from Michigan. If Reid become an impact player, and that’s a very big “if,” Suh would be the former first-round pick that kept on giving.
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Cleveland: Respect for Ray Farmer.
You have a few options when you make a mistake in life. You can own up to it and totally admit it and take your medicine; or you can do something less; or you can lie your way through it. We’ve all made mistakes and made choices about how to respond.
Cleveland GM Ray Farmer wishes he’d never texted offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan with suggestions/prompts/ideas/whatever during games last year. Farmer is a well-respected young GM in the league, a good scout who goes by his opinion, not by which way the wind is blowing. And he knew it was wrong to be in electronic communication with his coaching staff on game day. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and he just thought he should throw in his thoughts about what the Browns were doing on offense during the games.
It’s not something Shanahan particularly liked. But Farmer’s texting was discovered, and the league acted swiftly and fairly decisively: The NFL handed Farmer a four-game suspension to start the 2015 regular season. Once the preseason is over, Farmer cannot be involved in any team-related activities. He can’t go to practices. He can’t go to games. He must disappear until the Monday before Week 5, Oct. 5.
I expected Farmer to either no-comment this when we spoke at Browns camp last week, or maybe say he stands by whatever vanilla statement he issued when the sanction came down. But he didn’t.
“My mom and dad taught me a long time ago to take responsibility for my actions,” Farmer said, a little uneasy talking about it, on the side of the team’s practice field in Berea, Ohio. “That’s what I have done. As the time gets closer, I continue to reflect on what I did, and the cost of it. I made a mistake, and this is my penalty, and I am going to serve it.”
I wondered if he felt the sanction seemed a little harsh. Instead of texting, Farmer could simply have knocked on the door of the coaches’ booth and thrown his weight around. Or he could have walked to the sidelines to give his message, or sent a missive to do either.
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” Farmer said. “It’s not my job to make up the punishment, or to issue the punishment. My job is the general manager of the Cleveland Browns. And I made a mistake, and I have to live with it.
“I look at it this way: If I’m speeding, and I get caught, depending where it happens, maybe I get a $300 dollar fine, or maybe I get a $1,000 fine. That’s not my job, to decide what the fine is. If I speed and get caught, well, I shouldn’t have been speeding. Someone else determines what the penalty for it is.”
I’m not sure this is the most noteworthy thing coming out of Browns camp. I’ll be writing some about other things I learned there. But Farmer’s standup act impressed me a lot, and I thought you should know about it.
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Quotes of the Week
“His word is gold. And I think that’s what hurts him so much. He got played for a punk, for lack of a better word, and on top of that, he looked bad to his community—like he didn’t come through with Geno Smith, like it was his fault.”
—Luke Hurtado, a former high school teammate of IK Enemkpali in Texas, to Ben Shpigel of the New York Times, in an excellent profile of Enemkpali, and what made him so upset that he punched Jets quarterback Geno Smith in the jaw, fracturing it. Smith was a no-show for Enemkpali’s football camp fundraiser July 11, and exactly one month later, with Smith reportedly never having apologized for missing the camp and never paying Enemkpali back $600 Enemkpali said he was owed, the jaw-breaking occurred in the Jets’ locker room.
It will be interesting to see in the coming days just which story is accepted as the truth for why Smith no-showed. Shpigel reports it’s because a friend of Smith’s was in a bike accident. On the day of the event, word around the Jets was that Smith canceled because of a death of a friend. But the Shpigel story is interesting because it notes that Smith was featured prominently in publicity materials for the camp, and some people grumbled when the advertised starting NFL quarterback wasn’t there. The story paints a good picture—while not excusing the act—of why Enemkpali was so steamed that Smith didn’t show, and apparently didn’t call either. “He bailed on me,” Enemkpali told a friend on the day of the camp. “I haven’t heard from him.”
“Steve Spurrier had the best quote on that. They asked him if he ever had a quarterback punched out and he said, ‘No, I don’t reckon so. But I also have never had a quarterback that owed anybody money either.’ ”
—Philadelphia coach Chip Kelly, on the story of the week: Jets starting quarterback Geno Smith getting punched out by a teammate, allegedly because of an unpaid debt.
I think much has been made of Jet-turned-Bill linebacker IK Enemkpali breaking Geno Smith’s jaw Tuesday, and the subsequent fallout. Several points to make:
a. I was amazed, from the four coaches/players and one highly respected retired player I spoke with in the past few days that the blame for the incident in the eyes of the NFLers should be shared. I mean, almost equally shared. As one active quarterback told me, “You just do not go around owing teammates money—especially a teammate who doesn’t make much money.” As Jenny Vrentas reported Thursday, the Bills got the inside info on what exactly happened from a player inside the Jets’ locker room, and you can bet if the story came back that it was all Enemkpali’s fault in the eyes of this player, the Bills would not have signed him.
b. It’s pretty obvious from the words coming out of the Jets’ locker room—good reporting by the New York Post’sBrian Costello on Friday, saying he had two sources advancing the story that Smith “instigated the altercation with Enemkpali”—that there’s not overwhelming respect for Smith in the room.
c. From the respected retired player (not a Jet): “I can tell you there’d have been a huge problem in the locker rooms I was in if guys thought the quarterback owed money to a guy and didn’t pay—even if it was in dispute whether he owed him money or not. It wouldn’t matter what the reality was. Guys would be pissed.”
d. The Jets open against the Browns. And Cleveland isn’t overjoyed that the starting quarterback for the Jets will miss the game for two simple reasons: Smith is feared by no defensive staff in the league, and new Jets starter Ryan Fitzpatrick started 45 games for Gailey when he was head coach of the Bills from 2010 to 2012. Fitzpatrick knows the Gailey offense far better than Smith. Then there’s the touchdown-to-interception differential for both: Smith, minus-9; Fitzpatrick, plus-22.
e. Has there ever been a more transparent slap at a player than Enemkpali’s apology about the incident when he got to Buffalo, when he apologized to everyone in the Jets’ building except for the one whose jaw he broke in two places? Enemkpali: “I want to apologize to the Jets organization, the fans, my teammates and the coaches. I apologize for what happened. It should have never happened. I should have walked away from the situation. It was never my intentions to hurt anybody.” Then he thanked the Bills for picking him up. I would have loved to hear him say: “I wouldn’t apologize to Geno Smith if I lived to be 150.” Because that’s what he meant with that statement.
7. I think you shouldn’t blame me for the football locker-room ethos that shifts the blame from the assaulter to the assaultee. I’m the messenger here. I’m just telling you what five people I respect said about the punching in the wake of it. In my opinion, there’s never a good-enough reason for punching another man in the face.
8. I think if you’re wondering about the sanction awaiting Enemkpali by the NFL, well, I wouldn’t count on him being in a Bills uniform for the first couple of weeks. After the punchout, NFL VP Troy Vincent sent a memo to all coaches and general managers reminding them of the prohibition on fighting on the field and off. “These rules are in place for the protection and safety of our players and to keep them on the field,” said Vincent. “As professionals, no matter how emotional the game becomes, there is nothing that should resort to fighting.
Coaches are encouraged to emphasize to players, coaches, and other club personnel who are on the sidelines, that fighting will not be tolerated. We greatly appreciate all of your efforts to advance our great game, keep it competitive and professional, and to ensure that it is played to the highest standards.” So … how much of a suspension can Enemkpali expect? No one knows, because NFL discipline is a moving target. But I’d be surprised if it was less than two games.
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http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2015/08/16/chip-kelly-philadelphia-eagles-nfl-monday-morning-quarterback
Perception and Truth in Philly
Chip Kelly has taken some hits, in the media and from former players, this offseason. Now it’s the Eagles coach’s turn to communicate his thoughts. Plus, how badminton helped Sam Bradford, an ironman in Cleveland, the 2014 playoff team that’s better than everyone thinks and much more
by Peter King
PHILADELPHIA — I asked Eagles coach Chip Kelly if he felt frustrated with the perception that he can’t get along with players, and isn’t a good communicator, even though those who’ve been around the Eagles for years will tell you the door to his office is mostly open, while Andy Reid’s office door was mostly closed. He gave me one of those wry smiles, which I took to mean: I wish I could tell you exactly what I think of this, but I’m going to filter it, because nothing good can come of me airing out people.
“Yeah,” Kelly said with that smile the other day, after a training-camp practice in south Philly. “But there’s nothing you can do about it. I think we do a really good job with communicating with our players. You can talk to guys on the team who say it’s the best communication they’ve had since they’ve been in the league. It’s just who do you want to believe? The players who are here understand that. At the end of the day you bring in 90 guys to camp and 53 are going to make it, so 37 people are going to hear something they don’t want to hear, and that’s the hard part.”
Then he quoted two people. He said Phil Jackson once said that if you want to be liked, don’t get into coaching. “Then there’s the Mike Schmidt quote,” Kelly said.
Which one?
“He said, ‘Philadelphia is the only town where you can experience the thrill of victory, then the agony of reading about it the next day,’” Kelly said. “It’s part of the territory, and rightly so. These people [media people] are awesome. It’s an unbelievably competitive market. New York has two teams so they gotta go to the Giants and the Jets. Here, there’s one team.”
Chip Kelly (Matt Rourke/AP)
Much to get to this morning around the league, from a New York courtroom to the broken jaw of the broken quarterback in New Jersey to, finally, some fruitful negotiations for the San Diego Chargers … as well as stories from the training camp trail.
My favorite story here? It’s about badminton—Sam Bradford becoming the first quarterback in NFL to rehab a torn ACL by playing badminton. More about that in a few paragraphs.
Today I journey to Renton, Wash., to see my 17th team, the Super Bowl runner-up Seahawks, the first stop on a seven-team trip out west. On Thursday, the east-of-the-Mississippi portion of The MMQB’s 2015 NFL training camp tour concluded—16 camps, 19 days, 5,042 miles in one over-ripe nine-seat van with WiFi and way too many 2 a.m. check-ins at Fairfield Inns—and I’ll bring you tales that piqued our interest with the Jaguars, Bears, Packers, Lions, Browns and Eagles.
There’s where I’ll start—in Philadelphia, the last stop on our East/South/Midwest tour. This stuff about Kelly and his relations with players reminds me of a coach who left Cleveland in 1995. Bill Belichick was a bad communicator. Ran Bernie Kosar out of town. Too dictatorial. Players hated him. Had one winning season and won one playoff game in five years. Finished a lousy tenure eight games below .500. Left Cleveland, and the perception around the league was he’d only be a coordinator the rest of his career. When Robert Kraft hired him in 2000 to coach the Patriots, Kraft got comments like, “Are you nuts? Belichick’s not a head coach.” In 15 seasons with the Patriots, Belichick has averaged 13 wins a year (including the postseason).
Not saying Kelly will be Belichick. The Eagles, under Kelly, have been 10-6 back-to-back, with a muddled quarterback situation, and 0-1 in the playoffs. He’s made hugely controversial moves this off-season, from gambling on the oft-injured Sam Bradford to dealing running-back star LeSean McCoy to Buffalo to signing a pair of backs—DeMarco Murray and Ryan Mathews—to replace McCoy. When he traded nickel back Brandon Boykin to Pittsburgh last month (for a fifth-round pick in 2016 that becomes a fourth if Boykin plays 60 percent of the defensive snaps for the Steelers in 2015), Boykin decried the lack of communication with Kelly, later saying he did not mean Kelly was racist.
It’s fairly fruitless to ask a man to defend himself against charges that he is racist. And because there is no evidence looking at Kelly’s personnel decisions with the Eagles that he is, I didn’t ask him either. I simply think it’s an unfair question if people might think there’s something to it when there’s no supporting evidence to say there is. Think of it: He traded a white quarterback for a white quarterback in the offseason.
He jettisoned two white veteran linemen with big price tags—Todd Herremans and Evan Mathis. He dealt an African-American running back whose running style he didn’t like and who would soon be due a big contract for a white middle linebacker. He signed two African-American running backs in free agency. His first five draft choices were black. His top six imports from other teams in veteran free agency were African-Americans (Byron Maxwell, Mathews and Murray were the big ones, with E.J. Biggers, Brad Jones and Walter Thurmond the complementary ones). In other words, next story please.
The next story here is Bradford. Four notable things as he tries to rebound from an ACL tear of the same left knee in 2013 and again in 2014:
• Bradford tore the ACL for the second time 51 weeks ago in a preseason game against Cleveland, and as a precaution, he sat out Sunday’s preseason opener against the Colts. I’d expect him to play against Baltimore on Saturday night.
• He’s not going to be wearing a knee brace. In practice Thursday, I watched him move without restriction forward and laterally with only a black elastic sleeve around the left knee. “It comes down to this: I’ve torn it with it both times with a brace on it, and it hasn’t stopped it. What good’s the brace doing? So I’m not going to wear it,” he said.
• He threw the ball well and with accuracy in the two hours I watched him, and those in camp say his arm’s looked very good.
• And the badminton thing. One of Bradford’s big rehab practices was playing badminton without a net, with a doctor and athletic rehab specialist he’d just met, Bill Knowles, from Wayne, Pa.
“I don’t really know how to explain it,” Bradford said, and then paused a few seconds, because what happened in June is not like anything he’d experienced in his rehabs from two ACL tears of the left knee.
“There’s standard rehab, where you have a sheet of what you have to accomplish every day in terms of exercise and rehab. Bill Knowles’ deal is, ‘Let’s play games.’ One day he said, ‘Let’s play badminton.’ We warmed up playing badminton. And then every day we were out here playing badminton. No net. He would hit it high and make me change directions and run. He throws all these PE games at you.
You don’t think about it being rehab until you look and see the positions your body’s been in, and you think, That’s pretty close to the positions and movements you’ve got to make as a quarterback. I’m sure people up in the offices are looking out and wondering, what in the world are they doing playing badminton? But, you know, you spend a year and a half doing the same exercises, and you get so tired of doing the same thing over and over, and [Knowles] came in and said, Let’s change it up—let’s play some games. I mean, I loved it. And that’s when I really felt the rehab took a big jump.”
Bradford spoke on the field post-practice. He’s always been a sort of unaffected optimist, a que sera, sera type. Asked about having any fear of it happening a third time, he said, “None. If it happens again, it’s just meant to be. It’s as ready as it can be. I feel great. I am confident in how I feel and how I can move and how the knee is. I’ve done what I needed to do in camp, and I’m ready. I can play. I’ve got a great opportunity in front of me.”
Kelly said the Eagle doctors told him there’s a 10 to 12 percent chance of Bradford tearing the ACL again. It’s a risk he’s willing to take. “What I’ve seen in Sam is what I thought we were going to get when I traded for him,” Kelly said. “Extremely accurate—he makes really good decisions with the football. He has as good an arm as there is in this league. He’s everything you want in a quarterback and he was before he was injured. He just has to stay healthy.”
Finally, an interesting note from Kelly on Murray. He had an almost inconceivable 449 touches last year in Dallas—392 rushing, 57 receiving—and the road is littered with backs who couldn’t follow up a season with such pounding with more great years.
Kelly admitted it worries him.
“I think there is a lot of validity to it,” he said. “But how do you manage him going into a season? Our plan all along was to get another running back with him. I wanted to have two running backs, and that’s why we got Ryan [Mathews]. I don’t think you can have a guy carry it 370 to 400 times per season and be successful. We’re going to run it a lot—we always do—but we’ll have more than one guy doing it.”
So the coach with the most pressure in the NFL this year east of Jim Tomsula seems happy with his team four weeks shy of opening night at Atlanta. The noise is okay too, mostly.
“I love the NFL,” Kelly said. “I think it’s awesome. We have a great bunch of guys here and an outstanding staff. The players want more everyday, they want to be coached, they want more information, they want everything. We have some really great leaders here—Malcolm Jenkins, DeMeco Ryans and now Byron Maxwell, who came over from Seattle; he’s been outstanding. I think everyone was concerned when you add this many people. But the guys we’ve added have been awesome. I like what I see.”
The crowd, and the city, will let him know soon enough if they like it too.
Philadelphia: The Tebow Watch is happening.
While I watched practice Thursday at the Eagles’ complex, there was this scene: Sam Bradford, his receiver covered in a seven-on-seven drill, tossed a ball harmlessly out of bounds, into the large bushes on the edge of the practice field. A few snaps later, Tim Tebow, the fourth-string quarterback battling Matt Barkley for the number three job, took a shotgun snap, looked at his options, saw none, and threw the ball into the exact same area of bushes.
“There’s Tebow’s intended receiver,” said a fan I was standing next to on the sidelines of practice. “The bushes.” He and his buddies got a good laugh out of that one.
No comment on Bradford’s throwaway, of course. He’s an accurate passer and deserves the benefit of the doubt. But not so Tebow. He has been so inaccurate in his brief career (47.9 percent) that when he makes a throw like that, it’s: same old Tebow.
In fact, it’s not the same Tebow. What remains to be seen is if the mechanically rehabbed Tebow can push Barkley out of a job. On Sunday, in his first preseason test, Tebow was marginally good, completing six of 12 passes for 69 yards while being sacked three times. He was hurried on almost every dropback behind a makeshift—and struggling—offensive line.
But the bad thing for Tebow was he showed very happy feet at times, probably because of the intense pressure. He won’t make it, though, unless he can set his feet, look over his options and make a good throw. In the offseason, he got Tom House, noted mechanics-fixer, to help him with his footwork and his arm slot, and both looked better Thursday at practice. But I repeat: If he doesn’t show well in the next three games, I think Kelly will thank him for the effort and keep Barkley. Conversely, if he shows well, Kelly won’t be afraid to keep him, and even put in a package or two the weeks he’s active to throw a scare into the opposition.
“Tim’s sequencing has really improved,” Kelly said. “Not just his throw motion, but how his arm is following his legs in the right order. I’m not too worried about his arm slot; you see a guy like Philip Rivers throw from different angles and be effective. Tim’s better at the overall throw now.”
* * *
Chicago/Green Bay: A quick observation on the storied franchises.
Since the two teams met in that memorable 2010 NFC title game at Soldier Field—Packers 21, Bears 14—the Bears have had three coaches (Lovie Smith, Marc Trestman, John Fox) and three general managers (Jerry Angelo, Phil Emery, Ryan Pace). Green Bay has had one coach, Mike McCarthy, and one GM, Ted Thompson.
Since that game, the Bears have gone 31-33 and failed to make the playoffs four seasons in a row. The Packers have gone 47-17-1 and won one Super Bowl, and played in one other NFC Championship Game.
Since that game, the Bears have finished third, third, second and fourth in the NFC North. Green Bay has finished first, first, first and first.
Since that game, Jay Cutler has been involved in more melodrama than any other quarterback in the NFL. The only drama Aaron Rodgers has been involved in? I can’t think of it, unless appearing on Page Six of the New York Post because he’s been seen canoodling with Olivia Munn around North America counts as drama.
I feel for the Bears, because of the Kevin White news this weekend. White, the Bears’ charismatic first-round receiver, will be out for part or all of 2015 because he needs to get a rod inserted into his leg to correct a painful shin condition. He was going to be the speed weapon Cutler needed opposite Alshon Jeffery. Now the Bears will have Jeffery, Martellus Bennett and Matt Forte to take the pressure off Cutler, who simply has to cut down on the turnovers (24 last year, and it could have been worse; six more fumbles were recovered by Bears).
“We’re going to do things to help the quarterback,” GM Ryan Pace said at Bears camp in Bourbonnais. “We have a major commitment to the run, and that will take pressure off Jay. We have extreme confidence in the coaching staff, and we think Adam Gase can do a lot of things to help Jay. Adam can challenge Jay to be better, and also instill confidence in him. He’s an intelligent guy, and he works hard. We think Jay can be a very good quarterback in this system.”
Look, Pace is doing the right thing for his guy in propping up Cutler when the rest of the city wants him gone. I’d do the exact same thing. Say what you want, but if you were Pace, would you have fired Cutler and gone out and signed, say, Brian Hoyer? Or Ryan Fitzpatrick? No. You’d stick with Cutler and see if a third Chicago coaching staff could right the ship.
Meanwhile, five hours north of the Bears, Rodgers threw five interceptions last year. Four of them were on the hands of his receivers. And he threw 38 touchdown passes.
At Packers camp I became convinced that McCarthy decided to give up play-calling as much because he implicitly trusts Rodgers to be a coach on the field as that trusts the knowledge of Tom Clements in the offensive system. “Aaron gives me all the confidence in the world to do this,” McCarthy said on a rainy day in Green Bay. “I know how he thinks. He knows how I think. He can get us out of bad plays consistently. This offense is in great shape. If there was ever a time to get out of the play-calling, this is it.”
Two quarterbacks. Two different worlds.
* * *
Detroit: Better than I thought.
All along, I’ve had this thought that Minnesota would be my surprise team of the NFC. Then I came to Allen Park, Mich., to watch the Lions practice, and saw rookie back Ameer Abdullah run through everyone on defense, and watched one of the two or three most intense practices of our tour, and saw a healthy Calvin Johnson shred the defense like the pre-ankle-injury days. And I imagine that Caraun Reid and others we’ve never heard of can play well enough in the middle of the defensive line to soften the death blow of losing Ndamukong Suh.
Then I thought back to the final game of the 2014 regular season. Twenty minutes left in Green Bay. Detroit 14, Green Bay 14.
Matthew Stafford (217 passing yards, three touchdowns, no picks) versus Aaron Rodgers (226 yards, two touchdowns, no picks) dueling at 10 paces. Rodgers led two touchdown drives down the stretch, Stafford one. And the Packers won the game, 30-20, and the NFC North.
“I don’t accept they’re that much the premier team in the division as everyone says,” Stafford said after practice one morning. “Just look at how we played last year. We split with the Packers and swept the rest of the division. We’re close. We haven’t taken a step back.”
The irony of Suh leaving? And taking his incredible run defense and sacking (a team-high 8.5 sacks) with him to Miami? In the off-season, he tutored Reid, working out with the second-year Princeton kid, and all in Detroit camp say Reid came back this summer a different player. More stout. Stronger, with a better interior rushing presence. At 6-2 and 306 pounds, Reid looks more lithe and penetrating than he did last year. How interesting that Suh, who has expressed nothing but love for the Lions after leaving for Miami’s riches, may have left a gift upon his departure from Michigan. If Reid become an impact player, and that’s a very big “if,” Suh would be the former first-round pick that kept on giving.
* * *
Cleveland: Respect for Ray Farmer.
You have a few options when you make a mistake in life. You can own up to it and totally admit it and take your medicine; or you can do something less; or you can lie your way through it. We’ve all made mistakes and made choices about how to respond.
Cleveland GM Ray Farmer wishes he’d never texted offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan with suggestions/prompts/ideas/whatever during games last year. Farmer is a well-respected young GM in the league, a good scout who goes by his opinion, not by which way the wind is blowing. And he knew it was wrong to be in electronic communication with his coaching staff on game day. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and he just thought he should throw in his thoughts about what the Browns were doing on offense during the games.
It’s not something Shanahan particularly liked. But Farmer’s texting was discovered, and the league acted swiftly and fairly decisively: The NFL handed Farmer a four-game suspension to start the 2015 regular season. Once the preseason is over, Farmer cannot be involved in any team-related activities. He can’t go to practices. He can’t go to games. He must disappear until the Monday before Week 5, Oct. 5.
I expected Farmer to either no-comment this when we spoke at Browns camp last week, or maybe say he stands by whatever vanilla statement he issued when the sanction came down. But he didn’t.
“My mom and dad taught me a long time ago to take responsibility for my actions,” Farmer said, a little uneasy talking about it, on the side of the team’s practice field in Berea, Ohio. “That’s what I have done. As the time gets closer, I continue to reflect on what I did, and the cost of it. I made a mistake, and this is my penalty, and I am going to serve it.”
I wondered if he felt the sanction seemed a little harsh. Instead of texting, Farmer could simply have knocked on the door of the coaches’ booth and thrown his weight around. Or he could have walked to the sidelines to give his message, or sent a missive to do either.
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” Farmer said. “It’s not my job to make up the punishment, or to issue the punishment. My job is the general manager of the Cleveland Browns. And I made a mistake, and I have to live with it.
“I look at it this way: If I’m speeding, and I get caught, depending where it happens, maybe I get a $300 dollar fine, or maybe I get a $1,000 fine. That’s not my job, to decide what the fine is. If I speed and get caught, well, I shouldn’t have been speeding. Someone else determines what the penalty for it is.”
I’m not sure this is the most noteworthy thing coming out of Browns camp. I’ll be writing some about other things I learned there. But Farmer’s standup act impressed me a lot, and I thought you should know about it.
* * *
Quotes of the Week
“His word is gold. And I think that’s what hurts him so much. He got played for a punk, for lack of a better word, and on top of that, he looked bad to his community—like he didn’t come through with Geno Smith, like it was his fault.”
—Luke Hurtado, a former high school teammate of IK Enemkpali in Texas, to Ben Shpigel of the New York Times, in an excellent profile of Enemkpali, and what made him so upset that he punched Jets quarterback Geno Smith in the jaw, fracturing it. Smith was a no-show for Enemkpali’s football camp fundraiser July 11, and exactly one month later, with Smith reportedly never having apologized for missing the camp and never paying Enemkpali back $600 Enemkpali said he was owed, the jaw-breaking occurred in the Jets’ locker room.
It will be interesting to see in the coming days just which story is accepted as the truth for why Smith no-showed. Shpigel reports it’s because a friend of Smith’s was in a bike accident. On the day of the event, word around the Jets was that Smith canceled because of a death of a friend. But the Shpigel story is interesting because it notes that Smith was featured prominently in publicity materials for the camp, and some people grumbled when the advertised starting NFL quarterback wasn’t there. The story paints a good picture—while not excusing the act—of why Enemkpali was so steamed that Smith didn’t show, and apparently didn’t call either. “He bailed on me,” Enemkpali told a friend on the day of the camp. “I haven’t heard from him.”
“Steve Spurrier had the best quote on that. They asked him if he ever had a quarterback punched out and he said, ‘No, I don’t reckon so. But I also have never had a quarterback that owed anybody money either.’ ”
—Philadelphia coach Chip Kelly, on the story of the week: Jets starting quarterback Geno Smith getting punched out by a teammate, allegedly because of an unpaid debt.
I think much has been made of Jet-turned-Bill linebacker IK Enemkpali breaking Geno Smith’s jaw Tuesday, and the subsequent fallout. Several points to make:
a. I was amazed, from the four coaches/players and one highly respected retired player I spoke with in the past few days that the blame for the incident in the eyes of the NFLers should be shared. I mean, almost equally shared. As one active quarterback told me, “You just do not go around owing teammates money—especially a teammate who doesn’t make much money.” As Jenny Vrentas reported Thursday, the Bills got the inside info on what exactly happened from a player inside the Jets’ locker room, and you can bet if the story came back that it was all Enemkpali’s fault in the eyes of this player, the Bills would not have signed him.
b. It’s pretty obvious from the words coming out of the Jets’ locker room—good reporting by the New York Post’sBrian Costello on Friday, saying he had two sources advancing the story that Smith “instigated the altercation with Enemkpali”—that there’s not overwhelming respect for Smith in the room.
c. From the respected retired player (not a Jet): “I can tell you there’d have been a huge problem in the locker rooms I was in if guys thought the quarterback owed money to a guy and didn’t pay—even if it was in dispute whether he owed him money or not. It wouldn’t matter what the reality was. Guys would be pissed.”
d. The Jets open against the Browns. And Cleveland isn’t overjoyed that the starting quarterback for the Jets will miss the game for two simple reasons: Smith is feared by no defensive staff in the league, and new Jets starter Ryan Fitzpatrick started 45 games for Gailey when he was head coach of the Bills from 2010 to 2012. Fitzpatrick knows the Gailey offense far better than Smith. Then there’s the touchdown-to-interception differential for both: Smith, minus-9; Fitzpatrick, plus-22.
e. Has there ever been a more transparent slap at a player than Enemkpali’s apology about the incident when he got to Buffalo, when he apologized to everyone in the Jets’ building except for the one whose jaw he broke in two places? Enemkpali: “I want to apologize to the Jets organization, the fans, my teammates and the coaches. I apologize for what happened. It should have never happened. I should have walked away from the situation. It was never my intentions to hurt anybody.” Then he thanked the Bills for picking him up. I would have loved to hear him say: “I wouldn’t apologize to Geno Smith if I lived to be 150.” Because that’s what he meant with that statement.
7. I think you shouldn’t blame me for the football locker-room ethos that shifts the blame from the assaulter to the assaultee. I’m the messenger here. I’m just telling you what five people I respect said about the punching in the wake of it. In my opinion, there’s never a good-enough reason for punching another man in the face.
8. I think if you’re wondering about the sanction awaiting Enemkpali by the NFL, well, I wouldn’t count on him being in a Bills uniform for the first couple of weeks. After the punchout, NFL VP Troy Vincent sent a memo to all coaches and general managers reminding them of the prohibition on fighting on the field and off. “These rules are in place for the protection and safety of our players and to keep them on the field,” said Vincent. “As professionals, no matter how emotional the game becomes, there is nothing that should resort to fighting.
Coaches are encouraged to emphasize to players, coaches, and other club personnel who are on the sidelines, that fighting will not be tolerated. We greatly appreciate all of your efforts to advance our great game, keep it competitive and professional, and to ensure that it is played to the highest standards.” So … how much of a suspension can Enemkpali expect? No one knows, because NFL discipline is a moving target. But I’d be surprised if it was less than two games.
