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These are excerpts only. To read the entire article click the link below.
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http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2015/09/06/super-bowl-50-prediction-ravens-packers-nfl
See Ya in Santa Clara
The Ravens and Packers came close last season, blowing late leads in their respective playoff losses. Here's why they'll finish the job and meet in Super Bowl 50. Plus more playoff predictions, a solution for the NFL's discipline woes and notes on the biggest news from cutdown weekend
by Peter King
My picks, division by division:
AFC: New England, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Kansas City.
Wild Cards: Denver, Miami.
NFC: Philadelphia, Green Bay, Atlanta, Seattle.
Wild Cards: Arizona, Dallas.
AFC Championship: Baltimore 27, Denver 20.
NFC Championship: Green Bay 30, Philadelphia 26.
Super Bowl 50: Green Bay 31, Baltimore 27.
The awards:
MVP: Adrian Peterson, Minnesota.
Offensive player: Peterson.
Defensive player: J.J. Watt, Houston.
Offensive rookie: Marcus Mariota, Tennessee.
Defensive rookie: Randy Gregory, Dallas.
Coach: Dan Quinn, Atlanta.
Executive: John Dorsey, Kansas City.
Comeback player: NaVorro Bowman, San Francisco.
Seattle. I checked in with a Seahawk source Sunday night, and there’s scant optimism that strong safety Kam Chancellor—vital on the field, of course, but in the locker room too—will be in St. Louis for the opener in six days. Plus, free safety Earl Thomas, rehabbing from a torn labrum in his left shoulder, is likely to play next week but not certain. So, Seattle could face a matchup nightmare in St. Louis (last three years: Rams two wins, Seattle one in St. Louis) without the leader of the defense, Chancellor, and with Thomas not having hit anyone since Super Sunday 32 weeks ago.
Cary Williams, 30-year-old corner, replaces Byron Maxwell opposite Richard Sherman, and is on his third team in four years. Rookie Tye Smith, a fifth-round pick from Towson, is the likely nickel back. The Seahawks should score more, but the secondary has gone from the best in football to a total unknown.
Philadelphia/Dallas. Flip a coin. I like the Eagles better, by a bit, mostly because the Cowboys lost their best defensive back (Orlando Scandrick) for the year this preseason, and because Philadelphia scored faster this preseason than the Kardashians printed money. But there’s no insurance for Sam Bradford staying upright for the season; if he does, the Eagles are as good as anyone in the NFC, and maybe better.
My playoff jumpers? (The rising teams in each conference, I mean). Give me Minnesota (7-9 last year) and Miami (8-8 last year). The Vikings get a refreshed Adrian Peterson to buttress young Teddy Bridgewater at quarterback, and from talking to offensive coordinator Norv Turner in camp, there will be no conservation plan with Peterson. I think Peterson leads the NFL in rushes and rushing yards in his comeback year, and gives the Vikings the offensive identity they didn’t have a year ago. Last year, the Vikes ran on 42 percent of the snaps; this year, it’ll be closer to 52 percent.
Regarding Miami: I haven’t seen a team in recent years with the schedule advantage the Dolphins have in the first two months. Their opening seven weeks: at Kirk Cousins (Washington), at Blake Bortles (Jacksonville), versus Tyrod Taylor (Buffalo) at home, versus Ryan Fitzpatrick (Jets) in London, bye, at Marcus Mariota (Tennessee), versus Brian Hoyer (Houston) at home.
Of course, they’ve got the Patriots twice, the Eagles, Cowboys and Chargers in the last 10 games, but the schedule is tailor-made for a team with a dominating defensive front—not many teams have three defensive weapons on the front seven of Ndamukong Suh and Earl Mitchell together at tackle, and Cameron Wake coming off the edge—to get off fast.
NFL, union need to negotiate about discipline
Lots of leftovers after the embarrassing but not shocking (except to the NFL) total defeat in U.S. District Court on Thursday:
• The league got what it deserved, and I sense even some hard-liners in the league now are not convinced Tom Brady cheated. I’ve had a couple of club people who for months believed Brady must be guilty of something significant and now are questioning whether he directed any Patriots employees to do anything illegal. Clearly, some around the league don’t think Ted Wells, Jeff Pash and Goodell have the goods on Brady. They are right: The league doesn’t have the goods. There’s no proof that Brady told anyone to take air out of the footballs.
• For now—and I repeat, for now—I don’t think Roger Goodell’s job is in jeopardy. There are between two and four owners, a very small cabal, down on Goodell right now to the point that they would consider joining a movement to replace him. That’s not many, especially when you consider that Goodell is on the losing streak of all commissioner losing streaks, and when you consider that 24 votes would be required to replace Goodell. Understand that many of the leading owners in the league consider that Goodell is doing their bidding, fighting for what he believes is the right thing, and also that he’s taking hits for them on fronts like domestic violence.
• It makes sense for Goodell to fork over appeal authority in some commissioner-discipline cases, and I think he will—eventually. Goodell has said for years that nothing is set in stone, that the league has to be open to new ideas. The traveling draft, the re-do of the PAT, expansion of Thursday night football, expansion of flex scheduling, refs consulting with the New York officiating center during replay reviews, the 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time window on London games … It’s clear Goodell is not averse to change. And as Mark Maske reported in the Washington Post, the owners will discuss changing the commissioner’s authority in the discipline process.
For clarity’s sake: Goodell has the right, as we saw in the Brady case, to act as the hearing officer and the appeal officer in cases of Personal Conduct Policy violations and, most important, conduct detrimental to the game. (Most other discipline cases, such as on-field fines, substance abuse and PED cases, and CBA violation cases, have third-party or jointly appointed arbitrators.) I tried to talk to several owners in the wake of the Brady victory Thursday, and all but one wouldn’t speak, on or off the record. Too sensitive, most said.
But my reading of the situation from two people who have spoken to multiple owners or top club executives is that it’s a matter of time before the league begins discussions with union officials to try to find a solution to this mess. The feeling is a change will happen, but a change that happens in collective bargaining with the NFL Players Association.
• My suggestion for a solution. It could be that the union, smelling blood in the water, will stand firm and not give up anything in bargaining with the NFL, because the players know how weakened the NFL is right now. I doubt that will be enough for the league to just say, We’ll hand you neutral arbitration. But both sides know Goodell needs to fork over the appeal process for Brady-type cases. This solution seems logical: The league and players agree to a panel of three arbitrators; the arbitrators would be mutually agreed upon by the league and the union.
Each time there’s an appeal of a commissioner discipline case, one of the three arbitrators would be picked randomly to hear the appeal. In exchange, the CBA, set to expire following the 2020 season, will be extended one season, and would expire after the 2021 season. Now, the league will howl at this, saying that’s not enough of a trade with the players to give up such a valuable chip. But I would maintain this: The chip has become a poisonous one. The chip is not nearly as valuable as it once was. It’s now worth 20 cents on the dollar. Goodell has to make a save-face deal with the players, or risk the waterfall of negative press and public opinion washing over him and the league.
• Tod Leiweke should be on your radar these days. You may have read the other day that a key Goodell adviser, Paul Hicks, was resigning as the league’s executive vice president of communications and public affairs to take a job with a Washington consulting firm. True.
But the timing of his departure was odd—at the height of the biggest headache of Goodell’s tenure—at the same time the league's new chief operating officer, Leiweke, was conducting a thorough review of who should stay in the league office and who should go. As one top team executive said last week, “We need to find out if we have the right people giving us our legal advice.” Well, of course. When you’ve had setbacks in your last five major discipline cases, you’d be foolish not to question why.
Snaps played in 13 combined preseason games by three 2015 Most Valuable Player candidates:
Adrian Peterson (five games): 0.
J.J. Watt (four games): 0.
Rob Gronkowski (four games): 0.
Can we at some point, please, have a discussion about cutting the preseason from four to two games?
Kevin Clark of the Wall Street Journal first wrote about the 49ers catering to the shorter attention spans of their players in June, and I thought the story was so smart about the minds of young people today that I wanted to ask 49ers coach Jim Tomsula about it when I got to training camp recently.
Indeed, Tomsula has instituted a series of breaks between team meetings now. For the Niners, it’s 30 minutes in a meeting, 10 minutes free to do whatever.
“I went to a meeting this off-season and found out that my players—and really, all young people—basically have an attention span of about 28 minutes max,” Tomsula said. “At first, I’m thinking, Come on. But you hear really smart people talking about how to keep young people attentive and productive, and so I brought it back here. Now we talk in terms of 30-minute ‘blocks.’ Like, ‘How many blocks do you need for this install, coach?’
“I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about it at first, but actually, it’s led to us having a much more energetic day. Guys meet for 30 minutes, go to the bathroom, check their phone, get a coffee, send a couple of texts, whatever. Then they’re back, and they’re not distracted, and they stay fresh. That’s how it seems to us, anyway.”
No phones in the meeting rooms, of course. And no, “Coach, I’ve got to use the bathroom” 12 minutes into one of those blocks; if that’s the case, you should have gone 12 minutes ago.
What’s surprising, of course, is Tomsula is about as old-school as they come. Last year, when his daughter sent him a text with the letters “LOL,” he thought it meant “Lots of Love.” And he’s not on social media.
“Listen,” he said, pointing to the telephone on his office desk at Niners headquarters, “if you want to get a hold of me, call me on the telephone.”
Tim Tebow is not one of 1,696 active players in the National Football League. The four NFL people to get rid of Tebow—John Elway, Rex Ryan (and, in part, Mike Tannenbaum), Bill Belichick, Chip Kelly—should give you an idea of the odds he faces in returning to the NFL. He’s just not an accurate-enough thrower right now, but as Kelly told him, he needs to play the position in games, and the only place for him to do that now is in the Canadian Football League. If Tebow is serious about continuing his career in the NFL, he should be all about seeking a job in the CFL. That would take about 10 minutes to make happen.
I think Chip Kelly cutting Tebow proves what he has said all along: The best 53 guys will make his roster. It was neither a waste of time to bring in Tebow, nor was it a publicity stunt (as if Kelly wants publicity), nor was it something to buttress his image as some football genius. “There was no master plan,” Kelly said Saturday. “It was just that everybody comes in here and competes when you get here in April and we will let it play out the way it plays out.” And it did, and Tebow didn’t make it. End of story.
Robert Griffin III is the third quarterback in Washington—for now. I really don’t understand. If Griffin gets hurt on the practice field or the game field at any point this year and the injury is a significant one that stretches into 2016, the franchise is liable for a guaranteed $16.2 million base salary in the last year of Griffin’s contract. With Kirk Cousins the starter and Colt McCoy the likely number two, why would Washington risk investing 10.6 percent of its 2016 salary cap on a player hardly anyone in the organization believes in?
Tyrod Taylor is the quarterback of the Bills, and Matt Cassel is on the street. When the offseason began, Vegas odds (just kidding) had Cassel winning the starting job, E.J. Manuel the likely number two, and Tyrod Taylor fighting to fend off the rest of all available quarterbacks for number three. Taylor’s versatility and pleasantly surprising arm strength in camp won him the job. Now Cassel is hoping for a backup job somewhere else, and Houston (as Mike Florio reported Saturday) is a logical landing spot.
The trade for Kelcie McCray shows how serious the Kam Chancellor/AWOL situation is in Seattle. Clearly, the Seahawks are planning to play without Chancellor. That’s a serious situation. Read Greg Bishop’s enlightening story in this week’s Sports Illustrated to see for yourself how much of a leader and locker-room and on-field factor Chancellor is. But he wants to re-do his contract with three years left, and GM John Schneider isn’t willing to budge, for now, on at least making Chancellor’s contract increasingly guaranteed.
Seattle dealt a fifth-round pick to Kansas City, as Adam Schefter reported, for McCray, a hard-hitting but superfluous player for Andy Reid’s Chiefs. Now, you deal seventh-rounders for players you’re somewhat interested in around cutdown time. You deal fifth-rounders for players near cutdown time when there’s a fire drill. That's how I'd describe what is happening in Seattle with Chancellor right now.
**********************************************************
http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2015/09/06/super-bowl-50-prediction-ravens-packers-nfl
See Ya in Santa Clara
The Ravens and Packers came close last season, blowing late leads in their respective playoff losses. Here's why they'll finish the job and meet in Super Bowl 50. Plus more playoff predictions, a solution for the NFL's discipline woes and notes on the biggest news from cutdown weekend
by Peter King
My picks, division by division:
AFC: New England, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Kansas City.
Wild Cards: Denver, Miami.
NFC: Philadelphia, Green Bay, Atlanta, Seattle.
Wild Cards: Arizona, Dallas.
AFC Championship: Baltimore 27, Denver 20.
NFC Championship: Green Bay 30, Philadelphia 26.
Super Bowl 50: Green Bay 31, Baltimore 27.
The awards:
MVP: Adrian Peterson, Minnesota.
Offensive player: Peterson.
Defensive player: J.J. Watt, Houston.
Offensive rookie: Marcus Mariota, Tennessee.
Defensive rookie: Randy Gregory, Dallas.
Coach: Dan Quinn, Atlanta.
Executive: John Dorsey, Kansas City.
Comeback player: NaVorro Bowman, San Francisco.
Seattle. I checked in with a Seahawk source Sunday night, and there’s scant optimism that strong safety Kam Chancellor—vital on the field, of course, but in the locker room too—will be in St. Louis for the opener in six days. Plus, free safety Earl Thomas, rehabbing from a torn labrum in his left shoulder, is likely to play next week but not certain. So, Seattle could face a matchup nightmare in St. Louis (last three years: Rams two wins, Seattle one in St. Louis) without the leader of the defense, Chancellor, and with Thomas not having hit anyone since Super Sunday 32 weeks ago.
Cary Williams, 30-year-old corner, replaces Byron Maxwell opposite Richard Sherman, and is on his third team in four years. Rookie Tye Smith, a fifth-round pick from Towson, is the likely nickel back. The Seahawks should score more, but the secondary has gone from the best in football to a total unknown.
Philadelphia/Dallas. Flip a coin. I like the Eagles better, by a bit, mostly because the Cowboys lost their best defensive back (Orlando Scandrick) for the year this preseason, and because Philadelphia scored faster this preseason than the Kardashians printed money. But there’s no insurance for Sam Bradford staying upright for the season; if he does, the Eagles are as good as anyone in the NFC, and maybe better.
My playoff jumpers? (The rising teams in each conference, I mean). Give me Minnesota (7-9 last year) and Miami (8-8 last year). The Vikings get a refreshed Adrian Peterson to buttress young Teddy Bridgewater at quarterback, and from talking to offensive coordinator Norv Turner in camp, there will be no conservation plan with Peterson. I think Peterson leads the NFL in rushes and rushing yards in his comeback year, and gives the Vikings the offensive identity they didn’t have a year ago. Last year, the Vikes ran on 42 percent of the snaps; this year, it’ll be closer to 52 percent.
Regarding Miami: I haven’t seen a team in recent years with the schedule advantage the Dolphins have in the first two months. Their opening seven weeks: at Kirk Cousins (Washington), at Blake Bortles (Jacksonville), versus Tyrod Taylor (Buffalo) at home, versus Ryan Fitzpatrick (Jets) in London, bye, at Marcus Mariota (Tennessee), versus Brian Hoyer (Houston) at home.
Of course, they’ve got the Patriots twice, the Eagles, Cowboys and Chargers in the last 10 games, but the schedule is tailor-made for a team with a dominating defensive front—not many teams have three defensive weapons on the front seven of Ndamukong Suh and Earl Mitchell together at tackle, and Cameron Wake coming off the edge—to get off fast.
NFL, union need to negotiate about discipline
Lots of leftovers after the embarrassing but not shocking (except to the NFL) total defeat in U.S. District Court on Thursday:
• The league got what it deserved, and I sense even some hard-liners in the league now are not convinced Tom Brady cheated. I’ve had a couple of club people who for months believed Brady must be guilty of something significant and now are questioning whether he directed any Patriots employees to do anything illegal. Clearly, some around the league don’t think Ted Wells, Jeff Pash and Goodell have the goods on Brady. They are right: The league doesn’t have the goods. There’s no proof that Brady told anyone to take air out of the footballs.
• For now—and I repeat, for now—I don’t think Roger Goodell’s job is in jeopardy. There are between two and four owners, a very small cabal, down on Goodell right now to the point that they would consider joining a movement to replace him. That’s not many, especially when you consider that Goodell is on the losing streak of all commissioner losing streaks, and when you consider that 24 votes would be required to replace Goodell. Understand that many of the leading owners in the league consider that Goodell is doing their bidding, fighting for what he believes is the right thing, and also that he’s taking hits for them on fronts like domestic violence.
• It makes sense for Goodell to fork over appeal authority in some commissioner-discipline cases, and I think he will—eventually. Goodell has said for years that nothing is set in stone, that the league has to be open to new ideas. The traveling draft, the re-do of the PAT, expansion of Thursday night football, expansion of flex scheduling, refs consulting with the New York officiating center during replay reviews, the 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time window on London games … It’s clear Goodell is not averse to change. And as Mark Maske reported in the Washington Post, the owners will discuss changing the commissioner’s authority in the discipline process.
For clarity’s sake: Goodell has the right, as we saw in the Brady case, to act as the hearing officer and the appeal officer in cases of Personal Conduct Policy violations and, most important, conduct detrimental to the game. (Most other discipline cases, such as on-field fines, substance abuse and PED cases, and CBA violation cases, have third-party or jointly appointed arbitrators.) I tried to talk to several owners in the wake of the Brady victory Thursday, and all but one wouldn’t speak, on or off the record. Too sensitive, most said.
But my reading of the situation from two people who have spoken to multiple owners or top club executives is that it’s a matter of time before the league begins discussions with union officials to try to find a solution to this mess. The feeling is a change will happen, but a change that happens in collective bargaining with the NFL Players Association.
• My suggestion for a solution. It could be that the union, smelling blood in the water, will stand firm and not give up anything in bargaining with the NFL, because the players know how weakened the NFL is right now. I doubt that will be enough for the league to just say, We’ll hand you neutral arbitration. But both sides know Goodell needs to fork over the appeal process for Brady-type cases. This solution seems logical: The league and players agree to a panel of three arbitrators; the arbitrators would be mutually agreed upon by the league and the union.
Each time there’s an appeal of a commissioner discipline case, one of the three arbitrators would be picked randomly to hear the appeal. In exchange, the CBA, set to expire following the 2020 season, will be extended one season, and would expire after the 2021 season. Now, the league will howl at this, saying that’s not enough of a trade with the players to give up such a valuable chip. But I would maintain this: The chip has become a poisonous one. The chip is not nearly as valuable as it once was. It’s now worth 20 cents on the dollar. Goodell has to make a save-face deal with the players, or risk the waterfall of negative press and public opinion washing over him and the league.
• Tod Leiweke should be on your radar these days. You may have read the other day that a key Goodell adviser, Paul Hicks, was resigning as the league’s executive vice president of communications and public affairs to take a job with a Washington consulting firm. True.
But the timing of his departure was odd—at the height of the biggest headache of Goodell’s tenure—at the same time the league's new chief operating officer, Leiweke, was conducting a thorough review of who should stay in the league office and who should go. As one top team executive said last week, “We need to find out if we have the right people giving us our legal advice.” Well, of course. When you’ve had setbacks in your last five major discipline cases, you’d be foolish not to question why.
Snaps played in 13 combined preseason games by three 2015 Most Valuable Player candidates:
Adrian Peterson (five games): 0.
J.J. Watt (four games): 0.
Rob Gronkowski (four games): 0.
Can we at some point, please, have a discussion about cutting the preseason from four to two games?
Kevin Clark of the Wall Street Journal first wrote about the 49ers catering to the shorter attention spans of their players in June, and I thought the story was so smart about the minds of young people today that I wanted to ask 49ers coach Jim Tomsula about it when I got to training camp recently.
Indeed, Tomsula has instituted a series of breaks between team meetings now. For the Niners, it’s 30 minutes in a meeting, 10 minutes free to do whatever.
“I went to a meeting this off-season and found out that my players—and really, all young people—basically have an attention span of about 28 minutes max,” Tomsula said. “At first, I’m thinking, Come on. But you hear really smart people talking about how to keep young people attentive and productive, and so I brought it back here. Now we talk in terms of 30-minute ‘blocks.’ Like, ‘How many blocks do you need for this install, coach?’
“I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about it at first, but actually, it’s led to us having a much more energetic day. Guys meet for 30 minutes, go to the bathroom, check their phone, get a coffee, send a couple of texts, whatever. Then they’re back, and they’re not distracted, and they stay fresh. That’s how it seems to us, anyway.”
No phones in the meeting rooms, of course. And no, “Coach, I’ve got to use the bathroom” 12 minutes into one of those blocks; if that’s the case, you should have gone 12 minutes ago.
What’s surprising, of course, is Tomsula is about as old-school as they come. Last year, when his daughter sent him a text with the letters “LOL,” he thought it meant “Lots of Love.” And he’s not on social media.
“Listen,” he said, pointing to the telephone on his office desk at Niners headquarters, “if you want to get a hold of me, call me on the telephone.”
Tim Tebow is not one of 1,696 active players in the National Football League. The four NFL people to get rid of Tebow—John Elway, Rex Ryan (and, in part, Mike Tannenbaum), Bill Belichick, Chip Kelly—should give you an idea of the odds he faces in returning to the NFL. He’s just not an accurate-enough thrower right now, but as Kelly told him, he needs to play the position in games, and the only place for him to do that now is in the Canadian Football League. If Tebow is serious about continuing his career in the NFL, he should be all about seeking a job in the CFL. That would take about 10 minutes to make happen.
I think Chip Kelly cutting Tebow proves what he has said all along: The best 53 guys will make his roster. It was neither a waste of time to bring in Tebow, nor was it a publicity stunt (as if Kelly wants publicity), nor was it something to buttress his image as some football genius. “There was no master plan,” Kelly said Saturday. “It was just that everybody comes in here and competes when you get here in April and we will let it play out the way it plays out.” And it did, and Tebow didn’t make it. End of story.
Robert Griffin III is the third quarterback in Washington—for now. I really don’t understand. If Griffin gets hurt on the practice field or the game field at any point this year and the injury is a significant one that stretches into 2016, the franchise is liable for a guaranteed $16.2 million base salary in the last year of Griffin’s contract. With Kirk Cousins the starter and Colt McCoy the likely number two, why would Washington risk investing 10.6 percent of its 2016 salary cap on a player hardly anyone in the organization believes in?
Tyrod Taylor is the quarterback of the Bills, and Matt Cassel is on the street. When the offseason began, Vegas odds (just kidding) had Cassel winning the starting job, E.J. Manuel the likely number two, and Tyrod Taylor fighting to fend off the rest of all available quarterbacks for number three. Taylor’s versatility and pleasantly surprising arm strength in camp won him the job. Now Cassel is hoping for a backup job somewhere else, and Houston (as Mike Florio reported Saturday) is a logical landing spot.
The trade for Kelcie McCray shows how serious the Kam Chancellor/AWOL situation is in Seattle. Clearly, the Seahawks are planning to play without Chancellor. That’s a serious situation. Read Greg Bishop’s enlightening story in this week’s Sports Illustrated to see for yourself how much of a leader and locker-room and on-field factor Chancellor is. But he wants to re-do his contract with three years left, and GM John Schneider isn’t willing to budge, for now, on at least making Chancellor’s contract increasingly guaranteed.
Seattle dealt a fifth-round pick to Kansas City, as Adam Schefter reported, for McCray, a hard-hitting but superfluous player for Andy Reid’s Chiefs. Now, you deal seventh-rounders for players you’re somewhat interested in around cutdown time. You deal fifth-rounders for players near cutdown time when there’s a fire drill. That's how I'd describe what is happening in Seattle with Chancellor right now.
