Topic: 14-15 nfl thread

[the bread dragon]

its about time for this, i figured
romo is coming back tonight iirc, cba to watch it though

ive been real disappointed with espns coverage of the preseason, I dont know whats going on or whos doin well
doesnt matter a /whole/ lot but still there seems to be nothing but little league baseball and the latest lebron soap opera on espn nowadays

[Lord Raven]

espn's coverage kinda sucks in general

our special teams look good, i didnt catch our first team offense but they looked good on the last two drives I saw them in.

[SirBlaziken]

Well, Josh Gordon's out for the season.....

and we still suck. That's Cleveland for ya. On the bright side, the rookie LB out of Iowa is looking pretty good so far.

[the bread dragon]

weve got another tight end for when gronk goes down (again!! :']) at the cost of one of logan mankins, a very good guard

meh.

[Lord Raven]

So basically, like Sudfield.

[the bread dragon]

yep, pretty much /:

[SirBlaziken]

Woah woah woah, wait. Stop the presses. Cleveland won? Taylor Gabriel (wearing my favorite number 18 btw) is looking like a good slot receiver for us, hopefully we don't cut him.

[Lord Raven]

It's a preseason game homie, if we went by preseason Ryan Leaf would be the second coming of Jesus and Peyton Manning would be a bust.

[the bread dragon]

>implying ryan leaf /isnt/ the second coming of jesus
raven, youre slipping


but in all seriousness i dont even know if the patriots have won at all because it doesnt matter a whole lot and i dont really pay much attention to it

[SirBlaziken]

It's a preseason game homie

When you're a Cleveland fan, you'll take a win of any kind. Preseason is like the only time we're ever good.

[Kerou 犠牲]

Ray Rice is a cretin

[Lord Raven]

I posted this in another thread on another forum and here's my reaction as a former fan of Ray Rice who honestly thought he could possibly make a hall of fame career after 2012:

I am now of the opinion that Ray Rice should be suspended for at least a year if not permanently following the release of the elevator video. Disgusting.

Worst part is how he (most likely) convinced his wife to severely twist the story and outright lie to the public, Harbaugh, and Goodell about how it was a mutual fight and how he hit her in retaliation to her going Solange-crazy on him. It was one sided and the most she did was slap him in retaliation to something he did.

In the very best case (ie this is an isolated incident) this is a very good reason why I don't drink (fear of losing control - Rice was intoxicated but if he decked her like that there were far more issues with their relationship) and it's a very good lesson to people everywhere about perception and your actions rippling across the media. (Which many athletes need). In the worst case (not isolated) there will be significant more attention to DV in the NFL (even if the intent is PR) and the girls family will watch the wife's family more closely or basically separate the two.

I feel for Rice (because really his life has been very very tough, bear in mind his mother worked a lot and his father was gunned down in a drive-by when he was a year old so he had no father figure growing up) but there is no excuse for that incident. He's no longer a Raven and I just hope we don't have to cut someone soon so we are under the cap for this because I don't want it to affect someone's life outside of his own.

It's painful to think about this too because all I have is memories of the set of runs and emotions of our various playoff runs from 2008-2012 and the magical 2012 season ("Hey diddle diddle Ray Rice up the middle") and now I can't really think about them anymore without being reminded of this.

The implications towards our cap space and towards the NFLPA (namely in Goodell being able to make penalties harsher as he sees fit, as well as going against HIS OWN change he made months ago - Ray's first time offense became indefinite instead of six weeks, meaning he's setting a precedent towards being able to do what he wants to players) are abhorrent and both these things have their hands tied with this.

And it is really really sad to hear about considering all of the charity he does around the area I grew up in and the inner city of Baltimore (like restless amounts of charity, not just PR charity) and hell he even got some initiatives passed, both in terms of laws and whatnot, against bullying. He has done legitimately a lot for this city and it makes it that much harder to see and absorb something like that.

[Kerou 犠牲]

I think this shows just how much a person can tarnish their career by doing something so foolish; I mean of course there's going to be excuses for it but they still don't cover up the fact that it happened, especially with the twisting of the story.

It's happened a lot in sports, not just in a scenario like this, but I'd give some comparisons in a way to Lance Armstrong and how he had to step down from his charity stuff because he finally came clean about doping (after years and years of denying, he even had the courts on his side for accusations for it.

I don't really know about the suspension process and how that impacts teams and whatnot so I'm not going to comment on that specifically in Ray Rice's situation, but if that happened to a footballer over here I'd expect them to be banned from playing for a year at least, if not longer. What have they said; he's indefinitely suspended now is it (after the 2 game ban before)?

I hope at least from this there is more done to help protect players mentally and emotionally with dealing with the lives of being sportsmen because you see a lot of the time athletes (or celebrities in general, and actually every day people too) struggling with things and there's not enough done to help them. There's been a few extremities in football in Europe, I think back to Robert Enke and how he committed suicide because he couldn't cope with depression. I guess that's a whole 'nother topic for discussion though.

If anything though, this whole situation has got me thinking about sports and the mentality away from it is ^^;

Thinking about it these comparisons are kinda crap since I dunno, they should all be seen separately. Meh, cba to give rid of it all now xD

(btw in terms of actual football I'll probably post around Super Bowl season to get a gist of things because I usually try and watch that at least, best of luck to whatever teams you all support in here for the season)

[Lord Raven]

Yeah so suspensions are a game-by-game basis, and players are not allowed to report to training camp or contact coaches during their ban.  It's regular season only; Ray Rice was playing a bit for preseason (but they benched him because they wanted his backups to get reps cause they'd be playing the first two games), and preseason are basically exhibition games for us where coaches get a feel for what their players are capable of outside of practice and in a real game situation (the rosters trim from 90 to 53 between preseason and regular season).

Though the thing about Lance is that I don't think he affected in area in nearly the same way as Rice, because Rice's efforts actually passed legislation if I'm recalling right and on top of that he's had a ton of summer camps that he himself has been there for and supervised and worked with kids.  He wasn't just donating; he was giving kids experiences that he didn't have, because as I said Rice himself grew up without a father.

But as for his implications, I'm not going to go into the NFLPA stuff because it's a mess but teams can only spend a certain amount of money on players due to a salary cap and shared revenue, and any breaches of that results in fines and worse if not met.  Rice's contract was structured in a way that if we cut him, we end up over the salary cap this year, and next year we have 9.75 million dollars counting against the salary cap and the year after we have 4.5 million counting against it.  The top 48 contracts or so are the only ones that count towards it, so 4.5 million is either getting rid of a very good player or not being able to sign a very good player, and 9.75 is the same idea except times two (or even one really really good player), or hell it kills our ability to sign depth.  That's basically 8% of our spending power on one player that won't even play for us.  Unless we can find a way to opt out of the contract, his actions basically hindered the team greatly and probably prevented people from having jobs.  On top of what being 2.5 million over this year means for us.

It's ridiculous.

[Kerou 犠牲]

Holy cow that pre-season trim is massive, I thought it was only a small amount since I saw a lot of articles around for when Michael Sam got cut from the Rams D:

Man, that's impressive but at the same time it's so frustrating because of what he did. It's always so heartwarming to read about people taking time out to give back to people, especially in such a strong way as that. Damn =[

Ahh right, thanks for clearing that up for me (I knew about salary cap in a general perspective but I didn't realise some of the implications and whatnot), yeah I can understand that being such an annoyance. Whenever you're in a team that's heavily focused on tactics and strategy (which a lot, if not all of NFL is from what I can gather?) that can screw things up so much =/