You may have noticed that, in an effort to bring you as much fodder for high minded football thought as possible, we’ve added a “widget” (though it’s far to monstrous in size to merit that name) to the bottom of our little hermit’s hut on the web. Basically, the magic of Tweetizen allows us to gather tweets from all across the Twitter network (last usage of fake internet vocab, I swear) and hopefully provide you with a lot of links to football news and commentary around the web. If you feel like getting involved in the commentary, jump in.
UPDATE: And error #1 is caught: Each tweet contains a link, but for whatever reason, it appears as a blank space at the end of the tweet and an underlined blank word (a bunch of underscores) when you hover. Click on that blankness to follow the link for now.
UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: And we've fixed that problem. Links should be visible now. Be sure to scroll down and check these links out!
In order to prepare for the NFL draft (and survive the unbearably long offseason), we've decided to check in on this year's draft class from time to time and discuss some of the potential future characters of the League that stand out for some reason or another. Today, Kansas State QB Josh Freeman
My first paid writing gig out of college was writing for the WWE (the oiled up guys who put one another in bear hugs for shiny belts). The job allows for even less creative expression than you would imagine. Yet week after week, you were expected to come up with ideas, usually while traveling from small town to smaller town, write them out, then watch them be bastardized by incompetent wrestlers and producers, all the while defensively explaining to people that yes, you did have to be a good writer to get your job in the first place. Take it from someone who knows: Toiling in obscurity sucks.
Reflecting on this personal truth has me warming to Josh Freeman. With teams slowly realizing that Matt Stafford is an illusion, attention has turned to Freeman’s arm, which has led to comparisons to JaMarcus Russell. The similarities are immediately apparent to anyone who watches clips like the one above. The only other quarterback I’ve seen who can make a throw of that distance and accuracy with little to no regard for proper positioning and form is Russell. In fact, it’s almost scarier than Russell ever was, as Freeman looks like he could have a second gear of mobility that Russell lacks. In short, Freeman brings to a league with a shortage of consistent starting quarterbacks physical gifts that could rival almost anyone under center in the NFL. The perfect meeting of ability and opportunity, right?
Except Freeman remains third on the chart, behind both Stafford (yawn.) and Mark Sanchez, who is nowhere near as athletically gifted. The fact of the matter is that for all of his potential, Freeman’s gifts are viewed as perhaps permanently stuck as just that, potential. Freeman and his incredible arm never put together a winning season during his tenure as a starter for Kansas State. Never mind that he never had any elite talent around him, a fact made worse by playing in what may be college football’s new powerhouse conference; having never been a winner by any stretch of the imagination in college, scouts are obviously wary of Freeman’s ability to be a winner on a larger stage.
But what does that phrase even mean, “be a winner”? True, there are some players that do achieve victory against the odds, but this is because they tap into strengths that we never realized they had in the first place, strengths we may not have even realized were strengths. To say that they win because they are winners and winners win is an annoying syllogism that misses the point entirely. The sport becomes utterly uninteresting if we can’t gain some insight as to why these players win. That is not to say that we need it all on a platter. Yes, players can be winners because they have an arm like Freeman’s, but it’s usually even more than that, some combination of an obvious gift and something else. Maybe Freeman doesn’t have that something. Maybe, working in the wastelands of the Midwest’s forgotten football child, Freeman’s arm was just a novelty, like the country’s deepest well or the biggest ball of yarn.
Or maybe the something else that will make him something more than a spectacle is the journey out of obscurity. Being incredibly talented is a good thing, but it can also be a soul crushing thing for those who find no way to let their talent out into the world where it belongs. That world, for an arm like Freeman’s, one that shortens a field just by being there, is not to be found on empty plains, but in a crowded arena. When did front offices become so afraid of the responsibility that comes with being a teacher? Isn’t the American dream all about finding treasure where there was once dross, and turning fortunes around as a result? If a program committed to making Freeman a star, what on earth would his past performance have to do with what he could do in he future? Look what Mike Holmgren did with Brett Favre, or what Andy Reid did with Donovan McNabb; where you’re from is the marble slab out of which coaches are supposed to create art. In a league filled with middling performers with top notch resumes of success at lesser levels under center, it would be a shame to let a buried treasure like Freeman stay underground just because the dirt of deep burial has made his shine harder to see.
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Mike Singletary: Thank you for giving us some time today Mr. Stafford.
Matt Stafford: No problem. I’m just really excited to have the chance to be the starting quarterback for an NFL team.
Singletary: Well, that’s why we’re here. If you don’t mind, we’d like to ask you some questions that will help us determine if you’re ready to be our starting quarterback.
Singletary: Have you ever had thoughts about a man sexually?
Stafford: No!
Singletary: Never been fascinated with the phallus as a penetrating agent?
Stafford: What?
Singletary: Clearly, you’re repressed sexually. Matt, what was your youngest sexual memory?
Stafford: What the hell does that have to do with anything?
Singletary: It has everything to do with anything. Remember that Ken Dorsey kid? Totally flamed out. Remember why? Wore ladies underwear to express his psychic shadow.
Stafford: I thought he just didn’t have the arm for the job.
Singletary: That’s why I’m the head coach, and you’re the closeted, possibly molested quarterback.
Stafford: What about anything I’ve said makes you think those things?!?
Singletary: Oh that’s just my default starting point for everyone we interview. Matt, have you shifted your to the next archetype?
Stafford: Coach, I went to UGA and majored in determining whether he Bulldog Bunny I was hooking up with was or was not related to me. What on earth makes you think I would understand anything you just said.
Singletary: Matt, we all have psychological archetypes through which we must move in order to have stability in our lives. If we fail to make the transition from one phase of life to the next, psychosis can result. Take it from a man who gets into hissy fits on the sidelines and drops his pants as a joke in team meetings, it is SUPER important to mature to the next phase of your life.
Stafford: I’m out of here. (/exits)
Singletary: Damn. We really need a replacement after what years of quarterbacking this team has done to our last QB of the future.
Alex Smith: (/smears name on the wall in feces) It’s so the angels in my arm know whose they are!
Singletary: Still more talented than that drunk O’Sullivan, honestly.
In order to prepare for the NFL draft (and survive the unbearably long offseason), we've decided to check in on this year's draft class from time to time and discuss some of the potential future characters of the League that stand out for some reason or another. Today, Ole Miss OL Michael Oher.
There are a lot of reasons why our draft coverage shouldn’t discuss Michael Oher. For starters, he’s already got an excellent book written about him (or at least half about him) in The Blind Side, and nothing I say will be as interesting a story as chronicling his use of the new gladiator arena to rise through the American hierarchy of class and race. Furthermore, for our purposes, Oher’s status as a phenomenal offensive lineman seems to defy what “What Dreams May Come” has always been about. While great offensive linemen are necessary to the success of any team, and they often serve to change the identity of a team single-handedly (Jake Long and Joe Thomas both did so in a way of which few skill position players could ever dream), there really isn’t any mystery surrounding the position. Rather, they either succeed or fail, and the way we measure one offensive lineman varies very little from the way we measure another. Certainly, men like these are the foundation of any great team, but cinder blocks, though excellent construction material, build poor daydreams.
Except Michael Oher is something different. You watch him play, and the wonderful character from The Blind Side comes to life. I’m not talking about the sweet story of rags to riches either; I’m talking about the beastly man-child who yearned for people to notice not his mammoth frame, but his quickness. Watch the embedded video and the first thing that will jump out to you is Oher’s ability to move effortlessly from one defender to the next, locating defenders and beating them to the point of attack as though he knew where it would be long before the play was even dialed down to the field. It’s a freakish level of quickness achieved with remarkable consistency. The problem is that we now need a new word for freakish, because when you first take in the ballet of Michael Oher, it’s easy to forget that he’s 6’4” and weights 309 pounds.
That’s the real beauty of watching Oher’s growth; both as a player and a person in The Blind Side, we’re constantly reminded of a young man whose nature is one thing and whose form is another, and the result is a fight against the natural movement from one phase of development (gifted manchild) to the next (overpowering behemoth). Certainly, anyone whose even glanced at Jung knows the result of that kind of stagnation in progress is bad news (not saying that Oher will wind up talking to voices in his head, but that’s a pretty low goal ceiling for a potential all-pro lineman). Could it be that this is responsible for what many see as an inconsistency in performance by a lineman with so many natural gifts?
Or maybe we just need to shift Oher’s archetype. Rather than being stagnant in his development, maybe he’s simply developing in a different direction. We’ve all seen offensive linemen who have raised the ceiling for how overpowering a blocker can be; maybe Oher is another step in the direction of former Ravens great Jonathan Ogden, who stunned defenders with his ability to beat them not only to the action, but even to their reaction. If that’s the case, the Oher doesn’t need to be feared, but rather coaxed into his natural next phase, and any attempt to force him into the more common track for linemen would be the worst thing for him. After all, if the skill positions are won and lost at the climaxes of plays, leaving their battles to one grand moment, the trenches are won in a series of little attacks, retreats, diversions. True, the search for the overpowering behemoth that wins the game by essentially smashing the chess board is always fun, but the search for a versatile player with the quickness of both mind and physicality to win the game according to its rules is no less worthwhile. In short, Oher doesn’t need to be told that he’s moving in the wrong direction; he just needs better equipment for the narrow road he’s chosen.
Oh Timbaland - Timbaland Maybe it’s my east coast bias, or my general apathy toward the pre-professional football arts school that is USC, but I tend to ignore their stars. Defensively, they produce some of the most interesting physical talents in the draft year after year, but never anyone who seems to bring something new to the narrative, just more talent from a place where talent is in such high supply as to have become ordinary. Furthermore, their highly touted quarterbacks have yet to establish themselves as top tier quarterbacks at the next level, despite all the hype (don’t you DARE say “Carson Palmer” to me…definition of talent without direction, right there). So I was prepared to let Mark Sanchez slip by in this draft unnoticed. Except there’s one nagging question: If this kid is as ordinary as people seem to be making him our to be, why is he rising on everyone’s draft boards while the more physically gifted Matt Stafford slides? Perhaps more importantly, what is it about THIS quarterback that has the unflappable Pete Carroll completely flapped at the thought of not being able to watch his growth firsthand?
If I had to take a stab at it, there’s something different about Sanchez that neither Leinart nor Palmer has been able to develop: Success under pressure. Face it; Booty folded under expectations, Palmer had it easy, and Leinart was America’s favorite golden boy for his entire college career. The result on the pro level? An increasingly frustrated superstar who panics whenever he’s behind and a benchwarmer with no fight left in him (face facts…if he wanted it, he’d have asked for a trade when they re-upped Warner). Sanchez, on the other hand, moves differently. Maybe it’s the result of coming after two USC legends, or maybe it’s the fact that college football’s attention has drifted inward from the coasts, but Sanchez carries himself with none of the dignity that we saw from his predecessors. What we get instead is a guy who feels himself being chased, both figuratively thanks to expectations of his status and literally thanks to a penchant for moving around in and out of the pocket. Learning to live in that chase is what makes Sanchez’s game so interesting to watch, and has me wondering what he could do on a pro level, where learning to deal with fast moving pressure (again, both figurative and literal) is pretty much the road every young quarterback must follow.
Watch his throws, and the one thing that stands out is that he never seems to doubt that he will put the ball exactly where he is supposed to put the ball, no matter who’s behind him or what’s in front of him. Moving or not moving, panicking or standing tall, threading needles or finding open reads, the game just moves differently for Sanchez in that it never seems to change its speed for him. Wonder why Carroll is so pissed off? It’s because the hardest thing for any quarterback to learn, that the speed of the game shouldn’t affect the way you respond, comes second nature to a guy who learned early that pressure becomes real only the moment we acknowledge that it can affect us. Given one more year, you have to imagine that a coach like Carroll could have given him the smarts to make the best use of the gifts Sanchez had learned to rely on regardless of the situation. It isn’t that he doesn’t care; it’s that he doesn’t worry.
Instead, Sanchez has once again placed himself into the chase, with Carroll throwing him out of the good graces of NFL-lite University and pundits questioning whether a year of demonstrating the ability to consistently succeed outweighs Matt Stafford’s multi-year reign of consistent blah. In short, the world once again thinks Mark Sanchez has something to prove. What makes all of this interesting to me is that for once we have someone who neither thrives on pressure nor bows to it; instead, it just doesn’t exist. Watching that mentality play out on the next level, particularly with a quarterback who makes use of his feet, will be an interesting experiment in distinguishing apathy from understanding with regard to how the game is played under center.
Pray that the backwards thinking Boston pundits talk the Patriots out of this move, because make no mistake, this will be their defensive Randy Moss. There's not a lineman in the league with this kind of athleticism. They resurrected Moss, and Belichick is a DEFENSIVE coach. Oh, and if you think Brady wouldn't give up his number one payroll spot to add a championship or two, you're crazy. Great players get paid in their time. Legends get paid till the casket drops.
Now we all know I like Josh McDaniels. Really, I think he's the best new coach of the entire class, and has a proven track record of innovation and adaptation on offense. Furthermore, with the receiving corps he's being given in Denver, there's no reason to think he couldn't establish the same kind of multilevel assault game plan that he perfected in New England. So it's no small thing for me to have come to the following realization: Denver needs to fire Josh McDaniels. Now. Before they scrap a season that should have been about redefining the team's identity around the very player that McDaniels has managed to alientate, Jay Cutler.
For those of you not keeping track of the news, there is a rumor going around that Cutler's agent, Bus Cook, was in Buffalo recently, spurring rumors that Buffalo may be looking for some sort of trade package that would send the most talented quarterback of the 2006 draft class to Buffalo. The fact that we're all talking about this as though it was realistic is indicative of the problem; McDaniels has allowed the situation to spin into this kind of absurdity. There was one move to be made with Cutler, and even that one was a shameful retreat from faith to comfort. After it failed, McDaniels owed it to Cutler to apologize, to explain that he was as interested in the young signal caller's development as both Cutler and the team itself were. Instead, McDaniels has showed the sort of rigidity that his supposed mentor, Belichick, exposed as unnecessary and a liability.
So in order for the story of Denver to continue in the way that allows the league to become a more interesting place, McDaniels must go. After all, he's young, and this kind of firing would be one that spared his track record so that he could quickly land someplace else when another opportunity inevitably opened up. For Cutler, however, the next two years are the turning point of his story, where he develops from child prodigy in Elway's mold to master in his own right. Meanwhile, an offense built around Chris Simms (or worse, the painfully stoic gameplay of Trent Edwards), thriving on system over talent and turning its players into interchangable cogs (a mold from which which New England only recently freed itself), does nothing for the league but make it more bland. There are coaches available for the job, and several that could shape Cutler into the destructive vertical cannon that he is so clearly made to be (of course, the best man for that job was fired from it already, but that's another story...). If McDaniels is unwilling to use his unique tools to perform that shaping, then he should necessarily be removed from Denver, where that task has, prior to the last two weeks, been at the forefront of everyone's mind.
In essence, we're exchanging only a bit of practicality for a great deal of natural progress. No matter how interesting we find a character (and again, I think McDaniels could be the next great step in coaching innovation), the premise of his belonging to a story requires him to act within the confines of that story. His failure to do so makes him no less valid as a character, but utterly worthless to the tale he chooses to defy. Cutler is still meant to help tell that tale. I'm not so sure about McDaniels anymore.
Destruction comes in many bitter flavors. The one most favored in the NFL, largely due to the pretty highlights it produces, is that based on aggressive creation of one's own empire over another's system. Aaron Curry reminds you that for all of the importance we give to drive and power, glorifying the penetrating aspects of the game, defense will always be about grinding innumerable forces and directions to a halt. Sure, it’s fun to watch a corner fly through the air to disrupt the intimacy of quarterback and receiver and completely reverse the direction of the game in the process. Of course it’s thrilling to watch a tackle that drives with such force that it dislodges both the football and the order of the game, creating chaos. The fact of the matter, however, is that these are the exceptions to the rule of defense: Stop forward motion at all costs. Watching Curry’s brand of defense, then, is less about singular results than it is about the way it changes the movement of the world of the game, like watching gravity on Jupiter.
At 6’2”, 254 pounds, Curry runs a 4.56 40 and jumps an astonishing 37 inches into the air, all with the muscle to be one of the strongest linebackers in his class. Still, we’ve seen this kind of physicality before. The most remarkable thing about Curry, a physical specimen of the highest caliber, is how easily his tremendous physical gifts become camouflaged in the flow of the game. Consider, however, that at any given instant, the momentum carried by an offense is overwhelming both literally and metaphorically. Offenses create and execute; defenses read and react. Defenses are, by their very nature, one step behind, and generally the best they can do is slow the progress of the offense to the point where they can’t achieve the objectives set forth by the situation, be it ten yards of a touchdown. Aaron Curry’s tremendous physical gifts are expressed in his ability to make up for that step, allowing him to hit at angles and velocities that halt, not merely slow, the progress of the ball carrier.
This is no small matter. Indeed, in the NFL, a level of football built on physical superiority, this sort of ability to destroy progress and defy the direction and nature of the game is found deeper in the defense, where the quickness of both foot and mind necessary to anticipate the direction of the play is matched with the space and time to create the momentum needed to halt the ball carrier. In the case of Curry, however, we now have the distinct possibility of an NFL where this kind of stopping power can be seen much closer to the line, more accurately depicting the kind of gravity increase I mentioned earlier. Again, this is more than just the ability to create plays that are the exceptions to the rule; if Curry’s potential translates to the NFL, we’re talking about creating a new rule.
One has to wonder how the league would adjust to a player with that kind of ability. The NFL has taken drastic steps to make the game more conducive to rapid gratification. Curry’s game, however, thrives on making that kind of gratification impossible. He forces offenses to scratch, scrape, plead, and struggle for every yard. Granted, the league could provide the sort of physical challenge that overwhelms this gift, but that’s what the draft is all about, projecting talents into the future with maximum optimism. I’m not sure, should Curry proceed effortlessly into the league, that there is a run game built to handle the atmospheric change that he promises to bring. That alone merits attention in a draft that seems so terribly comfortable.
Certianly there are parellels to be drawn to leagues such as the USFL and the XFL, but both of those leagues were different in spirit. The USFL was built to steal talent away from the NFL, something that the UFL seems to have admited is impossible. The XFL, on the other hand, was designed to create a NEW football audience while drawing from the old one, which is a perfect example of pleasing nobody by trying to please everybody. Here, however, the UFL is pointing out that, with the loss of NFL Europe and NFL rosters shrinking, there may be untapped talent eager for a stage on which they can perform.
This directly applies to who Cian refers to as the "discarded fruits of Roger Goodell's stringent Personal Conduct Policy." Looking at players like Adam Jones, Michael Vick, and possibly soo Matt Jones, all of whom are repeat violators of the policy but also singular talents in the football world, one has to wonder whether the UFL might be the perfect landing spot for them. Cian shows that extending them a shot could immediately draw the league's credibility into question, which could be fatal for an already risky proposition. He's not wrong either; making these players the cornerstones of the UFL is at best, incredibly dangerous and at worst, foolish. Still, in my opinion, if the league is going to remain honest to its fans (in this case, those hoping to see it succeed) and its essential thesis, it has no choice but to offer these players the chance to show that wild talents exist outside of the NFL's increasingly narrow scope (check the list of unemployed QBs if that doesn't make sense). Because bringing them in, even if it means that the UFL will have to work harder and harder to downplay their status to avoid them becoming the sole faces of the league (at first, anyway), is the only way to make sure that the league can build upo the core it claims that it wants.
My point is that it doesn't work if the UFL only makes successes out of ignored players, because their very typecasting as ignored NFL players means that fans will do to them exactly what they're already doing: Not paying attention. But a player like Vick or, to a lesser extent, the Joneses draws attention because these are not ignored players, whose talent is questioned, but rather players forced out IN SPITE OF their talent. And when their presence draws fans, then the play of a league of Troy Smiths (FREE TROY SMITH), Adrian Arringtons, JP Losmans, and other talents who can't seem to find a team willing to break rank and experiment with wild risks for potentially wild talents, will get recognition. Then, the league gets to survive or die based on just what kind of quality of play that produces, which is all any league could ask for. It's ultimately a question of which is the cart and which is the horse: Credibility or talent. Reasonable minds disagree, but in this case, I'm happy to unreasonably hope for a field for unreasonable risk.
Mike Maycock apparently thinks that the Lions shouldn't pick Matt Stafford with the number one overall pick, despite their obvious need for a quarterback and the fact that he has looked totally competent for the position. While I'm never one to value practical building blocks over the chance to use skill positions to drastically change the image of a team, I'm in agreement on this one. The last several years have certainly instilled a justifiable fear of the purely special. Drafting and making free agency moves on the basis of freakish gifts as opposed to safe, practical needs has failed team after team and turned the Raiders into the spectacle of the league. For the Lions to dig their way out, one might initially suppose that charting a course of stability and consistency under center would be the first step toward rebuilding.
Still, when we consider the top pick of the draft, and the nature of teams that find themselves possessing it, shouldn't we insist that SOME degree of uniqueness? With a slew of athletic and football freakish figures on the board (including Aaron Curry, who Maycock loves, and who will certainly be in our "What Dreams May Come" coverage), can a team justify deliberately avoiding the possibility of transcendence and the risk it entails any more than it can justify wandering too deep into uncertainty for the sake of that transcendence?
Stafford could be good. Certainly, he has the physical gifts too succeed. Furthermore, his performance both in college and at the combine suggested that he's unlikely to be the sort of monumental failure that teams dread under center, which in this season of uncertainty at quarterback across the league is an invaluable commodity as a draft pick. But for a team that owes as much to its fans (and to fans of quality football) as the Lions do, it feels just as wrong to suggest that unambitious safety is preferable to unreasonable risk.
As for the number one spot, I can deal with people thinking Fitzy is a step behind Andre Johnson. I'm not sure that playing on a worse team and carrying it is a better feat than Fitzy turning Kurt Warner's technical savvy into power and beauty in mid air, but I see the point. I suppose it depends on whether you value yeoman toil in obscurity or the use of the spotlight to affirm self.
Sports, Drugs & Entertainment - Camron If I have one more conversation where somebody explains how thrilled they are that their team didn’t pick up Terrell Owens, I’m going to lose my mind. Without getting into my reasons for appreciating T.O. as a sympathetic, if tragically flawed and confused, hero in the story of the league, suffice to say that this notion makes absolutely no sense from a talent standpoint. There’s just no realistic argument to be made that the Cowboys are better next season without a receiver who put up over 1000 yards and didn’t just lead the team in touchdowns, but had as many as the next three receivers on the list combined. Patrick Williams is weeping right now, and Roy Williams, though an admirable soldier during his stint in Detroit, has yet to prove he can elevate a team the way Owens has now on two different occasions.
Which brings me to the historical context of Owens’s dismissal, which seems to be conveniently forgotten whenever his name comes up. Say what you will about his attitude (and much of it will be fair), but for all the talk about “destroying teams,” numbers show that teams get conspicuously better when T.O. comes to town, and conspicuously worse when he leaves. It’s the reason Jeff Garcia has been a perpetual journeyman since leaving the west coast. It’s the reason why Donovan McNabb looks more panicked each year that goes by without a title in Philly. Mark my words, it’ll be the reason Tony Romo finally has to answer for all the doubts raised by his dual status as NFL quarterback and tabloid celebrity. T.O. makes for a hell of a distraction, but sometimes that sort of distraction is a quarterback’s best friend. Otherwise, ugly questions make for ugly answers.
All of this makes the latest leg in Terrell Owens’s journey through the league one of the most interesting stories to look forward to next season. This is certainly because of what it will mean to the great Babylon of the NFL, the Dallas Cowboys, and how it could precede yet another fall from grandeur Personally, I’m more enamored with following the scapegoat as he sets up his hut in the wild outskirts of the league. Perhaps no situation prior to this one has played up Owens’s dual role as savior and destroyer of franchises. I wrote a long while ago about Randy Moss, and how the concept of mercenary transcendent talents irked me. Here, however, I’m less bothered, as Owens’s dismissals, compared to Moss’s forcing his way out, makes him feel more like a journeyman than a mercenary. If you ever watched The Mission, think Robert De Niro, who wanders into the jungle to find forgiveness after expulsion from society.
The analogy continues to work when we turn it on Buffalo, which is a city in need of a savior both on the field and in the eyes of the public. Their hungry neighbors up north seem poised to take their team from them, and the rest of the league seems content to let progress run its course. In bringing Owens in, then, the front office has defied convention in the interests of defying progress, upsetting the natural order in the hopes of seeing a ripple effect. Love him or hate him, Owens puts fans in stadiums and jerseys on backs.
Maybe it’s crazy to ask Owens to obviously step into the role that he has occupied implicitly throughout the last several years, but it’s certainly not boring, and it certainly is a vision with tremendous upside. If T.O. still has the juice, what better way to bring it out than to put pressure on him to produce, not because he owes it, but because the team has entrusted everything to him, essentially giving him everything he always wanted. It worked in Philly (Spygate will forever leave that game in question, regardless of what it says about those involved). Why couldn’t it work now, when both franchise and player have so much more on the line and so much more reason to meet one another in the middle to face their enemies? If finding redemption was a large part of T.O.’s last several years in Dallas (which, in my mind, fueled so much of the displeasure at the team’s underachievement), then this final retreat from mainstream NFL culture into the wilderness, setting him up with natives viewing him with the awe major media outlets reject, means there’s hope for the NFL’s unhappiest player to find happiness yet.
Throwing Into Traffic is a football blog founded by a couple of college grads with snooty liberal arts degrees who decided they'd rather be talking about football. The premise is simple: The NFL season is the best epic story in sports, and every intelligent person in America should be watching America's real favorite game. We started the site to give fans a place to find sometimes humorous, sometimes intellectual, and (hopefully) always interesting discussion on football and it's (ir)relevant tangents.
