Should He Stand?

The coach doesn’t employ, or pay the team. Most of the time, he doesn’t even pick the players. He is an employee, just like the players.

That news story is whack too.

Coach Pederson of the Eagles said more than a month ago that “I encourage everyone to stand.”

Yeah… I would say it’s kinda obvious what your stance is and I won’t say I disagree with you. Just putting it out there so the others will comment, interested in seeing how they’ll respond.

The correct answer here is…

Again, I can tell that some of you guys from the real world clearly have never watched ESPN or accidentally caught an episode of SportsCenter. And that’s not a knock on you - it’s just kind of funny to watch you real-world guys flail around trying to make sense of something you just can’t comprehend.

The “employer” who could take action here is either a) the team owner or b) the League itself by imposing some standard punishment (a fine? suspension?) on players who do not stand for the anthem. But you guys are still missing the point. A team owner might make talk big in telling all of his players that they are expected to stand for the national anthem, but when the rubber hits the road, they aren’t going to cut one of their best players, especially not a guy with a significant amount of guaranteed money in his contract; one of the other teams will happily scoop up a good player who becomes available. And the League isn’t going to come down hard on players for doing this, even relatively minor ones, because there’s an element of risk: if they come down hard on a small-fry player, what happens when one of the league stars does it? Suppose that the NFL suspends every player who doesn’t stand for the anthem today. Next week, star QB Cam Newton decides to take a knee for the anthem. They’ll suddenly be stuck in the position of having to suspend one of the League’s most popular and polarizing players. No chance in hell that will fly.

For every idealist like you guys that’s like “Fuck this, I’ll never watch an NFL game as long as this keeps happening” there are a few thousand rabid fans tailgating in the parking lot, swilling from a can of Coors Light, just waiting for the ball to be kicked off.

If some Police Officers turn their backs on the Mayor, or the Vice President, or the President, who should be fired?

As a lifelong Eagles fan…we’re kicking your ass today! Lol.

In some ways, that’s part of my point…has this really been all that “bad for business” for NFL teams? NFL fans are addicts. How many fans do you think are choosing not to watch the games, or giving up their tickets, because of the anthem protests? It’s a very, very, very small percentage of NFL fans.

The Steelers are a rock-solid organization. They also have a black head coach. And the rule that requires NFL teams to interview black coaches for head coaching jobs is called “The Rooney Rule,” after the Steelers Great owner, Mr Rooney.

Coach Tomlin said “No comment,” and Harrison said he’d break the leg of anyone who sat. That was the end.

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Just a few of many reasons I like the Steelers

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It’s cool to see a strong Organization handle business for years.

Everything situation that comes up is like minor, or temporary for them. They seem loyal and steady, so nobody is ever super pissed and making a big distraction.

Other teams, any little thing derails their whole program.

Eagles new coach is doing a great job of handling a messy situation.

Am I the only one who recognizes this bullshit of “White Privilege” for what it is? It’s racist as shit. People demonstrate their outrage in various ways and they are right, but the fail to recognize the very notion that a person has by default of their skin color, automatically had an advantage or disadvantage is plain old racism. It’s racism against white people, but racism is racism no matter the race you are attacking.

What the fuck is wrong with people? And why aren’t people calling this out as racism?

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Of course it’s bullshit.

Actually, viewership is down 12% across the board for the first quarter of the season. And I know a lot of Vets have turned off. So no, they are not impervious.

To be honest the NFL has been losing me for years. Rule changes have been slowly chipping away the game I used to love. Add in the constant political bullshit that anchors and analyst feel the need to share, I just can’t take it.

NASCAR went through something similar in the early 2000’s. It became extremely popular, it changed, and now they are losing fans and viewers. I feel the NFL is heading in the same direction.

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Is a lack of practice time in the off season making things extra sloppy early in the season?

I’ve always thought this was/is bullshit, no matter how many coaches say this.

NFL teams are in training camp and preseason for six weeks before the real games start. They do also have a smattering of minicamps in the offseason, and the season itself is 17 weeks long. They are football players from July through January. with occasional minicamps in the spring.

High school and college teams go into their first game with 2-3 weeks of practice, and most of those kids spent the offseason playing basketball and baseball (or wrestling, or track, or tennis, or whatever else they do). They have a shorter season (ends in November/December) and don’t came back to football until two weeks before school starts (yes, a few states have some spring practices, but most aren’t in pads).

I’m not buying “lack of practice time in the offseason” as an excuse for sloppy play.

I’m well aware that NFL playbooks are about nine thousand times as complicated as high-school playbooks; and actually, the funny part is, that’s where I place the blame. NFL coaches are obsessive, uber-competitive people that can’t turn it off; so when they aren’t coaching players because it’s the offseason, they are working madly trying to draw up new plays and formations, which is how we end up reading quotes about a playbook that has 800 different passing plays in it (with the average NFL quarterback throwing somewhere between 500-600 passes per season, that means your team could literally go the entire season without calling the same pass play twice).

The teams are sloppy in part because said coaches have written playbooks that are so damn complicated that a) the players can barely remember which way they’re supposed to go half the time - which accounts for lots of things like delay-of-game, illegal-motion, illegal-formation, and all that and b) there’s no practice time to work on things like “fundamentals” (throwing, catching, tackling, etc) because the coach has to put in all 800 pass plays.

One specific problem with no easy answer is tackling. The League decided that one of its major concessions to players in the last CBA would be a reduction in the number of padded practices, and that was a relatively obvious point to “give” on with all of the noise surrounding head trauma and CTE. More tackling in practice and genuine emphases on good, fundamental tackling would probably help with sloppy tackling, but the cost in extra impact and practice injuries is probably not worth it…I already hate how much it starts to feel like half the JV team is playing by midseason as the injuries pile up, and the League will not be enthused if star QB’s and RB’s go down with injuries in practice and you’re stuck watching the fourth-string RB who wasn’t even on the team after camp instead of the big-money stars.

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Amiri King weighs in.