The Weird, Wacky and Awesome World of the NFL - General Banter thread

Coileach dearg

Ares wrote: »

Agreed. I still think there is another great story in him like the one last season.

He needs to go to the CFL and learn how to throw. Either that or become a Full Back á la Michael Robinson at the Seahawks.

Justin10

Or just become a college analyst with ESPN

Ares

Coileach dearg wrote: »

He needs to go to the CFL and learn how to throw. Either that or become a Full Back á la Michael Robinson at the Seahawks.

The man lead a 1-4 team to a divisional playoff beating the Pittsburgh Steelers in the playoffs during his first season as a starting QB. And since then he gets thrown on the scrapheap? No I'm not buying that..

spiralism

Corvus Maximus wrote: »

You know I'm starting to pity Tebow, he's a good living, innocent oul Jesus loving sort of ejjit. Maybe he needs to start doing some serious cussing and disrespecting. Maybe carry a bottle JD around, fag hanging from the mouth, groupie on his arm. Wouldn't do any harm would it?

worked for Joe Namath

D3PO

Corvus Maximus wrote: »

You know I'm starting to pity Tebow,

Yeah I feel terrible for a multi millionare football player who cant get a starting gig. The poor guy

Coileach dearg

Ares wrote: »

The man lead a 1-4 team to a divisional playoff beating the Pittsburgh Steelers in the playoffs during his first season as a starting QB. And since then he gets thrown on the scrapheap? No I'm not buying that..

Yeah, just imagine what they would have done with a decent quarterback.
Peyton Manning = Superbowl favourites.

Son Of A Vidic

D3PO wrote: »

Yeah I feel terrible for a multi millionare football player who cant get a starting gig. The poor guy

You actually took my post literally and thought I was been serious? You need to read it again because here's what you must have missed.

Corvus Maximus wrote: »

he's a good living, innocent oul Jesus loving sort of ejjit. Maybe he needs to start doing some serious cussing and disrespecting. Maybe carry a bottle JD around, fag hanging from the mouth, groupie on his arm. Wouldn't do any harm would it?

Paully D

http://www.rotoworld.com/player/nfl/7406/robert-griffin-iii

A league source tells Profootballtalk.com that there is "much greater concern" about Robert Griffin III's reconstructed right knee than Griffin or "anyone connected to the Redskins" has let on.

Griffin will end up rehabbing both knees because surgeons were forced to use a patellar tendon graft from his left knee in order to fix his right. He tore the ACL, LCL, and partially tore his meniscus in the right knee. Per PFT's source, the "biggest concern" is with Griffin's knee cartilage. Due to two knee constructions and ultimately three surgeries since 2009 at Baylor, there is concern "about how much (cartilage) remains and how long it will last" in Griffin's knee(s).

A potential end result could be a bone-on-bone condition, which can lead to microfracture surgery and/or shorten a football player's career.

Son Of A Vidic

RG3 has been a breath of fresh air to the game, had a wonderful first season. Conducted him self with class and maturity throughout. Getting named a team captain in his rookie season pretty much says it all. And now we are here with a potential cloud hanging over him, that was all so avoidable. The whole RG3 thing is almost like a bad dream, but it must be a total nightmare for all redskin fans.

mikemac1

I wonder if there are starting QBs who are not captains

RGIII being captain isn't realy noteworthy. Sanchez and Stafford became captains as rookies too

Teams are allowed six captains

Son Of A Vidic

mikemac1 wrote: »

I wonder if there are starting QBs who are not captains

Russell Wilson and Colin Kaepernick aren't captains.

mikemac1 wrote: »

being captain isn't realy noteworthy. Sanchez and Stafford became captains as rookies too

Teams are allowed six captains

Well it was pretty noteworthy to me, hence the reason I posted it. I'm also well aware of how many captains a team can have and that quite a few teams in the league haven't filled all their captaincy positions. Stafford and Sanchez don't even come close on my radar, on any level, to RG3's rookie season performance.

3hn2givr7mx1sc

Anyone know if the Super Bowl will only be a red button option on BBC?

Son Of A Vidic

baz2009 wrote: »

Anyone know if the Super Bowl will only be a red button option on BBC?

Good news for ya, the Superbowl will be shown live on BBC 1, coverage is from from 2255-0400.

3hn2givr7mx1sc

Lovely, only have the basics down in college, no fancy red buttons!

HigginsJ

Masked Man

Coileach dearg wrote: »

Yeah, just imagine what they would have done with a decent quarterback.
Peyton Manning = Superbowl favourites.

Shoulda stuck with Tebow.

davyjose

Weird, Wacky and Awesome really is the perfect phrase to describe this game.

Mind still blown.

AIR-AUSSIE

Do Gamepass offer a subsrciption for just the Superbowl? The current offer of the playoffs til July 2013 is still a bit pricy for the use I'll get out of it.

A €10 - 15 for the week of the superbowl would be ideal for me.

Itssoeasy

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/01/14/3181706/dan-le-batard-taylors-pain-shows.html

MIAMI - As America's most popular sport encounters a liability problem . . . gladiator Junior Seau kills himself with a shotgun blast to the chest and leaves his damaged brain to study . . . as awareness and penalties increase around an NFL commissioner confronting the oxymoronic task of making a violent game safe . . . and as the rules change but the culture really doesn't . . . we think we know this forever-growing monster we are cheering on Sundays. But we don't. We have no earthly idea.

Dolphins legend Jason Taylor, for example, grew up right before our eyes, from a skinny Akron kid to a future Hall of Famer, his very public path out in front of those lights for 15 years. But take a look at what was happening in the dark. He was just a few blessed hours from having his leg amputated. He played games, plural, with a hidden and taped catheter running from his armpit to his heart. His calf was oozing blood for so many months, from September of one year to February of another, that he had to have the equivalent of a drain installed. This is a story of the private pain endured in pursuit of public glory, just one man's broken body on a battlefield littered with thousands of them. As death and depression and dementia addle football's mind, persuading some of the gladiators to kill themselves as a solution to end all the pain, and as the media finally shines a light on football's concussed skull at the very iceberg-top of the problem, we begin the anatomy of Taylor's story at the very bottom . . . with his feet.

He had torn tissues in the bottom of both of them. But he wanted to play. He always wanted to play. So he went to a private room inside the football stadium.

"Like a dungeon," he says now. "One light bulb swaying back and forth. There was a damp, musty smell. It was like the basement in Pulp Fiction ."

The doctors handed him a towel. For his mouth. To keep him from biting his tongue. And to muffle his screaming.

"It is the worst ever," he says. "By far. All the nerve endings in your feet."

That wasn't the ailment. No, that was the cure. A needle has to go in that foot, and there aren't a lot of soft, friendly places for a big needle in a foot. That foot pain is there for a reason, of course. It is your body screaming to your brain for help. A warning. The needle mutes the screaming and the warning.

"The first shot is ridiculous," Taylor says. "Ridiculously horrible. Excruciating."

But the first shot to the foot wasn't even the remedy. The first shot was just to numb the area . . . in preparation for the second shot, which was worse.

"You can't kill the foot because then it is just a dead nub," he says. "You've got to get the perfect mix (of anesthesia). I was crying and screaming. I'm sweating just speaking about it now."

How'd he play?

"I didn't play well," he says. "But I played better than my backup would have."

He didn't question these needles or this pain, didn't question the dungeon or the doctors. Consequences were for other people, weaker ones. There was only one time Taylor questioned the worth of what he did for a living, while crying and curled up on the pavement of a parking lot outside his doctor's office. It was the needle in the spine that made him wonder about the price of this game, but those questions were every bit as fleeting as the soothing provided by those epidurals. He didn't practice much in 2006 because of a herniated disk in his back, and he needed the medicine pregnant women use for labor just to get to Sundays. Taylor's wife was helping him down the stairs as he left the doctor's office after one such epidural, but that wasn't the bad part. His back locked up as he tried to get in the passenger seat of their car, making him crumble.

"I started shaking on the ground," he says. "My wife was trying to pick me up. I was in tears."

Help came to get him back upstairs . . . to get another needle in a different spot on the spine. He won Defensive Player of the Year that season, believe it or not. Still tells Nick Saban that he won that award because of how little he practiced that year, keeping his body fresh from the daily ravages of the job.

"There was a period of a year and a half or two years when I couldn't put my kids to bed," he says. "My wife and I laugh about it. You have to bend down. I couldn't with their weight. I would just hover. I would get as low as I could, and then drop them, and they'd bounce."

He isn't bragging, and he isn't complaining. He wants to make sure you know that. He feels lucky and blessed to have done what he did. He is just answering questions matter-of-factly about the insanity of the world where he worked. It is a barbaric game, trying to be more of a man than the next man, putting your pain threshold against your muscled opponent's, all of these competition-aholics colliding at an inhumane rate of speed.

So did he lie to the doctors?

Yes.

Did he get in that player deli line outside the trainer's room before the game to get that secret elixir, a Toradol shot in the butt that would lubricate and soothe away the aches for three hours despite its side effects (chest pains, headaches, nausea, bloody stool, coughing up blood, vomit that looks like coffee grounds)?

Yes.

Did he think this was smart or healthy?

No.

Did he care that it wasn't smart or healthy?

No.

Taylor was leg-whipped during a game once in Washington. Happens all the time. Common. He was sore and had a bruise, but the pre game Toradol and the post game pain medicine and prescribed sleeping pills masked the suffering, so he went to dinner and thought he was fine. Until he couldn't sleep. And the medication wore off. It was 2 a.m. He noticed that the only time his calf didn't hurt is when he was walking around his house or standing. So he found a spot that gave him relief on a staircase and fell asleep standing up, leaning against the wall. But as soon as his leg would relax from the sleep, the pain would wake him up again. He called the team trainer and asked if he could take another Vicodin. The trainer said absolutely not. This need to kill the pain is what former No. 1 pick Keith McCants says started a pain-killer addiction that turned to street drugs when the money ran out . . . and led him to try to hang himself to break the cycle of pain.

The trainer rushed to Taylor's house. Taylor thought he was overreacting. The trainer told him they were immediately going to the hospital. A test kit came out. Taylor's blood pressure was so high that the doctors thought the test kit was faulty. Another test. Same crazy numbers. Doctors demanded immediate surgery. Taylor said absolutely not, that he wanted to call his wife and his agent and the famed Dr. James Andrews for a second opinion. Andrews also recommended surgery, and fast. Taylor said, fine, he'd fly out in owner Daniel Snyder's private jet in the morning. Andrews said that was fine but that he'd have to cut off Taylor's leg upon arrival. Taylor thought he was joking. Andrews wasn't. Compartment syndrome. Muscle bleeds into the cavity, causing nerve damage. Two more hours, and Taylor would have had one fewer leg. Fans later sent him supportive notes about their own compartment syndrome, many of them in wheelchairs.

Taylor's reaction?

"I was mad because I had to sit out three weeks," he says. "I was hot."

He had seven to nine inches of nerve damage.

"The things we do," he explains. "Players play. It is who we are. We always think we can overcome."

Everything is lined up to get the unhealthy player back on the field - the desire of the player, the guy behind you willing to endure more for the paycheck, the urging of the coaches and teammates, the culture that mocks and eradicates the weak and the doctor whose job it is not necessarily to keep the player healthy but healthy enough to be valuable to the team, which isn't the same thing at all. The doctor gives the player the diagnosis and the consequences on the sidelines with in-game injuries, without the benefit of an MRI, and then the player makes a choice with the information about whether to take a pain-masking shot. And the choice is always to play.

"Damn right," Taylor says.

You never know if all those needles - and Taylor took a lot - produce more pain. Science has linked Toradol to plantar fasciitis (the aforementioned torn tendons in Taylor's feet), so Taylor might have been taking one pain killer . . . that helped create a different pain . . . and thus required a different pain killer. That was certainly the case after his compartment syndrome. He developed a staph infection that required that catheter to run from armpit to heart with antibiotics. He'd hook himself up to it for a half-hour a day, like a car getting gas, letting the balls of medicine roll into his body. Then he concealed the catheter in tape under his arm so that an opponent wouldn't know he was weak. Opponents will find your weakness, At the bottom of a fumble pile, a Buffalo Bills player once squeezed the hell out of Taylor's Adam's Apple to try and dislodge the football. Anything you read about the PICC line catheter (peripherally inserted central catheter) Taylor used will tell you to avoid swimming or weight lifting or anything that might get it dirty or sweaty. Taylor was playing with it in for weeks while colliding in the most violent of contact sports. Doctors told him it wasn't a good idea to play with it in. He ignored them.

That is ****ed up over a game.

Arawn

Itssoeasy wrote: »

http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/01/14/3181706/dan-le-batard-taylors-pain-shows.html


That is ****ed up over a game.

It's not a game though. It's a career that most have given up pretty much everything to persue,most know it's a short time job with a massive payday once they play. I know I'd probably do the exact same in his position

Son Of A Vidic

Arawn wrote: »

It's not a game though. It's a career that most have given up pretty much everything to persue,most know it's a short time job with a massive payday once they play. I know I'd probably do the exact same in his position

I agree with you there. Playing in the NFL is also the dream of a lot of kids out there. When you fulfill that dream, letting go of it is often the hardest thing to do. So many players do silly things and don't walk away when they really should. But that's human nature and I certainly don't judge them or condemn them for it.

kmart6

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zce-QT7MGSE

Son Of A Vidic

^ ^ ^
Priceless.

PokeHerKing

That is pure quality!

HigginsJ

http://www.nfl.com/videos/nfl-films-sound-efx/0ap2000000127459/Sound-FX-Ravens-vs-Broncos

Terrell Suggs on sound fx. Mad as a box of frogs but really classy with the fas at the end

davyjose

HigginsJ wrote: »

http://www.nfl.com/videos/nfl-films-sound-efx/0ap2000000127459/Sound-FX-Ravens-vs-Broncos

Terrell Suggs on sound fx. Mad as a box of frogs but really classy with the fas at the end

Suggs went up in my estimation after the Colts game. To play the way he did with a fcuked up bicep is unbelievable -- even against our crepe paper O line.

kmart6

Such a waste and really sad outcome....

Ryan Leaf off to prison........

Paully D

kmart6 wrote: »

Such a waste and really sad outcome....

Ryan Leaf off to prison........

Way before my time as an NFL fan, but thinking back to the 1998 draft. I've read quite a bit about it and there really was a huge amount of people that would have taken Leaf over Manning.

http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/newsday/access/28036931.html?dids=28036931:28036931&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Mar+29%2C+1998&author=Bob+Glauber&pub=Newsday+(Combined+editions)&desc=NFL+%2F+Leaf+Is+Big+Favorite&pqatl=google

The overwhelming consensus: Manning may have the more recognizable name, but Leaf clearly is the preferred quarterback among league executives. Fourteen of the 20 polled said they would draft Leaf over Manning, citing the Washington State quarterback's stronger arm, better mobility and more promising long-term prospect as a franchise-caliber player.
"I'd take Ryan Leaf," Buffalo Bills general manager John Butler said. "I like the big, physical aspects about him. He's got good mobility, and there's something about him, kind of tough to say just what, just something that you like in a quarterback. They're both talented players, but I give the edge to Leaf."
Giants coach Jim Fassel, a former college quarterback, prefers Manning, largely because the Tennessee quarterback and son of former New Orleans Saints quarterback Archie Manning is a more polished player at this point.

Imagine if the Colts had drafted Leaf instead? :eek:

I read a book during the summer about an agent who represented Leaf for a while and he said he was always out partying and getting up to no good so it's probably not a surprise to see how his career and life went. As you say though, such a waste and a sad outcome.

Langdon Alger

kmart6 wrote: »

Such a waste and really sad outcome....

Ryan Leaf off to prison........

Looks he Jets have found a replacement for Sanchez

kmart6

Paully D wrote: »

Way before my time as an NFL fan, but thinking back to the 1998 draft. I've read quite a bit about it and there really was a huge amount of people that would have taken Leaf over Manning.

http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/newsday/access/28036931.html?dids=28036931:28036931&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Mar+29%2C+1998&author=Bob+Glauber&pub=Newsday+(Combined+editions)&desc=NFL+%2F+Leaf+Is+Big+Favorite&pqatl=google



Imagine if the Colts had drafted Leaf instead? :eek:

I read a book during the summer about an agent who represented Leaf for a while and he said he was always out partying and getting up to no good so it's probably not a surprise to see how his career and life went. As you say though, such a waste and a sad outcome.

Oh this is a surprise to nobody, he's been on a huge downward spiral for close to a decade!