In mid-April, sportsbooks around Las Vegas started to post their lines for the opening weekend of NFL action. It was exciting to see what the market feels about those Week 1 contests (apparently, they're for the Raiders and against the Chargers, for one), but that's just 16 games. We need more chances to throw away our money.
Enter the Cantor Gaming group, the arm of Cantor Fitzgerald that operates the sportsbooks at several Vegas-area casinos, including the brand-new sportsbook at the Palms. The Cantor books are known for being non-smoking and offering tablets for live betting during games, but they took a step forward in our hearts in May by posting lines for a few more of those NFL games we like to throw money at. Instead of merely posting lines for the 16 games of Week 1, Cantor posted lines for the first 16 weeks of professional football.
Yesterday, we stopped lamenting the end of the NFL's acquisition season by detailing how 10 teams had sufficiently upgraded their weakest spots in the lineup. Plaudits were handed out, compliments were given, and we even found a nice thing to say about the Browns taking a running back third overall. All in all, it was a day of high praise.
Today, though, brings the natural counter to that piece: the 10 teams who failed to address their biggest holes this offseason. Some of these organizations tried to do so and failed. Others were limited by the salary cap. A couple of them even created those holes early on in the offseason and never seemed to get around to patching them up. We're not concerned with the excuses here, though; we just see the smoldering wreckage at certain positions for each of these teams and wonder whether that problem will come back to haunt them in 2012.
Let's just acknowledge it: The acquisitions portion of the football offseason is over. Listen, we're not any happier about this than you are. Those halcyon days when half the league's teams were linked to Peyton Manning and Robert Griffin III in these pages are in the past. One day we'll all look back at the spring of 2012 and all chortle at how young we once were — Skrillex, really? — and, well … why don't we do that today?
No, now is not the time to start filming our I Love the '10s pitches about dubstep kings. Since the league's 32 teams are done with the vast majority of their player acquisitions for the upcoming season, though, we can start putting all those signings and trades and drafts into context by taking a look at which teams actually made a serious investment into filling the biggest holes on their roster. Of course, we also need to question those teams who failed to fill their noticeable problem, whether they entered the offseason with that issue or created it with their offseason moves without addressing it by the end of the NFL draft this past weekend.
This week, Giants owner John Mara slipped a very interesting tidbit into the public consciousness for the first time. Mara, who is on the league's Competition Committee, noted that the league has had preliminary discussions about removing kickoffs entirely from the NFL. Such a move would eliminate one of football's most dangerous plays in the hopes of keeping players healthier by reducing the league's dangerous concussion rate. In the process, though, it would make the game less exciting and remove a competitive advantage for teams like the Bears and Jets.
While Sean Payton is appealing the year-long suspension that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell laid down as part of Bountygate, it seems unlikely that the appeals court — namely, Roger Goodell — will find any reason to significantly shorten or remove his suspension from the books. Sorry, Jimmy Buffett. That uncertain future has led Payton to line up one Bill Parcells as a possible short-term replacement as Saints head coach for the 2012 season, and it's a move that Parcells is apparently considering. On paper, it's an easy case: Head coach with a sublime track record of success comes in to coach his protégé's team for one season in the hopes of winning a third Super Bowl before quitting for good (again). When Parcells has taken over as the new head coach or football czar of an organization he wasn't previously involved with, he's improved that team's win-loss record by an average of 6.5 wins during his first season. So let's pencil in the Saints to go 19 and negative 3 next year, right?
Well, well! Someone has been reading Machiavelli's The Prince! Or possibly listening to Tupac's Don Killuminati: Makaveli. Either way, Sean Payton is, reportedly, getting into seriously heavy chess moves.
For all of the questions that surround Tim Tebow, we know one thing for sure: Drama follows him. And yet, heading into this offseason — one where he was coming off a playoff victory and was the presumptive, though not the conclusive, starting quarterback for the Denver Broncos — I naively thought we'd have a few months of reprieve from Tebowmania. I was very wrong. Instead, Tebow had his starting job in Denver usurped by a free agent quarterback — some guy named Peyton Manning — and, after a furious day of trade negotiations, Tim Tebow is, suddenly, a New York Jet. The same Jets that went 3-5 over the second half of last season (including a loss to Tebow's Broncos) and reportedly ended the year at each other's throats. So, what else is new?
Let's be very clear about this. The New Orleans Saints are not reeling today because the defense chose to implement a bounty system designed to injure other quarterbacks. They are not reeling because some jilted informant told the league about their secret club. The Saints will be without Sean Payton in 2012 because they committed what the NFL perceives to be a more serious crime: They lied to Roger Goodell.
The NFL's official release on the suspensions implicates head coach Sean Payton (suspended for one year), assistant head coach Joe Vitt (suspended for eight games), and former defensive coordinator Gregg Williams (suspended "indefinitely") as having lied to the league's ongoing investigation into the bounties. Williams is identified as having "intentionally misled" investigators in 2010, while Vitt "fabricated the truth" in his interview with the league that same year. The evidence against Payton appears to have been even more damning. When general manager Mickey Loomis (also suspended for eight games, making Loomis the first GM in league history to earn a suspension) told Payton in 2010 that the organization was being investigated for the bounty program, the report suggests that Payton went to Williams and Vitt before their interviews with the league's security and told them to " … make sure our ducks are in a row." It doesn't appear that Payton was interviewed as part of the investigation at that time, but when he denied all knowledge of the program in a 2012 interview with the league, they showed him an e-mail from 2011 in which Payton added a very expensive postscript: "PS Greg [sic] Williams put me down for $5000 on Rogers [sic]." The message refers to Aaron Rodgers, who the Saints were about to play in the NFL's opening game of the season. When presented with that evidence, Payton admitted he was referring to the Packers quarterback. That postscript (or not having a separate Gmail account to use in lieu of his nfl.com e-mail address) will cost Payton $7.5 million by virtue of his one-year suspension without pay.
Take one poisoned locker room with a leadership vacuum and an embattled quarterback. Add Tim Tebow. Problem solved, right?
Well, maybe. By acquiring Tebow and a seventh-rounder for their fourth- and sixth-round picks in the 2012 draft, the Jets are making a small investment and hoping that they can turn Tebow into something resembling a motivational speaker who also happens to get onto the football field for five plays per game. They think they can control Tebowmania. And nobody, for better or worse, can do that.
As the Dolphins continue to flounder in their search for a new quarterback this offseason and times seem to get more desperate with each day, they might do well to heed WOPR's advice from WarGames. Their only winning move might be not to play at all.
The weekend did not go very well for Miami, with Peyton Manning reportedly removing the organization from his list of possible landing spots before Matt Flynn signed a three-year deal with the Seahawks on Sunday. The Dolphins responded to that news by bringing in 49ers starter Alex Smith for contract talks, just as Smith's former employers were revealed to be a mystery team in the Manning sweepstakes. Oh, and while the Dolphins could theoretically have gone for Texas A&M quarterback Ryan Tannehill with the eighth overall pick in this year's draft, Peter King of Sports Illustrated is reporting that there is a good chance that Tannehill won't last to that spot, with the Browns considering a move for him at no. 4.
As it turns out, Buffalo was more than a leverage stop for Mario Williams. We expected Williams to use an offer from the Bills, an organization that hasn't won a playoff game since 1995, to get a similarly sized deal from a more prominent team. Instead, on Thursday morning Buffalo completed the most surprising free agent signing since Reggie White in 1993, locking up Williams with a six-year deal that guarantees him an incredible $50 million. And as free agent signings go, the deal sure feels like it leans closer to masterstroke than disaster.
The $50 million guarantee is the truly incredible thing about this deal. The previous record in guaranteed money for a defensive player in free agency was set by Albert Haynesworth, and depending on what source you see for that contract, the guaranteed figure was between $36 million and $41 million. If the $50 million figure is legitimate, it dwarfs the previous record and creates a new standard for dominant defensive players to approach. Without this deal, the Packers could have gone to Clay Matthews this offseason and creditably offered him $40 million in guaranteed money as part of a new deal; now, no. 52 will probably get $52 million in guarantees on his next contract.
Did the Bills overpay? Yes and no. In a way, they had to overpay, because they probably wouldn't have been able to lure Williams to Buffalo on a market-value deal. Maybe they whispered "$50 million" into Williams's agent's ear at the Combine and got his first visit as a result. Maybe they whispered "$40 million" instead, got him to show up, and upped their offer to $50 million when Williams left their facility on Tuesday night. It's hard to imagine that Williams would have chosen the Bills over most other teams in the NFL with money being equal, and it's also simultaneously hard to imagine anyone else in the league shelling out $50 million in guaranteed money for Williams. Heck, while we suggested that the Bills should make Williams a Godfather offer before free agency, even we didn't think they'd go to $50 million.
When teams overpay to acquire marginal talent in free agency and the decision takes some criticism, that team's fans usually respond with a fair-but-flawed argument: "We sucked at that position last year and we desperately need to improve there, so if we overpaid, that's life." It's what plenty of Redskins fans said Tuesday afternoon about Pierre Garcon, and it's what plenty of Jaguars fans said Wednesday about Laurent Robinson. So let's explain why that mode of thinking is troublesome, and how teams can use that desperation to their advantage as opposed to forcing themselves into bad decisions.
On Tuesday morning, word around the NFL was that the Bears were basically formalities away from locking up Vincent Jackson and Mario Williams. By 5 p.m., the Bears had acquired Brandon Marshall, but the Bills were now going to host Robert Meachem and Mario Williams and sign them both before their fans woke up the following morning. As the clock struck midnight on the East Coast, Meachem was on the Chargers, Williams was a free man, and we vowed to stop listening to the rumor mill. And then on Wednesday at 12:05 am on the East Coast, we started refreshing Twitter every five seconds while jonesing for our fix. We're only human.
By the end of a busy first day of free agency, the league had raided the wide receiver and cornerback aisles and left them barren, with 10 notable signings between the two positions alone. About half of those moves made a lick of sense, as logic took a backseat to getting (or spending) cash now. It is our duty to cover both the insightful and the incoherent, and so we start our look at Day 1 of free agency in Washington, where the Redskins defied the odds to pull off their best Redskins impersonation.
It's finally here! With free agency just 24 hours away, we finish up our free agent preview today with a look at the teams who we think should spend exorbitant sums of money to improve themselves over the next couple of weeks. And while last year's free agency period was overshadowed by the lockout and the mass confusion that emanated from said work stoppage, it's good to see that this year's shopping spree will not be overshadowed by any pressing NFL business that could have been resolved months ago.
Well, shit. Just when we thought Bountygate was going to occupy us for the next few weeks, the league decided to add a spending scandal to the mix and dramatically change the financial outlook for the Cowboys and Redskins. Toss in Peyton Manning's nationwide tour and the holding period that a fifth of the league seems to be in while waiting for his decision, and it seems like the crop of veteran free agents we expected to be the lead story are basically irrelevant right about now.
