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.
The Cleveland Browns had an interesting first day of the 2012 NFL draft. On the one hand, Cleveland got two of the draft's most productive players: Brandon Weeden, quarterback from Oklahoma State, who threw 71 touchdowns over the past two seasons, and Trent Richardson, an absolutely ferocious running back who rushed for more than 1,600 yards as the offensive centerpiece for Alabama's championship squad.
And yet, we’re starting to see that drafting a running back so high — the Browns traded up to get Richardson — is typically not a great idea. And Weeden? Well, let's just say that picking a rookie quarterback who is 28 years old is not exactly without risk.
Slapping a grade on an NFL draft the day after it happens is dumb. Slapping grades on teams in the middle of the draft? Well, that's even dumber. Everyone knows this, but we still write and read draft-grade articles at any possible time of draft reflection because the idea that a team might have just turned things around with a great draft is incredibly compelling.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Kevin Demoff. I was worried I was going to have to take an online course in elbow nerve endings or spinal fusion surgery if I wanted to keep up with the NFL offseason. And frankly, with my double major in air conditioning repair and criminal justice, I just don't have the bandwidth.
The COO of the St. Louis Rams shook up the NFL landscape Tuesday by declaring, if I may put this hyperbolically, open season on the Rams' no. 2 overall pick in the draft. We now have a Robert Griffin III bidding war going on. Let's take a look at the RG3 Power Rankings, shall we?
As always, we detail the sordid and the successful every Tuesday in our weekly look back at the previous weekend's games; this is "The Fabulous and the Flops" for Week 15.
This week, we'll identify the player who might qualify as the worst backup quarterback … ever. We'll point out which quarterback looks like a different man during the second half, try to compare a player to a couch, and note which head coach was brave enough to own up to his mistakes on Sunday. We'll start, though, with the blowout from last Thursday night.
In case you were out living a life of leisure, here's what you missed in sports on Wednesday.
The Los Angeles Clippers acquired Chris Paul for three players, Eric Gordon, Chris Kaman, and Al-Farouq Aminu, and a first-round draft pick. To be fair, McCoy spent his formative years Texas, so he pretty much always sounds like he's concussed.
In this week's "The Fabulous & the Flops," we mine the annals of futility to find comparable games for some of the week's worst performances. Which quarterback nearly beat out Blaine Gabbert for the least accurate game of the season? Which pair of elite wide receivers couldn't buy a catch on Sunday? Which team should probably stop calling running plays altogether? And what did Devin Aromashodu unexpectedly do? All that and more, but first, is Beast Mode becoming a dominant running back?
In this week's edition of "The Fabulous and the Flops," we identify the player who needs to accompany Ndamukong Suh to image-revamping school, show some love to the young talent who is making the absence of a major star seem like nothing, and basically make fun of the sloppiest game of the season for a while. Plus: Our coverage of Chris Johnson as either the best or worst player on the field continues!
In case you were out living a life of leisure, here's what you missed in sports over the weekend.
The NBA is back! Pending ratification, a new labor agreement has been reached between players and owners that would allow for a 66-game season beginning on Christmas day. Which means that the first Christmas memory for many young children will be the terrifying image of Kevin Garnett screaming at them through the television.
In this look back at Week 11's action, we identify the fabulous linebacker who seems to be making everyone else on his team superstars, the pair of rookies who made our Friday column look wise, and the head coach who deserves credit for trying to pull out an unorthodox win.
In this week's "The Fabulous and the Flops," we've got our usual mix of praise and scorn. In our look at the numbers and storylines coming out of this weekend's game, we find a coach who's messing around like he wants to be fired, a group of overmatched offensive linemen who helped create career days, and a veteran specialist who had something resembling a perfect game.
We start in Atlanta, though, where an All-Pro probably cost his team the game without anybody realizing it.
In this week's "The Fabulous and the Flops," we've got a lot of questions to answer about a tricky Week 8. Which team put up a dominant defensive performance and nearly lost? How many weeks can a fluke stick around before it's no longer a fluke? And has Tebowmania really bitten the dust?
First, though, we begin with the biggest upset of Week 8.
With another NFL week in the books, it's time to traverse the football landscape and identify the heroes and villains from Week 7. In "The Fabulous and the Flops," we sift through the reams of numbers and narratives produced by each game from the previous weekend to somehow make sense of a game that doesn't always make sense. Like how the young quarterback who received plenty of praise for his game really didn't play all that well. (And no, we don't mean Tim Tebow.) But more on him later. We'll start in Detroit, where two teams previously traveling in opposite directions crossed paths and seemed to reverse field.
The following is a list of adult men who threw passes on Sunday in the National Football League: John Beck, Christian Ponder, Kyle Boller, and … wait for it … Vince Young. And if that wasn’t enough to have fans of repulsive quarterbacking Harbaugh handshaking each other, with Oakland quarterback Jason Campbell out with a broken collarbone, the Raiders are reportedly close to acquiring Carson Palmer. If the deal does happen, there is little doubt that at some point this season, he will be joining the above list of esteemed field generals. Good news for Raiders fans, bad news for those of us who couldn't wait to see Terrelle Pryor make a run at scoring quadruple-digit BQBL points in a single week.
But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. This week there was plenty for fans of failure.
If you loved the "Five Up, Five Down" feature in our Monday morning wrap-ups of the NFL, well, you're going to be very fond of our new Tuesday feature here in Grantland, The Fabulous & The Flops of the NFL. After the dust has settled on Monday Night Football, we'll go through every game of the past week and use our proprietary mix of common sense and statistics to identify a hero and a villain from each contest. What do the numbers in the box score fail to tell you? Who flew underneath the radar? What's the most important fact you need to take away from each contest? These are the sorts of questions we'll answer in this space each week. This column is your overly-obsessed-with-the-NFL friend who stayed up all day and night Monday watching the games while you were at work. Everyone needs one of those!
