As the long, hot summer drags on, we here at The Triangle figured we’d provide a steady stream of NFL goodness as a reminder of the light at the end of the baseball-lined tunnel.
The start of training camp is a time for hope, for promise, for finding reasons to be excited about the future. The situation in Jacksonville this week is no different. There is good news coming out of Jags camp, and that news is things can’t get any worse.
Already faced with a lack of interest so formidable they’re encouraging fans to come with sack lunches in hand, the start of Jaguars training camp can’t be described as anything less than a disaster.
Amid the echo chamber of dissent surrounding the Jeremy Lin signing, there's a very interesting historical question that hasn't really been answered. As sports fans, we often want to believe that we're seeing something new and fresh, something that's never happened before. The reality is that most things we see have happened before and will almost surely happen again. The last nine months of Jeremy Lin's career, though? That might actually be unprecedented in the history of American sport.
Think about it. Try to find a historically comparable situation where all three of the following things occurred:
1. A player at the beginning of his professional career without any status as a top prospect was acquired by a team off of the waiver wire/from the free agent market as freely available talent.
2. That same player promptly played at an elite level for a portion of exactly one season.
3. That player departed the team during the subsequent offseason.
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.
