What's that? You were wondering exactly how many days until the start of the NFL season? Well, you're in luck! We here at the Triangle are set to spend the next three months providing a daily reason to get excited about pro football's return.
I'm pretty sure the video says everything, but in case you forgot, here's Adrian Peterson’s 2012, coming back from a shredded knee andwith a sports hernia: 2,097 yards, 12 rushing touchdowns, 131.1 yards per game, 6.0 yards per carry, 3.93 yards per carry after contact, 44 broken tackles, 40 runs of 15 or more yards, and the most not-surprised-by-anything-he-does season a running back has had since I’ve been alive.
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So much amazing is happening, and the Shootaround crew is here to help you keep track of it all. You'll find takes on moments you might've missed from the previous night, along with ones you will remember forever.
10 Thoughts Written Less Than a Minute Afterward
Brian Phillips:
1. I don't know. I don't. I do. Not. Know.
2. That was. What do you even. How would you.
3. I want to see Kawhi Leonard's Blood Meridian of a dunk on Mike Miller depicted in the most fevered Cormac McCarthy prose you could possibly imagine. "And then rising from the hard planks like a pheasant startled by shot the cornrowed elongated youth swung down his arm and it was as if fire fell with his swing and truth fell with it and something fell too that was neither fire nor truth but that could perhaps have been called beauty and that was more terrible than fire or truth by far."
4. I want to see Mike Miller's shoe given its own display case in the Hall of Fame.
5. I want John Donne to motherfucking come back from the grave and rewrite "Death Be Not Proud" about Tim Duncan, who is older than sand and who played most of that game like he just cold forgot it. Fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, and that's only the first half.
6. Tony Parker's penultimate minute of the fourth quarter. There are no verbs. He killed all the verbs. You've just got: Tony Parker. Ball. Trajectory. Ninety-nine nervous breakdowns. Net.
7. I want to see Ray Allen's 3 at the end of regulation given its own display case in the Hall of Fame. And I want the placard text to be about Danny Green. And I want the rest of the Hall of Fame closed forever.
8. There's going to be a Game 7 in the series. Just sit with that for a second.
9. How can you even. I mean. Where do you find the.
What's that? You were wondering exactly how many days until the start of the NFL season? Well, you're in luck! We here at the Triangle are set to spend the next three months providing a daily reason to get excited about pro football's return.
I’ve learned in my two decades of attending professional sporting events that I have a tendency to inflate moments I witness. I’m sure Michael Jordan’s best playoff game wasn’t Game 1 in the first round against the Bullets in 1997, but because it was the first one I’d seen, it feels that way. When it comes to Colin Kaepernick’s performance in last year’s divisional round, which I watched from the Candlestick press box, I’m fairly confident my spot in the building didn’t skew what I saw that day.
The Packers were hapless, yes (hapless enough that they felt compelled to send their defensive coaching staff to Texas A&M to figure out the read option), but Kaepernick was also magnificent on his way to 444 total yards and a 49ers blowout.
With the way Kaepernick played last season, and with San Francisco’s trip to the Super Bowl, it doesn’t feel like the 25-year-old Nevada product has eight fewer starts than Russell Wilson. But he does. Kaepernick is only 10 starts into his career, but already, he feels like one of the more important assets in all of football. This is in part because he’s a high-caliber quarterback with a second-round price tag. But he already deserves evaluation independent of finances. His peers voted him the 81st-best player in a poll of players by the NFL Network. Let’s reiterate — that's based on six fewer starts than Ryan Tannehill has.
For the most part, the 49ers are positioned to continue the offensive success they enjoyed during Kaepernick’s limited stretch. Without Michael Crabtree, who played at a Pro Bowl level with Kaepernick under center, San Francisco’s passing game will likely hit some snags, but there are still plenty of pieces to fill out the 49ers offense. Kaepernick will be without his no. 1 target, but to go along with Anquan Boldin (who, the Niners are all too aware, has a little something left), Kaepernick still has the league’s best offensive line, one of its best tight ends, and a bevy of recently drafted weapons that are more likely to come into play this season.
Kaepernick’s performances following the win over Green Bay didn’t quite compare, but there was still something to watching him chew up yards and generally dominate on a postseason stage. He’s capable of plays only Robert Griffin III can match, and the idea of seeing it over a 16-game season should be enough to have anyone outside of Seattle looking forward to Sundays. There’s a chance those 10 games were the exception, but an offseason of Kaepernick taking reps as the starter and the Niners staff formulating game plans with him as the centerpiece should continue his success. Colin Kaepernick is likely here for the long haul, and by the end of this year, my guess is that we’ll all very used to it.
What's that? You were wondering exactly how many days until the start of the NFL season? Well, you're in luck! We here at the Triangle are set to spend the next three and a half months providing a daily reason to get excited about pro football's return.
Earlier today, the NFL made it official that, indeed, the Cincinnati Bengals will again be the subject of HBO’s beloved, perfect, likely endangered Hard Knocks. More than ever, it seems like teams are hesitant to bring the all-access series to their training camps, and the network reportedly was refused by a handful of franchises before landing on the Bengals, who were also featured on the 2009 version of the show.
That’s not to say Cincinnati is an unattractive choice. The Bengals have made the playoffs for two straight seasons, have a young quarterback facing a potential turning point, and feature one of the best skill-position players in football in A.J. Green. Green has been excellent in his first two seasons after going fourth overall out of Georgia in 2011, but while the Bengals’ best player did spend his college career in Athens, he’s a former fourth-round pick who resides on the other side of the ball.
If we’re limiting our evaluations to terrestrial beings (which would exclude J.J. Watt), it would be reasonable to argue that Geno Atkins, the Bengals’ 25-year-old, force-of-nature defensive tackle, was the best defensive player in the NFL a season ago. His 12.5 sacks were tied for 15th most in a single season by a defensive tackle in NFL history, according to Pro-Football-Reference, but sack totals do very little to illustrate just how dominant Atkins was. His 62 total hits and hurries (as tallied by Pro Football Focus) were 13 more than the next best defensive tackle (Ndamukong Suh), and his 86 total pressures were the third most of any defensive player in the league. Let’s note this again — he’s a defensive tackle.
The dominance translated to the run game as well, where Atkins’s 28 stops (again according to Pro Football Focus) were second among defensive tackles. His 18 tackles for loss were also best at his position, according to Advanced NFL Stats. And while the numbers are great and all, with Atkins, they aren’t even comparable to the video evidence. One of the best plays of the NFL season comes at the 1:36 mark in the video above, when Atkins drives 315-pound Willie Colon fives yards in the backfield before casually discarding him and burying Ben Roethlisberger. If you’re too lazy to scroll, here’s a GIF:
That is pure carnage. At 6-foot, Atkins is one of the strongest players in the entire league, a scary-powerful bundle of leverage who can get under just about every interior lineman in football. That’d be fine if he also weren't a knifing run stopper who’s also a nightmare as a speed rusher against woefully outgunned guards. If there’s anything better in that video than the destruction of Willie Colon, it’s watching Atkins terrorize poor Eli Manning. It’s to the point that I almost, almost feel bad. Ya know what? Just watch the whole video. Preferably twice. Of all the things to be excited about in Cincy, this guy tops the list, and when it comes to defensive players not named Watt or Miller, there’s no one I’m looking forward to watching more this fall.
What's that? You were wondering exactly how many days until the start of the NFL season? Well, you're in luck! We here at the Triangle are set to spend the next three and a half months providing a daily reason to get excited about pro football's return.
I would say that the Chan Gailey era was a dark time for Buffalo, but really, after Gregg Williams, Mike Mularkey, and Dick Jauron, I guess darkness is relative. Doug Marrone, former Syracuse head coach and, more importantly, former Saints offensive coordinator, is the latest attempt at a worthy carrier of Marv Levy’s torch, and so far, Bills fans at least have to be pleased that the sins of the previous regime are slowly being purged.
In March, the Bills released quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick, he of the six-year, $59 million contract signed less than two years earlier. With their first pick in April’s draft, Buffalo drafted the man they hope to be their answer at that position — Florida State’s E.J. Manuel. And about a month ago, 40-year-old Doug Whaley replaced Buddy Nix — the man responsible for Fitzpatrick’s payday — as the team’s general manager.
But if Fitzpatrick is the most brutal crime committed by old management, C.J. Spiller is the black mark of the old coaching staff. Spiller, taken ninth overall in the 2010 draft out of Clemson, was used as a situational player for his season and a half in Buffalo. A punt returner in both 2010 and 2011, Spiller didn’t hit double-digit carries until a Week 10 injury to starting running back Fred Jackson gave Spiller the nod for the rest of the season. Spiller did well enough with the work — averaging 5.19 yards per carry over the final six games — to earn the 1a role in Buffalo’s two-man running game heading into last season. What followed was enough to drive Bills fans completely insane.
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So much amazing is happening, and the Shootaround crew is here to help you keep track of it all. You'll find takes on moments you might've missed from the previous night, along with ones you will remember forever.
Pagan Rituals
netw3rk: In the Heat’s pregame hype-huddle, Dwyane Wade, ringed by his teammates, screamed “How will we respond?!” To which I tweeted:
“HOW WE GONNA RESPOND?” - The guy whose fault it is.
For most of these playoffs, various pundits, tastemakers, and members of the roundball intelligentsia have been vigorously shoveling dirt onto Wade’s head, face, neck, and chest area and tamping it down with some hard stomps of the loafer. And for good reason. He’s averaging 15.1 points per game this playoffs, down nearly eight points from last year’s 22.8; before Game 4, his PER for these playoffs was down to 17 from last year’s 22; and he’s shooting the second-lowest eFG of his playoff career, behind his injury-hit 2006-07 playoff campaign. The fall-down-seven-times-stand-up-eight Flash of the past was reduced to nothing more than the faint throb of a raver's day-old glow stick. People who get paid to be smart about basketball, and who are much smarter than I about basketball, have wondered aloud if it was time to bring Wade off the bench, à la one-shining-bald-spot Manu Ginobili. My contribution to this discussion was to make a Dwyane Wade Oregon Trail dysentery meme.
So, where the hell did this come from? Wade erupted last night in Krakatoa-ian fashion, scoring 32 points on 14-of-25 shooting. It’s his first time ALL PLAYOFFS scoring more than 30 points and only the third time he’s scored more than 20 (he scored 20 points or more 17 times last playoffs). And it’s not just that he got hot from long range, as players will sometimes do, and just started randomly splashing jumpers like a gambler catching hot cards. He was driving HARD, like the Wade of a million YouTube mixes with his Euro-step set to “Ibiza,” taking 12 shots in the paint, converting 10. It’s even more startling considering Wade tweaked some portion of his lower extremities in the first quarter, causing him to need a trainer to stretch him in a manner usually befitting a safe word. Somewhere, Tim Grover is chanting ancient Aramaic demon spells while sacrificing a rare eagle and burning a human foot in a bonfire.
What's that? You were wondering exactly how many days until the start of the NFL season? Well, you're in luck! We here at the Triangle are set to spend the next three and a half months providing a daily reason to get excited about pro football's return.
Along with being the two best wide receivers in the NFL last season, Andre Johnson and Calvin Johnson have a lot in common. They share a last name, they played their college football at schools now in the ACC, and they were taken in the top three of their respective drafts. They also, in a way, represent the end points of the Detroit Lions’ road to wide receiver redemption.
The end of that road came in 2007, when the Lions took Calvin Johnson second overall. All Megatron has done since is earn one of professional sports’ best nicknames and put together a stretch of seasons that, at 27, already have him in rare historical company.
The beginning came four years earlier, during the 2003 NFL draft. That year, there were two wide receivers considered to be top-10 talents. One was Michigan State’s Charles Rogers, a 6-foot-4 220-pounder who imposed his physicality on defensive backs and had the 4.4 speed to run by them. The other was Andre Johnson, the Miami receiver who combined a collection of excellent physical traits with a substantial feel for finding space in defenses. When it came time for the Lions to make their pick, the second overall, they went with the local kid. A series of injuries and positive drug tests led to Rogers playing only 15 games in a Lions uniform before eventually being released in 2006. Detroit compounded its receiver problem by drafting Roy Williams seventh overall in 2004 and Mike Williams 10th overall in 2005. As the Lions have struggled to find a complement to Megatron, Andre Johnson, who was taken one pick after Rogers, has spent the past decade quietly being one of the best wide receivers in football.
I bring this up not to torture Lions fans (but seriously, Andre Johnson and Calvin Johnson could very easily both be Lions right now), but also to note that for as clear as Megatron’s greatness has been, Andre’s collected efforts still somehow seem overlooked. Maybe it’s just easier to put it this way — over the past five seasons, Andre Johnson has belonged right beside Megatron in conversations about the best wide receiver in the NFL.
What's that? You were wondering exactly how many days until the start of the NFL season? Well, you're in luck! We here at the Triangle are set to spend the next three and a half months providing a daily reason to get excited about pro football's return.
Like most great things, the fat-man touchdown was born from a combination of opportunity and a desire for revenge. In his team’s 23-0 blowout of the Bears in the 1984 NFC Championship Game, 49ers coach Bill Walsh decided to use guard Guy McIntyre as a blocking back near the goal line. Mike Ditka saw this as an attempt at mockery (because of course he did), and it was there at Candlestick Park that Ditka vowed to one day have his vengeance.
So much amazing is happening, and the Shootaround crew is here to help you keep track of it all. You'll find takes on moments you might've missed from the previous night, along with ones you will remember forever.
Danny Chau: One hard-fought game that went down to the wire, two remarkable blowouts; two unreal 3-point barrages from Danny Green, three confounding performances from LeBron James, each with a different slant on his ever-changing narrative. The series has been all over the place, and while the Spurs obviously have the advantage at this point, back-to-back blowouts don’t tell us too much about the course this series is about to take. Between these two great teams, the series will likely go to whichever is more consistently aggressive. At this point, that favors San Antonio because there hasn’t been anything more consistent in this series than the hustle and effort from Tim Duncan and Kawhi Leonard.
What's that? You were wondering exactly how many days until the start of the NFL season? Well, you're in luck! We here at the Triangle are set to spend the next three and a half months providing a daily reason to get excited about pro football's return.
T.O.’s last down of regular-season NFL football came in 2010. Since that stint with the Bengals ended, he’s split his time between a disastrous stretch in the Indoor Football League and every celebrity sporting event ever conceived, all the while holding out hope for one more NFL shot. He had a short-lived stay with the Seahawks last summer, but that appears to be the last interest anyone’s shown. And if T.O. doesn’t catch on this year, he says, he’s calling it quits for good.
What's that? You were wondering exactly how many days until the start of the NFL season? Well, you're in luck! We here at the Triangle are set to spend the next three and a half months providing a daily reason to get excited about pro football's return.
Three years ago, the NFC West was, without argument, the worst division in professional football. Marshawn Lynch beasting people and their 41-36 win quickly made the circumstances of getting there unimportant, but it hasn’t been that long since the Seattle Seahawks were 7-9 and hosting a playoff game. It was a historically bad collection of teams, and that futility is what makes the current NFC landscape so difficult to understand.
With offseason personnel moves all but over, the NFC West is home to the two most-talented teams in the conference — if not the entire league. Dirt-cheap quarterbacks have helped the Seahawks and 49ers build two of the deepest rosters in football, and the idea of (at least) two games between those teams feels like more than we, the football-watching public, deserve.
So much amazing is happening, and the Shootaround crew is here to help you keep track of it all. You'll find takes on moments you might've missed from the previous night, along with ones you will remember forever.
Wrath of the Titan
Andrew Sharp: Thoughts during the first three quarters last night:
• LeBron's gotta come out killing everyone. This is going to be awesome.
• Wait, why isn't LeBron killing everyone?
• Wow, maybe the Spurs defense is just that good.
• Put him in the post, put him in the post.
• Is Danny Green really outplaying LeBron right now?
• [LeBron barely hits rim on fast-break layup.]
• What the hell is happening? Is this 2011?
• He's got a wrap on his knee now. Is he hurt?
• He looks sluggish. Is he tired?
• Is he just psyched out by the Spurs? Were the COLUMNISTS right?
• Oh god. Everyone's going to spend the next 48 hours arguing about what's wrong with LeBron, half the sports world calling him a coward who can't measure up to the Spurs, the other half defending him and wondering why everyone's making such a big deal about the best player in the world suddenly crashing back to earth. Both sides will be equally insufferable and this is so awful. I want to move to Antarctica.
Then the fourth quarter started, and LeBron happened. It started with a jumper falling, then he found Mike Miller for 3 with an outrageous pass, got himself a layup, hit Birdman with another outrageous no-look, nearly destroyed the earth with that Splitter block, and turned the two possessions after that into a Ray Allen 3 and a middle-finger fast-break dunk for himself. All part of a 33-5 run, and then the game was over. LeBron happened.
It's probably unfair to watch basketball like this, obsessing over one player on both sides of the court. But when he explodes like that, you see why we do it.
What's that? You were wondering exactly how many days until the start of the NFL season? Well, you're in luck! We here at the Triangle are set to spend the next three and a half months providing a daily reason to get excited about pro football's return.
For the same reason it lacks stars, the NFL typically lacks villains. In an 11-per-side, helmeted-and-padded game, personality rarely shines through, and that means the objects of our loathing become the men roaming the sideline, or the helmets themselves. There are occasions when a brash wide receiver or a stomping can get our attention, but it doesn’t go much beyond that. And that’s why Richard Sherman’s continuing efforts to go full wrestling heel have been wonderful.
The list of players Sherman has sparred with — both physically and verbally — has gotten long enough that I’m afraid I might forget someone. It started with Tom Brady, includes an actual jab from Trent Williams, and spilled into the offseason with Darrelle Revis, after Sherman had already taken shots at Roddy White just a few days earlier.
After calling White an “easy matchup,” Sherman furthered his criticism on NFL Network’s Around the Leaguejust a few days later. “His strengths are in their system, within their system," Sherman said. "His strengths aren't his own.”
So much amazing is happening, and the Shootaround crew is here to help you keep track of it all. You'll find takes on moments you might've missed from the previous night, along with ones you will remember forever.
The Shot
Danny Chau: It might be a bit early for this, but I wonder whether Tony Parker’s shot clock–beating bank shot will end up in a Finals montage 10 or 20 years down the line. Does the sheer impossibility of the moment trump its sloppiness? It was quite a lengthy scramble. Would time constraints force producers to trim a bit off the beginning of the play? Or would they decide that the folly was key to the glory? I’m getting ahead of myself, but in the moment, it sure looked like something timeless.
What's that? You were wondering exactly how many days until the start of the NFL season? Well, you're in luck! We here at the Triangle are set to spend the next three and a half months providing a daily reason to get excited about pro football's return.
It didn’t matter much, not with all the Robert Griffin magic and the surprise playoff trip, but long before the Redskins’ best offensive player went down for the season, their best defensive player was already gone. Brian Orakpo played just one full game for Washington last year, suffering a torn pectoral muscle in Week 2 against St. Louis, which cost him the rest of 2012. The Redskins rode Griffin and their offense for much of the year, but while their quarterback’s path back to health will be paramount, Orakpo’s return changes the complexion of Washington’s defense.
In 2011, Orakpo’s third season, the outside linebacker finished the season with nine sacks — less than half the total of that season’s sack king, Jared Allen. Teased out, though, the numbers show that Orakpo’s year ranks alongside Allen’s, and just about anyone else’s. His 49 combined hits and hurries were just two fewer than DeMarcus Ware’s total, according to Pro Football Focus. Orakpo had 12 fewer pressures than Ware and 22 fewer than Cameron Wake (who led all 3-4 outside linebackers), but he also rushed the passer less often. According to PFF’s numbers, Orakpo came on just 74.4 percent of pass plays, a rate almost 10 percentage points lower than Ware. Overall, it leaves their pass-rushing production at about the same level.
