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.
In case you were out living a life of leisure, here's what you missed in sports on Tuesday.
The Miami Marlins suspended manager Ozzie Guillen five games for positive comments he made about Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Right before Guillen went out to address the media, a frantic PR person desperately tried to convince him to take off the green military cap and lose the cigar. "Oh come onnnn," said Guillen. "It'll be hilarious!" When the items were confiscated, he frowned and began to think.
The Robert Griffin III trade on Friday night produced more than a marked uptick in celebrations on U Street; it set into motion a series of events that should have a profound impact on the NFL as it heads into free agency this week. We don't know how the trade between the Redskins and Rams will play out over the next five years, but we do know that there are nearly a dozen teams who felt the reverberations of the RG3 deal and its resulting events. Teams handing out makeup contracts! Cap space being carved out! Peyton Manning sleeping overnight in desperately desirous cities! We have to take the temperature of the rest of the league right now to see how this RG3 deal has, well, heated things up. (Get it?) (You get it, right?) (It's a fev … OK, sorry.)
Back in November, when Robert Griffin III insisted he was keeping all of his options open, he sat in a windowless conference room and told me he was seriously considering a return to Baylor for his senior season so he could enroll in law school, and that he had not ruled out the possibility of making a go at the 2012 Olympic Games as a hurdler. All these possibilities laid out before him seemed to brighten his spirits, and yet when I asked specifically about the NFL, pragmatism crept in.
“With the NFL, if they come knocking at your door, you’re not going to tell them no,” he said, and then — largely because my question nudged him in this direction — he said that the NFL didn’t like smart guys who knew what they were worth, and that pro football was a bottom-line business that was “just about the spectacle.”
The marriage between Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts whimpered its way to a conclusion on Tuesday night, as Chris Mortensen reported that the team will release Manning to avoid paying the $28 million roster bonus due to the future Hall of Famer. Although Manning could eventually choose to re-sign with the Colts on lesser terms, the decision likely brings Manning's 14-year career with the team to an end. He finishes with 54,828 passing yards and 399 passing touchdowns in blue and white; only Brett Favre and Dan Marino have more passing yards and passing touchdowns for a single team.
In case you were out living a life of leisure, here's what you missed in sports on Monday.
According to sources, Saints owner Tom Benson is backing head coach Sean Payton despite accusations that he maintained a bounty program to injure opponents. "I think Sean Payton is great! Beep-Beep-Beeeeeeeep! No problems here! Beeeeeeeeep-Beep-Beep" he said loudly. It took code-breakers all night, but they finally realized Benson was using Morse code to deliver a hidden message: "Bounty on me, please help, they have my wife."
Redskins players came out in support of former assistant Gregg Williams, insisting that while he gave money for big hits and good plays, there was never a bounty system to reward anyone for injuring an opponent. "He would also pay us $1,000 if we threw water in his face and called him 'Little Linda' until he cried," said one former player. "But I'm pretty sure that was unrelated."
In case you were out living a life of leisure, here's what you missed in sports over the weekend.
Kobe Bryant, the Masked Mamba, scored 33 points as the Lakers avenged his broken nose with a 93-83 victory over Dwyane Wade and the Heat. "From this day forward, I shall never be seen without a mask," Kobe said after the game, "and it won't be this admittedly feminine Mardi Gras feather mask, either. I left my cool ones at home."
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.
When we wrote about the Suck for Luck campaign before Halloween, we suspected that the Miami Dolphins would end up with Andrew Luck, either by producing the worst record in football or via trade. Since then, though, the Dolphins have gone 4-3, pushing them away from the Luck sweepstakes. The Colts had a 33.2 percent chance of getting the first overall pick when we wrote our initial piece, but heading into Week 15, Football Outsiders estimates their chances of holding the first overall pick at 91.1 percent. If the Colts want Andrew Luck, they're going to get him.
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 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.
