Fear The Chorizo

Anyone else get the feeling after last night's MVP award that Rodgers wanting a trade out of town is a distant 3rd in the potential outcomes for next season? I think a return to the Packers and retirement might be running neck and neck, with a trade out of town to play for a new team being an afterthought. We're probably only a couple weeks away from knowing for certain - but I think if he truly wanted to walk and continue playing elsewhere we'd have heard something by now from Rodgers' camp.

Yeah that hurt and was inexcusable, but it didn't lose the game either. You can lay that blame on Favre and one of the worst throws I've seen in my life. His performance in the Raiders game a few weeks earlier when Favre's dad died was the worst thing that could've happened. Favre was throwing those exact same passes into double and even triple coverage and completing them. I wonder if Favre would've thrown that pass against the Eagles if those passes had been intercepted in Oakland. He absolutely would have, unfortunately....that was the year Ahman Green was an absolute monster and the Packers were a run 1st team. Teams had to crowd the box to stop the run and it opened up 1 on 1's with walker and Ferguson on the outside. Green bay dominated that game at the line of scrimmage and had no business losing it. The 4th and short stop inside the Eagle 5 at the end of the 1st half ( kick the FG and take the points with the lead!!) changed how they played offense the rest of the game and some disguised coverages led to some poor passes late.

Ultimately it just depends what you follow and grew up with in terms of sports - alpine and snowsport events are king in many of the European countries with mountains, which is why the Winter Olympics exist in any capacity at all.

keep in mind that swimming and track races often have a series of qualifying heats that cloud the actual picture of which competitors reach a final race. A lot of times the events that have multiple runs included for the overall cumulative time (bobsled/luge events have 4, I believe) will stagger each round of competitors starting with the slowest time and ending with the best from the previous round. Skiing also has multiple runs for many of their racing events aside from downhill and super G. It's quite common for the 1st competitor through a course and posting the best time to get knocked down the rankings - particularly when an event includes cumulative time for multiple runs and the racer order of each run starts with the slowest prior time. If a ski event with two runs takes the top 32 skiers after the 1st run to determine who medals, the 2nd run will started with the 32nd fastest time and and finish with the fastest time from the 1st run - so even if the 32nd best time from run #1 blisters the course for their 2nd run, their cumulative time is incredibly unlikely to medal. Cross country skiing penalties are often related to impeding a competitor - track and swimming have the same sort of penalties but those typically wind up as a straight DQ. Biatholon events add extra laps/skiing or penalty times for competitors who miss targets in their shooting rounds. There are plenty of H2H concept events in the Winter Olympics if you look for them - but they also have a ton of events where everyone is racing the course for the fastest time or doing crazy tricks to maximize a judges score.

There are two sticks (gates) at each point in the course that the skier has to go between to stay on the course - in events like slalom, skiers often take the line that stays on the inside turn of each set of gates so they minimize the actual distance they need to ski down the course and in turn have a faster time. What Shiffrin did was take too aggressive and tight a line at one of the first couple gates without carving out a tight turn to set herself up for the next gate - that resulted in her slipping a bit where the course layout required a carved turn to make it through the next couple gates that were staggered. Right after slipping she barely got through the very next gate but her line was so far out of whack she couldn't recover to get between the next pair of blue sticks and skied out of bounds. The fact it happened only a couple gates into the run is what's crazy for a world class skier - it'd be like a Formula 1 driver running straight into a wall on the 1st turn of a track in a solo qualifying run. In slalom, the gates are just sticks because there are so many in tight quarters and the racers like to punch them down to clear them from their torso because their best lines are often running the skis right next to them.

The NFL combine is must watch TV for many football fans - and that event's biggest draw is watching guys in underwear run 40 yards by themselves and 2 tenths of a second often separates 1st round talent from 3rd day draftees at certain position groupings. To each his or her own - but navigating the course itself in ski races IMO is more entertaining to watch than 8 people swimming or running at the same time in a pool or on a track to see who does it the fastest. Seeing the effect of skiers taking slightly different lines or approaches to parts of the course is pretty cool when they layer leaders' or other competitors' lines through various splits. If you need to see snow events that actively have people racing together, there are various ski/snowboard cross events and cross country skiing where people are racing at the same time - and those are typically very cool to watch. Alpine skiing/bobsled/luge are just not events where you line up a bunch of people at the same time and send them racing down it for safety reasons. For those events, the uniqueness of the course and sheer speed factors are the entertainment.

Thanks, but my point was that the general public probably doesn't matter nor care (I'll forget what you told me by the next time I end up watching it). I enjoy watching it, but to me (the casual observer), it is a lot of the "same" between the various races. Its almost like if they played basketball on a US court, then a Euro court, and 3on3 half-court. Each would have their nuances that make more difference to the player than it does the casual spectator. I think the more accurate analogy would be swimming, not basketball - everyone's in the same pool, but different swimmers excel in different strokes and frequently different distances based on their endurance and body type. The once-in-a-generation swimmers are the ones who are considered world class in multiple strokes and distances. Same goes for skiers who are considered legit medal contenders across multiple events. Or take track - downhill probably most resembles the 100 yard dash where it's simply brute speed, Super G would be the 200, G slalom would be the 1,500 meters, and slalom would be a 400 M hurdle event. On the world stage, you rarely see a track athlete even compete in more than 2 of those events at a level where they have medal aspirations.

Added hype/pressure to perform isn't anything new in terms of Olympic buildup - and the US isn't even close to being among the countries who raise expectations and pressure on their own athletes the most. With what happened in Tokyo during last summer's Olympics with Simone Biles and what appears to be happening with Shiffrin, I think there's a big impact on not having family/close friend support systems there in person for athletes to lean on if things don't go according to plan and negativity quickly snowballs mentally. Skiing events in particular, oftentimes the order of the racers, ski wax choice, and changing snow conditions play a huge role in who actually medals in those events.

I've always found the winter games particularly snoozy. It always sort of felt like a bunch of things that are all the same with a minor variation. There are only so many ways I can care about going down a slope. Summer isn't a whole lot better but there's usually some good swimming and the gymnastics can be kinda fun to track. I'm with you overall though. I stopped caring after high school. I will say I am really looking forward to the World Cup running over the holidays this year. That will be cool. Olympic hockey is fantastic and probably the best team sport in summer or winter Olympics to watch....to me the speed ski and skating sports that are timed or in the case of short track against competitors are much more entertaining than watching people run as fast as they can in a lane or around an oval...or swim in a pool for that matter. Gymnastics in summer = figure skating in the winter....ok and fun to watch at times as long as it's only once every 4 years. Summer Olympics have way too many events that are just terrible for TV - basically half of them could just be grouped into "exercise".

It's also not helped by a broadcaster that used to devote three or more full-time networks to covering the games (the "Olympics Triplecast" of decades ago), scaling back to one full-time channel (USA), with one more during prime time and late night (NBC), as part of a strategy to steer traffic to its new streaming platform. NBC Sports Network folded at the start of the year, niche sports do not seem to be airing on CNBC like they have in prior games, and NBC has an "Olympic Channel" that is only airing highlights rather than actual competitive events. Aside from Curling, I'll probably end up sticking to NBC proper, since I anticipate the prime-time coverage will have the anticipated *stars* of the games. I'm not paying for Peacock just to watch things which would have been on cable in prior years. Agreed on all the streaming service/app nonsense - those things were supposed to supplement TV broadcast capabilities and be used by people who prefer that option. Instead, it's turned into a "buy our app/service in order to watch the content we paid dearly for the rights to" - and the Olympics just don't move the needle enough to make the masses register and watch. Because it's so segmented, there's no way to pull off a good broadcast because the primetime/late night shows on TV can't draw from everything in order to preserve an incentive to pay for Peacock.

They did. The mountain only gets about a foot of snow a year. And they knew this back in 2015: https://snowbrains.com/2022-beijing-olympic-mountain-venues-average-2-snow-depth-in-winter/ Even in typical snow-havens, artificial snow is made and applied to many of the courses because Olympic-level skiers feel like it's more consistent to race on....however it breaks down and becomes treacherous when subjected to temps above freezing faster than natural snow. Beijing has never been an area that maintains temps well below freezing and they typically don't get alot of snow in the mountains they are using for the ski events - so as soon as they were named a host city people knew this was going to happen. Agreed with Homer's post above - hosting the Olympics in this day and age seems more like a burden than a benefit to cities/countries, and the interest in doing so has dried up. To me, my interest in the Olympics in general has waned considerably and that seemed to begin around the same time pro athletes crossed over to play on national teams for the big team sports (basketball, hockey, etc.). Doping ruined most of track and field for me, too. It also doesn't help that the IOC as a group are some kind of awful. I've always thought the Winter Olympics were the more viewer-friendly events to broadcast, because there are fewer events and most of them are people hurtling down mountains and ice tracks at insane speeds or doing crazy acrobatics on ice skates. Curling is also weirdly entertaining to watch on television. However, I think the push to increase the overall # of events has forced broadcast networks to limit how much time they dedicate to televising each of them, and the broadcasts have morphed into more of a highlight reel show that doesn't let the viewer settle in to watch something for an extended period of time - that is definitely the case for when the events happen on the other side of the world and there's a time zone lag.

It really isn't that difficult to sort out how much MLB teams still lean on ticket sales/gameday revenues to make the finances work, since the shortened 2020 season was essentially played without fans. Forbes estimated the Brewers' 2020 season revenue to be $104 million bucks over the course of a 60 game season - that amount was essentially TV revenue, largely influenced by MLB having a postseason (i.e., the actual amount of TV revenue that would've been paid to the Brewers had they played 162 games instead of 60 during the regular season wouldn't have dramatically jumped, because their own local TV deal is peanuts compared to most other teams in MLB). So most of their 2020 revenue was from the shared TV/streaming/broadcast contract money spread across baseball. For example, the Cubs' 2020 revenue was estimated to be $163M and the Dodgers was $185M - big market teams that would've wound up with much larger amounts of TV money had they played 162 regular season games based on their larger TV contracts. The Brewers' estimated revenue for the 2019 season that had normal attendance? About $295 million dollars - nearly triple what their 2020 fanless revenue stream was. The Cubs 2019 revenue? $471M....Dodgers? $556M (also about 3x these clubs' 2020 revenues). Reports indicated the Brewers lost out on between $175M and $185M dollars in revenue during 2020 because they couldn't have fans in the stands. Large market teams can weather the storm of sustained poor gameday attendance and still strive to remain competitive in terms of player payroll - with the current uneven financial playing field heavily influenced by the portions of local TV$ that aren't currently shared across MLB, small market teams absolutely depend on ticket and gameday revenues if they want to try and compete even in the middle of the pack in terms of player payroll. Arguing otherwise is simply wrong, particularly when we are basically one year removed from a MLB season that saw no gameday revenue and a 2021 season that was significantly reduced in that regard due to COVID. Small-mid market clubs are desperate to get butts back in the stadium seats across 81 home games for 2022, and any sort of labor dispute/lockout that impacts their bottom line projections for this season is going to really sting.

Harbaugh was in SF with the Vikes' new GM...seemed to be a connection there worth exploring simply based on familiarity, and the perception was that Vikes' ownership where the ones who needed to be sold on Harbaugh being the guy - perhaps once Adofo-Mensah started listening to Harbaugh he suddenly remembered what led to things souring as fast as they came together for the 49ers when he was head coach and things fizzled quickly. The interview did indeed happen, and it lasted most of a day - the end result was no offer was made by the Vikings to Harbaugh from what I gather, so he slithered back to Michigan and put on brave face saying he didn't really want the NFL job even though he would've jumped if he was actually offered it.

Particularly with adding an extra regular season game to the schedule, just do away with actually playing the Pro Bowl game. Go ahead and keep separate honors like All Pro and Pro Bowl since there are plenty of contract incentives for being named to a Pro Bowl that aren't likely attainable if the awards get restricted to 1st and 2nd team All Pro rosters....just don't line up and play a meaningless and listless football "game". More often than not many of the guys named as Pro Bowlers can't even play in a way that led to them being among the league's best players anyways, so what's the point?

Dillon getting injured on ST early in the 2nd half absolutely hurt their offense and probably left points on the field - the snow made that slick field ideal for a 240-lb RB to get a ton of carries, churn clock, and move the chains. Not having him forced GB to try and use Aaron Jones in that role and he appeared to wear down. The drive they actually scored a FG in the 2nd half was pretty much all #33. And yeah, it's not just ST units blocking to prevent kicks from getting blocked (that's actually the easiest thing to get right on special teams, to be honest) - coverage units were a disaster and return units were better served taking fair catches and touchbacks, too.

On one of the SF blocks, the Packers lined up 4 people to block 6 rushers. There was a timeout or something, and then a regroup, and they came out with the exact same 4v6 blocking scheme. That alone is grounds for firing. Correct me if I'm wrong, but a FG blocking formation is pretty straightforward in that there are always 4 blockers on either side of a snapper. If a team were to dedicate more blockers to one side of the formation, wouldn't the opponent just slide more rushers to the weak side? That FG block at the end of the 1st half occurred because Lancaster set up too far back and too wide of Lowry on the left side of the line. That alignment created a huge gap in the protection on that side. Then, after Lowry engaged the guy directly in front of him he blocked in towards the interior of the line and left Lancaster on an island against 3 49er rushers. Lancaster opted to try and block the rusher furthest to the outside (he whiffed even trying to do that), but doing so left a wide open lane for a free rusher to cut into the center - which resulted in him being able to block the kick practically with his face. The rule on FG blocking at the edges is to always block the inside guy 1st if faced with a 2 on 1 situation - because if the mechanics of the snap/hold/kick are in sync the outside rusher won't have time to impact the kick. A very similar mistake was made by Barnes on that punt block in the 4th quarter - GB had plenty of blockers on the right side to handle what the 49ers did...but at the snap of the ball Barnes turned outside to block a rusher coming towards him and wound up double teaming that guy with McDuffie while the undersized long snapper was forced to try and block a defensive lineman rushing right up the gut. If Barnes does the same thing Burks did at the other side of the formation (stick glued to the longsnapper for a count to make sure there wasn't a rusher coming up the gut before peeling outside to block or run downfield to cover the punt), the guy who blocked the punt doesn't come close to doing so. The formation design for both of those blocks was just fine - the execution by the players was atrocious and I'd all but guarantee those specific players were identified as potential weaknesses to try and exploit with creative block rushes by the 49ers based on film review. The decisions those players made on the pair of blocked kicks is a failure of coaching to drill the proper technique into them.

This is a fantastic hire - frankly I'm shocked he isn't still the head coach of the Raiders.

What gets lost on this timing question is the fact teams can announce they have trades in place well before the new league year starts in mid-March. Last year, I think the Stafford/Goff trade between the Rams and Lions had already been agreed to in principle before last year's Super Bowl - those transactions aren't official until the 1st day of the 2021 league year in mid-March 2021 as well, but the cap semantics and roster planning started shaking out well before that. Specific to the Packers, that likely means if Rodgers wants out and the Packers trade him, the trade will be announced in principle well before the new league year starts, likely giving his new team time to negotiate a new contract as well. For the Packers, that event would likely trigger many of the veteran cuts/restructures that will also be necessary to both get well under the 2022 cap and retool the roster. One other cap figure that will be sure to be reduced even while keeping a core player on this roster longterm is Jaire Alexander by giving him a new deal - his current 5th year option amount of ~$13-14M will be reduced by inking him to a longterm extension with a huge signing bonus and then structuring his contract so his 2022 salary is peanuts and spreading the amount of his signing bonus across 4-6 seasons capwise. If all this happens, GB will have ample space to franchise Adams if they need to prior to trading him before the draft. The other option, of course, is for Rodgers to want to return along with inking Adams to a new contract - that would also likely mean a restructured/new Rodgers contract and a new Adams contract, both which would pay them big upfront signing bonus money so their 2022 salaries are much lower and spreading signing bonus $ out across a few future cap years to make the salary cap shell game fit for this next year. This would all be done in principle ahead of the 1st day of the new league year, when all those figures go into effect.

The more unaffordable baseball gameday experiences are for "Joe Lunchpail" to actually attend games in person are, or the more alienated they feel as fans, the fewer of them tune in to listen/watch that team from their couches. Longterm, that ultimately leads to smaller values of the next media broadcast contracts that organization gets - particularly in smaller markets and compared to similar market sizes who may have a larger fan following. This is particularly true with baseball, which has 81 dates to try and sell tickets for while maintaining fan interest. If you don't have a high gameday demand for fan attendance, that trickles down to diminished demand for sponsorship $/merch sales/marketability of the organization. Additionally, poor attendance also leads to lower prices on luxury boxes for corporate entities as well. I'd imagine a decent chunk of the luxury suites are largely comped or marked down significantly to the companies who have various sponsorship deals with the club anyways. Thinking butts in the seats who paid significant dollars to watch a game in person are insignificant to a professional baseball franchise is just foolish - even in this day and age. If that was truly the case, teams would be building new ballparks that resembled single A stadiums with roughly 5,000 seating capacity and just fill them up with luxury suites to reduce the overhead they have with stadium maintenance and gameday staffing.

While it may not be a probable outcome, there is certainly more than a zero chance that Jordan Love could lead a playoff squad. Especially a defense and run-heavy squad, which is certainly where it seems Lafleur would like to go. Particularly with how the NFC North will look next season

31 white coaches and 1 black coach This comment is almost as bad as the poor job NFL owners have done over the years hiring minority coaching candidates. If you ever meet Ron Rivera or Robert Saleh in person, please tell them you think they are white. Also, there are currently 5 head coach openings in the NFL.

Yes and no. From the start of the new NFL league year in early March until the first week of the regular NFL season in September, only the 51 most expensive contracts actually count against a team’s salary cap. That means those guys who signed "futures" deals will only be counted against the cap until their deals are replaced by free agent signings and draft pick signings. While correct on Top 51, at the moment each one of those contracts counts against the 51 because the roster isn't full. Plus, those guys they sign from here will simply have a netting effect. The 70 million doesn't factor in draft signings or free agents at all. It also includes all the veteran cap figures pushed back a season from last spring's salary cap gymnastics that were done to get the team under the cap for last season without doing anything with Rodgers' contract at the time. The same thing's going to happen again this March, only with the benefit of also being able to reduce the huge 2022 cap hit Rodgers' contract has either by a restructure/extension or by a trade. The ~$20M in cap space likely needed to franchise Adams is totally hypothetical, because if he resigns with the Packers his new contract will likely contain a huge signing bonus with a very low year 1 salary, and achieve significant cap savings by spreading that signing bonus out to future cap years even though Adams would get his huge payday this year. If Adams is a Packer in 2022, his cap hit this season will be significantly lower than that - otherwise he's getting tagged and traded in a scenario where Rodgers is also leaving via trade and the team will essentially be in cap slashing/retooling mode anyways. Would I like to see both Smiths back on the defense next season? Probably, but definitely not on their current contracts that were already drastically restructured to keep them around one more season in 2021 - those cuts are virtually automatic and everyone knew it as soon as those restructures were announced last spring.

There's a cap don't matter mentality on this board because it honestly doesn't matter on teams with great quarterbacks - you just figure it out at the margins and keep pushing forward. Will some guys have to be cut that could be contributors in 2022 if their salaries were more friendly? Yes, but if Rodgers and Adams want to be back, you get them done and move forward. This isn't kirk cousins we are talking about. The $70m you are referencing includes the salaries of everyone still currently on the roster from this year's team and what their current contracts cap hits would be for 2022. That just isn't reality, because close to $40m of that figure was likely going to be veteran cap cuts of the likes of the Smiths, cobb, Crosby, Turner, etc after this year no matter how this season went. Then that remaining $30m comes down either to how a restructured or new Rodgers deal to keep him a Packer reduces his 2022 cap hit and likewise for a new Adams deal that can spread out huge signing bonus figures onto future cap years that are now much more likely to jump up with a return to normal revenue streams as the pandemic becomes an endemic. There are still more veteran restructures that can even further trim their bottom line if they need to do it. Then again, if Rodgers and Adams don't want to return, the cap reductions can get carried out much differently.

Is it me, or is every time the amount of salary cap the Packers need to cut get referenced, that overall figure gets larger on this board? There are so many ways the theoretical cap figure can be adjusted and altered that until we know which players they actually want to retain and which ones actually want to stay here, there's not point in discussing hypothetical cap scenarios, tbh. Roughly half of the likely salary cap savings this team needs to make before mid-march are essentially auto cuts that many teams make annually when non-guaranteed veteran contract amounts remaining get out of whack with their onfield performance. Hopefully by the end of February they won't be needing to cut $134M... One thing's for certain - whether or not Rodgers and Adams are Packers next season or playing elsewhere has absolutely nothing to do with what the team's longterm salary cap outlook currently looks like. We are talking about 2 of probably the top 3 or 4 players on their roster in terms of talent/production for 2022 - if they want to be here, you find a way to make the financials work to keep them around. If you don't, you utilize what limited financial control you have over those players (i.e., franchise tag) until you get viable trade offers to maximize value in return for sending them elsewhere.

Now go get someone from outside the organization that has the bonafides to change the painfully longstanding culture of putrid Packer special teams - particularly coverage/blocking and return units. Someone like Andy Hill from the Chiefs - who has experience working under Dave Toub. Another interesting if not wishful thinking option could be Chris Horton from the Ravens. Baltimore may be able to block a strictly lateral ST coordinator move, however they also have Rosburg in charge of special teams/associate head coach there. Harbaugh was a highly respected special teams coordinator himself before becoming a head coach, and their ST units are perennially among the best. I still wish they did this a week earlier, but if a guy like Tabor wasn't on their radar to bring in I hope they did have a laundry list of preferred options they can choose from.