Honestly the jersey's are boring... They've been boring for a while. Even college football is Nike dominant.

Take a leaf from soccer's book and allow teams to sign with a manufacturer themselves. Adidas, Puma, Under Armour, New Balance, Gymshark, even Reebok have been making a comeback in sports recently.

Needs some variety and fresh ideas.

Just wondering if, in Cleveland's weird situation, if they should not only tank this year but next year as well and make all their trades for 2026 draft picks instead of 2025? Could they get more value for taking them futher down the road? Would the NFL be ok with that situation? Since they can't get rid of watson, is there anything else that would make more sense?

During an offense live-ball fumble that occurs behind the line of scrimmage, is there any existing rule in the rulebook to prevent an offense from setting up a deep-field pick play by "blocking" when that ball is a live ball and before it is recovered by a quarterback that is eligible to make a pass?

Thought dawned on me a bit ago. Was curious if anyone had a better idea than I.

I’d say

Mahomes Lamar Burrow Allen Herbert

Hello! I'm copying and pasting an article I wrote (yesterday) for my blog. I can put a link, but I don't know if that's allowed here. In any case, I would love to know other actual NFL fans' thoughts. Please, tear into me... if you disagree.

The 4-hour NFL fan

There are two aspects of my personality that fight each other. Aspect 1 is the portion of me that wants to be productive at all hours of the day; to always be making progress in my goals, and to allocate as much time to this as I can.

Aspect 2, on the other hand, is a sports fan. In the context of my life, sports haven’t aged well. After watching a game on television, I don’t feel fulfilled the way I do when I check an item off its checklist. Though I do feel something else, which is also desirable. I’m not the right person to argue “being a sports fan is good” here, at least in this article. After all, it would be difficult to explain sports fandom to an extra terrestrial.

What I will say is this: it’s pseudo religious. You root for a team because you grew up rooting for a team. When the team is bad, that stinks, because you're stuck with them. But the “being stuck” part is critical to this equation; that’s part of the allure.

So, I’ve made my peace with devoting a portion of my life force to “staring at a TV while desiring that the uniforms I grew up rooting for have more points than the uniforms I grew up rooting against.” However, we need limits on this.

For that reason, I made a subconscious (or maybe direct, I don’t remember) decision to pare down my sports-watching diet; to only follow the one sport I liked best, the National Football League.

“At least”, I reasoned, “the football season is only a third of the year”. My favorite team only has 17 games a year. As a middle ground, I do think “only pro football” fits the bill. (“Only college football” works too.)

I mostly stay true to this, albeit with a small yearly exception for March Madness, and an every-four-years exception for the World Cup.

Self-contained though it is, it’s still a big sacrifice when it comes to time. Not only do I have a favorite team, I also follow (the storylines of) all 32 teams. I listen to NFL podcasts. Regarding the games themselves, there’s Thursday, Sunday, and Monday night football (3.5 hours each per week), and then of course NFL Sunday (7 hours a week). Combined, that’s 17.5 hours a week.

In the before times, I didn’t usually watch this much football, though 10 hours wasn’t unusual. Looking at it soberly, giving up 10 hours a week, 17 weeks a year, is a major thing. I’m not even counting the playoffs in those calculations.

So let’s cut to the chase. I’m going to present some techniques that have enabled me to have it all. To be a part of the conversation without sacrificing too too much.

[Beginner] Limit your investment

Starting off here, I’ve often sought to reduce the overall amount of time and mental energy spent on something that supposed to be a fun past time.

Watching all the games of my favorite team is one thing. Watching all the games of every team… now that’s a “sometimes food”, usually only at the start of the season. I can’t do it regularly, even with the techniques outlined later in this article.

I tried fantasy football for a couple years, and it had some fun elements to it, but one of the major drawbacks is the time investment. I would be on a walk, or doing some other mundane activity, and I’d start strategizing about my fantasy team. I don’t like insidiously “always on” hobbies like that. I like hobbies that I can pick up and put down, and fantasy just wasn’t that.

I have a couple of NFL football podcasts I enjoy. One is more comedy-focused, and one is more Xs-and-Os analysis. At one time, I probably had 6 or 7, for which I’d listen to every darn episode. (Playing fantasy made this even worse.) So mostly, I just do the two, now. There are too many other interests that I shouldn’t neglect.

These are more meta-level things, let’s move on to more tactical time-saving techniques:

[Intermediate] Start the game late, with a DVR

When the Lions made the playoffs in 2011, I asked a friend if I could watch it at his apartment. He told me yes, but that he wanted to start watching the game late, intentionally. I wasn’t super familiar with DVRs back then, but agreed to his offer. I think that was probably my first time watching games that way, and it definitely worked.

Obvious though it may be, this should still be stated: commercials are the enemy. I could go on many rants about advertisements on NFL games, but instead I’ll describe them with a single word: repetitive.

Fast forward to early 2018 and, on a whim, I signed up for YouTube TV. The selling point was something called “Cloud DVR” – basically unlimited recordings, and seamless switching from live to delay. This became the main way I’d watch games. Before long, I found myself intentionally making my stream 5 to 30 minutes behind the real broadcast.

Regarding this “delayed on purpose” concept, I have a couple big picture things to say.

Firstly, you'll need to get used to being a little offset from the actual live happenings. The truth of the matter is that there’s already a slight delay when watching a “live” event on television. Putting that “well actually” aside though, this technique can lead to getting spoiled by friends’ text messages, or absent-mindedly refreshing social media.

It’s less than ideal, but what you lose in this spoilage potential is massively outweighed by “you don’t have to watch ads.” No ads. Did I mention no ads?

Secondly, beyond just ads, sometimes I want to skip the in-between-plays stuff. The “skip 15 seconds forward” button on the YouTube TV app can be really good at this specifically for American football. I’ll see a player starting to get tackled, I can tell the play is about to be blown dead, and I’ll just skip forward (usually twice) at this point. They’ll already be lining up for the next play. Yes, this is all very A.D.D., but I’ll remind you that the goal of all this hubbub is saving our precious time.

Injuries and penalties, while sometimes intriguing, usually induce boredom. It’s nice to be able to skip right through those.

This is all leading into the next hack:

[Hard] Wait until 30 minutes after the broadcast, then watch condensed mode

In 2014, I got a free trial of “NFL Game Rewind”, a service which lets you watch entire games after they aired. I liked being able to watch random out-of-market games. Back in those days, you needed DirectV to get every game live, and I definitely wasn’t about to start paying for that.

Roughly around 2016, the service (now named “NFL GamePass”) introduced “condensed mode.” If you click this option, you’ll see an edited broadcast, with only the actual plays, reducing the normal 3.5 hours to 40 minutes. What an idea!

This takes some getting used to, but it’s so much more time efficient, and the increased density means you’re glued to your seat the whole time. I love the feeling of listening to a podcast the day after a game, and the hosts are talking about that same game… which they clearly watched the long way. Whereas for yours truly, I only donated 40 minutes of my life, but I still know every reference. In short, it 100% feels like you “watched” the game.

At first I did this for other, tangential games – not for my primary rooting interests. A few years later, I began experimenting with new ideas. I decided to deliberately not look up the score of a given game until after it concluded, and then watch the condensed broadcast blind. Later, I even did this for the games I cared most about.

Some weeks in 2020, I watched an entire regular season week (all 16 games!) this way. (To be fair, I was located in Singapore back then, where the games start at 2am local time.)

How did all this stuff work? Amazingly. To be completely caught up on everything, and to be able to hold a conversation about every team, but not needing to spend an entire weekend watching television, felt like an insane hack.

The NFL’s service for this keeps changing names, and these days it’s “NFL+”. I think the NFL is aware of people like me, because they’ve added features to help me. For one, they offer a feature to blur the scores of all games. I love that they added that. Truly, hats off. I’m saluting, bowing, and sobbing. A+ feature.

Sans features like that, you have to be very vigilant about not accidentally seeing the score of a game. To this end, I set up a special wallpaper on my phone: a bright yellow image with the text “don’t look at scores or check social media”. I’ve definitely needed to be vigilant with this. It requires discipline.

Wrapping up

Did I really just write 1,500 words on the best way to feel productive while caring about pro football? I suppose I did.

I’m relatively new to the nfl and especially the advanced stats, but with Joe Alt being basically perfect to this point in the season (only allowing 1 sack and 1.5 pressures iirc), the chargers very noticeably having a vastly improved run game, and no mega breakout skill position rookies so far, what would it take for him to secure the award? Is there even a path for a lineman to win the award?

As it stands, Tua has no plans on retiring after his frightening concussion? Should the Dolphins unilaterally decide to not play him or respect his wishes to stay in the game?

Which teams do you believe are fraudulent to start the year?

This article has 3 good ones

https://twsn.net/2024/08/3-teams-on-nfl-fraud-watch-week-0

Does anybody know where I can find a full NFL Broadcast from the last two seasons that includes the commercial breaks as well?

I am working on a project for school and need the commercial breaks included in the full broadcast. I have been looking all over but can only find full broadcast replays without the commercials.

Anybody got suggestions?

https://youtu.be/yneOlFtpVqI?si=NVuhidbaBacygdMH

I’m a person who lives in Australia and wanting to join the NFL. As wondering, is it still possible if i study in Australia and after getting a degree, declare for the NFL draft. Is it possible?

Istead of 2 games a season inter division, every fifth game played is decided the week before based on an algorithm pitting evenly matched teams. You could use win strength based on previous four opponents or any number of metrics.

This would further encourage parity because with three regular season games based on strength mixed through the regular season you couldnt have shitheel teams get lucky when 3 or 4 opponents have become worse on the off season.

Its the same number of games at the same stadiums so its a wash in terms of how rough it would be on the players (you would still account for short weeks when scheduling so no one plays like...a monday night then thursday or something)

When was the last time an NFL team that was losing successfully recovered an onside kick and proceeded to score the game winning points on the same possession? Bonus question, when was the last time it happened in the playoffs?

If Minnesota available what would the return look like? I would think obviously 2-3 first round picks and a player or 2.

Trying to watch Steelers Ravens and the commentators will not shut up. Guess they think it's all about them stfu and let us watch the game

I made a spreadsheet of hypothetical rosters for the upcoming flag football Olympics. Since USA is king, I took it a step further and broke down what it would look like state by state, since that would be a much better showcase of gridiron talent.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XioAXQGEaaNewQIz0wYmwFgHOy7gVOTeGr7ikBBLFa8/edit#gid=0

It took a long time to do and I tried to research as much as I could.
Candidly, I know it can improve.
That's why I'm posting it here. So you all can give some input.

runnit.org/post/beneath-the-helmet-a-review-of-concussion-nfl

I was curious about this question, but haven't been able to find a definitive answer anywhere. I was hoping maybe we could arrive at an answer together, or even without the stats theorize on who it could be.

edit: Current leader is tackle Todd Steussie with 125, tired of searching so if anyone else can find anyone with a career total higher than 125, let me know.

The Browns shouldn't have traded 3 1st round picks, and two fourth-round picks for Watson. Instead, we could have had Baker Mayfield on our team who led us to the playoffs in 2020 for the first time since 2002. He almost led us to the Super Bowl but lost to the Chiefs by only 5 pts. But instead, we have Watson who has sat out for almost half the games we have played so far this season. He has been Sitting on the bench because his arm hurts. But we had Baker play while he was injured and because they thought he was doing so bad we got rid of him for a 2024 conditional draft pick. Also, we could have gotten Mayfield for probably 4 more years for the low price of 36 mil but instead, we got Watson for a 5 Year 230 MILLION DOLLAR CONTRACT. I don't know why the browns have to do this... They have done this every year and they are making everybody mad. So thank you Browns for Watson

Why didn’t Drake London’s touchdown count against the bucs week 7? I thought the ball had to break the plain and it looks like it does?

https://operations.nfl.com/the-rules/nfl-video-rulebook/defenseless-player/

So during the Cle-SF game, sometime in the fourth on Cleveland's last FG drive, one of SF's dbs his a Cleveland receiver while he was in a defenseless posture, per the rule, section A pt 2. This is pretty clear.

Part B of the rule defines what is illegal contact against someone in a defenseless posture. Part 3 describes what was flagged on that particular play:
"illegally launching into a defenseless opponent. It is an illegal launch if a player (i) leaves both feet prior to contact to spring forward and upward into his opponent, and (ii) uses any part of his helmet to initiate forcible contact against any part of his opponent’s body. (This does not apply to contact against a runner, unless the runner is still considered to be a defenseless player, as defined in Article 7.)"

Part B leads me to believe that both qualifiers have to be present for the flag to be called, not one or the other. Yet, on this play and many others I've seen, if one of these happens the flag is thrown anyway. I agree with the interpretation, but I think they need to reword the rule and make it say "OR (ii) uses any part of..." so it is clear it can just one.

Greg Olson was announcing the game and was adamant that it was not a foul. Well I guess, technically he's right, but the rule has never been interpreted that way. Which I hate, because man does he love to shit on the Cowboys.

I don't have much knowledge of a Reddit account and how this works, but Elon has banned me on X. I have been posting this stuff in small group chats with friends, but it was suggested I take my work and knowledge of NFL insight to this platform. So my apologies if I missed some sort of formatting requirement for this thread. I worked for the NFL for 7 years, and I still have remained in contact with people who work within the buildings of each team. Anything I choose to post here is fully sourced from within the league. r/NFL , r/Colts and r/minnesotavikings won't let me post because I am new here.

But, I can say with full confidence that Jonathan Taylor wants to play for the Minnesota Vikings, and I report this as my in-facility source tells me, word for word, "he wants to play for the Vikings, but the Vikings won't offer until they see how their newly formed running back room turns out".
This would explain why the Colts have asked for insane value from both the Dolphins (Waddle, picks) and from the Packers (Dillon, Watson, picks) they are eying the team that Taylor wants to play for and has requested to be traded to in order to leave things on good terms and not cause any future troubles with legality.

The Vikings are also interested, and if their plan to run Mattison like they did Cook does not turn out well, expect a full-package trade deal to send Jonathan Taylor to Minnesota by the trade deadline.

https://www.tnsports.net/post/titans-sign-deandre-hopkins

Link: https://youtu.be/IuhdbUM037k

Link.

Posted this earlier this evening, wanted to get the group's takes ...

https://www.denverpost.com/2023/05/24/brandon-mcmanus-sean-payton-denver-broncos-nfl-salary-cap/

... did Sean Payton pull the plug on Brandon McManus TOO soon? Or is that just Payton being Payton? Curious for Saints fans' thoughts as well. Thanks! -SK

Does anyone know of a resource that tracks the types of defensive schemes by percentage? 40% man? Two high safeties? Various zone schemes? etc.

Thanks for any suggestions.

I was thinking about how Jerry Jones has added incentive to win within the next few years because of his age, and the thought of trading Dak Prescott straight up for Aaron Rodgers popped to mind.

I know there would be lots of wild factors here. They have Arods former coach whom he may or may not like. They are both in the NFC and the Packers have said they only want to trade Aaron to the AFC. But does it not make some sense? Unless the Packers really like Jordan Love, they can find a bridge quarterback for a couple of years and still remain competitive.

Thoughts? Is this completely stupid? Lol