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Looks like the USFL is for Real

May 14, 2012 by

We reported a few months back, on April Fool’s Day to be exact, that there were rumors that the United States Football League was about to resurrect itself as a spring football league and it now appears that the rumors were not a joke and that you can expect to hear more about the league in the coming months according to a piece at NBC Sports.

At the time of the report there was a web site for the league as well as at least one news story that claimed it was true and that they had interviewed the new owner of the league. Now we have seen a second piece that said that the league was for real.

It has now started to fill out a bit of its top management with the reported hiring for ex Oakland Raider great Fred Biletnikoff as an advisor for the league. The league also has James Bailey, a former executive for the Cleveland Browns and then the Baltimore Ravens for 21 years, on the USFL’s board of advisors.

The league intends to model itself after Major League Soccer and that it will have the players and coaches under contract to the league, rather than individual teams and said that it views itself as a minor league source for the NFL.

It has no plans to try and steal away, or even sign, players that are drafted by the NFL and will instead look to fill its ranks with both undrafted players and those that did not make the grade in their first try with NFL teams.

It has said that there have been no talks yet with the NFL but that it expects to have talks within the next 60 days and said that it will keep all of its practices and games open to NFL personnel. It is the process of gaining owners with ties to the areas where t hopes to locate teams and is creating a board of directors.

The USFL plans to be a summer league with initially eight teams. While no schedule has been announced I wonder how well non-drafted college players will be interested in going here instead of waiting for NFL minicamps and trying to catch on there instead. If the NFL gives its official blessing to the USFL’s role as a minor league that might help draw in these players. Also just a footnote, the web site I listed as the league’s in the first article was incorrect and the correct one is listed in this article. Sorry.

Filed Under: NBC Sports, NFL, NFL Draft, USFL Tagged With: ,

Friday Grab Bag: Are Replacement Refs in the NFL’s Future?

May 11, 2012 by

Mashable does a nice job showing how fast eight technologies have penetrated the US market since the telephone was patented in 1876. The speed upon which each succeeding generation of technology grows is interesting as many of them piggybacked on older technology. I mean you cannot have these technologies until electricity reached all of the country.

I was interested to see how relatively slowly the Internet caught on compared to mobile phones, but I guess that is partly due to a number of issues from slow connections early on, lack of a substantial amount of meaningful content ( I mean at one time one of the most popular site on the internet was watching a coffee pot) and emerging rival modem standards that helped confuse non-technical users.

From the charts it looks as if it is possible that the two emerging fields, tablets and smartphones are headed to being the fasted technologies adopted to date. Smartphones make sense since they are an extension of an already known commodity but tablets are a relatively fresh start. The data covers the past five years and the numbers from the next five look to be very interesting.

NFL still not produced evidence on Saints bounty program, NFLPA claim
The NFL Players Association continues to claim that it has not been given “specific, detailed evidence of player involvement in a pay-to-injure program.” Domonique Foxworth, president of the NFLPA has an opinion piece in USA Today in which he stated that punishment demands evidence and the league is not willing to produce it.

He claims rather than produce the evidence the league has used media leaks, pr campaigns and character assignation to manipulate public opinion.

Apple wins one
Apple, on a recent losing streak in the legal department won a case this week when a judge threw out the Proview Electronics Co.’s trademark lawsuit against Apple. The case, which has bogged down Apple in China, has ruled that Proview cannot sue Apple in California.

The case revolves around Apple’s purchase of the iPad trademark from Proview and then Proview claiming it did not sell the rights to the iPad name in China. The two are reportedly looking at a cash settlement but are far apart on the terms.

St. Louis Blues sold
The NHL Board of Governors has approved the sale of the St/ Louis Blues hockey team to Tom Stillman, a beer distributor, for an estimated price of $130 million. Stillman has been a minority owner of the team since 2007, Yahoo! reports.

The team has been for sale for the last two years, ever since the current ownership group, led by Dave Checketts and his Sports Capital Partners Worldwide, started to look around. It had originally been looking for investors to buy out Towerbrook Captal Partners which held 70% of the team but could not find investors.

Google wins a bit more in trial versus Oracle
After a jury ruled that Google did infringe on Oracle’s API copyrights but could not reach a decision on if that action was protected by the ‘fair use’ doctrine that allows copyrighted material to be used Oracle asked the judge to throw out Google’s ‘fair use’ defense.

The judge declined saying he did not think that it would be correct for him to rule in favor of Oracle. Experts now expect at least a partial retrial of the first portion of the case.

Who do Crowdfunders Invest in?
We have started talking a lot about crowdfunding, but mostly in relation to just a very few efforts, and yet that industry is starting to emerge as a huge source of funding for startups, enabling a wide variety of developers to get seed money and more to launch products.

Well if you were interested in a breakdown by category of where the money is going at Kickstarter wonder no more because there is now a great graphical breakdown of the effort. A few interesting facts-50,000 projects have sought funding since it opened its doors in 2009 and film and video is the top pledge earner, with $60 million pledged to date. There is a host of interesting information so head on over and take a look.

Replacement officials in the wins for NFL season?
Fox Sports is reporting that the NFL has started to look at replacement officials for the upcoming season in case it cannot reach a new agreement with the NFL Referees Association- currently the talks are at an impasse.

The league is asking its officiate scouting department to help identify potential replacements with an eye out for recently retired college officials as well as current officials at a variety of levels of the sport including semiprofessional leagues. The NFL used replacement officials in 2001 at the start of the season.

Smart Shoes the next trend in computing?
Computer scientists from e Telekom Innovation Laboratories, the University of Munich, and the University of Toronto have taken a step forward on a research paper on the next generation of wearable computing with the publication of a joint paper entitled “ShoeSense.”

The gist of the paper apparently calls for the development of sensors that would be placed in shoes that have the ability to understand customizable hand and arm gestures that are then relayed as commands to a smartphone. Users would be able to then send messages without appearing to while in meetings, at dinner and other places that it is not always appropriate to do so on the handset.

Nielsen looks at smartphone owners in US
A recent report from Nielsen shows that smartphone ownership continues to rise in the US and is now the preferred handset of more than 50% of Americans, actually 50.4%, up from 47.8% in December 2011.

Android is the dominate operating system with a 48.5% market share then followed by Apple’s iOS with 32%. Research in Motion’s Blackberry platform has 11.6% followed by Windows Mobile, Windows Phone and then others.

Filed Under: ABC, Android, Apple, Fox Sports, Google, Kickstarter, Lawsuit, Mashable, NFL, NHL, Nielsen Ratings, Oracle, Smartphone, Yahoo Tagged With: , , , , ,

Will NFL Concussion Issues Drive Athletes to Other Sports?

May 9, 2012 by

If you are a fan of the NFL, or really just football in general, you cannot have avoided the ongoing debate on concussions-an issue that was recently brought once again to the forefront with the tragic death of former NFL star Junior Seau.

I am in no position to say how this should be handled but I am curious if it will have an impact on the sport by driving multi-tool athletes to head to other sports, particularly baseball but I expect others might see a growing interest as well.

The death of Seau, Dave Duerson and others and the growing understanding of the possibilities of damage that impacts on the brain in the form of long term health issues such as Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, dementia, depression and others might cause players to consider a different sport, at least players that are good at more than one.
I will point out that while a growing body of evidence appears to point to the impact as causing the damage most also say that they have nothing definitive to link the two. Also when the damage offered is a contentious issue as well.

However someone, or more than one, is taking it seriously and that is the more than 1,200 former NFL players that are involved in the over than 50 lawsuits against the NFL over this issue. You can get a breakdown here on all of the cases so far.

That amount of players and the comments they are making about the sport are enough to make anybody pause about their intended career. But there are other draws to play rival sports.Pay and career lengths are also issues that could come to the forefront. According to this story the average pay for a player in MLB is $3.44 million last year and the average career length is 5.6 years.

The NFL claims that the average career is almost the same, at 6 years, although others claim that it is roughly half that at 3.5 years. The average salary is about $1.1 million. Of course there are a ton of qualifiers including bonuses, etc… but the biggest seems to be that in baseball your contract is guaranteed while in football it is not aside from the first years usually.

Crossover players are nothing new, both into baseball from football and vice versus. Reggie Jackson and Dave Winfield are always the first to come to my mind. Winfield was drafted by four teams in three sports coming out of college-The San Diego Padres as a pitcher with the 4th pick, the Atlanta Hawks in the NBA and the Utah Jazz in the ABA as well as the Minnesota Vikings in the NFL, despite the fact that he never played football.

Jackson, having been recruited to play at Alabama, Georgia and Oklahoma in college ended up playing football at Arizona State. Having broken bones in his back in a high school game Jackson new the issues with injuries and quickly ended up with the baseball team. Both are now in MLB’s Hall of Fame.

The current generation of baseball players has lots of athletes that played other sports at a high level, players such as the Twins’ Joe Mauer was a top ranked quarterback in high school, Rockies 2010 first-round draft pick Kyle Parker was also Clemson’s starting quarterback and others include Jeff Francouer and Carl Crawford.

Off course this happens the other way as well- with Tom Brady getting drafted by the Expos, Jack Del Rio drafted by Toronto and Jake Locker drafted by the Angles before all of these players went on the college and pro football.

I am sure there is no real way to see if the concussion issue, along with pay and career length, will make a difference. I enjoy both sports greatly and do not want to see a drop off in talent in either sport, but if the concussion studies do turn out to be accurate I hate to see someone die before their time just for my entertainment. However hopefully technology will come to the rescue.

Filed Under: ABC, Baseball, ESPN, Junior Seau, Lawsuit, Major League Baseball, NFL Tagged With: ,

The NFL Metes out Punishment to Saints Players — This could be a Long Battle

May 2, 2012 by

After a week delay NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has come down on the New Orleans Saints players that were most active in the notorious bounty program installed by defensive coach Gregg Williams by suspending four players for various lengths of time.

Suspended without pay are Jonathan Vilma for the entire 2012 season, Anthony Hargrove (now a Green Bay Packer) was given an eight game suspension, Will Smith was suspended for four games and Scott Fujita, now with the Cleveland Browns, was given three games. Vilma’s was the most sever because he supposedly put his own cash up for anyone that would injure Brett Favre in the 2010 NFC Championship game.

The four players are not taking this sitting down and have already pledged to fight the issue in the courts as well as appealing the ruling. I did a quick look and cannot find anybody that has won an appeal from Goodell, I guess that might be because he has to decide if his original ruling was correct and he goes with his first impression.

The court battle could be a protracted affair and I wonder of a judge will order the league to let the players participate n games while the matter is being disputed? I wonder how Goodell will react to being over ruled by a judge, if that happens?

On top of the lawsuit and the appeal, the NFL Players Association has issued a short release that simply said that the NFL has still not provided it with details or specific evidence of these players involvement in the pay-to-injure program.

There is one other interesting aspect to this mess, and that is the numerous lawsuits against the NFL regarding concussions will take a good look at this program At least one of the has already cited the bounty program, that only leaves about 50 lawsuits and 1,200 plaintiffs to go!

Filed Under: ESPN, Lawsuit, NBC Sports, New Orleans Saints, NFL, ProFootballTalk, The Big Lead, USA Today Tagged With: , ,

The 2012 NFL Draft is in the Books-Did Your Team Win or Lose?

April 30, 2012 by

There is a nice piece in Sports Illustrated by Richard Deitsch that quite clearly shows the difference between ESPN and the NFL Network’s approach to covering last weekend’s NFL draft. It breaks down to one with a relatively minimalist approach (ESPN) and the other went with ‘kitchen sink” approach.

Of course over the course of three days the cast of characters changed a bit and the dynamics of the broadcasts changed with them. I tend to favor a smaller group because I find I learn more and hear more interesting bits of information when there are fewer people vying to be heard.

An interesting side note is that while the two networks had a gentleman’s agreement not to tip picks prior to the announcements, but that did not include Twitter. While the reporters for the respective networks did not tweet all of the picks, they did so on a number of them.

We found that following twitter was much better than following the broadcasts for the most part, not only because the information came fast and furious, but also you could much more easily cut out the noise from announcers filling air time.

There are of course a number of post draft appraisals available for fans to peruse but it is worth listing a few here. Bleacher Report did a nice job, I believe in rating the draft team by team. USA Today had very different impressions on a number of teams compared to the BR ratings so it is interesting to see why they differed and where they agreed.

In the past I have read a few, not from BR, that seemed to give everybody an A or B grade. Sorry, I don’t buy it. Some picks are just strange, and some teams seem like they went too far in breaking from group thinking. Of course it is hard to tell until a few years have gone by, for the most part, but you can make some informed statements based on what is already know about the players, and the teams they are going to.

For a general view of the draft I could point you back to Sports Illustrated and Peter King’s Monday Morning QB column where he talks about how there were a great many stories in the NFL draft. I would have never guessed. As a counterpoint you could always read Kissing Suzy Kolber’s rude interpretation of Peter King’s column instead.

I usually watch the draft switching between the two networks while looking at twitter. A buddy has two TVs going, using his computer to watch his favorite team’s war room and watching twitter feeds on his phone while scratching names off a list he keeps. Wonder what he will do until next year? Well now that the draft is over how long until training camp officially opens?

Filed Under: bleacherreport, ESPN, Kissing Suzy Kolber, NFL, NFL Draft, NFL Network, Peter King, Richard Deitsch, Sports Illustrated Tagged With: , ,

Want to Spout off About the Draft? CBSSports Wants to Hear From You!

April 25, 2012 by

Have you ever watched some talking head spout some nonsense on television, say about the qualities or lack thereof in a football player being drafted? Well CBS Sports is grabbing hold of social media and will allow you to have your say- within reason of course.

CBS Sports has set up an interactive 2012 Draft Day program, rather than fill the airwaves with two days of people explaining why Team A was wrong in selecting Player B because on this expert’s mock draft the player is not even a 3rd rounder, and so on and so forth.

While it does have the usual suspects, NFL insiders, draft experts and college football mavens, it has a number of systems in place to allow you to comment about the events as they unfold. The show will include two sets, one that is dedicated to following social media such as Twitter feeds and Facebook, and highlighting the current hot conversations. The set will also have live interaction with fans and have snap polls to get instant feedback on events.

Manning the social desk will be moderator Lindsay McCormick along with CBSSports.com’s Senior NFL Columnist Pete Prisco along with Senior NFL Blogger Will Brinson.

On the second set will be what viewers have become accustomed to over the years, where we see the draft as it unfolds, hear commentary and analysis from the experts on the picks and listen to prediction on who each team will draft to fill important voids in their lineups.

The more mainstream set will feature Jason Horowitz as master of ceremonies along with CBSSports.com College Football Insider Bruce Feldman and NFL Draft expert Rob Rang, and former St. Louis Rams General Manager Billy Devaney. If you are away from your television during the draft CBS Sports Mobile iPhone users can watch live streaming coverage of CBSSports.com Draft.

This is a great way to use social media to your advantage. The huge growth in the draft just highlights how interested fans are in their teams and the moves that they make. My allowing them to have a say simply makes them even more involved.

Filed Under: CBS Sports, Facebook, Fanatic Fans, NFL, NFL Draft, Social Media, Sports Social Media Tagged With: ,
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