The FootballGuys.com Has You Covered
Today’s Friday, so we’re taking a break from the usual NFL news grind. Some players are negotiating contracts, some rumors are floating around about trades, and Brett Farve might be announcing his retirement. Plus there’s the combine. There’s actually a lot that goes on during the offseason, but if you want a different voice on all of it, you might do well to check out FootballGuys.com.
Because this is the Super Bowl Blog, we’re big fans of the FootballGuys blog- which is oftentimes more colorful and insightful with their football analysis than we can be here. You should check it out. In a few clicks I found this really interesting article bout the free agent running backs that are on the market right now. As you can see, there are some quality guys out there- although most of them are backups, reserves, second options and the like. However, Marion Barber on the Cowboys is a free agent, although restricted. He will probably stay in Big D, but there could be a lot of movement with these players sometime very soon.
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Strained Faces at the Combine
Do you like to see huge football players and their strained facial expressions or tensed muscles? Well, if you visit the SportsIllustrated.com photo gallery of the NFL combine, you’ll get more red-faced athletes than you can shake a stopwatch at. Some of the Super Bowl Blog’s favorite pictures in the gallery are those which show huge, fat linemen doing things that they would never be asked to do in a game- like jump as far forward as they can from a standing, flat-footed position. But that’s the beauty of the combine. Sometimes it might seem a little silly, and oftentimes it really is.
The point is, if you’ve had your eye on that USC defensive lineman all year long, if you like his initial first moves, his instinct for plugging running lanes, his ability to close in on scrambling quarterbacks, and you’ve seen him do everything you want a lineman to do in a game, are you really going to not draft him because his three cone drill time is slow? Not a chance. It seems that, if anything, the combine serves to weed out fringe players and that’s about it. If you were good in college, your stock probably won’t move that much one way or another with a mediocre combine performance.
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The Best Free Agent QB’s
Right now the news from around the NFL is pretty tame. The combine showed us a bunch of good football players could bench a lot and run a fast 40, but the draft day speculation can get a little much if you’re starting right now. Other than that, there are some players getting dropped, some rumors of trades and deals going on, but if you’re glued into your team, you probably know the whole deal. Perhaps it’s time to discuss some quarterbacks who could become starters on a team next year. That’s right. We’re talking about some free agent QBs. CBS Sports has a feature that goes over the basics on the best free agent play callers available this offseason.
Which of the five men they list would you rather was working for your favorite NFL team? Would you like the 14 years of NFL experience that comes with Todd Collins? Or would you rather have a younger guy, like Quinn Gray. All of the unrestricted free agents that this article mentions have a good amount of NFL experience under their belts, so they would all work well as a backup. Something tells us that that’s exactly what these players will end up doing. But we could be wrong.
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Running Backs in the Draft: McFadden to go No. 1?
If you had the top pick in the NFL Draft, would you go for a quarterback, a receiver, a defensive tackle? Or would you try to land another Adrian Peterson with a running back as your first pick? A good running back can be the cornerstone of your franchise, your whole offensive game plan, the go-to guy when it’s fourth and two. So who are the NFL scouts looking at in this year’s draft class? It looks like Darren McFadden, the running back out of Arkansas, is the clear leader of the bunch, but there are a lot of quality guys right behind him. You can check out a short video at CBS Sports where they go through some of the top candidates for your team’s next ball-carrier.
McFadden had an excellent year at Arkansas, and it’s hard to deny his skill, his ability to find the hole- to explode around the outside of the tackles, especially- based on his stint with the Razorbacks. But if you overlook McFadden’s teammate, Felix Jones, you might lose out on a great running back. He’s also a good guy to pick up if you need somebody to catch punts. Illinois’ Rashard Mendenhall is a guy who did well at the combine. He’s getting a lot of attention right now, but we’ll see where he end up on draft day.
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Matt Ryan: Will He Go Number 1?
As the most visible player on the field, quarterbacks are oftentimes the highlight of the NFL’s Draft. Last year there was the game-within-the-game between LSU quarterback JaMarcus Russell and Notre Dame QB Brady Quinn, when Russell went No. 1 but Brady fell to the late teens, the big story on draft day was Brady’s slippage. This year, there are more than two QB’s expected to go in the first round, but deciding who will go where is a little more tricky than figuring out which college graduate has the best arm of the bunch. Sometimes you need a QB with good legs, or the one who’s most ready to start from day one. Those picks might be very different. As ESPN’s John Clayton can tell you, it’s all about figuring out what the drafting team needs.
There’s a lot of stuff out there about how the combine went for the future NFL QB’s but sometimes all the analysis and all the predictions in the world won’t give you any idea about what the teams are going to do when the draft finally begins. Make sure to keep up to date on all of the latest combine stuff. Then when your teams lands the future of their franchise…
…get some NFL tickets to see a rookie QB in action.
Frivolous Friday at the Super Bowl Blog
As is tradition here at the Super Bowl Blog, we’re going to give you a little deviation from the usual. Now, Friday Fun Day around here has gotten a little predictable. You probably assumed that we were going to throw another article at you from The Onion. While we enjoy their take on sports immensely, that’s been the regular for a long time now. How about something different? Here goes.
Check out pro-football-reference.com for a little frivolity. How about a comprehensive look at the places of birth for every NFL player in history? You can see if thee is any active player from your state (for instance, California: yes; Vermont: no). You can also see where some foreign players have come from. Did you know that Ted Wilson, who played in three games for the Washington Redskins in 1987, was born in the country of Zephyrhills! Country? I always thought Zephyrhills was something about which I should consult my physician before use. Kidding, kidding. It’s Funny Friday, you know.
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All About the NFL Combine
Pete Fiutak of Fox Sports has a concise, no-nonsense article about the NFL Combine. Who is the third best quarterback for NFL teams to consider? What players are using steroids? Which cornerback will work best in the NFL? All will be revealed if you read the article. At Fox there’s also some other live blogging coverage of the Combine, held in Indianapolis this year. You can see what players are flopping, which ones are separating themselves form the pack, and try to get an early edge in predicting where the players will go on draft day.
Right now the combine is going to look like a jumbled mess of 40m times, benching numbers and “three cone drill” averages. It’s also best to remember that the combine, while important, might not be the determining factor in how your NFL team is going to draft in the next few months. Performance on the field during the season can trump the numbers at a combine, where a bad lunch can spoil a very important workout. The players got to the combine because they performed well on the field, and they will move on to the next level because of that same game-time excellence.
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The NFL Combine Is Here!
If you check out SportsIllustrated.com, you’ll find a nice little article about the NFL Combine called “The Idiot’s Guide to the Combine.” You can also check out the sweet new Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, which features the incredible babe Marissa Miller on the cover… but I digress. The NFL Combine is the place where players who want to get picked up by an NFL team go to run the 40 yard dash, get their measurements taken, do a shuttle run and talk about how much they can bench. Sounds like high school gym, except that a bad performance here could cost you to drop from a first-round draft pick to a seventh, and potentially millions of dollars are on the line.
There are certain schools of thought on the combine that lend some credence to the seemingly asinine procedures and rituals they do at the Combine. Sometimes, such as in the case of the 2007 Giants draft picks, their new guys all did well in the combine, and they all turned out to be good enough to help win the Super Bowl. But other times a football player’s worth can’t be measured in a 40 time, where fractions of a second separate a fast receiver from a slow linebacker. It was often said that Jerry Rice never had a very good 40 time, but that when he was on the field, in uniform with a defender on him, he could outrun anybody.
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49ers’ Burning QB Question: Alex Smith or Shaun Hill?
March Madness will take on a new meaning for the 49ers this spring. The San Francisco starting quarterback job is up for grabs starting March 17, the date when the offense is supposed to first meet over the break. The two frontrunners for the position, Alex Smith and Shaun Hill, are both just coming off of season-ending surgeries. They are both young, and had promising futures when they left their respective colleges just a few years ago. As you might already know, Alex Smith was the 49ers starting play-caller when the 2007 season began, but he sustained an elbow injury in the fourth game of the season and never returned to full strength. Hill took over after veteran Trent Dilfer proved ineffective. Hill played well in his starts, but also quickly fell to an injury.
This ought to prove to be an interesting and intense preseason position battle in the 49ers’ training camp. Hill seems to have better mobility, but Smith probably has a better arm- if he gets enough protection to get his passes off. Who would you rather the Niners play on opening day?
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Tuesday Morning Quarterback Reviews Bad Predictions
Football junkies know all about Tuesday Morning Quarterback, the regular feature at ESPN that gives us some great pop culture information, along with some insightful sports commentary. This week author Gregg Easterbrook is going through some of the worst predictions of the past season, including a lot of stuff about the Super Bowl, the Patriots and the Giants. If you have a free hour, or you have an hour where nobody at the office is going to be looking at your computer screen, you should definitely check this out.
Speaking of bad predictions, this article has the Super Bowl Blog thinking. What do you think the worst predictions of the last football season were. Obviously TMQ has its own ideas, and the Super Bowl is a game where it seems like everybody has a prediction. But what were some of the other ones? That the Bears would go back to the Super Bowl easily? That the 49ers would rise to the top of the NFC West. It’s easy to be a critic, right?
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