Tag: MMQB

The Patriots Are Dropping Like Flies as FIVE Players Have Now Opted Out of the Season Due to COVID

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Today has been a rough day for the New England Patriots and I haven’t even finished my morning Iced Tea from Dunkies. This was bound to happen as the guinea pig that is the MLB showed everyone just how quickly an entire sports league can turn into a disaster with this bastard that is coronavirus. The Marlins have had 17 guys test positive and because of the six degrees of separation other teams like the Phillies and the Yankees had to cancel games as they awaited their own COVID test results.

So if you’re an NFL player watching this quickly unfold, it has to make you think. Is this worth it? If you’re Dont’a Hightower and you’ve already made millions and millions of dollars and won three Super Bowls and you just had a baby, do you want to risk bringing that infection home with you? Even if you’re Clay Travis and you think the risk of getting into a car crash is worse (seriously), do you want to have the anxiety of worrying about that every day for the next several months? It seems like a lot of Patriots players are saying hell no.

Bert Breer was on Toucher and Rich this morning and half jokingly wondered aloud is this the price the Patriots pay for having a team comprised of a bunch of smart, thoughtful veterans. It’s a good question because if you’re a young player or a fringe roster guy you might not have secured the bag yet and you may never get another job that pays nearly as much as the NFL. So thats a risk you are a lot more willing to take than an established/paid veteran in this league. Especially when the average NFL career is like 3.3 years.

The question now is how much are the Patriots in trouble and what if even more players opt out? If you’ve listened to the McCourty brothers at all you have got to be worried about whether they’re going to play or not. Those two are intelligent and vocal guys and they have expressed valid, legitimate concerns with resuming play. Right now the Pats have lost their starting Right Tackle, their best Linebacker, a key special teams and depth RB, plus their fullback and another OL. All of this after the team was already tasked with replacing Tom Brady as well as key veterans like Jamie Collins, Kyle Van Noy, and James Develin.

To be brutally honest I don’t expect most of these leagues to finish the season. There’s just too many people interacting with one another and especially in the MLB with teams flying all around like its no big deal. Now imagine that with rosters triple the size in the NFL. The leagues that went with the bubble are the only real shot we have of seeing a completed season this year, but even the NBA has dudes hitting up the strip club for some drums and flats. I don’t know about you, but a strip club is one of the last places I’d want to be during a freaking pandemic. The NHL may be the only league to get through the year as they have a bunch of historically laid back homebodies in hockey players quarantined up in Canada.

Now I’m not going to panic about the Patriots just yet because I tend to agree with my friend here below, even if it is because I’m wearing rose tinted glasses that Belichick and Brady fused onto my face over the last 20 years.

But that’s assuming we even get to the start of the season. Players weren’t even due to report yet and the Patriots had five guys opt out. Lets watch this Marlins story play out a bit more and see if MLB can get back on track because we’re less than a week into the season and it already has the makings of a doomsday scenario.

However, if MLB can’t stem the outbreak and more importantly assuage any player concerns, it could be the harbinger of bad news for the NFL in 2020.

My Fantasy QB Cam Newton is Dressing Bad, Playing Worse

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Look, sometimes I enjoy dressing like a dickhead too. Maybe throw on some white jeans when I’m in a beach town and have a couple crafties by the water. But Cam Newton cannot continue to dress like Audrey Hepburn if he is going to keep putting up these disastrous fantasy performances.

I honestly don’t know what I did to Ron Rivera to deserve such blatant disrespect for my fantasy team, but he’s about to get himself fired with bullshit play calls like this.

In reality he’s probably still hurt after offseason shoulder surgery and an ankle injury in the preseason because he missed throws that literally I could make on multiple occasions last night.

I give him credit for shouldering the blame, but I don’t know if he actually gets it. It sure as shit doesn’t seem like it with SNL worthy clips like this from his post game presser.

If we’re being honest I knew I was in trouble last week after I saw him strutting to the podium wearing a hat wrapped in barbed wire immediately following a 5 point performance.

Maybe this is all some abstract art project like the time Joaquin Phoenix pretended to lose his mind just because. I remember being legitimately concerned for the guy and it all turned out to be a hoax. Remember even David Letterman almost kicked his ass.

But hey, if I can’t win a fantasy football matchup, at least I can laugh at my own expense. Here are the best of the rest smoking Aunt May Cam Newton’s outfit last night.

Brian Hoyer Seems to Have Singlehandedly Won the Super Bowl for the Patriots

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Yahoo – Patriots backup quarterback Brian Hoyer used one of the projects [Peyton] Manning is currently involved with to help him prepare his teammates on defense for the Super Bowl…He bounced around a bit, but got a chance to be a starter in 2013-14 with the Cleveland Browns. In Cleveland, Hoyer played under offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan — and a young coach named Sean McVay, who was then tight ends coach.

Via Albert Breer of The MMQB, Hoyer (who also played for Shanahan in San Francisco) believed he’d have institutional knowledge of the offense McVay now runs with the Rams because of his time in Shanahan’s system.

So in the days before the Super Bowl he watched Manning’s “Detail” on ESPN+, the episode centered around Rams quarterback Jared Goff, and quickly realized the offense is the same one he worked in.

Hoyer watched film of the Rams, saw an interview in which Goff and McVay discussed McVay being in Goff’s ear right up until the 15-second cutoff during games, and for good measure, he watched the Amazon series “All or Nothing” which focused primarily on the last days of Jeff Fisher’s tenure with the organization but included McVay’s first organized team activities from his first months with the Rams.

The language was the same.

Armed with all of that, Hoyer was able to do a great job impersonating Goff during practice, preparing his teammates for how to play Los Angeles’ young quarterback.

I mean this was bound to happen sooner or later was it not? You have one of the best, most analytical quarterbacks of all-time in Peyton Manning just breaking down game footage for anyone with $4.99 in their pocket to see. Surely someone was going to watch that and use it to their advantage. Especially the Patriots if their opponent in the Rams appeared on said show. Especially if those MORONS didn’t even bother to change anything in the last 5 fucking years.

The key excerpt is just that. Brian Hoyer, from his time playing under Kyle Shanahan, and a young Sean McVay, on two different teams knew the type of system they like to run on offense. Except it wasn’t just the system that was the same.

“The language was the same.”

How is that even possible? For a league that treats the smallest of details like Soviet Bloc state secrets this is laughable. Now a lot of coaches rehash the same ideologies and styles of play over the years (i.e. Andy Reid, Wade Phillips), but to just re-use the same system without even changing a word here or there? Come on Sean, you learn this in every 9th grade homeroom across America when you need to copy off of your buddy’s homework.

 This was why it took two full years for the “A Football Life” documentary on Bill Belichick to come out. Released in 2011, the doc featured behind the scenes footage of the 2009 Patriots season, the one made famous for Bill predicting how easily the Pats would be stopped in the playoffs:

and him commiserating with Tom Brady on the sidelines during a blowout to the Saints

That was legendary, behind the scenes, insightful footage that I never thought would see the light of day. But it literally took two years after the season ended to come out. When half the players featured were no longer even on the team.  Not a couple of weeks after a game in real time so anyone with an ESPN+ subscription can watch behind the scenes Rams footage to go along with Rams game tape as well as a Hall of Fame quarterback breaking it down so even idiots like me can follow along.

Well hats off to Brian Hoyer for doing his goddamn job.

Hoyer had done such a good job preparing his teammates that when the Patriots were practicing in Atlanta, he felt frustrated.

“They had everything covered,” Hoyer said. “I was like, ‘Either these guys know what all our plays are, or they’re gonna ball out in the game.’ You could see it. They were playing so fast, they were so on top of it. And you get to the game, and they go and have the best defensive performance I’ve ever witnessed.”

The rest, as they say, is history.

Now the NFL Doesn’t Know What Edelman Tested Positive For; NFL Scientists Trying to Figure it Out

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SI – “I know what Julian Edelman posted on Instagram in the wake of the suspension news (“I don’t know what happened”) came off as a little weird, but there is an explanation for it. I was told Edelman’s result was triggered by a substance that wasn’t immediately recognizable, and there are scientists analyzing it. And as to the timing, the test did happen during the offseason (a couple months ago), which means it’s not for any kind of stimulant. You might remember the rash of players saying they got popped for Adderall—the rules have changed now so that offseason use of stimulants falls under the substances of abuse policy, rather than the PED policy.”

Late last week Julian Edelman got popped for PEDs, but it wasn’t immediately known what he had actually tested positive for. However, Bert Breer of MMQB reported today that Edelman’s “I don’t know what happened” defense may not be totally unfounded because apparently the NFL doesn’t know what happened either.

“I was told Edelman’s result was triggered by a substance that wasn’t immediately recognizable, and there are scientists analyzing it.”

Ask anyone who has read “Game of Shadows” or “Juiced” or followed really any of the Olympic track scandals over the past 20 years; the steroid scientists are always ahead of the league scientists. Its just a constant game of catch up as the leagues are trying to reverse engineer everything and figure out what to test for. With that being said, when they do pop someone its usually a hybrid substance or a masking agent of another substance that triggers the test. Breer makes it seem like Edelman tested positive for something the NFL has never seen. But if thats the case, then is the substance he took actually banned? Did Edelman even know if it was or wasn’t?

I mean technically, if its not a banned substance then you can’t suspend a guy for it. You would have to at least inform the NFLPA that it will soon be banned and that it will be tested for in the future. Without knowing all the details its hard to say who’s more in the wrong here (neither Edelman nor the NFL are in the right) because if you’re the NFL how can you suspend a guy for something you didn’t know even existed let alone banned? If you’re Edelman WTF are you doing taking something that isn’t 100% approved by the NFL. A lot of players won’t even step foot in a GNC anymore because who the hell knows whats in half of the supplements they sell? If you don’t know, then don’t risk it.

So the real question is what did Edelman test positive for? Adamantium? Vibranium? The symbiote that forms Venom?

Or is it a TB12 cocktail? I’m certainly not going to point the finger because it would be criminally negligent for Alex Guerrero and Tom Brady to be signing off on anything even approaching questionable as part of the TB12 Method. Doing so would essentially submarine a potential billion dollar business in a second.

But thats not to say the media won’t make the connection, allude to the connection, or nearly come to blows arguing over the mere mention of a possible connection.

Either way the Patriots have become a constant source of drama and gossip this offseason, which is the antithesis of what this team has been for the past 18 years. Thats tough to ignore because where there’s smoke there’s usually fire. But until that shoe drops, I fully expect the team to win 12+ games and be chasing another Super Bowl this year. So for all the critics calling for the end of the dynasty, saying every great team run ends the same; It only ends once. Everything before that is just progress.

Jets QB Christian Hackenberg Sent Off the Field for Terrible Practice Performance

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SI – On Monday at Jets’ camp, Christian Hackenberg was having trouble just breaking the huddle correctly. During one rep in seven-on-seven drills, as he approached the line of scrimmage, a coach ordered him to re-huddle. When he broke the huddle again—in the wrong fashion for a second time—he was ordered off the field. No one expects the Jets to contend this season, but at some point, they will have to decide whether Hackenberg is the answer at quarterback, a decision that could affect their 2018 draft plans and their franchise for years to come.

First off, what the FUCK does this even mean? He didn’t exit the huddle correctly? I don’t even understand what that entails. Did he not clap after calling the play? Did he try and line up in the slot like the old Wildcat days? Its such a Jets problem to have too. The guy can’t even get out of the HUDDLE to get ready to attempt to play QB. Forget actually playing QB well. Baby steps guys. J-E-T-S. Just Enough To Suck.