NFL Playoffs running thread

Jesus man, it has been 2 days and nothing but Cody Parkey talk. What's the name of the Bears DB who got beat by Golden Tate on the 1 yard line? How many Bears got beat when the Eagles slice through the defense with two minutes to go?

 

But (playing devil's advocate) the Bears only gave up 16 points. Only Indy (and Philly) gave up less. And despite the miscues you mention, the defense still gave its team a chance to win. The kicker had one job at the end of that game was to get that kick up and through to take advantage of what the defense did. The real travesty was the Bears' offense settling for field goals. They kicked four field goals and went 3-4. One of those is a TD and we're not talking kickers. Then again the kicker goes 4-4 and we're talking about a defensive battle.

 

I don't know that it absolves him, but it does put some of the blame on a teammate who didn't keep his guy engaged.

 

Another chink in the ESPN armor.

 

Pretty confident in saying this would have happened with just about any sports team. There are a-holes everywhere.

 

Agreed. I always think of the Steelers fan who drove his car through the stadium gates and into Three Rivers Stadium back in the 1980s. He nearly hit people working in the stadium and knocked over vats of nacho cheese. He later claimed that he did it because he was upset by the lousy play of Steelers' quarterback Mark Malone.

 

Hell, just look what happened at the Ravens game in the upper deck. You had Ravens fans getting into fist fights with each other, and that stuff happens every game, every stadium. After a playoff loss, a lot of fans are drunk and triggered, so threatening a placekicker's life is sadly common.

 

Yeah, in the modern NFL, you hold a team to 15 points, defense did its job.

 

I dunno why, I found the phrasing of this sort of mundane tisk-tisking kinda interesting.

We can't really say he's a guy who is "unlikely to win - or even get close to - a Super Bowl" because the truth is no QB, no matter how good is likely to do that.

And we can't really say someone who is good enough to "win - or even get close to - a Super Bowl" because recent history has a lot of perfectly middling quarterbacks winning or going.

So the circle gets drawn outward and ends up at skillset, which has the vague sense someone like Josh Allen might have that hope, while Jackson does not.

Granted, it also has a kind of dabbling in the football culture wars tone, which might be intentional, might now. It seems reasonable to say, "This guy seems like a bad passer, and it seems unlikely he'll improve on that enough to be a consistent player." Cleaner anyway.

And then there's the idea of "investing even more time and effort," as if a whole boatload of meh QBs won't be taken every season and as if letting him flame out next year is some lost cost. Baltimore will draft 22nd, in a bad QB class. They could reach, they could mortgage the farm and trade up (usually a bad strategy), they could hope they get lucky with a Russell Wilson type. I suppose last year they could have passed on Jakson and taken, I guess Mason Rudolph, Kyle Lauletta or Mike White.

Shoot, if trying to make a bad QB happen is a black mark, Baltimore has been investing time and effort in guys unlikely to make Super Bowls since moving from Cleveland, and somehow has two titles to show for it.

 

Not one person on this board thought Nick Foles could lead a team to a Super Bowl win 13 months ago.

 

They spent five years trying to make Kyle Boller a thing. Lamar Jackson can get more than seven starts before we write him off.

 

Price of playoffs tickets in LA are skyrocketing. Cheapest tickets on StubHub are $370 with fees for upper end zone, which are practically a different ZIP Code at the Coliseum.