David Carr’s dog, preparing for the Super Bowl. (via)
You can prepare by reading Greg Hanlon on Bill Parcells, the coach who deserves credit from both teams, and the entire football league, for what he has done for the sport. (Quotes from Tuna on his football philosophy beyond the click).
Four years later, many changes for Patriots, Giants
- Of the 106 players who were on the active rosters for the Giants and Patriots in the Super Bowl on Feb. 3, 2008, only 23 are still employed with the same team today.
“With all the work he put in rehabbing, I saw a different David Harris after that,” said his childhood friend and teammate at Michigan. “He came out with an explosiveness I’d never seen from him. We started calling him ‘The Black Hammer’—it was an old ‘70s Blaxploitation vibe I wanted to give him. He wasn’t just tackling people. He was hitting people violently.”
With the Jets, his nickname is more politically correct: “The Hit Man.”
Does anyone feel bad for the N.F.L. owners right now? Capital New York’s co-editor Josh Benson and Sridhar Pappu, a journalist who wrote about the players’ union for the New York Times, discuss:
Josh: I don’t even think the owners are pretending this is about getting by. Theoretically they could always use more money to plow back into the league. Because who couldn’t use more money. But their argument seems to come down to, The players have enough already. We’d like more.
It’s sort of the same argument they use for those personal seat licenses, which some people buy. And for the price of tickets in general.
Speaking as a Jets fan who used to go to lots of home games and has long since been priced out of going, I have a hard time sympathizing with that reasoning.
Am I missing something?
Sridhar: No, you’re not. The reason the N.F.L. Players’ Association has asked for the league to open their books is essentially compel the owners at least to try to explain why they need revenue back from the players. Throughout this whole fight, the owners have never claimed they were losing money or were in dire straits—as is the case with the NBA, which did open its books to the union and which faces a lockout of its own.
This business makes $9 billion annually. Remember, this was not a strike. It was a lockout. The owners wanted more, and they figured they could keep the players away from their livelihood until they got it.
Greg Hanlon, in the locker room and on the field:
Wauffle’s replacement, Robert Nunn, has preached a renewed emphasis on technique and “gap discipline” to a defensive-line unit that strayed from these fundamentals last year. That’s what Rocky Bernard, the Giants spherical and soft-spoken defensive tackle, told me when I approached him for an interview at his locker.
“With Wauffle it was more about ‘getting off, getting off, getting off,’” he said, describing an approach that valued attacking penetration above all else. “With Nunn, we’re not just getting off like a wild man anymore. We still have a gap, but we balanced up our stances a bit so we’re not shooting the gap as much. It’s more just staying in your gap when [blockers] are trying to cut us off, reach us and scoop us and stuff.”
