DAVIE, Fla. (AP) -- For Chad Johnson, a weekend confrontation with his wife has led to repercussions beyond a misdemeanor charge and NFL unemployment.
Chad Johnson’s new reality show is pulled by VH1 (Yahoo! Sports)
13 Aug
2012
2012
Jets CB Cromartie hopes to play 2 ways this season (Yahoo! Sports)
13 Aug
2012
2012
CORTLAND, N.Y. (AP) -- All the begging might finally be paying off for Antonio Cromartie.
Monday Night Matchup: Cowboys, Raiders each looking for more discipline on the field
13 Aug
2012
2012
When the Oakland Raiders and Dallas Cowboys take the field for the first Monday Night Football matchup of the 2012 season, they'll both be trying to move past disappointing 2011 campaigns. Of course, with the Cowboys, any season that doesn't end in a Super Bowl win for owner Jerry Jones is a disappointment -- which means that Jones has been disappointed since the end of the 1995 campaign. There have been close calls, and teams stocked with a lot of talent in the last few seasons, but Dallas' relative lack of postseason success -- one playoff win since 1996 -- grates on a franchise that has won just 14 games in the last two seasons.
For Cowboys nonpareil pass-rusher DeMarcus Ware, the success is based on discipline, and doing more than saying. Ware has always had that modus operandi, but as he recently told ESPN Dallas, the entire Cowboys defense seems to be on the same page more than last season.
"You have Rob Ryan coming in with a new defense, and then having a lockout where the guys really didn't know where they fit in the defense, and then going into the season playing fairly well," Ware said of his defensive coordinator, who ran a unit that finished 16th in Football Outsiders' opponent-adjusted metrics, and 20th against the pass. "We are not saying we were the best defense in the league, but we tried our best to do that. Now we have tape to correct ourselves on, and now we have those OTAs and minicamp and training camp. Guys are flying around. They know what's going on. They are not making any mistakes. There are always technical things you can work on, but that's what you want. You don't want mental busts and mental mistakes."
As for the formerly loquacious Ryan, the Cowboys' second-year defensive coordinator has zipped it up to the media, and he's focusing more on fundamentals. Why is this so?
"You know what? It's act before you speak," Ware said. "Just getting out there and doing what we need to do and just let your actions speak for themselves. That's what we've been doing. We've been quiet. He's been quiet. The defense has been quiet. Right now, we are in our little tunnel now in the dark, and eventually we are going to turn our light on."
The Raiders have been trying to turn the lights on for a decade; they haven't had a winning season since 2002. Defensive tackle Richard Seymour, acquired in a trade from the New England Patriots in 2009, is trying to roll with a talented but inconsistent front seven that has produced middling results of late. In the first full year of the post-Al Davis era, there are new points of focus in a regime led by general manager Reggie McKenzie and head coach Dennis Allen -- the seventh different Raiders head coach in as many years.
"I think they have a clear direction in terms of where we want to go as a team," Seymour told San Francisco station KNBR about the new guys in charge. "I really enjoy defensive guys, so first speaking of McKenzie, he's a defensive guy, he knows football, he came from a great organization in the Packers. And understanding there's a way to do anything, so I like where we're headed with him. And then in terms of Coach Allen, he's a no-nonsense, straightforward, smart football guy that you can expect to put you in the right places and make plays. He wants a smart, tough, physical football team, and that's what we're trying to go out and do at this point right now.
"We have our work cut out for us. There isn't a pill that we can take to get through camp or anything like that. But these guys are pushing us and they're letting us know there's no shortcuts to it. So I understand that, the new regime understands that and we definitely are on the right track, headed to where we want to go."
Oakland's run defense was particularly problematic in 2011; only the Carolina Panthers were worse per FO's metrics. "I just think it's attention to detail," Seymour said.I" think we have the talent. I think everyone knows that. It isn't where we don't have talent to get it done, we definitely have that. I just think it's everybody committing to our common goal and being where you're supposed to be. The only thing I can go out and do is do my job, but everyone has to have that same mentality and I think at this point that's what we're building now. So I'm not gonna predict anything at this point, but I definitely will say our run defense will be a lot better than it was last year."
We'll see what happens for the new-look Cowboys and Raiders when they get it going tonight in Oakland.
(H/T: Sports Radio Interviews)
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Jets, Tebow get to work on wildcat package (Yahoo! Sports)
13 Aug
2012
2012
CORTLAND, N.Y. (AP) -- Shhh! The New York Jets worked on the wildcat.
Tackle Thomas retires as an Eagle (Yahoo! Sports)
13 Aug
2012
2012
BETHLEHEM, Pa. (AP) -- Longtime offensive tackle Tra Thomas will officially retire from the NFL as a member of the Eagles.
Kansas’ Euro-Trip includes team bonding, two losses and a spitting incident
13 Aug
2012
2012
At the conclusion of a week-long tour of Switzerland and France that included his team's first exhibition losses of his tenure, Kansas coach Bill Self clearly saw an opportunity to motivate his players.
"If anything it tells us how hard we need to work because we're not very good right now," Self said. "I'm not sure anybody's any good in early August, but we're certainly not. Our veterans need to really step up. There's no reason we should have lost back-to-back games."
The second of Kansas' two losses, a 79-60 drubbing at the hands of a French pro team, was somewhat expected for Self since he sat veteran starters Jeff Withey, Travis Releford and Elijah Johnson to give his newcomers more playing time. The previous day's one-point loss, however, Self described as "inexcusable."
Despite the back-to-back losses, there were some positives from the trip for a Kansas team hoping to extend its Big 12 title streak to nine despite the departure of Thomas Robinson and Tyshawn Taylor. Here's three other takeaways from the trip:
1. Kansas fans will have to wait until November to get a better idea of what highly touted Ben McLemore can bring to the team. McLemore tweaked his groin during the Jayhawks' final pre-tour practice, sidelining him for the final two games of the trip and limiting him to just 21 unproductive minutes during the first two games. McLemore, who sat out all of last season due to academic eligibility issues, surely would have benefited from playing in some competitive games prior to November. The last full season the 6-5 junior has played was as a junior in high school.
2. Of the young players who did make their Kansas debuts, Andrew White and Perry Ellis were the two most impressive. White, a sweet-shooting small forward, averaged 11.0 points per game and shot 8-for-18 from behind the arc despite logging just 75 minutes in the Jayhawks' four games. And Ellis, a skilled power forward, concluded the trip with his best performance, scoring 16 points and grabbing 12 rebounds in Sunday's one-sided loss. "It was a lot of our first times coming overseas," Ellis told the school's official site. "Just getting together and bonding, it was a good experience for us."
3. Maybe the most memorable episode of the trip occurred during the second quarter of the Jayhawks' first game in Switzerland. Swiss forward David Ramseier went berserk after being assessed a technical foul, spitting in the faces of two officials before being restrained by coaches and teammates. "He went nuts. He went absolutely nuts. I've never seen that," Self told the Lawrence Journal-World. "I saw Bill Romanowski do it in football one time, and I saw Roberto Alomar do it in baseball one time. But this guy went and actually did it twice. He's going after the official and did it twice."
Mathews targets Sept. 10 opener for return (Yahoo! Sports)
13 Aug
2012
2012
SAN DIEGO (AP) -- Running back Ryan Mathews is targeting the Chargers' Sept. 10 season opener against the Oakland Raiders for his return from a broken collarbone suffered in San Diego's first preseason game.
Jets forbid media from tweeting out Wildcat information, forget that everyone already knows it
13 Aug
2012
2012
Apparently, the New York Jets have just been taking their sweet time with the Wildcat, and now, they're really ready to unleash it. So says Manish Mehta of the New York Daily News, who relayed this bit of info from the Jets' PR department before Monday's practice:
Well, good. There shouldn't be a problem with the bunker approach. It isn't as if anyone has free access to specific information about the Wildcat concept, and its three primary plays -- Steeler, Power, and Counter, plus the play-fake pass that could come off a reverse.
Oh, wait ... you say there IS such a thing? My goodness.
David Lee, the man drawing the X's and O's of the Wildcat in that video, used to run it at Arkansas with Felix Jones and Darren McFadden. And it was Lee, not former Miami Dolphins head coach and current Jets offensive coordinator Tony Sparano, who brought the Wildcat to the NFL on a large scale in a Week 3 upset win over the New England Patriots in 2008. Lee, then the Dolphins' quarterbacks coach, gave Sparano the idea. And Lee is the Buffalo Bills' current quarterbacks coach. So, the Jets' secretive approach should pay extreme dividends!
[Also: Chad Johnson gets released from jail, then gets cut by Dolphins]
Or, maybe it's just the Jets who are puzzled by the 'Cat. When they lost 17-13 to the Tim Tebow-led Denver Broncos in Week 11 of the 2011 season, defensive coordinator Mike Pettine now recalls that they were so busy preparing for the Tebow Wildcat they didn't really see, they were unable to adjust to other things. From the Daily News:
It's a question that confounded defensive coordinator Mike Pettine when the Jets faced Tebow in Denver last season. After the Jets shut down the Broncos for 3½ quarters, Tebow beat them with a frenetic 95-yard game-winning drive in the final five minutes. Part of the reason why? Pettine said the Jets had exhausted so many hours preparing for the Wildcat/read-option plays that they didn't have time to practice two-minute situations in the run-up to the game. So when Ryan consulted Pettine before the Jets traded for Tebow in March, the defensive coordinator was all-in. "Absolutely," Pettine told Ryan. "I'd rather face him in practice than a game."
Never mind that, per Football Outsiders' 2011 game-charting, Tebow didn't run a single play classified as a Wildcat. That includes the Jets game, which saw Tebow using far more of the read-option ideas he's been running since he became a red-zone weapon for Urban Meyer's Florida Gators. It's not that Tebow can't run the 'Cat -- he's certainly got the general skill set to do it very well -- but that wasn't what the Jets saw. The winning play was a simple Tebow bailout against the Jets' Cover-0 package. We expect announcers to confuse read-option and Wildcat plays -- they do it all the time.
[ Also: Veteran receiver Plaxico Burress works out for the Patriots]
We also expect more of professional football coaches.
Another goofy aspect of the Jets' sudden 'Cat paranoia is that they've been very open about it before. On Aug. 2, the Associated Press published a report that had the Jets breaking down their Wildcat concepts to an extensive degree.
The Jets had kept their wildcat plans mostly under wraps since acquiring Tebow from Denver in March, but ESPN has been camped out all week showing live shots from practice—including the goal-line plays Thursday. Clearly, New York has a lot more in store for Tebow and it's likely much of that will be revealed during the regular season as the Jets game plan specifically for opponents.
By the way, everyone in the world knows that Tebow will see read-option looks in the red zone. He scored as many rushing touchdowns in college as did Marshall Faulk.
[Also: Rookies who shined in preseason opener must replicate outings]
"I don't know if I've ever seen as much interest," Tebow said with a laugh after the closed practice, when asked if he'd ever seen such secrecy. "I don't know if it's secrecy. We're going out there, running our offense and our plays. It's just part of the offense to us. Like we wouldn't talk about play-action plays. It's just nothing something we [need] to talk about how much we do it."
It's actually standard operating procedure for the media to refrain from revealing any specific play designs in closed practice. Any reporter who's been doing this longer than five minutes understands this. So, the Jets are either shadowboxing with the public, putting out the perception that there's a whole new Wildcat package in the works, or they're just being a bit goofy about the whole thing.
Right now, we're betting on the latter.
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Brandon LaFell has starting gig ‘locked up’ – Brandon LaFell | CAR
13 Aug
2012
2012
Brandon LaFell reportedly has the No. 2 wide receiver job "pretty much locked up."
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