2023 NFL Regular Season Through Super Bowl LVIII

[BBTV]

5 minutes ago, tBBP said:

1.) I honestly cannot ever remember a time since their inception that the Jacksonville daggone Jaguars have been top billing in a given week. And against the Browns, at that?? What are they expecting, another Bottlegate to break out or something??? What the whole what the what????

 

Probably vs Steelers in '07ish.  Garrard era.  

[DG_ThenNowForever]

Bills at Chiefs will still be a good game; all of Buffalo's games have been interesting. It's just that the stakes are a lot different than expected.

 

Bills by 3, lol.

[oldschoolvikings]

25 minutes ago, tBBP said:

 

 

2.) Excepting the two LA and the two NJ NY teams, that Indy vs Cincinnati game might be the shortest road trip between teams in the league. In fact I'm pretty well confident it is since there's barely about 100 miles between Indy and Cincy. (Well, 112 if you count from downtown to downtown, but still...)

What about Commanders and Ravens?

[BBTV]

1 hour ago, tBBP said:

2.) Excepting the two LA and the two NJ NY teams, that Indy vs Cincinnati game might be the shortest road trip between teams in the league. In fact I'm pretty well confident it is since there's barely about 100 miles between Indy and Cincy. (Well, 112 if you count from downtown to downtown, but still...)

 

Met Life Stadium is 95mi (by car) from Lincoln Financial Field.  PHL-NYC = 90 min train ride (similar bus ride.)

 

Fedex Field is 125mi (by car) from Lincoln Financial Field.  PHL-DC = <2hr train ride.

 

M&T Bank Stadium (Baltimore) is 98 miles (by car) from Lincoln Financial Field.  PHL-BAL = 1:10 train ride.

[Fowler2]

Steelers . That's all. 

[TrueYankee26]

Time for Days of our Steelers to make a return??

[Cujo]

New England playing themselves further away from the #1 pick

 

[dont care]

1 hour ago, Cujo said:

New England playing themselves further away from the #1 pick

 

They were going to trade out of it anyways

[Lights Out]

The Steelers have seemingly had a knack for losing to the worst teams ever since that Raiders game in Cowher's last season where Ben threw two pick-sixes. As bad as the Patriots are, it didn't surprise me that they won last night.

[tBBP]

We'll see if those back-to-back losses lead the Rooneys actually make the move they should have made five or six offseasons ago: cutting ties with Tomlin et. al and completely renewing the tree up there in Pittsburgh...

[BrySmalls]

On 12/6/2023 at 7:53 PM, tBBP said:

 

Granted, I've never had a reason to pay attention to TV charts, but it has been interesting watching these maps in this thread the past couple weeks, just to see how much of the map gets swathed in either red or blue. That said, two things:

 

1.) I honestly cannot ever remember a time since their inception that the Jacksonville daggone Jaguars have been top billing in a given week. And against the Browns, at that?? What are they expecting, another Bottlegate to break out or something??? What the whole what the what????

 

2.) Excepting the two LA and the two NJ NY teams, that Indy vs Cincinnati game might be the shortest road trip between teams in the league. In fact I'm pretty well confident it is since there's barely about 100 miles between Indy and Cincy. (Well, 112 if you count from downtown to downtown, but still...)

 

On 12/6/2023 at 8:20 PM, oldschoolvikings said:

What about Commanders and Ravens?

 

It is 32.8 miles from M&T Bank (Ravens) to Landover Field (Commanders), https://maps.app.goo.gl/NbZqcqd9JdmdZvnP6.

[Sport]

On 11/27/2023 at 8:47 AM, Sport said:

 

Some of you might be tempted to take the Steelers seriously and I am warning you do not fall for it again. Look at their schedule and then look at who they have left. That is a bad football team living off of a Steelersy run of fortunate scheduling.

 

As I was saying. They're not good. I never thought they'd lose home games to both the Cards and Pats, but maybe everything going their way all the time is regressing to the mean?

 

[SFGiants58]

I’m just imagining Tomlin being pressured into resigning, if only so they can keep the “we don’t fire head coaches” charade going.

 

Funny enough, Tomlin is only one part of a much larger set of problems that have plagued the Steelers for years. Like their QB rotation being and a negative organization culture. Watch them go 8-9 though, blame the results on injuries and Matt Canada, and continue as if the core isn’t in decay. 

[Dynasty]

1 hour ago, tBBP said:

We'll see if those back-to-back losses lead the Rooneys actually make the move they should have made five or six offseasons ago: cutting ties with Tomlin et. al and completely renewing the tree up there in Pittsburgh...

 

I know many are beating on the whole "always a winning season" thing with Tomlin, but if that's going to be the standard for the Steelers now, then they really have fallen from their Super Bowl days. In fact, I don't think I see them winning another one with Tomlin ever again. They got everything they could out of his tenure.

 

The Steelers usually don't fire people because their "philosophy" and "culture" have always been unquestioned, but maybe it's at the point where we can say that it's aged to where change is needed.

[Lights Out]

The whole "we don't fire coaches" shtick has always been silly since the Steelers haven't actually needed to fire anyone since Bill Austin. I think most other teams would have also kept Noll and Cowher around for a long time.

 

Conversely, before Noll, when the Steelers were their era's version of the Browns/Lions/Jets, they were cycling through coaches every few years like anyone else. And as Cowher's players retired, Tomlin gradually became another Wayne Fontes who does just enough every season to avoid being fired - another situation that isn't unique to the Steelers by any means.

[Cujo]

Sean McDermott said he wanted the Bills to come together like the 9/11 hijackers. *facepalm*

 

[Kramerica Industries]

On 12/5/2023 at 2:36 PM, DG_ThenNowForever said:

 

Reffing has been bad forever, but I feel like the quality of everything took a nosedive in the COVID years.

 

Our expectations of professionalism are down across the board everywhere, and it doesn't seem to matter that much.

 

(I am now a boomer)

 

Let me put it like this:

 

The head commentator for CBS on officiating matters is Gene Steratore. For NBC, it's Terry McAuley, and for ESPN it's John Parry.

 

All those hires happened before the 2018 or 2019 seasons. Three of the more highly thought of referees in the NFL, and they left in that space of time for television, and that's not including other long-time referees who retired towards the end of the 2010s (a list which includes Ed Hochuli and Walt Anderson). Consider that there are 17 referees (and their crew, of course), it's a pretty exclusive club to be in at a given time, and there was massive turnover during that time.

 

Let me put it another way...

 

Here's your 2017 NFL officiating crews.

 

Here's your 2023 officiating crews.

 

Common names on both lists: Brad Allen, John Hussey, Clete Blakeman, Carl Cheffers, Ron Torbert, Bill Vinovich, Craig Wrolstad

 

I don't know how this compares to more historical standards, I don't have that amount of time or interest to research it, but that's only seven (7) referees from 2017 who are still referees in 2023. In the six seasons since 2017, 58% of referees have left the position.

 

Now, obviously referees aren't the only on-field officials, and often times referees get blamed for flags that they have nothing to do with...the areas of the field referees are chiefly responsible for are anything behind the line of scrimmage and up to it, and maybe a few yards beyond it depending on where the flow of the play goes. Referees rarely have responsibility towards calling pass interference, for example, and I also don't know how the turnover rate of other officials compares during this time period or the impact it's had. In any case, referees do have the responsibility of managing the game and the players, staying on top of the operations, and all that kind of stuff, there's a lot of leadership involved in handling such a capacity, and having 58% turnover in the last six years seems like a lot of turnover to handle.

[The_Admiral]

8 hours ago, Cujo said:

Sean McDermott said he wanted the Bills to come together like the 9/11 hijackers. *facepalm*

 

 

Imagine sitting on this story for four years, keeping it in your back pocket for when McDermott inevitably loses the room, only to drop it weeks after a top story in America was "Zoomers read bin Laden's letter to America, declare him 'low-key based'"

[ruttep]

I'm of the belief that bad officiating is just something that you can't control, and blaming the refs for a loss is pointless. The refs simply suck, they're not trying to specifically screw your team over.

 

That being said, I'm not trying to defend the refs here, but a lot of rules in football are extremely subjective and open to interpretation, and a (possibly bad) argument could be made that every horrible call in a game was by rule the correct call.

 

But in games that are close enough that you can argue a ref call swung the game in a certain direction, there are probably several different plays that you can point to where mistakes were made by the players or coaches that would have led to a different outcome for the game. 

 

TL;DR refs don't favor either team, they simply suck, complaining about them is pointless.

[dont care]

14 hours ago, SFGiants58 said:

I’m just imagining Tomlin being pressured into resigning, if only so they can keep the “we don’t fire head coaches” charade going.

 

Funny enough, Tomlin is only one part of a much larger set of problems that have plagued the Steelers for years. Like their QB rotation being and a negative organization culture. Watch them go 8-9 though, blame the results on injuries and Matt Canada, and continue as if the core isn’t in decay. 

Even if he doesn’t he only has one more year on his deal. All they have to do is not extend him and watch the contract expire. It’s not firing someone technically