TrinidadDolfan
1st Team All-Pro
Three Things to mull on NFL Draft Thursday:
Thing 1: If the Miami Dolphins end up drafting Texas A&M quarterback Ryan Tannehill at No. 8 overall tonight, as virtually every mock draft in creation has them doing, you can just imagine all the eye-rolling around the league.
“See,” those rolling eyes will suggest, “the meddling owner got his way.”
Brian Billick of NFL Network was on WQAM this morning and the former Super Bowl-winning coach sounded skeptical it would really go like that for the Dolphins, even with Steve Ross perhaps more heavily involved in the player-personnel process than most of his peers.
“You hear this all the time: ‘The owner wants this guy to sell tickets, has a predisposition toward someone else based on the hype going this way or the other or maybe should take him because he’s a local guy,’ ” Billick told host Joe Rose. “You hear that all the time about the ownership or maybe the marketing people. Those people, they’re not allowed in the draft room. I’ve never been there [when they have been].
“Doesn’t mean they don’t think it. Doesn’t mean they don’t hope it happens. But I’ve never heard of anybody in there pounding, just from a PR perspective or a selling-tickets perspective. I don’t know that that happens. I think it’s overplayed.”
And yet …
“That doesn’t mean that in Miami the owner Stephen Ross doesn’t like Tannehill for whatever reasons he does,” Billick added, “and feels like, ‘Boy, we’ve got to get a quarterback,’ but I don’t know that I buy into the idea the owner is really pounding away to taking a guy because they struck out in some other areas and they need to make a splash. They just need to win games.”
Amen to that.
Thing 2: Did Brandon Marshall kill the Pro Bowl?
Chris Mortensen of ESPN was just on “Mike and Mike” this morning and said his sources were telling him the NFL’s highly flawed all-star game is “on life support” as an event.
There is talk that player contracts would still include Pro Bowl incentives — the union would squawk if those went away — but the game itself probably won’t be played this year and possibly not again any time soon.
That would mean for the first time since the 1949 season, the NFL would go without an all-star event.
Until they figure out a way to make it look like anything more than flag football on the beach, that’s just fine with me.
Thing 3: We finally get a Game 7 tonight at 8:30 in Sunrise, and it should be pretty memorable regardless of the outcome.
Just one other time in franchise history have the Panthers played a seventh game — “Win or go shave,” you might say — winning at Pittsburgh in the 1996 Eastern Conference finals.
And now that seventh-seeded Washington has knocked out the defending Stanley Cup champions from Boston, the Panthers could be looking at home ice for the rest of the Eastern Conference playoffs. All that would require is Ottawa knocking off the Rangers tonight in their Game 7 at Madison Square Garden.
And, of course, the Panthers will have to possibly end the career of Hall of Fame goaltender Martin Brodeur with a Game 7 victory tonight.
Think they can do it? I still do, but it might take another overtime.
http://blogs.sun-sentinel.com/sport...k-on-steve-rossryan-tannehill-connection.html
Thing 1: If the Miami Dolphins end up drafting Texas A&M quarterback Ryan Tannehill at No. 8 overall tonight, as virtually every mock draft in creation has them doing, you can just imagine all the eye-rolling around the league.
“See,” those rolling eyes will suggest, “the meddling owner got his way.”
Brian Billick of NFL Network was on WQAM this morning and the former Super Bowl-winning coach sounded skeptical it would really go like that for the Dolphins, even with Steve Ross perhaps more heavily involved in the player-personnel process than most of his peers.
“You hear this all the time: ‘The owner wants this guy to sell tickets, has a predisposition toward someone else based on the hype going this way or the other or maybe should take him because he’s a local guy,’ ” Billick told host Joe Rose. “You hear that all the time about the ownership or maybe the marketing people. Those people, they’re not allowed in the draft room. I’ve never been there [when they have been].
“Doesn’t mean they don’t think it. Doesn’t mean they don’t hope it happens. But I’ve never heard of anybody in there pounding, just from a PR perspective or a selling-tickets perspective. I don’t know that that happens. I think it’s overplayed.”
And yet …
“That doesn’t mean that in Miami the owner Stephen Ross doesn’t like Tannehill for whatever reasons he does,” Billick added, “and feels like, ‘Boy, we’ve got to get a quarterback,’ but I don’t know that I buy into the idea the owner is really pounding away to taking a guy because they struck out in some other areas and they need to make a splash. They just need to win games.”
Amen to that.
Thing 2: Did Brandon Marshall kill the Pro Bowl?
Chris Mortensen of ESPN was just on “Mike and Mike” this morning and said his sources were telling him the NFL’s highly flawed all-star game is “on life support” as an event.
There is talk that player contracts would still include Pro Bowl incentives — the union would squawk if those went away — but the game itself probably won’t be played this year and possibly not again any time soon.
That would mean for the first time since the 1949 season, the NFL would go without an all-star event.
Until they figure out a way to make it look like anything more than flag football on the beach, that’s just fine with me.
Thing 3: We finally get a Game 7 tonight at 8:30 in Sunrise, and it should be pretty memorable regardless of the outcome.
Just one other time in franchise history have the Panthers played a seventh game — “Win or go shave,” you might say — winning at Pittsburgh in the 1996 Eastern Conference finals.
And now that seventh-seeded Washington has knocked out the defending Stanley Cup champions from Boston, the Panthers could be looking at home ice for the rest of the Eastern Conference playoffs. All that would require is Ottawa knocking off the Rangers tonight in their Game 7 at Madison Square Garden.
And, of course, the Panthers will have to possibly end the career of Hall of Fame goaltender Martin Brodeur with a Game 7 victory tonight.
Think they can do it? I still do, but it might take another overtime.
http://blogs.sun-sentinel.com/sport...k-on-steve-rossryan-tannehill-connection.html