Quotulatiousness

December 8, 2014

Vikings beat Jets 30-24 in overtime

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:05

Not surprisingly, the Winnipeg CTV station chose not to show the Vikings-Jets matchup on Sunday, as neither team has realistic playoff hopes (the Vikings are still mathematically alive, but even if they won out, they’d still need an unlikely amount of help to earn a wildcard … they can’t win the NFC North this year). The Jets don’t have anything left to play for, aside from a better draft selection in 2015, but that didn’t mean they planned on laying down to the Vikings.

Fresh of his accolade of Rookie of the Week for last week’s game, Teddy Bridgewater showed that it wasn’t a fluke. Behind an offensive line that seems to get thinner by the minute — only two starters from the season opener are still healthy, and one of them is slumping terribly this year — Teddy played an excellent game, posting another stellar passing rating of 117.7 (which should get him consideration for rookie of the week honours again). Oddly, this was the third time Bridgewater has played against Geno Smith: they’d played against one another in high school and at university (Teddy won both of the earlier games).

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October 18, 2014

Percy Harvin traded … again

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:18

Former Minnesota Vikings wide receiver Percy Harvin was apparently unhappy in his new home of Seattle, so Seattle traded him to the New York Jets, along with his pricey contract. This isn’t the first time Harvin’s been unhappy enough to force his team to trade him: that’s the blueprint of how he left the Vikings. Harvin is a very talented receiver — when healthy — but he seems to be unable to get along with authority figures like head coaches. Even head coaches who are widely known to be easy to get along with, like Leslie Frazier and Pete Carroll. Harvin reportedly threw a weight at one of the assistant coaches early in his career with the Vikings, and gave Golden Tate a black eye during Superbowl week with Seattle. One wonders what he’ll manage to do to destroy the chemistry (such as it is) with his latest team.

At the Daily Norseman, Ted Glover reviews the [head]case:

To say this came as a surprise is an understatement, and it makes me wonder that if Harvin can’t play for two of the most player friendly coaches in the NFL in Leslie Frazier and Pete Carroll … how will he be able to fit in with Rex Ryan? And if Harvin wasn’t happy in Seattle, where he won a Super Bowl and has one of the best young quarterbacks in the NFL throwing to him…how in the blue hell (as Fearless Leader would say) will he get along with Geno Smith and the talent wasteland that is the New York Jets offense? Yeah, Geno is an upgrade over Christian Ponder from his Minnesota days … but the Jets have literally nothing else in terms of offensive weapons, and a pretty bad offensive line.

And Geno’s not all that much better than Ponder, so yeah. I just see this as another train wreck already in the making, but who knows, stranger things have happened.

So with Harvin now on the Jets, let’s take on final look back on the trade that got this all started. In March of 2013, the Vikings sent the disgruntled but ridiculously talented Harvin to Seattle. In return the Vikings received Seattle’s first and seventh round pick in the 2013 draft, and their third round pick in the 2014 draft.

Arif Hasan at Vikings Territory:

The Seahawks evidently wanted to make this trade for a while. One interesting thing about the trade: Seattle will eat a significant amount of cap space from a trade, perhaps up to $9.6 million in accelerated cap (the combined cost of the future impact of the prorated salary bonus he received).

In all honesty, I can’t really say with confidence what the biggest reason for the Harvin trade was, though I have to imagine it’s more attitude than talent. Pete Carroll was enamored with Percy Harvin coming out of Virginia back when Carroll was at USC. The talent Percy had that made him a first-round draft pick and an early MVP candidate in 2012 is still all there.

But it’s not inconceivable that it’s for football-only reasons—he took up $13.4 million of cap space on a young team looking to sign new contracts, and was going to take up $12.9M and $12.3M in the following years. While he was taking all that cap space, he grabbed 133 receiving yards and 92 rushing yards for 45 yards from scrimmage a game. There are about 66 players with more, including Jerick McKinnon and Cordarrelle Patterson—both acquisitions made as a result of the trade the Minnesota Vikings made with Percy Harvin (McKinnon with a pick received directly from the trade and Patterson as a replacement).

November 22, 2012

Tim Tebow … future CFL star?

Filed under: Cancon, Football — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:54

Edmonton is crying out for a quality quarterback to take the Eskimos back to glory (or something that might pass for glory in poor light). Colby Cosh explains:

Tim Tebow. Say what you want about the man, and you will, but he is good copy. I got into a Tebow discussion the other day on Twitter after I started wishing aloud that he would come to Edmonton and save our CFL Eskimos from the wretched, dare I say almost Rider-like, state into which they have fallen. I was not really being serious. Well, OK: maybe ten percent serious.

About a year ago our genius general manager Eric Tillman decided to risk all on one turn of pitch-and-toss and trade our longtime quarterback, Ricky Ray, for magic beans from a passing pedlar. This decision was second-, third-, and nth-guessed at the time, and it was, we now know, rabidly opposed by head coach Kavis Reed. Ray does not throw the ball very far, or in an especially conventional way, but he has supreme accuracy statistics and had won two Grey Cups in Edmonton with pretty underwhelming teams. (The once-proud Eskies have not had a 12-win season yet in this century.)

Ray was divisive, though, Lordy, not Tebow divisive. But the trade united the city in agreement that the return was disappointing, and the unfolding of the Esks’ 7-11 season emphasized this in an especially brutal way. Peaceable Canada has never approved of the American practices of tarring and feathering or hastening the unwelcome out of town on a rail, but Tillman came within about a micron of it.

As with any healthy, anatomically intact young football fan, my thoughts sometimes turn to the curiously saintly, annihilatingly gifted Tebow. Last year’s Denver Broncos hero has entered the metaphorical wilderness of the New York Jets roster, where he spells off starting QB Mark Sanchez for a few snaps a game, plays on special teams, and for all I know mops the locker room. He is paid well for this, but it is not doing much for what you would call his human capital. In practices, Sanchez gets the vast majority of the “reps” — i.e., the work of simulating real plays. Tebow’s experience as a “punt protector” has been unhappy. There is already tremendous prejudice against him in the league, because he throws a football in a faintly silly way, and the longer he goes without running an offence as a quarterback, the less likely he is to ever be asked to do it again. Catch-22.

November 18, 2012

The Two Scotts psycho-analyze the New York Jets

Filed under: Football, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:54

Scott Reid and Scott Feschuk try to explain the New York Jets:

New York Jets (plus 3) at St. Louis

Scott Feschuk: The New York Jets have done the impossible: they’ve made me feel sorry for Tim Tebow. Here we have a team that’s 3-6 — a team that over the past two weeks has been blown out by Seattle and Miami… a team that stops the run about as well as Kevin James stops at eating just a couple of your fries… a team that insists on starting a quarterback who plays like a kid dressed up for Halloween as an NFL quarterback — and all week this team devoted its energy to debating whether its backup QB, who hardly ever plays, is or is not “terrible?” Here’s the hard truth: the Jets have tuned out Rex Ryan. They need to make a change. You know who should coach this team? That Jill Kelley lady from the David Petraeus sex scandal.

She seems to be able to make grown men do anything. Within minutes of meeting her, FBI agents are ripping off their shirts and army generals are sending off lewd email messages about their four-star boners. Surely, if anyone could get Mark Sanchez to throw the ball in the general direction of someone — anyone — in green, it’d be her. Pick: St. Louis.

Scott Reid: Pro-tip for you buddy — it’s not all that difficult to get army generals talking about their boners. In fact, military men can be included in a rather exclusive list of male-dominated professions that can be easily coaxed into talking online about their wood. This group includes, but is not necessarily limited to: doctors, lawyers, door-to-door salesmen, pastry chefs, magazine editors, cabinet ministers, air conditioner repairmen, director Kevin Smith, certified management accountants, video game designers (especially video game designers!), piano instructors, hot air balloonists, dairy farmers, astronauts, union leaders, clergymen, tutorial assistants, pipe fitters (no surprise there), air traffic controllers, official team mascots, building inspectors, glass blowers, financial regulators and whatever the hell it is that you call what we two do for a living. The real trick, in fact, is to get us men NOT to talk about our boners. How? Actually that was a ruse. There is no way to get us not to talk about our boners. But the wise among us do know better than to do it via email with chicks who suffer from “f-ing crazy big-eyes syndrome.”

Of course, none of these human failings afflict Tim “Mr. Vanilla” Tebow. You know, maybe a little dirty-talk over the interweb would help Tim straighten out his skinny post (and yes, I’m speaking metaphorically). Pick: St. Louis.

October 12, 2010

Vikings fall short in 2-minute drill

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:39

After either a thrilling defensive struggle or a boring low-scoring affair (take your pick), the Vikings suddenly became dangerous through the air, with two touchdowns to Percy Harvin and one to Randy Moss. The Favre-to-Moss score was historic, as it was Brett Favre’s 500th TD (and he went over the 70,000 yards of total passing milestone on that series — nearly 40 miles through the air).

Minnesota’s defence kept them in the game, limiting the Jets to only field goals through the first half, but spending far too much time on the field — the Vikings managed just barely more than 50 yards of total offense through 30 minutes. The end of the first half must have seemed more like the end of a regular game for the tired defenders.

In addition to the other records, Favre also passed Warren Moon for the top all time in another category: fumbles. He fumbled the ball twice (both times the Jets came up with the ball), including one that he dropped onto Adrian Peterson’s foot for an unplanned punt.

After the second Harvin TD, it was a two-point game (the Vikings having missed a conversion to tie the game). The Vikings finally appeared to be clicking, with the offensive line keeping the pressure off Favre and the receivers managing to get open for passes.

The Jets gave Minnesota a gift in their second-to-last series, stopping the clock twice and going incomplete on third down to give the Vikings nearly two full minutes to close out the game with a score. Favre then re-gifted the opportunity back to New York with an intercepted pass that was run in for the game-sealing score.

The game, however interesting, may have been less important than the latest scandal to excite the media feeding frenzy:

The Vikings shocked the NFL world by orchestrating a trade that brought Randy Moss back to Minnesota. Who would have guessed it would become a secondary story by the end of the week?

The Moss trade became a sidebar to the evolving scandal involving Brett Favre and alleged inappropriate messages and photos sent to former New York Jets employee Jenn Sterger in 2008.

The story, broken by the website Deadspin.com, gained steam throughout the weekend and serves as a juicy subplot to the Vikings’ Monday night game against … you guessed it, the New York Jets.

The “sexting” story actually broke a while back, but for some reason didn’t catch the media’s attention until this week. The NFL is investigating, which may end up with some disciplinary action against Favre if they determine that the story has validity.

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