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Bleeding Green Nation (via the Athletic)
NFL salary cap manager says the Eagles “are screwed” and should start over
The Eagles were facing a roster reckoning even if Wentz and the offense had functioned at a high level this season, and even if the salary cap were expected to expand instead of contract. A cap manager from another team struggled to find enough players to release for Philly to comply with the projected $175 million cap for next season.
“Holy shit,” the cap manager said at one point.
“They are screwed in general,” he said a few moments later.
Finally: “This is a bear.”
“I would advocate tearing it all down and starting over
Blogging the Boys (via DallasCowboys.com)
Cowboys news: More blame on the coaching staff in loss to Ravens
The Cowboys have lost six of their last seven games due to a series of repeat errors that boggle the mind. From the silly penalties to untimely turnovers to blown assignments, the Cowboys have played bad football from Week 1 and McCarthy’s inability to solve the team’s biggest problems is disappointing based on his championship pedigree. The one-time Super Bowl winner is ultimately responsible for the Cowboys’ failures as the leader of the team. Considering how the team has looked under McCarthy’s direction, Jerry Jones has to wonder if the veteran coach has the ability to right what appears to be a sinking ship.
McCarthy has to find a way to sell hope to his squad and get them to play with the urgency needed to make a playoff push. The odds are long.... If this is a prideful bunch, we will see them make the corrections to their biggest issues and play their best football down the stretch. I’m not overly optimistic of seeing a drastic change after watching this group for 12 games.
Bleeding Green Nation
State of the Eagles: Doug vs. Howie Cage Match Special
Spoiler: I have Howie winning in four.
Let me start off by saying I like Doug as a guy and as a coach. And while he has clearly been hamstrung by Howie’s undue influence in the organization - I’m speaking to the report that Howie selected all of the coaching candidates for Doug to hire - he’s also not perfect. He could have avoided Howie’s intrusion into the assistant coaching search by picking better candidates to replace Frank Reich and John DeFilippo in the first place, for instance.... However, Doug has largely failed to find any decent coaching hires outside of the initial staff he put together in 2016. Since then, the play designs of Doug’s “brain trust” have had the excitement of tapioca pudding, and his in-game playcalls are either overly “cute” or just plain monotonous.
So much of what can be said about Howie has already been said. For his entire tenure as Eagles’ general manager, he has been a known quantity: a guy who came from outside of the traditional “football world” who was, as one might expect of an outsider, a scattershot evaluator of talent. He is a man who would always leaving you wanting more out of his drafts, but who also made up for that with cunning trades and shrewd free agent signings. He was the master of the “market inefficiency” - adept at exploring avenues for acquiring talent that other GMs were either ignorant of or were too afraid to venture. He also managed the salary cap with such expertise that the Eagles were never gasping for cap space.
For years these talents shone bright enough to blind us from his warts, finally peaking in his masterstroke 2016-2017 offseasons. Inheriting the Chip Kelly disaster that left the team bereft of talent, in 2 short years he assembled a roster so talented and so deep that not even the loss of an MVP quarterback could slow its march to capturing the team’s first Lombardi trophy by beating one of the greatest dynasties in sports history.
But that was then. This is now. Howie’s shining moment has faded faster than a shooting star - a streak in the night not forgotten, but long since past. And what we’re left with is a general manager that doesn’t appear to be doing anything well. We already knew he wasn’t great at drafting - but when is the last time he really hit big on a free agent signing? When was the last time the Eagles “won” a trade? Where are these market inefficiencies he is supposed to be seizing? And don’t even look at the salary cap - now impossibly bloated in a desperate attempt to recapture lightning in a bottle, using tactics most infamously employed by Jerry Jones, which at one time earned him our unending ridicule.
Big Blue View
‘Things I think’ about the first-place New York Giants
A few leftover thoughts before we fully focus on Arizona
When you think of all the unheralded players and in-season acquisitions who have helped the Giants [Logan Ryan, Jabaal Sheard, Niko Lalos, Isaac Yiadom, Austin Mack, Cam Brown, Carter Coughlin, Tae Crowder, Alfred Morris, Devonta Freeman before he got hurt] you have to give the Giants’ front office credit. I don’t know how the Dave Gettleman-Joe Judge dynamic works in terms of who gets more credit or has more pull when it comes to these moves. I just know that whatever the dynamic the evidence in the first year of the Gettleman-Judge pairing is that the relationship works. Whatever you want to criticize Gettleman for in his first two years you can, but the crotchety old GM and the hard-nosed young coach seem to work well together. If Gettleman wants to stay on beyond this season, I don’t know why the Giants would mess with that.
Blogging the Boys
The Dallas Cowboys hit a new low, they have been flexed out of their Week 15 SNF game
This is who the Cowboys are now.
When the NFL announces its schedule there are a few things that are essentially guaranteed about it. One of them is that the Dallas Cowboys will play the maximum amount of games on prime time. These are the Dallas Cowboys that we are talking about. They are America’s Team. Whether they are good, bad, or somewhere in between, the Cowboys are the draw of the National Football League. Or at least they used to be.
Week after week the Cowboys have found new ways to not just lose, but to lose in catastrophic fashion so far in 2020. They have lost many of their stars, but that has happened in seasons before. Typically the weight of The Star carries the group through thick and thin in that capacity, but it appears that those days are a thing of the past.
The NFL announced on Wednesday that they are flexing out of the Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers Week 15 game on Sunday Night Football. They are putting Dallas and San Francisco in the 1 PM ET hour where the less popular teams play and are instead choosing to highlight the Cleveland Browns and New York Giants.
This is a new low for the Cowboys if we are being quite honest.
Big Blue View
Ex-Giant Odell Beckham Jr. says Pat Shurmur “betrayed” him
Two years removed from New York and the star wide receiver continues to harbor ill feelings
The star playmaker took to the “All Things Covered” podcast with Patrick Peterson and Bryant McFadden to express his simmering discontent with the Giants organization, implying that then-head coach Pat Shurmur undermined his final two seasons with the team.
“It just felt like I was coming to the end of a road and I was pushing for something that wasn’t tangible. And that was where it all went haywire,” Beckham said. “We got a new coach in there, and I feel like that’s a situation I can be honest now, because people have come out, like anonymous coaches, when we know who it really was.
“I felt betrayed in a sense that this coach tried to turn me against my brothers and my coaches and was telling the young guys to stay away from me because I’m not a good person or not a good team (player) or role model or this and that.”
Beckham and the Giants did not part on good terms. The three-time Pro Bowler was traded two seasons into a five-year contract worth $90 million. The former LSU Tiger made his mark in New York with jaw-dropping catches and off-the-field controversies.