Happy Monday, friends, as we come off a mostly slow opening weekend of free agency.  Of course, I have some thoughts, and I'd be happy to read your thoughts.  Let's get right to it, without further ado.  Ready.... BEGIN!!!!

1.  First things first, I have a myth to dispel.  The world did not end for the Arizona Cardinals this weekend.  They're probably going to take a step back, but it will be due to the one difference-making loss they have absorbed, in Kurt Warner.  Karlos Dansby is not a difference-making player, and neither are Antrel Rolle, or Anquan Boldin.  They're all pretty good players, who can help a team win, but none is top of the NFL dollars, and I commend the Cardinals' brass for knowing that, and being wise.  Let's break it down.

First, there's Rolle, who was a slower CB, who turned into a faster FS.  I like his ability to cover, and if you scheme him right, he can make some plays.  I like what Bill Davis did with him in Arizona this past season, but I think the scheme was very instrumental in making him look good.  Rolle's signing with the Giants is interesting, because with Perry Fewell running that defense now, I have to wonder what they're going to be doing.  Fewell is a Tampa-2 guy, and if you're going to have Rolle just dropping into a deep half or third most of the time, I don't see how he's worth the money.  For one thing, that's not something he's natural at, and for another, lots of guys can do that.  I liked the play of Kenny Phillips before he got hurt in 2009, so I wonder what this signing says about his health.

With Dansby, I see a guy who makes a lot of tackles downfield.  He runs well, and he's a good tackler, with good coverage skills.  You can find those guys in the second round of the Draft, though, which you know, because that's where you got Dansby.  A player like that, you make it a priority to draft one, and you have the guy cheap for awhile, before he walks, and you hopefully get a good compensatory pick for him a year later.  Dansby helps the Dolphins get a little faster at LB, but I don't like the huge cash outlay for a guy who isn't sacking the QB.  I think it's something a sucker team does, and I'm surprised at Bill Parcells' regime doing it.

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Happy Tuesday, friends, and welcome to The Mothership.  I hope you're having a nice week so far.  It's an interesting week this week, as free agent tenders are finalized, and the weirdest player acquisition season in recent memory commences.  It seems to me that movement of free agents is going to be very limited, in both the unrestricted and restricted markets.  We'll explore this, and other things, like we do every week.  Ready..... BEGIN!!!!!

1.  There are a few big names available in unrestricted free agency, and as you'd expect, I have some thoughts on some of them:

a.    Julius Peppers  DE  Carolina Panthers

Happy Monday, friends.  I am back from a fairly non-vacation-like vacation, and ready to get back in the saddle with The Mothership.  I met my 3 month old niece for the first time ever this past week, and it turns out that kids take a lot of energy.  My brother and his wife were working hard to take care of her, and I tried to help to the extent that that's possible.  I even changed my first diaper ever, which, for an avowed me-unit, is really something.  (I recently invented the term me-unit, and submitted it to Urban Dictionary.  I am very proud of this.)

Anyway, with trying to help with the little one, and being called constantly by my co-workers about matters small and large, I didn't end up having a tremendous amount of time to work on the site, as I had planned to.  This week is my month-end close at work, and I'll certainly be busy with that.  Tonight though, (meaning Sunday night, when I am writing) I'm going to let some stuff go, and give you a vintage column.  Ready..... BEGIN!!!!

1.  I recently decided to re-activate my Sirius radio subscription, which I had cancelled about 2 1/2 years ago.  I always liked it, but I was getting separated from my ex-wife at that time, and it was an obvious cut from my monthly expenses, as I downshifted from dual-income living to single-income.  With this site, I can claim it as a business expense, because I almost exclusively use it to listen to Sirius NFL radio.  

I was listening on Sunday, when they like to have reporters on.  Alex Marvez, and... whoever were on, and they were talking about the shocking rumor that the Rams might want to trade out of the top pick in the Draft, and the Bucs might want to trade in.  I don't find this to be shocking at all.  The top of the Draft value this year is at DT, and the Rams have spent two very high picks on their defensive line in recent years.  Adam Carriker was thought to be a can't miss guy, and he's mostly missed.  Chris Long struggled for a year and a half, before playing much better down the stretch in 2009.  I think you can still have hope for Carriker, and you can feel pretty good that Long is ready to be more consistent, and become an above-average player.

Tampa wants one of the two DTs, and you can't blame them.  I am not going to say that it's definitely Ndamukong Suh or Gerald McCoy, because their defensive scheme (assuming they stay with a modified Tampa-2) needs players like both of them, and the Bucs have neither.  Suh is a clogger/occupier type, like an Albert Haynesworth.  Like Haynesworth, he's good enough to get pressure, but his primary function is to stuff the middle in the running game.  McCoy is a 3-technique penetrating type, like a John Randle or Warren Sapp.  

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Happy Monday, friends.  I'm writing from vacation, in lovely southern California.  It's been a quiet week for the site, because at my company, the price of going on vacation is doing two weeks worth of work in the week before you leave.  I remember a conversation I had with our VP of Operations, and I was expressing some concern that our revenue was going to tank during the last month of our fiscal year, because people would be taking vacation, so they didn't lose it.  Since our business sells billable hours, more vacation time seemed to me to correlate with lower billable hours.

The VP kind of laughed, and asked me what I do when I go on vacation.  Did my work just go unfinished for a week?  No, not me.  I'm a high initiative guy, you know?  I work hard before and after the vacation.  The VP gave me an important lesson in business that day, and that was that throughput expectations remained constant, even when there was a lot of vacation expected.  The workers could go on vacation, but the work needed to get done anyway.  In other words, vacation is a nice theoretical concept for employees to feel good about, but at the end of the day, we're doing jobs which take 52 weeks per year of work to effectively do.

That kind of reminded me of the NFL offseason.  It seems like not much is going on, but really, it's the best time of year to get better.  Players who want to improve are working hard on their skills and conditioning.  Coaches are working on their schemes, and scouts are figuring out which players can best help their teams.  

Welcome to the best part of the NFL year, friends.  I plan to work hard to improve this site, and really grow the readership.  And this week, while I am on "vacation" the work really starts in earnest.  I hope, if you enjoy the site, that you'll tell your friends to check us out.  For now, it's on to business.  Ready..... BEGIN!!!!

1.  They're still partying in New Orleans, and they should be.  After a week to reflect on the accomplishment of the Saints, I'm even more impressed.  If you remember back to 2005, (the end of the Jim Haslett/Aaron Brooks era), the team was as much of a disaster area as the New Orleans area was.  

Haslett, a good coordinator, never seemed to find the right approach as a head coach.  Brooks had a million dollar arm and a ten cent head.  The roster was talent-poor, and the psyche of the fan base was damaged.  No discernible program was in place, and remember, this was a team which had never known real sustained success in its history.

When Sean Payton came in in 2006, he established a program which ultimately led to the victory in Super Bowl XLIV.  They got lucky in landing Drew Brees, who wanted to go to Miami.  Their choice of Reggie Bush with the second pick in 2006 hasn't turned out to be a great value, in terms of statistical production for the money, but he opens up their offense in a lot of important ways.

The Saints have done a great job in identifying their type of players, finding them, and coaching them up.  If you think of guys like Jahri Evans, Carl Nicks, Marques Colston, Lance Moore, and Roman Harper, none of them was chosen with a premium draft pick.  Players like Scott Fujita, Scott Shanle, Jonathan Vilma, and Bobby McCray came through trades or free agency.

The success of the Saints should give all fans hope that a new program can deliver a championship, especially if you give it time to be effective.  As a Broncos fan, I know a lot of our fan base has tended toward taking every speed bump as a sign that the program is wrong.  I credit the Saints owner and fan base for having the patience to let a good plan work.

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Happy Monday, friends, and congratulations to the New Orleans Saints on their impressive victory in Super Bowl XLIV.  It was a total team effort, and I'll have a lot of observations to share to that effect.  I had planned for this to be short-ish, but the party I was planning to attend got canceled, due to a sick kid.  I had another invitation, by a friend who lives in the trendy Warehouse District in downtown Cleveland, but I decided to just make some shrimp jambalaya (which was awesome), watch the game from home, take good notes, and write a robust edition of The Mothership.  Let's get this thing underway, then.  Ready..... BEGIN!!!!

1.  Drew Brees won the MVP award for the Super Bowl, and he played a great game, and deserved it.  The real star, though, was Head Coach Sean Payton.  The Saints got behind in this game pretty quickly, 10-0, and the team's poise improved a great deal after a shaky start.  That's not what usually happens when you go down 10-0 to the Colts; most teams get that "here we go" feeling, and the rout is on.  The Saints got their act together, and played the way they can play.

A key moment in the game was when Payton elected to go for it on 4th and goal from about 1.5 yards away.  There were just under 2 minutes to go, and both teams had all three timeouts.  I loved the call, and judging from my Twitter feed, I was about the only one.  Of course, I understand clock and situation management very well, and most people don't.  It was the right call, without question, and I am going to explain why.

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It's been a hell of a week, friends.  I mentioned that my company was being acquired by another Fortune 500 company, and the deal went final yesterday.  I worked about 60 hours this week, and as of this morning, my boss was still calling me about minutiae.  I had very little time to write about football, or do much of anything this week, so I apologize for my silence for the last few days.

Today, I want to briefly talk about the Hall of Fame.  I started a longer post about football economics, that I am about halfway done with, and which posted accidentally for a little while a couple days ago, but that will be out in the middle of this coming week.  I have analyzed the Colts and Saints to death the last couple weeks, and I don't particularly want to duplicate those efforts.  Here, we'll be quick and to the point, so y'all can get back to your weekend activities.

This HOF class is kind of interesting.  I think three really borderline guys got in, and some obvious ones didn't.  Jerry Rice, Emmitt Smith, and Dick LeBeau were locks.  Beyond that, it was anybody's guess who was going to make it.  You may know that it's a deeply held belief of mine that reporters shouldn't be voting for anything important.  I believe that as deeply as many people believe in their religions.  

Reporters find stuff out by asking other people questions, and then they report on what people who know stuff tell them.  That doesn't qualify you to do the evaluation needed for something like electing Hall of Famers.  On top of that, I think the sort of work that reporters do leads to personal relationships, grudges, slights, and other things which make objectivity impossible.  

There are great players who aren't in the Hall of Fame because they didn't curry favor with the reporters who do the voting.  Sterling Sharpe is the second best WR I've seen play, and he was not far behind Jerry Rice at all.  He was a great, great player.  Michael Irvin wasn't as good as him, and neither were Cris Carter or Andre Reed.  None of the players playing today are as good as he was, either.  He absolutely dominated football games, with his precision, strength, physicality, intelligence, and hands.

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Happy Monday, friends, and welcome to the Mothership.  It's been quite a month of January, and the site is now in its fourth week of operations.  Thanks for your continued readership, and for being down since Day 1.  Today, we'll talk about some Bowls.  One important one (Senior Bowl), and one unimportant one (Pro Bowl).  And who knows?  We may dabble in some other stuff too.  That's how we do, right?  Ready..... BEGIN!!!

1.  Senior Bowl week was interesting.  I appreciated NFL Network's decision to televise some of the practice sessions, even if I think they showed too much of Mike Mayock talking, and not enough of what the players were doing.  When it gets down to it, it's still more information than fans have had in the past.  I watched all the televised practice sessions, and the game itself, and as you'd expect, I have some thoughts.

a.  I will start with the QBs, because they got the most attention during the week.  None of them looked very good to me in the game.  I thought that Zac Robinson looked the best, but he struggles to drive the ball down the field with velocity, and I doubt he'll ever be more than a backup.  I was particularly disappointed with Sean Canfield, who I liked in his college games, but who looked like he'll never have enough arm for the NFL.

Jarrett Brown showed a good arm, but he is a project, because he only played one season, and that was in a run-heavy, shotgun-spread offense at West Virginia.  I saw some people loving on Dan Lefevour on Twitter Saturday, and when I watched the game Sunday on DVR, I wondered what they were looking at.  I didn't think he looked particularly good throwing the ball.  Tony Pike looked like a borderline player, with a below average arm, and only average accuracy.  He did move well, though.

Tim Tebow looked pretty much like I expected him to.  If you watched some of the practices, he improved as the week went on.  The fact is, most of the things he was doing were new to him.  He did short-arm a couple throws during the game, but I thought that those were footwork related, and not indicative of a lack of arm strength.  When he gets his feet right, he can drive the ball.  It's just that the footwork that the plays he is running called for is different than what he's used to.  He's definitely not going to be ready to start on Day 1 in the NFL, but with good NFL coaching, he'll be fine eventually. Cut To The Chase »

Happy Wednesday friends.  As I write this on Tuesday night, I am feeling a bit better, and expecting to be back in my office tomorrow.  Once again, I worked from home today, and started to feel better as the day went on.  I haven't sneezed in awhile, and even went to a Chamber of Commerce networking event for a little while earlier (which is hilarious, if you're familiar with my political leanings.)  

Anyway, I promised some content for today, and content you shall have.  First, I'll start with some thoughts and observations from the two games from Sunday.

1.  New York Jets at Indianapolis Colts 

a.  I lauded the Austin Collie pick when it happened last April, and he's made me (and Bill Polian) look smart.  He's very reliable, and I was almost shocked when he dropped the first pass thrown to him Sunday.  I think Collie's combination of fluidness and precision in his routes are already near the top of the NFL for slot receivers.  I think he's a more sturdily built, quicker version of Brandon Stokley, and I expect him to have an excellent and long career.

b.  Speaking of previously unheralded Colts WRs, how about Pierre Garcon?  He was fantastic Sunday, but I have to clear up an uncommon misconception about him.  Well, it's more like a misconception about his college.  Mount Union College is a perennial Division III powerhouse, and is located in Alliance, Ohio.  Alliance is about 20 miles east of Canton, and is notable for being the site of the historic wedding after-party where I picked up my first woman out of a bar, 2 weeks after getting legally divorced.  (She's a co-worker of the groom, and we ended up dating for a few months last summer; she's the one who broke up with me during halftime of the Hall of Fame game last August, freeing me up to write a lot of words for MHR.)

Anyway, Rich Eisen was saying on TV that Mount Union is in New Jersey, near the Jets facility.  Not so much, Rich.

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Happy Monday, friends, and welcome to The Mothership.  We've got a couple more teams going fishing, and we'll explore their situations.  We'll also devote some early thought to the Super Bowl matchup.  Finally, since the Senior Bowl is this week, we'll get into that a little bit, and possibly also consider the less important Pro Bowl.  The NFC Championship game isn't over yet, as I start writing this, but I want to get a couple thousand words written before midnight.  Ready..... BEGIN!!!

1.  Both championship games were very interesting on Sunday, after the first two weekends had a lot of blowouts, and a few uninteresting close games.  I would venture to say that the only entertaining game in the first two weeks was Arizona vs. Green Bay.  It was a good Football Sunday, and we'll start by thinking about the losers.

a.  New York Jets - First of all, let me reiterate that anybody who made it to their conference championship game had a good season.  That said, this was not the year New York planned to be in Super Bowl contention, so I think they were already playing with house money on Sunday.  They wanted to win, and I know they believed that they could, but they're still developing into what they ultimately want to become.

First things first, since the MSM will always focus on the QB position first.  Mark Sanchez generally has a ways to go as a decision maker, but he showed a lot of poise during the recent run, and it has to make Jets fans very excited for the future.  He had a good day on Sunday, and the two TD passes he threw each showed a quality that the elite QBs possess.  He showed outstanding touch on the deep ball on the first, and impressive toughness and accuracy under pressure on the second.  My concerns about his ability to play in bad weather aside, it's pretty clear that the Jets have their guy of the future.

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