Category: NFL

Bauer & McVay: Why are we the last to know?

~ T.J. Simers ~ 2 Comments

By T.J. Simers

I have no idea what I am writing about, although I would if I was working the story.

That’s an indictment of the LA Times and its inability to tell us the inside story when it is time to read the inside story.

It’s like the recent Trevor Bauer story, the Dodgers going to the Friday deadline to keep or release Bauer and the Times’ baseball writers apparently clueless to tell us what was happening. Inexcusable, making the LA Times useless.

I remember when Plaschke was a Times’ beat reporter covering the Dodgers, and Dylan Hernandez later followed to do the same job. They were superb, two bulldogs who would never have left Times’ readership uninformed. It has a large part to do with why they were promoted to columnists.

To this day Plaschke and Hernandez are called upon to reach key officials with the teams in town because the beat reporters don’t have the contacts to properly report a story. There might be some truth to the fact that people are more responsive to Plaschke and Hernandez because they are opinion makers, but the truth is Plaschke and Hernandez did a better job of cultivating sources while they were beat men.

The decline in quality leadership within the Times’ sports department has allowed this slippage in beat personnel to cheat Times’ readers from reading a first-rate newspaper.

The list of legendary beat men and women working in the Times’ sports section is, well, legendary. Not anymore.

Now we have the Rams’ head coach John McVay holding football fans hostage with his angst, or whatever reason it is that it’s not a foregone conclusion he’s returning.

The reason, of course, is that Times’ beat reporters have failed to do their jobs, one of their prime responsibilities to get to know the people on their beats better than anyone else in the country. They spend hours and hours with the Dodgers and Rams and yet they appear to know just as much as you and I, which is nothing.

How impersonal, and journalism has always been very very personal. I spent hours talking to Chuck Knox at the end of a day in the media room at Rams Park in Anaheim, talking about his kids, my kids and other reporters couldn’t understand why I thought Knox was such a personable guy.

Rams’ executive John Shaw, who orchestrated the team’s move to St. Louis, would speak to me regularly, often in the Rams offices on Pico in Los Angeles. That’s where I met and talked with owner Georgia Frontiere. The other reporters on the Rams beat openly griped about the favoritism Shaw and Frontiere were apparently showing, yet Frontiere was standing on the practice field less than 100 yards from where the media were seating for photo day and not one of them made a move to go out there and talk to her.

Like any profession, sometimes laziness is far too prevalant.

McVay is 36, seems personable from afar, but why aren’t the Times’ writers telling us what is going on with the guy? It’s not like they are trying to get something out of Belichick.

Why is someone talented enough take his team to the Super Bowl twice, at such a young age, already even considering such a career change? That’s something you come to learn or discuss in October, December or the last time there was noise about him going into a TV booth.

Where’s the insight? Whatever the Times is paying these guys it’s too much because you are not getting your money’s worth.

I really liked Knox, and came to know many of the coaches, GMs, players and owners in the same way. It was part of the job, developing trust with the people we covered, so when a story broke we could make a telephone call and have it answered. I still treasure many of those relationships. I came to even like Mike Garrett and Kevin Malone.

How disappointing to know Times’ reporters are waiting around now for press releases to tell them what they should be telling us with great reporting.

Good news: Most morons live in Indy

~ T.J. Simers ~ Leave a comment

By T.J. Simers

I don’t know about you, but I feel so much better knowing 65,576 morons have surfaced in one place.

And it’s a place where I most likely will not be visiting, so there’s very little chance of crossing paths with the morons. I have enough problems knowing some USC fans.

Is life so miserable, so absent of anything to do in Indianapolis that 65,576 people would show up for a Colts game the day after Christmas? Here were all these losers standing and waving little blue flags for an NFL team already eliminated from the playoffs and still trying to compete without the assistance of a quarterback.

They were cheering for a third-string quarterback for a team directed by a clueless coach who will never coach again after the next few weeks. Yeah, they were waving their little blue flags on national TV identifying themselves as the morons who paid money to be there, park there and take out a second mortgage on their homes to buy a beer.

The NFL has always tried to rip off the paying customers, making season ticket holders purchase preseason tickets for games that don’t matter. But now as a Christmas gift to the nation, the NFL should be commended for putting a face to the morons waving their little blue flags.

There must be nothing to do in Indy.

The coach who doesn’t know nothing started Nick Foles at quarterback while putting Matt Ryan in street clothes and making Sam Ehlinger the backup not deemed worthy enough to replace Foles who kept throwing the ball to the other team. You don’t have to take head coaching classes to know Foles has had it.

How bad must Ehlinger be? Heck, hire Hackett; he’s available.

The coach who don’t know nothing has already told Foles he will be starting the next game. How much is the owner of the Colts paying the coach who don’t know nothing to throw the Colts’ remaining games? You don’t play Foles again unless you are trying to lose, or you don’t know nothing.

I still don’t understand why the 65,576 morons, who call Indy home, didn’t boo until they went hoarse. They should have made their disgust known to a national TV audience so that they might secure a hint of redemption with those who think only morons live in Indy.

Were they content to sit there and hope Foles saved their day?

The game should have been played with no one in attendance, and how proud would we be of the citizens in Indy to know they were not going to be duped into cheering for a team with no chance to win.

What does it say about the Chargers that they were only 3 1/2 point favorites over a team that had absolutely no chance to win?

What does it say about me that I know this much about a Chargers-Colts game?

Knocking the sense out of the NFL

~ T.J. Simers ~ Leave a comment

By T.J. Simers

If you are tough, you are admired, and especially in the NFL.

But you can be tough, and stupid as well.

The TV announcers piled it on when Chargers’ quarterback Justin Herbert injured his rib cartilage and hung in there tough two weeks ago. They gushed.

Then he came back to play for the Chargers in the next game knowing he could tough it out. He wouldn’t say if he took a pain-killing injection because tough guys don’t admit such things. The Chargers were so inspired, they got pummeled.

And it looked to me like Chargers’ head coach Brandon Staley was a wimp, unable to tell his quarterback to take a seat. More than that, he continued to play Herbert after the Chargers went down by 28 points and the game could no longer be won.

It’s obvious Herbert is calling the Chargers’ shots, and in a macho game, the macho quarterback is going to stay out there and prove his toughness no matter how stupid he might be.

Head coaches are supposed to make such tough decisions.

Now I wonder about Miami coach Mike McDaniel and quarterback Tua Tagovailoa. Two weeks ago, Tua took a hit, came to his feet and stumbled badly, too dizzy to leave the field on his own.

There was a time when we applauded that, knocking the stuffings out of player, and look at that!

In the days before CTE and head trauma, it wouldn’t have been a surprise to see Tua return to the field after halftime. But we know now via deaths to really cool people like Junior Seau that blows to the head are devastating.

How many times had we cheered for Seau after watching him trying to behead a ball-carrier by leading with his own helmet? The more explosive, the more we cheered.

But now we know better, or supposedly we do. We demand that our athletes who take a big lick be cleared by a doctor before returning to the field. We penalize the guys who deliver the big helmet hits, instant replay determining if it was “targeting,” in college football such a conviction resulting in ejection.

There is no way I expected to see the return of Tua two weeks ago after halftime, taking for granted we are more informed about the head these days.

But I know how much chicanery goes on behind the NFL scenes. I covered the NFL on a daily basis for more than a decade. It used to be steroids driving the game on the hush-hush, and probably still is.

But knowing Seau shot himself in the chest so he could preserve his head for medical study, I have become so much more sensitive to head injuries and the pressure not to play.

Team doctors have always worked as if taking orders from coaches and owners, and of course they are. Someone doesn’t remain a team doctor for any length of time if they aren’t getting the players back on the field at warp speed.

I think Tua set a modern-day record in this age of CTE, and just as importantly, his team won.

I remember doing stories on great players like Al Toon, who got knocked silly so often he had to spend his later years working with horses because people were too much for him. I also learned at the time that a player getting a concussion was going to be more susceptible to getting another.

So, was Miami surprised to find Tua lying on the ground, his fingers twitching as we were told, because he injured his head again? If you have a son, is there any doubt whether he will play football?

The NFL is immensely popular, but head injuries have the potential to sabotage the sport. The NFL took to selling clothes and appealing to mothers several years ago to keep mom’s input as positive as possible when it came to the family decision for a kid playing the sport or not.

But as Tua and the Dolphins showed moms everywhere, winning at all costs is what is really important in the NFL. And as almost anyone in the NFL would tell you, tough times never last, but tough people do.