Uh-oh...

Finally, the last word before Super Bowl Sunday, Neil Paine's warning that history and the statistics over 48 previous Big Games suggests that because this game pits two of the best teams ever, it will more than likely be one of the worst game ever.

So, don't say we weren't warned!

The 4th annual NFL Honors were tonight...

...and it was interesting to watch the NFL try to do Hollywood... 

Seth Meyers did a great job...to the Boston native's credit, he spent a good chunk of the monologue skewering BallGhazi, or DeFlateGate, or whatever else we call it...

JJ Watt is apparently either a demi-god or was being softened up not to get the MVP award...although he did become the first unanimous Defensive Player of the Year...

Thomas Davis made me cry just a little bit when he won the Walter Payton Man of the Year award...

Aaron Rodgers had one of the better lines of the night telling Peyton Manning that his quad looked pretty good and he should come back already...Rodgers won the MVP but came up second best to Davis for the Man of the Year...

None of the Patriots or Seahawks were there, or allowed to be there (it seemed). Rob Gronkowski won Comeback of the Year, and his four brothers and mother accepted for him. Two of the brothers took credit for his toughness by beating upon him throughout his childhood...

Odelle Beckham Jr. got lots of credit for The Catch... but Larry Fitzgerald earned the first ever Art Rooney Sportsman of the Year, deservedly so...

Arizona Cardinals' coach Bruce Arians earned his second Coach of the Year honors, and DeMarco Murray of the Cowboys was Offensive Player of the Year.

Finally, to see Jim Kelly get a standing O from the NFL fraternity before introducing the eight member Hall of Fame class of 2015 was touching. Then, the most touched member of an obviously elated crowd of electees was veteran Vikings' lineman Mick Tinglehoff, who was selected by the veterans' committee and was almost overwhelmed by the moment. Also elected were 'contributors' Ron Wolf and Bill Polian, along with five other players: Jerome Bettis, Will Shields, Tim Brown, Charles Haley, and the late great Junior Seau, a recent suicide from concussion trauma, who was represented by his two sons (who are the spitting image of him!). 

Super Bowl prop bets.

These always amuse me. You simply have to be an addict to study them more than for laughs... You can also go to Bill Simmons' pre-Super Bowl article or podcast to see a few other ones that will make you chuckle.

Enough of this flat ball crap - what about the GAME?

We've spent the VAST amount of our blogging time here at FF dealing with and laughing at the "DeFlateGate" controversy - and mind you, while it's hardly the reason the Patriots won against the Colts, I have little doubt that they indeed cheated and need some form of punishment for it - and very little talking about the Super Bowl game itself. 

Which is a true shame, because it's got the potential to be a FANTASTIC and FASCINATING game! On a large scale, it's amazing to consider that if the Seattle Seahawks win, they're the first repeat champion in ten years, beat (perhaps dominated?) Peyton Manning and Tom Brady in consecutive SBs, and lay claim to being one of the great teams and certainly one of the GREAT defenses in NFL history. Conversely, if the New England Patriots win, they've got four titles in the Belechick/Brady era, six appearances in fourteen years, twelve division titles, and lay claim to their Mount Rushmore (or Passmore?) position with Walsh/Montana, Noll/Bradshaw, and Lombardi/Starr. 

On a small scale, the game itself could be an amazing chess match between New England's multiple formation offense and Brady's brains and short gain drives against Seattle's fast moving defense that dares you to do exactly what the Patriots want to do...and between New England's consistent defense and the run-option, read-what-they-give-you offense of Russell Wilson and Marshawn Lynch.

I don't see a blowout either way, although if one team gets rolling nothing's impossible. Neither coach is going to let this get out of hand - we're not talking about Mike McCarthy of the Packers here. Belechick and Carroll are both EXTREMELY hands on coaches, both willing to risk whatever needs to be risked if the situation calls for it - if they have 4th and 1 on the goal line, they're going for the throat; that's what I'm saying! Seattle came back on an overly conservative coach; that's NOT going to happen against NE. New England confused a pair of young teams; that's NOT going to happen against SEA.

Our meaningless predictions: Katy Perry's halftime will be fun and upbeat and forgotten by next week. The National Anthem and America The Beautiful (my personal preference for a replacement for the unsingable Star Spangled Banner!) will go off without a hitch and ignored after the fact, I pray. The commercials will be great except for maybe two, and we'll talk about them for a week, and move on. The ball inflation will be checked within an inch (or a PSI) of its life, and be no factor whatsoever (but every time Brady muffs a pass, it'll come up). The nachos will be gone before kickoff. Goodell will listen to his handlers and make as short an appearance at the trophy presentation as appropriate, and the winning owner will declare his team to be one of the greats of all time.

The meaningful predictions: ESPN's many, many football writers provide their opinions here.  Bill Simmons makes his (predictable) prediction here after an above-average column, even for him, here. His partner in type, Bill Barnwell, does his usual masterful job dealing with the nitty-gritty in this article. Here's the similar mass prediction article from Sports Illustrated. And you can undoubtedly find more wherever you care to look, including within your own family...

As for Following Football's crack prediction? Our record this year has been stellar, outpacing Vegas and every major venue during college bowl season, and while our record against the NFL spread was barely above guesswork, we did get the correct winners over 75% of the time this season with our tiered rankings, and it was curiously accurate in matching the point spread with a minimal amount of calculating involved.

Our tiers have Seattle above the Patriots to start with, and both computer rankings we follow closest (Elo and Sagarin) also rank Seattle first, New England second. Finally, while we wouldn't normally count controversy against a team in this situation (it's usually negated by the "us against the world" emotional factor), remember that Belechick's game planning really is a major portion of their success - he does an amazing job of taking away what he's most concerned about and focusing your attention on a game plan you weren't prepared to take on. Whatever else this distraction (and others) has done to the Patriots, it's minimized the time the coach could game plan for the multi-faceted Seahawks, and that's to Seattle's advantage:

We're taking Seattle by four.

Speaking of Easterbrook, consider this advice:

This is analysis of a UC Berkeley report on WHEN you should kick and when you should go for it on fourth down...more in formation after the article:

Hey, NFL coaches! Want to win one more game this season than you otherwise would? Below I'll tell you how. In fact, I will reveal a simple formula that will increase the odds of victory for most football teams.

And I won't just be whistlin' Dixie. The formula was tested over the offseason in thousands of computer simulations by the sports-analysis firm Accuscore -- the same Accuscore that, during the 2006 NFL season, compiled a better game-predictions record than anyone in the ESPN television, radio and Internet empire. Accuscore and I spent some time over the winter devising and testing various assumptions about football tactics, arriving at one formula that almost always improves the chance of winning. Ideally we'd like to sell the formula to NFL franchises for huge amounts of money, then spend the rest of our lives riding around in limousines. But what the heck, in a moment I'll simply give it away.

First, some history. Year in, year out, Tuesday Morning Quarterback rails against excessive punting. I document "preposterous punts" -- punts on fourth-and-short in opposition territory or on fourth-and-1 when trailing in the second half. My archive of preposterous punts now numbers into the hundreds, and shows teams that punt on short-yardage situations in opposition territory, or when trailing in the second half, almost always go on to lose.

Elaborately, I've argued that if NFL, college or high school teams went for it on most fourth-and-short downs, the additional scoring from sustained drives would more than offset the field position surrendered by occasional failed tries. I've quoted Don Shula as privately telling a powerful insider (me) that not punting would revolutionize football. I've shown that since the average offensive play gains almost five yards, going for it on fourth-and-3 or less mathematically favors the offense: and that this would hold even if nobody ever punted on fourth-and-3 or less.

Last fall, I worked through the probabilistic pluses and minuses of rarely punting, concluding, "Probabilities suggest a team that rarely punts will increase its scoring" but not increase opponents' scoring. Last fall's anti-punt column also highlighted an academic paper by economist David Romer of the University of California at Berkeley, who contends NFL teams should go for it even on most fourth-and-longs. Finally, I've railed against the two reasons coaches order punts on fourth-and-short. First, "because that's what we always do." Second, because if coaches order fourth-down tries that fail, they will be blamed, whereas if coaches order punts, the players will be blamed for the loss.

Because coaches are afraid of being blamed, my anti-punt theory has never received a systematic trial. In my own coaching of middle-school, county-league flag football, I haven't sent the punt unit on the field in two years, and have posted two undefeated seasons. But since punting happens less in flag than in tackle anyway, this might not tell us much. Until such time as some college or pro coach decides to believe what he reads in TMQ, there won't be a real-world confirmation of anti-punt thinking.

So, I asked the computer whiz-kids at Accuscore, whose software simulates entire NFL games, if they could take actual games from the 2006 season and rerun them with everything the same except one team eschewing the punt. We chose three types of games: great games between top teams (for instance, New England at San Diego in last season's playoffs), good games between good teams (for instance, Denver at St. Louis in the regular season) and average games involving average teams (for instance, we tested the home-and-home series between the 49ers and Cardinals). We defined two sets of punt-shunning rules: the hyperaggressive pedal-to-the-metal tactics advocated by Romer and a somewhat more conservative set of anti-punt rules designed by TMQ. We assigned the anti-punt tactics to the home team but not the visitor, then to the visitor but not the home team in the same pairing. Accuscore simulated about 10,000 sets of games, to wash out the effects of chance.

Bottom line: avoiding punts added an average of one point to a team's per-game scoring, without adding any points to its opponents' average scoring. Teams avoiding punting became 5 percent more likely to win -- statistically significant owing to the thousands of tries. Doesn't sound like much? One more point scored per game represents the difference between the Bengals and the Patriots of the 2006 season. Last season, one additional victory would have put the Packers, Panthers or Rams into the playoffs. A 5 percent improvement in victory likelihood translates into one additional victory per 20 games, or just shy of one extra win per NFL season. I think any NFL owner would gladly pay millions of dollars for one additional win per season.

Accuscore tested the hyperaggressive approach advocated by Romer in this paper, and also tested TMQ's somewhat more conservative tactics. The Romer rules, derived from his statistical study of an entire NFL season, are as follows. Go for it on fourth-and-4 or less from anywhere on field, even deep in your own territory; go on fourth-and-7 or less inside the opponent's 45; go on fourth-and-10 or less inside the opponent's 33 (except that inside the opponent's 33, attempt a field goal in the fourth quarter if a field goal causes a tie or gives you the lead). My own rules I'll describe in a moment.

Accuscore found when high-quality teams -- especially last season's Chargers, Colts or Patriots -- employed either Romer's very aggressive anti-punt tactics or my somewhat less aggressive anti-punt rules, their chances of winning improved by about the same amount. That both sets of rules worked for quality teams suggests good teams are more likely to be able to convert first downs -- and thus the better the team, the more that team might profit by rarely punting.

There was one exception: rarely punting slightly reduced the odds of victory for the 2006 Baltimore Ravens, which had a weak offense but the league's best defense. For the mid-quality teams, such as last year's Broncos and Chiefs, and for average teams such as last year's Niners and Titans, Accuscore found the hyperaggressive Romer strategy was volatile: making victory a lot more likely about two-thirds of the time, but decreasing the odds of victory the other one-third of the time. For the same group, TMQ's rules added somewhat to the odds of victory while almost never backfiring.

AP Photo

Stop me before I punt again!

The Conclusion: unless you are the Baltimore Ravens or Baltimore-Ravens-like, use the Tuesday Morning Quarterback Sure-Fire, Never-Fails, All-Weather, Computer-Tested, Victory-Enhancing, Call-Me-in-My-Limo Guidelines. Here they are, and sorry there was no way to simplify:

• Inside your own 20, punt.
• From your 21 to 35, go for it on fourth-and-2 or less.
• From your 36 to midfield, go for it on fourth-and-3 or less.
• From the opposition 49 to opposition 30, go for it on fourth-and-4 or less.
• From the opposition 29 to opposition 3, go for it on fourth-and-3 or less.
• From the opposition 2 or 1, go for it.
• Exception: inside the opponent's 25, attempt a field goal if it's the fourth quarter and a field goal causes a tie or gives you the lead.

A few notes on my sure-fire formula: By only disdaining the punt in situations in which the odds of success are pretty good, my anti-punt strategy takes into account player and crowd psychology. Because fourth-and-short attempts will usually succeed, players will remain upbeat, while the defense will understand that though it occasionally will be sent out with bad field position after a blown try, overall, the team will benefit from rarely punting. Romer's more aggressive strategy creates too much chance of a lustily booing home crowd, or players who think their coach is a fool after, say, a missed fourth-and-3 attempt from your own 10-yard line: and psychology is a big factor in football.

My strategy also values field goals more highly than does Romer's: field goals are nothing to sneeze at, so it makes sense to attempt them on fourth-and-long. Finally, my rules violate my own immutable law of field-goal decisions, namely, Kick Early, Go For It Late. I couldn't think of a way to incorporate Kick Early, Go For It Late into the decision-making tree without causing Accuscore's job to become excessively complex. At any rate, the simulations showed that unless you're in the fourth-quarter exception, statistically you're better off going for the touchdown on fourth-and-goal from the 2 or the 1 -- disproving the Kick Early, Go For It Late law, which can no longer be viewed as immutable. (I've sent the football gods a memo on this.)

By the way, this "revolutionary" study? It's approaching TEN YEARS OLD...

Gregg Easterbrook's take on "PSIcheated", as he calls it.

PSIcheated: Deflategate caught on quickly, but TMQ is weary of "-gate," perhaps because there have been so many. Your columnist will call the scandal PSIcheated.

Newspaper front pages, the lead story of network evening newscasts, 24-7 cable news coverage -- if the Patriots doctored game balls, that's wrong, but why the four-alarm level of coverage?

One reason is simply that football is the king of sports. America is obsessed with this game, down to its minutiae. The NFL has an outsized role in society, and never hesitates to use that outsized role for money and ratings. When the NFL screws up, it's an outsized screwup.

Another reason is that many Americans feel the NFL has gotten too big and deserves to be brought low. This is especially true at the top of the news media, which has never understood football culture, but many who love football feel the same way. The National Football League broadcasts the word "arrogant" on all known frequencies. The public subsidies to billionaire owners, the taxpayer-funded motorcades that treat teams, owners and Roger Goodell like visiting royalty. Millions of Americans are sick of that stuff. And the NFL needs to become aware that there are millions of Americans who are sick of its excesses.

Initially mulling this, I was tempted to say another factor in the reaction is that so many people viscerally dislike Belichick*. But the Saints' bounty scandal and the Ray Rice imbroglio got four-alarm treatment, and neither involved Belichick*.

He doesn't help himself by having a public appearance style that makes Ben Bernanke seem like a stand-up comedian. Belichick's* dad was an assistant coach for Naval Academy football; the son may have grown up thinking football wasn't just an entertaining sport but every bit as important as what the United States Navy does. One of the failings of football culture is taking itself too seriously, as if football games were vital to society. Belichick* radiates this failing.

[+] Enlarge

AP Photo/Rick OsentoskiWho's to blame for PSIcheated? Maybe the Trilateral Commission.

Pete Carroll has a smile on his face, likes a good time, chats up reporters, slaps fans on the back. Carroll is the gregarious host who wants everybody to come to his party. Belichick* is the angry guy who wants neighborhood kids to stop running across his lawn. The New England coach clearly despises the sports reporters whom his contract requires him to speak to, and doesn't show affection for spectators, either. This makes him seem an ingrate -- if it weren't for sports reporters and sports fans, he wouldn't enjoy a phenomenal salary. The negative energy field that Belichick* projects causes many to enjoy seeing him squirm.

But on reflection I don't think the reaction to PSIcheated is about Belichick*. It's about the assumption that people reach positions of power and privilege -- in sports, business, government, school, Wall Street -- by cheating, and most are never caught.

The American economic and cultural systems are far from perfect but are mostly open, surely less rigged than the systems of most nations. Laws are far from perfect, but in the main, American law pushes for fair competition. But if there's a fair, open competition and one person ends up with a powerful, highly remunerative position while another ends up with little or nothing, we may prefer to believe the whole thing was fixed. Seeing a powerful, wealthy person caught cheating reinforces this.

Postscript No. 1: Reader Will Krummel of St. Louis notes, "After the trick plays in the Patriots-Ravens playoff game, Tom Brady lectured the Ravens that they should read the rulebook. Meanwhile, the Patriots were breaking the rules. How arrogant."

Postscript No. 2: Even the National Federation of High Schools mandates football inflation levels. There's just no way on God's green earth the Patriots did not know about this rule.

Postscript No. 3: TMQ regularly reminds -- including in this 2007 column as Spygate started -- that there is no law of nature that says professional football must remain popular. One reason NFL games are so great is the sense that they are ultimate all-out competition. If a sense arises that the games aren't really fair, popularity will decline. Add to this that the growth of legal sports betting. In a sports-betting environment, any indication of shenanigans will be magnified.

Postscript No. 4: Andrew Luck's hand size (pinkie to thumb with fingers spread) is 10 inches, Brady's is 9.4 inches. That's a bigger distinction than it may seem. Belichick* leaves nothing to chance. Going into a rain game for the AFC title, he would have known that all other things being equal, Luck would have a better grip on the ball. He wouldn't have known the Patriots would breeze to victory.

Postscript No. 5: In September 2007, Goodell said, "The consequences are severe if you don't follow the rules and you don't play fairly." Now the NFL says it can't possibly finish an investigation until after the Super Bowl. Can't possibly! This is like when Washington deflects some controversy by appointing a commission that files its report years later.

JJ Watt - the legend grows...

Completely irrelevant to everything, but part of the growing legend of Houston Texans defensive end/tackle/tight end/stud superstar J J Watt... here he is on Jimmy Kimmel, demonstrating his absurd vertical leap.

Drafting in Aussie football is very different than the US...take a look:

Instead of simply going in order, last to first, over the course of several rounds as the four major North American team sports do, Australian Rules Football takes that format and adds two important and sometimes controversial possibilities:

1. If you have trained a youngster in one of your "academies" (think prep school for footy, run by the AFL clubs, especially outside of Melbourne), you get to reserve that young man regardless of where you draft. So, if you have a top prospect who you've trained, and he's considered the second or third best player in the draft...you can reserve him at wherever you draft: 10th, 14th, whatever. Nice deal if you can get it.

2. The other advantage is more colloquial: If there's a young man in the draft who's the son of one of your (former) players, you get to reserve that player in the same way. That's a really cool way to preserve the long traditions of many of the clubs who've been around for a while - there have even been three-generation players on some of the Melbourne clubs!

However, you can understand some of the objections that teams might have if certain teams are getting players too "cheaply", and the AFL is designing a system to evaluate and compensate teams a little more evenly.

(By the way, the site this comes from, AFL.com.au, is an outstanding source of unbiased information on the game. Amazingly, it's a standalone arm of the AFL that has NO TROUBLE at ALL criticizing the hand that feeds it, and it's still got access to everything it needs to provide in-depth coverage of the sport like the NFL does. 

And then there's this...

Fire alarm at Patriots hotel goes off in middle of the night

Posted by Darin Gantt on January 27, 2015, 7:29 AM EST

The Patriots ball boy who took the footballs to the bathroomis going to have to make room in the doghouse.

Because the guy in charge of wake-up calls at the Patriots’ team hotel is going to be in there with him.

Via Jeff Darlington of the NFL Network, the fire alarm at the Patriots hotel went off in the middle of the night, forcing everyone up for about 10 minutes.

The hotel was not on fire, thankfully.

But the Patriots might not be as well-rested today as they’d have otherwise hoped.

Robert Kraft defends his Patriots (as he should).

Robert Kraft is as upstanding a guy as we have in NFL ownership. He went from the bleacher seats to the board room, buying his hometown team because they needed a good owner - and they got a great one.

So, whatever we think about "DeFlateGate" (and my opinions are well documented on this site), it's completely appropriate for Mr. Kraft to come out as he did today and defend his property, defend the team he owns and runs and which sets his own reputation beyond his paper company fortune.

(This article comes via Yahoo! Sports.)

This is an incredibly damning article against the Patriots' flat footballs.

Brian Burke of Advanced Football Analytics has a study of the fumble rates of the New England Patriots that is all but a smoking gun as regards to the history of low pressure footballs since the Brady/Manning rule went into effect in 2007.

Let me quote some of the most relevant passages, but you definitely need to go to the article itself to study the data - it's alarming:

For whatever reason, the Patriots do have exceptional ball security, especially for an outdoors team. And I mean exceptional. 

I was intrigued by a link sent to me via Twitter at Sharp Football Analysis, a handicapping site. The article demonstrated that NE's ball security was an outlier to the tune of several standard deviations. The charts are convincing, and the implication is that NE benefitted from under-inflated balls is unmistakable.

NE ranks third over that period. Very good, but nothing out of the ordinary. You'd expect teams with good QBs and good offenses to have fewer strip-sacks. But the article linked above makes a good point: Many teams that play indoors are concentrated at the top of the list. Let's see how the table looks if we exclude dome teams.

Whoa. In this case NE is at the top of the list, and the next best team is a distant second. Notice how the second team (BLT) through the second to last team (PHI) have rates that are within 1 or 2 plays of each other. NE, however, is better than the next best team by 20 plays per fumble.

I'm not sticking my neck out here and saying this is evidence of anything. It's fair to say that Belichick emphasizes ball security emphatically, and is quick to bench players who drop the ball. Everyone will have their own opinion anyway. I'll just say, either way, it's worth looking at. If it's a result of an unfair advantage, that's interesting. If it's the result of good coaching, that's just as interesting.

Addendum: @brian30tw pointed out that NE's big improvement in fumble rate occurred in '07, precisely when the NFL's rule allowing visiting teams to bring their own balls went into effect. Other teams didn't have such good fortune.

To summarize: Before the rule change (championed by Tom Brady) that allowed each team (read: quarterback) to adjust the inflation of the football to their whim in 2007, the Patriots' fumble numbers were very similar to everyone else's. After the rule change, their fumble rate dropped precipitously, to the point where they are so far away from the statistical likelihood of doing so under the same conditions as the other outdoor teams that they can no longer be considered feasible.

SO, I'll go out on the limb and say it: The evidence suggests that this is a pattern of behavior that has very possibly occurred since the implementation of the Brady rule in 2007. More than an isolated cheating incident in a single playoff game, the low inflation of New England's footballs has been going on for YEARS. Their offense has not been playing with the same equipment standard as the rest of the league, the very essence of cheating.

And what's worse? They won three Super Bowls BEFORE all of this started. They were ALREADY GREAT. But remember that Spygate ALSO hit the scandal sheets in 2007... Maybe the New York Giants really are the karma police...

Go, Seattle.

Andrew, you did NOT just go there....

“The energy is sort of sucked out of you. You do feel deflated … Awwww, shoot. Oh well.”

—Colts quarterback Andrew Luck, describing in a bit of a double-entendre his feelings about the sudden end of the Indianapolis season while being interviewed at the Pro Bowl.

From Jim Steeg, via Peter King, about coach Don Shula

“Back in the seventies, the Dolphins were going to play the Raiders in Oakland. They practiced at the Oakland Coliseum on Saturday, and in the locker room Larry Csonka found laying there the Raiders’ game plan for the next day’s game. He gave it to [Dolphins offensive line coach] Monte Clark to give to Don Shula, which Monte did.

“The next day the Dolphins got beat by the Raiders. Csonka went to Monte and asked, ‘How did we lose? We had their game plan.’

“Monte’s response: ‘I gave it to Don and he threw it in the trash. He said, ‘We do not cheat!' "

How do you maintain rivalries in an era of bloated conferences?

This also comes from Dr. Saturday, and it's a direct result of the ridiculous size of the conferences in college football today. The ACC, for reference, now has fourteen teams in two divisions, which means that teams in the opposite division (even longtime rivals who have been split apart) play each other at most every OTHER year, so they come to your campus every FOUR (or more?) years. Here's a novel solution for that from the state of North Carolina, right on the dividing line of the Atlantic Coast Conference...

North Carolina and Wake Forest, two ACC rivals, took an interesting approach to filling a slot in their non-conference schedules for 2019 and 2021.

Instead of looking outside the ACC, the two programs will square off in non-conference games – one at Wake Forest on September 14, 2019, and one at UNC on September 25, 2021. Because of the ACC’s scheduling arrangements, the two teams were not scheduled to play one another in those seasons. Now they will, but the game “will not factor into the ACC standings.”

“This is a unique opportunity to play a regional rival in years that fall outside the normal conference rotation,” UNC athletic director Bubba Cunningham said. “We have a long history with Wake Forest that has historical value and will generate interest within our fans.”

According to a release from UNC, this home-and-home arrangement is “the first time two members of a Power Five conference have agreed to play each other in a football series originally scheduled as non-conference games.”

North Carolina and Wake Forest have a rivalry that spans more than 100 years. In 105 meetings, the Tar Heels lead the series 68-35-2. The two teams played one another every year from 1944-2004 but now play on an infrequent basis due to the rotating schedule (which is set through 2024) stemming from the conference’s expansion to 14 teams (UNC and Wake are in different divisions).

This agreement also satisfies the ACC’s requirement of each program scheduling at least one power five team in its non-conference slate.

The two programs will meet in conference matchups in 2015 and 2022

NCAA playoff semifinal dates...pending?

This report is straight from Dr. Saturday, and it hits a topic I'd been wondering 

about as well...

Report: ESPN, NFL want CFP to change date of semifinal games

 

By Sam Cooper3 hours agoDr. Saturday

• 
• 
• 
• 

View photo

.

College Football Playoff Executive Director Bill Hancock poses with the College Football Playoff National Championship …

Year one of the College Football Playoff was a huge success with the two semifinal games falling on New Year’s Day. Next year, however, the two semifinal games are scheduled for New Year’s Eve.

ESPN apparently isn’t too happy about it.

According to the Sports Business Journal, ESPN executives “are lobbying CFP officials” to move next season’s semifinal games – the Capital One Orange Bowl and the Goodyear Cotton Bowl – from New Year’s Eve to Saturday Jan. 2, 2016.

On New Year’s Eve, ESPN’s broadcasts would compete with a bevy of countdown broadcasts that bring in the New Year. With ratings in mind, ESPN is hoping for a change.

From the SBJ:

Sources say that senior network executives as high up as ESPN President John Skipper are pushing for the change as a way to get better television ratings, but the CFP is unwilling to make such a move because it is committed to the original plan to hold tripleheader bowl games, including the semifinals, on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.

Despite ESPN’s wishes, the CFP isn’t budging.

“We’ve started a new tradition and we don’t want to back away from it now,” said Bill Hancock, the CFP’s executive director.

The championship game drew record ratings (33.4 million viewers), while the semifinals each drew “more than 28 million viewers.” According to the SBJ, “ESPN insiders say they are prepared for double-digit drops in viewership” if the games stay on New Year’s Eve.

On top of the wishes of ESPN, the NFL is mulling the possibility of expanding its playoffs. One of its new playoff games could potentially be moved to Monday, which would “compete directly with the CFP championship.”

Because of this, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell reportedly met with CFP commissioners to discuss a potential conflict.

From the SBJ:

Sources say NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell initiated a series of high-level meetings with some of the CFP’s most influential commissioners, including the SEC’s Mike Slive and the Big Ten’s Jim Delany. Goodell approached the commissioners to discuss the potential impact an NFL playoff expansion would have on the CFP championship game.

Additionally, Goodell reportedly “told the college commissioners that any playoff expansion likely would put a wild-card game on Monday night.”

The CFP’s 12-year contract with ESPN has the title game being played on a Monday night and Hancock said the CFP office is opposed to an NFL playoff game being played on the same night.

“We picked Monday night because it was open and it was the best night for our game. We announced that in June 2012,” Hancock said. “We established that our game was going to be on Monday night for 12 years.”

- - - - - - -

Sam Cooper is a contributor for the Yahoo Sports blogs.

Interesting Super Bowl Fact #5

Seattle won last year's Super Bowl by a score of 43-8, a winning margin of 35 points.

New England has three Super Bowl titles...won by a combined total of 9 points. (A field goal victory each time - 20-17 over the Rams, 32-29 over Carolina, and 24-21 over Philadelphia.)

If you count wins AND losses, Seattle's SMALLEST margin was 11 points, in a loss to Pittsburgh (21-10) in 2006.

Meanwhile, in the Belechick era, the LARGEST margin in any of their FIVE Super Bowls was 4 points, when the Giants beat them 21-17 in a game that every Pats fan has beaten out of their memory for sanity's sake.

(Of course, if you go back pre-Belechick, there WAS that one time in 1986, when Da Bears beat the Pats 46-10, in a game that wasn't even THAT close...)

Interesting Super Bowl Fact #4

Seattle is the very first team in ten years to reach the Super Bowl after winning it the previous year. (In fact, they're the first defending champion to even win a playoff game in ten years.)

The last team to do it? 

New England, 2003-2004. 

(And they won, too.)

About the Pro Bowl...

Apparently they played the Pro Bowl last night.

Who cares?

I applaud the NFL's continuing efforts to attempt to salvage this albatross - first moving it to Hawaii so the players could make a vacation of it, then to the site of the Super Bowl and making it as close to a pick-up, fantasy football game as they can manage. 

But the truth is - you might as well play it with flags on. Nobody wants to get hurt playing football ever, but they sure as heck don't want to get hurt playing a completely meaningless game that no one cares about. 

All-star games in basketball, hockey, baseball, soccer...all work because they're relatively safe. At the college level, they have a secondary purpose - to showcase kids for the draft. The HS All-American game does the same for those kids going into college. 

What possible motivation would the pro football players have. Money? Pride? Presitge? Can't all that be achieved with a nice banquet celebrating the All-Pro players the same weekend? (And then you can include the Super Bowl teams' players, too.) Make it part of the Honors gig they do anyway, and call it good.

(Who won, anyway? I never heard...)

Charles P. Pierce of Grantland.com makes some fun points about the jocularity that he sees as DeFlateGate...

Because we are a nation of infantilized yahoos, I am able to present to you, verbatim, the second question posed to Tom Brady on Thursday, as he stood behind a lectern to discuss the tempest in a protective cup known as Ballghazi. I am not making any of this up, either.

“Tom,” he was asked. “This has raised a lot of uncomfortable conversations with people around the country who view you, a three-time Super Bowl champion, and a two-time MVP, as their idol. The question they’re asking themselves is,  ‘What’s up with our hero?’ So can you answer right now, Is Tom Brady a cheater?”

This is a very big country. So, I would imagine, there are any number of uncomfortable conversations about a number of subjects going on at any one time. This is only one of them, and it is very minor — but, because we are a nation of infantilized yahoos, this is where we are. Watching the Great Media Hippo doing a moral ballet. To chronicle their heroes, the ancient Greeks had Homer. We have sports talk radio. This says nothing good about Western civilization.

Aside from his larger point, loosely translated as WTF?, the fact that this was the second question of the entire press conference startles me. Why not ask for FACTS first? It also makes me wonder more why Brady's answer was "I don't believe so", rather than something like, "HELL, NO!!!" Maybe it's because just the day before, his mentor and coach did this to him...

But part of Brady’s softened, perplexed demeanor had to be attributed to the fact that, earlier on Thursday, his head coach had tied him to the cowcatcher of a runaway train. “I think we all know that quarterbacks, kickers, specialists have certain preferences on footballs,” Belichick had said. “They know a lot more about it than I do. They’re a lot more sensitive to it than I am. I hear them comment on it from time to time, but I can tell you and they will tell you that there is never any sympathy whatsoever from me on that subject. Zero. Tom’s personal preferences on his footballs is something he can talk about in much better detail and information than I can possibly provide. I can tell you that in my entire coaching career, I have never talked to any player, staff member about football air pressure. That is not a subject that I have ever brought up. To me, the footballs are approved by the league and officials pregame, and we play with what’s out there. That’s the only way that I have ever thought about that.” Over the side, Tom. Watch that first step.

This was the point I made yesterday: when push comes to shove, nobody is sacred in Bill Belechick's mind. Pierce emphasizes something that needs to be said here, however unfair it seems...

Because of New England’s history, especially the whole Spygate business that hangs around the franchise’s neck like a dead raccoon, anything is assumed to be possible. But disqualify the Patriots from the Super Bowl? Blow up a game between the two best teams in the league for the purpose of having Kam Chancellor devour Andrew Luck on national TV? Bill Belichick is unlikely to be fired. Tom Brady is unlikely to be suspended, at least not until next year. Anyone telling you that any of these things is likely, quite frankly, are either trolling, or they are insane. There is no third alternative.

Or uninformed or unrealistic about the importance of money to the NFL, but that would be too easy to admit...

The whole thing is flatly hilarious. The way you can be sure of this is that the ladies of The View pronounced themselves outraged by the perfidious Patriots on Thursday morning. Rosie O’Donnell wanted them booted from the Super Bowl. (Trolling or insane? Our lines are open.) Moreover, because of the miracle of Twitter, and the fact that we are a nation of infantilized yahoos, everybody in the bunker at Gillette Stadium became aware of what the ladies of The View felt, and many of the assembled press felt compelled to get various New England players’ reactions to Rosie O’Donnell’s commentary. Me? This is what I think: Once a scandal starts being discussed on The View, it stops being a scandal and becomes a sitcom. I think this should be a rule.

Pierce does add some salience to the conversation regarding coach Belchick, whom he regards as,... Well, let's just say he doesn't think the coach was completely believable, either. Here's his take on Belechick not knowing the procedures for game-day footballs but still using the roughed up footballs in practice to "prepare for anything":

If you are not reading this on the back of your turnip truck, you undoubtedly have said to yourself at this point, “Bill, pal o’mine. You didn’t know the game-day protocols for the footballs, but you know enough about them to muck them up for practice?” That dog sits on the porch, licks its balls, and doesn’t even try to hunt.

A moment of rebuttal for a well-presented view on DeFlateGate

Here's a view that I had considered at first - I'm aware of the laws of gas pressure, and that volume OR pressure decrease with temperature (or a combination of the two), and that probably does happen to some extent in all cold-weather games.

Here's the rebuttal:

Why were the twelve balls for the Colts ALL perfect if they had the same circumstances as the twelve deflated Patriots balls?

Why has this NEVER come up in any of the previous cold weather games, including the ones during this very playoff season in Green Bay, for example, or any of the miserable ones in December?

Why is the other circumstantial evidence so compelling?

(And here's the question I really want answered someday, if indeed it is Tom Brady behind this, as I'm about 2/3 sure of at this point...WHY? You won this game 45-7, and you actually beat them WORSE when you had the regular balls in the second half. Besides, the plan was ALWAYS going to be run it down the Colts' throats because your line is tougher than theirs anyway - your passing wasn't going to be the difference in the game. Why would a GREAT quarterback like you DO this? I've never understood why Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez, two certain Hall of Famers WITHOUT steroids and HGH, went to the cheating route when they were so good without cheating. Insecurity is always the answer I hear, and I have to believe it. I'm an extremely insecure person, and yet I've never done anything like that, and neither has 99% of folks, I think. [Maybe that's high.] I pray we're wrong about this. I fear we're not.)

Here's Peter King in today's MMQB, finishing the argument for me...

The condition of the footballs on Sunday is coming into clarity.

This is significant, because it takes weather-as-a-factor out of the possible reasons why New England’s footballs could have lost air while the balls on Indianapolis’ sidelines would have stayed fully inflated. I am told reliably that:

• The 12 footballs used in the first half for New England, and the 12 footballs used by the Colts, all left the officials’ locker room before the game at the prescribed pressure level of between 12.5 pounds per square inch and 13.5 psi.

• All 24 footballs were checked by pressure gauge at halftime. I am told either 11 or 12 of New England’s footballs (ESPN’s Chris Mortensen reported it was 11, and I hear it could have been all 12) had at least two pounds less pressure in them. All 12 Indianapolis footballs were at the prescribed level.

• All 24 footballs were checked by pressure gauge after the game. All 24 checked at the correct pressure—which is one of the last pieces of the puzzle the league needed to determine with certainty that something fishy happened with the Patriots footballs, because the Colts’ balls stayed correctly inflated for the nearly four hours. There had been reports quoting atmospheric experts that cold weather could deflate footballs. But if the Patriots’ balls were all low, and the Colts’ balls all legit, that quashes that theory.

The conclusion: There is little doubt the New England footballs were tampered with by a human.