NFL - NEWS & NOTES

Andy Reid facing the Eagles should be fun.

 

The Chiefs are headed to the Super Bowl after 23-20 win over Bengals

 

Kelce vs Kelce also.

 

Last year the Chiefs beat the Eagles, 42-30... A high scoring affair again would be ok by me, but so would a defensive game won in the trenches too. I just hope its a close, exciting game.

 

Mahomes milked that for all it was worth tho. Yeah you'd like the defender to be smarter in the heat of that moment, you should never want to risk involving clown officials, but that was basically a flop and with Mahomes being the darling of the NFL the ending was written in that moment. Very unsatisfying. I fucking hate flops. The Bengals repeatedly got the short end of the stick in that game. Maybe not outrageous obvious stuff, but anything they could call against them they did. Oh and 2 attempts at a 3rd & 9 lol.

Between that and the first game, which never got going cos of the early injury to Purdy, one of the worse Championship weekends in recent memory. Since 2010 at least heh.

 

Andy Reid earns 21st postseason win, moves ahead of Tom Landry for No. 2 in NFL history



Chiefs coach Andy Reid won the 21st postseason game of his NFL coaching career on Sunday night, taking sole possession of second place in NFL history.

Reid has moved ahead of Tom Landry, who won 20 postseason games with the Cowboys. Reid is now No. 2 in NFL history behind Bill Belichick, who has 31 postseason wins.


The AFC Championship Game win over the Bengals was Reid’s 11th postseason win with the Chiefs. He also won 10 postseason games as head coach of the Eagles.

Now Reid will coach in his fourth Super Bowl, against his former team, and attempt to get his second ring.

PFT

 

Shanahan after the game offered an explanation for his decision not to challenge the play.

“Because the replay we saw didn’t definitively show that,” Shanahan said in his postgame press conference. “We saw one up on the scoreboard. I wasn’t going to throw one anyways just to hope to take the chance. But they showed one up on the scoreboard that didn’t have all those angles you guys saw. That looked like a catch and we didn’t want to waste a timeout. Which we definitely would have if we didn’t see that. I heard they got a couple other angles and you guys ended up seeing later that it was not a catch.”
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Not sticking up for the guy, or making an argument, just wanted to post what he said directly. Seems as if a 49ers secondary player should have seen enough to convince the coach to throw the flag, but they didnt and it cost them. As soon as I seen it, i thought it was a remarkable catch, but the multi-angled replays showed it wasnt.

 

If a coach always listened when a player says throw the flag he’ll lose a lot of challenges. Based on his view and the fact that the ref was right there and could only see the back, that’s hard to put it on Shanahan. Speaking of the refs, they were awfully one sided. Pretty sure there were 3 automatic first downs called on one drive against the 49ers, with at least 1 being questionable. Refs were definitely visible, I’ll leave it at that.

And it sucks Purdy got hurt. I wanted the 49ers to lose, but would’ve liked to see him play all game. A lot of injuries in both games

 

At times, NFL needs to slow things down for “expedited review” to work

The opening drive of Sunday’s NFC Championship included an opening-drive fourth-down conversion that shouldn’t have been.

Receiver DeVonta Smith made what appeared to be a great catch on fourth and three from the San Francisco 35. 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan could have challenged the play, but the key replay wasn’t immediately available.

Some have suggested that Shanahan should have realized from the manner in which the Eagles rushed to the line to snap the ball that something about the catch was amiss. Still, without seeing the play, the idea of burning a challenge on a hunch that early in the game made little sense.

Enter expedited review. As explained during the game, the NFL has the power to alter plays without a formal replay review. Under one of various specific categories in the rulebook (more on that in a later post), the replay assistant or the league office can intervene, if the ruling on the field was clearly and obviously wrong.

As to the Smith non-catch, the league office has access to all Fox camera angles, and more, in real time. The evidence was available to be seen, if someone had enough time to see it.

That’s where the longstanding habit of teams rushing to snap the ball becomes critical. As Chris Simms pointed out during Monday’s PFT Live, in what other sport is the action rushed forward to prevent a mistake from being fixed?

In this case, how hard would it be for the league office to instruct the referee to pause the action so that expedited review wouldn’t have to be quite so expedited?

Would it slow the game down by 10 or 20 seconds? Sure. But if the goal is to get things right, it’s time well spent.

It’s a case-by-case, know-it-when-you-see-it test. For the same reason Shanahan should have wondered whether a challenge flag may have been justified, the league office should have realized that the Eagles were trying to cut off any type of review process by getting the ball snapped.

Consider the difference in this case. Instead of the Eagles getting an ill-gotten first and goal that, two plays later, became a touchdown, the 49ers would have had a first and 10 from their own 35.

With or without the Brock Purdy injury (which may or may not have happened if the ensuing drive had begun at the 35 instead of the 25), things would have been very different as a result of the first drive of the game.

The league is fortunate that the catch and the touchdown it set up didn’t impact the outcome of the game. But the league should treat the situation as if it did, in order to spur the kind of change necessary to ensure that a team won’t short-circuit expedited review by getting the ball snapped and cutting off any chance to fix a clear and obvious mistake.

PFT (Mike Florio)

 

The offseason is underway for 30 of the NFL’s 32 teams and they now know the salary cap they’ll be working with in 2023.

The NFL informed teams that the cap will be set at $224.8 million for next season.


That’s up from $208.2 million for the current season and reflects the uptick in revenue that the league will enjoy from new broadcasting deals that kick in during the 2023 season. It also shows that the league has rebounded well from the drop to a $182.5 million salary cap in 2021 due to the impact of COVID on attendance and other revenues.

With the cap set, teams can now use that figure as they make decisions about contract options, roster bonuses and extensions. Franchise tags can be applied starting on February 21 and the new league year begins on March 15.

 

Kyle Shanahan didn't throw a challenge on DeVonta Smith's "catch" because the scoreboard showed a replay where it definitely looked like a catch. It was such a nice angle that the 49ers didn't want to risk throwing a challenge in hoping it was dropped since it looked like a catch.

 

What sold me on throwing the flag had nothing to do with his players... I would have reacted to the player making the "catch". He jumped up and immediately started signaling to run a play ASAP. This told me HE knew it wasn't a catch.

 

Normally you would too but at the same time the team can catch a very good 49ers team from being able to sub in goal-line personnel and that may have been something planned. Had it happened anywhere but near the goalline then yes all alarms should be sounding. The scoreboard guy did the team a solid showing the good angle instead of nothing. Had nothing been shown then Shanahan said they might have thrown the challenge.

 

Ive always been a proponent of the game being human and mistakes will be made, but at the same time with all the available technology, maybe a crew in the booth of these huge games could watch the game and if they see any uncertainty, call a TO and review it. Why not? Everybody loves a 5 hour football game (im kidding). Seriously, if they could do something along those lines in a timely fashion, it might improve the game and eliminate any questions.

On a side note... If the Eagles were stopped on 4th down on their opening drive... they still would have won, 24-7, lol and

 

Somebody take my Great Niece and Nephew to school for me... Its 7 f'n degrees here. Homey no likey.

Correction, its 5. Just remember what I said about Mother Nature.

 

Combine this with the risk vs reward aspect, which to me is always the #1 factor when you have a limited number of challenges in hand. A first down play and the guy gains six yards but you think he stepped out of bounds after three yards... who cares? Keep it in your pocket.

But this was a fourth down conversion and a 29-yard gain. Seriously, WTF would be a better time to challenge than that??

 

Indeed... great job by the scoreboard guy, and I hope the Eagles give him a HUGE bonus because without the Purdy injury, that might have been the difference-maker in the game.

But my point is that it was yet another game management fuck-up by the guy who is cementing himself as the all-time king of game management fuck-ups in huge games.

 

I learned something mildly amusing from an article today... three hours before every game, the equipment managers have a sort of "draft". The officials open a box of six balls to be used by the kickers. The home team equipment manager chooses one, then the visitor, home, visitor, home, with the visitor getting the last ball. They have the three hours before game time and very strict rules of what they can/can't do to prepare the balls for the game.

The kickers say unprepared balls are like kicking bricks, so the amount of attention given to each ball matters. Oddly enough, Cordarrelle Patterson's record-setting kickoff return for a touchdown ended up being a huge factor later in the game. It was a record-setting return, so the football was taken out of the game at that point. That was Chicago's #1 kicking football. Their kicker missed his next field goal attempt with the #2 ball, snapping a streak of 21 consecutive field goals made.

 

I remember seeing a video of this in action like 10 years ago.

 

Here's one from Shayne Graham:




Some examples of the rules involved... putting the towel in the bowl of water and using it to wet the ball is fine, but you can't put the ball itself in the bowl of water.

That Wilson brush Graham uses in the video is the only brush allowed. No other brand, no other type. Any use of the brush has to be by hand - no attaching it to any kind of machinery.

Air and towel dry only. No hair dryers or other heaters allowed in preparing the kicking ball. The towels and the brush are the only tools allowed.



The video shows a violation! Graham uses the corner of the counter to push in the ends of the ball.

He retired in 2016, so he last played under the previous version of the rule. The current version, which went into effect in 2020, prohibits "altering the shape of the football (including, but not limited to, kneeling or standing on, bouncing, throwing, using a hard surface or otherwise exerting excess pressure)."

So... the Chiefs and Eagles won't be allowed to do that.