Jim Harbaugh has got to be sleeping with a picture of Colin Kaepernick underneath his pillow and kissing it every night before he goes to bed. A lot of people in the sports world ripped on Harbaugh for benching his staring quarterback, who at the time had the highest quarterback rating in the league, for a second year player who had zero starts under his belt. I applauded the move because I, like Harbaugh, did not believe that Alex Smith was the guy that would get the 49ers over the hump. I will also be the first to admit that I didn't know Kaepernick was that guy either, and I bet Harbaugh also didn't KNOW but had a lot more insight into what Kaepernick could and could not do than any of us did. This is the kind of coaching that has brought the 49ers to the big game in a year after their hearts were broken in the championship game. Every 49ers fan is out reveling in the glory that is Super Bowl week but if you caught any of them this time last year they'd probably lock themselves into a room and cry themselves to sleep after watching images of Kyle Williams muffing not one, but two punts in the same game against the Giants.
And lets not forget an equally daring decision that will probably never get the same amount of publicity as the Kaepernick decision: Older brother John Harbaugh making the decision to fire an ineffective Cam Cameron and handing the offensive keys to Jim Caldwell. Since then, Flacco has looked every bit of his self-proclaimed "elite" and I've heard some Raven fans actually wonder if their team can afford to keep Flacco or if they wouldn't have been better off with Flacco being mediocre so that he'd cost less to keep. To them, all I say is - I'm a Buffalo Bills fan. Caldwell is taking advantage of Flacco's arm and aggressive tendencies and balancing that with Ray Rice and Bernard Pierce to keep the defenses honest. The gameplan, thus far, has been sound. The one blemish Caldwell has as a Ravens play-caller was against the Broncos in the regular season, but that was his 5th day on the job.
All the hoopla this week will be disgusting. The media will beat the Harbaugh brother story to death. There will be fabrications left and right and people will wonder who started them and if it had anything to do with the opposing team. The Pro Bowl and the Super Bowl are reminders to most football fans that the season has ended and the off-season has begun. The Super Bowl is more of an event, an entertainment show for 3-4 hours rather than solely a football game between the two best teams in the NFL. There's probably a large minority or maybe even majority of the viewers watching just for the commercials. For people like me, I love this time of the year. I love how much more access a fan now has to the NFL off-season process. I recorded Senior bowl practices so that I can be as close to it as possible short of being an NFL scout. Next month we'll have the combine followed by free agency in March and then the draft in April. I guess as a Bills fan I've had a lot of time to research and watch draft prospects since they're typically out of it by November. So, over the years, I've come to appreciate that process and I love the part where I get to figure out who's good and who's not and which team will draft whom.
By the way, NFL scouts have been working all year round. They've been visiting campuses to watch and scout seniors all year long and once the Juniors declare for the draft they will trek back to those campuses and do homework on them. They will have watched countless hours of tape, interviewed players at the bowl games,etc etc. I guess I can't not say something about the Manti Te'o thing so I'll just say this: By the time the draft rolls around, we'll have as complete a picture as we probably need to on this story. I don't know what happened. If I had to guess, from the looks of it he got caught in a scam, discovered that he was being duped but then was too embarrassed, like any normal human being would be, to reveal that he'd been duped. The biggest tell I've gotten so far on him is that Te'o is not the sharpest tool in the shed and is gullible. All things considered, not the worst quality in a NFL middle linebacker. Hopefully he has the right people around him advising him through this mess and helping him in the future to avoid pitfalls such as this.
As it says on my high school football sweatshirt - "There is no off season"
And lets not forget an equally daring decision that will probably never get the same amount of publicity as the Kaepernick decision: Older brother John Harbaugh making the decision to fire an ineffective Cam Cameron and handing the offensive keys to Jim Caldwell. Since then, Flacco has looked every bit of his self-proclaimed "elite" and I've heard some Raven fans actually wonder if their team can afford to keep Flacco or if they wouldn't have been better off with Flacco being mediocre so that he'd cost less to keep. To them, all I say is - I'm a Buffalo Bills fan. Caldwell is taking advantage of Flacco's arm and aggressive tendencies and balancing that with Ray Rice and Bernard Pierce to keep the defenses honest. The gameplan, thus far, has been sound. The one blemish Caldwell has as a Ravens play-caller was against the Broncos in the regular season, but that was his 5th day on the job.
All the hoopla this week will be disgusting. The media will beat the Harbaugh brother story to death. There will be fabrications left and right and people will wonder who started them and if it had anything to do with the opposing team. The Pro Bowl and the Super Bowl are reminders to most football fans that the season has ended and the off-season has begun. The Super Bowl is more of an event, an entertainment show for 3-4 hours rather than solely a football game between the two best teams in the NFL. There's probably a large minority or maybe even majority of the viewers watching just for the commercials. For people like me, I love this time of the year. I love how much more access a fan now has to the NFL off-season process. I recorded Senior bowl practices so that I can be as close to it as possible short of being an NFL scout. Next month we'll have the combine followed by free agency in March and then the draft in April. I guess as a Bills fan I've had a lot of time to research and watch draft prospects since they're typically out of it by November. So, over the years, I've come to appreciate that process and I love the part where I get to figure out who's good and who's not and which team will draft whom.
By the way, NFL scouts have been working all year round. They've been visiting campuses to watch and scout seniors all year long and once the Juniors declare for the draft they will trek back to those campuses and do homework on them. They will have watched countless hours of tape, interviewed players at the bowl games,etc etc. I guess I can't not say something about the Manti Te'o thing so I'll just say this: By the time the draft rolls around, we'll have as complete a picture as we probably need to on this story. I don't know what happened. If I had to guess, from the looks of it he got caught in a scam, discovered that he was being duped but then was too embarrassed, like any normal human being would be, to reveal that he'd been duped. The biggest tell I've gotten so far on him is that Te'o is not the sharpest tool in the shed and is gullible. All things considered, not the worst quality in a NFL middle linebacker. Hopefully he has the right people around him advising him through this mess and helping him in the future to avoid pitfalls such as this.
As it says on my high school football sweatshirt - "There is no off season"
