NFL

8 hours ago, Irish Saint said:

Belichick will want to keep on coaching he will want that record of being the coach who has won the most games. At 72 he doesn't have the time to build a team that is why I think could be the Raiders. Have even heard the Cowboys mentioned. Apparently  their love the limelight owner has stated that it is not definite that McCarthy will be head coach next year. Cowboys I don't care them who beats them.

As for quarterbacks the draft is hit and miss. Josh Allen is a free agent after the play- offs. Will he stay at the Bills? 

This season will be remembered for the teams who made the play-offs with back up quarterbacks even the Bengals came close in thar crazy AFC North.

Meanwhile at One Jets Drive. They bowed to the wishes of Mr Rodgers got the offensive coordinator he requested and two of his old wide receivers from Green Bay and all for diddley squat.

Oh yes, I agree he is chasing Don Shula’s record for regular season wins and the short term option would be to go takeover a decent team in one of the weaker divisions.

I’ve seen a few teams being bandied around like Atlanta or Seattle who had on the cusp seasons in terms of the playoffs.  As for the playoff teams themselves, there’s quite a few scenarios that could work through like Dallas or Philadelphia losing in the wild card round and then dumping their head coach.

There’s no guarantee in the draft for sure, but I’d much rather have a high pick than a low one if I was trying to recruit in that area (Brady a notable exception to that rule).

So the Bears are coming back to London.

Obviously, tickets aren't out for a while but I've got a mates 40th coming up and this would be a perfect gift.

Does anyone know of any tips for how to get tickets to a game even if you're willing to pay a bit more, like hospitality or part of a package deal? I don't fancy leaving it to the chance of being in a queue with a few hundred thousand people...

2 hours ago, Maximus Decimus said:

So the Bears are coming back to London.

Obviously, tickets aren't out for a while but I've got a mates 40th coming up and this would be a perfect gift.

Does anyone know of any tips for how to get tickets to a game even if you're willing to pay a bit more, like hospitality or part of a package deal? I don't fancy leaving it to the chance of being in a queue with a few hundred thousand people...

If you are serious about hospitality drop a line to the Bears couldn't do any harm. Bears ,Jags and Vikings have been allocated to the UK as the NFL now allocating teams to countries. Could be good PR for the Bears Panthers have been allocated to Germany. Ireland got the Sreelers which with the Steelers history is apt

Personally, would love to take in the game on Brazil at the home of Corinthians ( some wonderful shirts in their history)and it wouldn't matter who was playing

"I wish it was colder" adorned Dolphins head coach t shirt  last year as the Dolphins went to Buffalo in the play offs. A year later he has got his wish as the Dolphins go to Kansas with the temperature at kick off predicted 0 Fahrenheit. 

In Buffalo tomorrow's game against the Steelers has been postponed until Monday 21.30 GMT due to adverse weather  conditions. Earlier in the week there was talk of moving the game to Cleveland due to the weather.

I watch the ITV  show but Osi is way too much Ham American and Jason Bell is known for Girls Aloud...I like NFL highlights just like I like AFL and GAA but these guys do my head in.

3 hours ago, EggFace said:

I watch the ITV  show but Osi is way too much Ham American and Jason Bell is known for Girls Aloud...I like NFL highlights just like I like AFL and GAA but these guys do my head in.

It's a good job most rugby league fans on here don't appear to like thr NFL. Quite a few can't abide McDeemott , O' Connor , Wilkin. I dread to think what they would make of Bell and Schector. Sadly,Jeff Rheinbold seems to have returned to Hawaii.

15 hours ago, Maximus Decimus said:

So the Bears are coming back to London.

Obviously, tickets aren't out for a while but I've got a mates 40th coming up and this would be a perfect gift.

Does anyone know of any tips for how to get tickets to a game even if you're willing to pay a bit more, like hospitality or part of a package deal? I don't fancy leaving it to the chance of being in a queue with a few hundred thousand people...

Tottenham Hotspur Stadium Event hospitality has a separate page covering all events and concerts there. Contact them directly ASAP.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/aaron-rodgers-nfl-jeffrey-epstein-jimmy-kimmel-covid-pat-mcafee-conspiracy-theories-1234946453/

Apologies this is behind a pay wall. I places some of it below.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, it appears Aaron Rodgers, who’s taken a grand total of four snaps as quarterback of the New York Jets, has lost his mind. 

This week, during his weekly appearance on ESPN’s The Pat McAfee Show (or if a WWE wrestler on bath salts hosted a sports program), he sorta accused Jimmy Kimmel of associating with Jeffrey Epstein — exacting revenge against Kimmel for ragging on Rodgers and his public Covid vaccine skepticism in his late-night monologues. This latest outburst follows a string of recent kooky behavior, including receiving a homeopathic vaccine alternative as a way of “immunizing” (his words) himself against the virus, dabbling in 9/11 trutherism, going on McAfee’s show every week behind the ugliest webcam setup you can possibly imagine and saying ridiculous ###### like “woke mob” and “Alphabet Mafia” on The Worldwide Leader in Sports, embarking on darkness retreats to help make major life decisions, and, worst of all, signing with the New York Jets. Didn’t he see what happened to his mentor, Brett Favre?

Once Aaron was, by all appearances, a nice man with a cannon for an arm. He had his hobbies. He was surprisingly good at Jeopardy! He was nice to people. He had famous girlfriends. Then a bunch of stuff happened in his life, and in the lives of everyone, and he lost the thread little by little, week after week. 

Considering all this, his postseason achievements have been… slight. He won a single Super Bowl, in 2011, and then proceeded to ply his trade for disappointing Green Bay Packer squads of every shape and size. A 15-1 squad in the regular season, crucified by Eli Manning and the Giants. A loss to the demon Tom Brady, plying his trade for Tampa Bay. Ground into dust by a world-historic Seahawks pass defense. Over and over, Aaron would play like God, and over and over, the rotten Green Bay Packers would let him down. A defense that doesn’t work, receivers who can’t create, the worst running game you’ve seen in your life. Disappointment, year after year, and it was never his fault. The Packers were just not up to the task of supporting the best quarterback who’d ever lived.

Breakup. 

A normal man getting divorced or breaking off an engagement fires up cigs like it’s the end of the world. I’ve seen it; it’s absolutely terrifying. One after another, three gigantic puffs and then dumped in the ashtray. Anything to seek one second of comfort while everything you had planned for your life slips away from you. 

Rodgers is an athlete though, so he can’t do that. When he and Shailene Woodley broke off their engagement in 2022, he needed to find a less productive outlet for all that anxiety than smoking cigs. So, like many men before and after him, he got into drilling Internet into his head all night and talking about it with his friend on a podcast. It’s just that he was Aaron Rodgers, and the podcast where he appears is now on ESPN. These are the woods of divorce: the light at the exit is always moving, the darkness just gets deeper and deeper. 

Cheap, niche, and kind of stupid: the ESPN of the future is here, and it sucks. McAfee has allowed himself one major expense, though: he has paid Rodgers to come on his show every week and talk nonsense so that media guys like me will write about the inane he says on-air and gin up attention for McAfee’s broke-dick discount-daily podcast-ass program. 

In a way, Rodgers losing it is ESPN’s fault. They give him a giant platform to wander around every week, he wanders dick-first into a bunch of swamps, ESPN and their lil afternoon show get attention, and everyone marches forth, confident in their ability to ever-so-slightly increase the amount of money they can extract from ESPN, thereby proving its usefulness in the broader Disney family of products and services. 

Go Rogers as Jimmy Kimmel has a face you could punch more then once the .

2 hours ago, Irish Saint said:

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, it appears Aaron Rodgers, who’s taken a grand total of four snaps as quarterback of the New York Jets, has lost his mind. 

 

This week, during his weekly appearance on ESPN’s The Pat McAfee Show (or if a WWE wrestler on bath salts hosted a sports program), he sorta accused Jimmy Kimmel of associating with Jeffrey Epstein — exacting revenge against Kimmel for ragging on Rodgers and his public Covid vaccine skepticism in his late-night monologues. This latest outburst follows a string of recent kooky behavior, including receiving a homeopathic vaccine alternative as a way of “immunizing” (his words) himself against the virus, dabbling in 9/11 trutherism, going on McAfee’s show every week behind the ugliest webcam setup you can possibly imagine and saying ridiculous ###### like “woke mob” and “Alphabet Mafia” on The Worldwide Leader in Sports, embarking on darkness retreats to help make major life decisions, and, worst of all, signing with the New York Jets. Didn’t he see what happened to his mentor, Brett Favre?

 

Once Aaron was, by all appearances, a nice man with a cannon for an arm. He had his hobbies. He was surprisingly good at Jeopardy! He was nice to people. He had famous girlfriends. Then a bunch of stuff happened in his life, and in the lives of everyone, and he lost the thread little by little, week after week. 

Considering all this, his postseason achievements have been… slight. He won a single Super Bowl, in 2011, and then proceeded to ply his trade for disappointing Green Bay Packer squads of every shape and size. A 15-1 squad in the regular season, crucified by Eli Manning and the Giants. A loss to the demon Tom Brady, plying his trade for Tampa Bay. Ground into dust by a world-historic Seahawks pass defense. Over and over, Aaron would play like God, and over and over, the rotten Green Bay Packers would let him down. A defense that doesn’t work, receivers who can’t create, the worst running game you’ve seen in your life. Disappointment, year after year, and it was never his fault. The Packers were just not up to the task of supporting the best quarterback who’d ever lived.

Breakup. 

A normal man getting divorced or breaking off an engagement fires up cigs like it’s the end of the world. I’ve seen it; it’s absolutely terrifying. One after another, three gigantic puffs and then dumped in the ashtray. Anything to seek one second of comfort while everything you had planned for your life slips away from you. 

 

Rodgers is an athlete though, so he can’t do that. When he and Shailene Woodley broke off their engagement in 2022, he needed to find a less productive outlet for all that anxiety than smoking cigs. So, like many men before and after him, he got into drilling Internet into his head all night and talking about it with his friend on a podcast. It’s just that he was Aaron Rodgers, and the podcast where he appears is now on ESPN. These are the woods of divorce: the light at the exit is always moving, the darkness just gets deeper and deeper. 

Cheap, niche, and kind of stupid: the ESPN of the future is here, and it sucks. McAfee has allowed himself one major expense, though: he has paid Rodgers to come on his show every week and talk nonsense so that media guys like me will write about the inane he says on-air and gin up attention for McAfee’s broke-dick discount-daily podcast-ass program. 

 

In a way, Rodgers losing it is ESPN’s fault. They give him a giant platform to wander around every week, he wanders dick-first into a bunch of swamps, ESPN and their lil afternoon show get attention, and everyone marches forth, confident in their ability to ever-so-slightly increase the amount of money they can extract from ESPN, thereby proving its usefulness in the broader Disney family of products and services. 

I've never seen a better example of 2020s era journalism than this. Petty, ranty, bitchy and all about winning culture wars battles.

Aaron Rogers can't be a great player who became a conspiracy nut. Because he's a conspiracy nut who is also on the perceived wrong side of a number of issues, he also has to have actually been an awful player. We can't have it that he might actually be good in any walk of life.

I mean he led the Packers to a 15-1 season that then lost in the playoff game! Talk about rubbish.

17 hours ago, Maximus Decimus said:

I've never seen a better example of 2020s era journalism than this. Petty, ranty, bitchy and all about winning culture wars battles.

Aaron Rogers can't be a great player who became a conspiracy nut. Because he's a conspiracy nut who is also on the perceived wrong side of a number of issues, he also has to have actually been an awful player. We can't have it that he might actually be good in any walk of life.

I mean he led the Packers to a 15-1 season that then lost in the playoff game! Talk about rubbish.

 

Not necessarily a way of looking at things I agree with but all US sports, and their fans and commentators, put a premium on how you perform in clutch/post-season games. A great regular season record is worth nothing if you don't consistently perform in the post-season. In baseball, you see this with players like Clayton Kershaw who are mocked despite regularly topping the regular season stats but just not being superhuman post-season.

You don't need to be a nutter - and Rodgers is a nutter - for that to happen.

11 hours ago, gingerjon said:

Not necessarily a way of looking at things I agree with but all US sports, and their fans and commentators, put a premium on how you perform in clutch/post-season games. A great regular season record is worth nothing if you don't consistently perform in the post-season. In baseball, you see this with players like Clayton Kershaw who are mocked despite regularly topping the regular season stats but just not being superhuman post-season.

You don't need to be a nutter - and Rodgers is a nutter - for that to happen.

Yeh, I kind of get this feeling.

I've always found it extremely flawed, but I can see how it appeals to sports fans. We like to think that the scoreboard always reflects the two teams, rather than including a great amount of individual instances. Just because a team lost a playoff game, doesn't mean they would have lost had they played the same game 10 times. 

It's like in boxing. I often find fans treat a victory as proof that their fighter would win every time. Take Fury-Wilder 3. It doesn't suit his supporters to accept he might have lost that fight 20 times out of 100.

Waiting for Buffalo Pittsburgh,  let's reflect on the previous four games. Highlight for me David J Boyce 89 Yr old Lions fan  season ticket holder for 66 years see his team win a play offgame for the first time in 32years.

Then we have the hilarity of America's team. 16 consecutive home wins and in come the Packers first number 7 seed to win a play off game. Cowboys that one star on your helmet isn't your crest it's a rating.

Texas's team Houston 3 13 1 last season up against the number one defence in the Browns and they absolutely dismantle them. 

Miami 1 -10 in games played at 5 degrees centigrade or less, or maybe it was the curse of hard knocks.

So tonight in snowy Buffalo were they were paying fans  20 dollars an hour with food and drink to clear snow so the game can finally go ahead and the Bills Mafia stepped up to the mark. Of the remaining teams I hope the winner of this game wins the Superbowl.

Finally the Eagles at the Buccs. Eagles have collapsed up against a quarterback who has been passed from team to team finally landing at the Buccs and leading them to a division title.

Play off football win or go home what this game is all about

14 minutes ago, Irish Saint said:

Waiting for Buffalo Pittsburgh,  let's reflect on the previous four games. Highlight for me David J Boyce 89 Yr old Lions fan  season ticket holder for 66 years see his team win a play offgame for the first time in 32years.

Then we have the hilarity of America's team. 16 consecutive home wins and in come the Packers first number 7 seed to win a play off game. Cowboys that one star on your helmet isn't your crest it's a rating.

Texas's team Houston 3 13 1 last season up against the number one defence in the Browns and they absolutely dismantle them. 

Miami 1 -10 in games played at 5 degrees centigrade or less, or maybe it was the curse of hard knocks.

So tonight in snowy Buffalo were they were paying fans  20 dollars an hour with food and drink to clear snow so the game can finally go ahead and the Bills Mafia stepped up to the mark. Of the remaining teams I hope the winner of this game wins the Superbowl.

Finally the Eagles at the Buccs. Eagles have collapsed up against a quarterback who has been passed from team to team finally landing at the Buccs and leading them to a division title.

Play off football win or go home what this game is all about

I think CJ Stroud picking apart the Browns much heralded ‘D’ was the highlight for me so far.

5 minutes ago, Gerrumonside ref said:

I think CJ Stroud picking apart the Browns much heralded ‘D’ was the highlight for me so far.

 

I just loved the emotion of that old man being interviewed how he had went with his dad and now he goes with his son. 66 years season ticket older!

Didn't see that Browns defeat coming at all. Truthfully I had them going to the Ravens and winning next week.

Pittsburgh are going to miss  TJ Watt big time. Love listening to Romo it's a free education.

With apologies to our Australian friend R L Winger

Rudolph may have saved Christmas for the Steelers.....  but they shouldn't have let him play in any play off games.

In other news I have a dear friend who lives in Waterloo Iowa who has informed me her nephew has declared for the NFL draft this year. I'll not mention his name but he won an award for best full back the Low Man trophy played for Kansas State but having declared for the draft did not play in.their bowl game.If drafted in April my allegiance will switch to that team even if it is the Cowboys . Good luck to the lad.

8 hours ago, Irish Saint said:

did not play in.their bowl game

He missed out on a giant pop tart toasting itself.

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/chiefs-dolphins-wild-card-game-15-fans-hospitalized-dozens-treated-for-hypothermia-symptoms-per-report/

As I say to my wife when she complains of if being cold. Love ,you don't know what cold is

12 minutes ago, Irish Saint said:

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/chiefs-dolphins-wild-card-game-15-fans-hospitalized-dozens-treated-for-hypothermia-symptoms-per-report/

As I say to my wife when she complains of if being cold. Love ,you don't know what cold is

An average day where I live.

47 minutes ago, Irish Saint said:

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/chiefs-dolphins-wild-card-game-15-fans-hospitalized-dozens-treated-for-hypothermia-symptoms-per-report/

As I say to my wife when she complains of if being cold. Love ,you don't know what cold is

I may not know cold but I recognise stupid and fans getting hypothermia watching sport definitely qualify.

CJ Stroud is all I will offer to this thread!!

Absolutely phenomenal player - we won't beat the Ravens to be here is incredible

So I'm 4 behind in the tipping competition time to make a case for the 4 outsiders.

Texans at Ravens

Texans have slid under the radar this year no-one had them making the playoffs after 5heir 3 13 1 record last year. They drew the number 1 defence in the wild card.  As Kenilworth Tiger states in C J Stroud they have a quarterback and having dismantled the number 1 defence they have nothing to fear against the Ravens defence.  Unfortunately , the Ravens also have a great offence led by Lamar Jackson tho as of yet no great record in play off games. They have their main tightend Andrews returning this week.

Next Packers at 49ers

49ers were my pre season tip to win the Superbowl they hadtheir injuries mid season and now have a virtually fit full roster. Green Bay are the youngest average aged team to win a play off  game. In T J Love they also have a quarterback who plays with a smile on his face.  

Buccaneers at Lions

For me the "romantic" game of the four. The Buccs led by Baker Mayfield number 1 pick in the 2018 draft now at his four team. In that same draft the Jets took Sam Darnald at 3 and Buffalo Josh Allen at 7. The Lions their first play off win in 32 years and one of the few teams never to play in a Superbowl.  If you want a laugh search youtube for the reporter asking the Buccs coach  how they would deal with the cold in Detroit. The coach kept his cool and at end merely smiled you know Detroit play in a dome.

Finally, the piece de resistance Chiefs at Bills. This was the year the stars were aligning for the Bills. Burrow at Cinncy was gone for the season.  Going into week 14 at the Chiefs they were 6-6 they have been playing knock -out football since then. Here come the Chiefs led by Mahomes but it is their defence that are leading the way. The cold will hold no fear for the Chiefs. Watching the Bills against the Steelers on Monday night I watched their already banged up defence lose three more players. Its alright saying next man up but the barrel is only so deep.

If those stars do align and Buffalo go the whole way I wonder who will remember the Chiefs disallowed touchdown against them in week 14 that would have won the game

Offensive offside called as the WR had his foot over the line. Happens every game and not always called

For me it's Ravens, 49ers, Lions and Chiefs

Tho in the tipping competition my selections may be different 

Enjoy

    200 supporters clearing the walkways and terraces.Weather a bit warmer for tonights game.When Bills beat  Miami last week it was -10 with a wind chill factor of -27.Miami had lost 10 games on the trot playing in weather of -5 or lower.Who would have thought Bills play out of New York but New York Giants and Jets play out of New  Jersey.