Welcome to the Doug Pederson era, where expectations are low for a team that will probably blow most of its timeouts:


 Voila_Capture 2016-07-18_10-23-50_AM

I can hardly wait.

And hey, Doug-Doug-Doug-Dougy-Dougy-Doug-Doug is carrying over Chip Kelly’s sports science initiatives. Well, sort of. He’s keeping sports science guru Shaun Huls (top 5 name) around, but only in the same way that you might keep a phone book around– sure, it’s there if you need a doorstop, booster seat or a good laugh, but you’re not going to use for its canonical use. From Matt Lombardo’s piece on Pederson’s sports scienctiest:

“A lot of that stuff has been cut way back,” Pederson said during the Eagles’ mandatory minicamp. “I think it was introduced, and now, great, it was introduced. Now let’s pull back on it. If guys want it it’s there available to them, but at the same time we’re not going to force it down anybody’s throat, so to speak.

“The availability is there. But it’s been introduced to the team and they’ve been exposed to it for the last couple of years. At the end of the day, they’re football players. And, again, it’s that one-on-one communication. ‘How are you feeling? Are you getting enough sleep? I can tell if you haven’t slept last night.’ It shows up. Out here it’s going to show up.”

Are you getting enough sleep? If only they made scientific devices to track such things.

And, my prediction is that Doug will go down as one of the softest, most player-friendly coaches in Philly history:

“I can’t speak [on last year] because I wasn’t here for any of that,” Pederson said of the fractured relationship between Kelly and the players, that at least partially stemmed from sports science initiatives. “But just knowing what the guys have done this year and I get more and more either text messages or guys just coming and wanting to say hey and talk and hit me up at practice about certain things, like ‘hey coach, what about this or what about that.’

“So it gets me to think about what the players are really kind of into and what they’re thinking about. And I think too that you have to listen to the players. I mean, you have to listen to them. They’re the ones out there, they’re the ones playing, they’re the ones out there grinding every day, and if you’re not listening to the players, I think you’re just kind of stalemating yourself.

After watching a good chunk of All or Nothing on Amazon, I’m imaging what it would be like if a fringe roster guy approached Bruce Arians and requested that the team cutback on shuttle drills:

Voila_Capture 2016-07-18_09-12-10_AM

I’m not bullish on Pederson. Then again, I hated Charlie Manuel with a passion in 2005 and 2006.

Let’s hit it!

 

But first, a word from our sponsors:

Voila_Capture 2016-06-24_10-07-24_AM

Benjamin. Be all about him. Get one.

More. Already have all of our shirts? Check out Philly Phaithful.

Amazon. You’re going to buy shit, so just hit our link so we get a kickback for it.

 

The roundup:

Oh, it gets worse. Eliot Shorr-Park, fresh off being stalked on vacation and unfortunately not nosing with Taylor Swift in a far-flung ocean, on the reason Sam Bradford is still here:

According to a person familiar with the situation with requested anonymity, it was owner Jeffrey Lurie who was the driving force behind the team’s decision to re-sign Bradford, as opposed to top personnel executive Howie Roseman or head coach Doug Pederson.

You know you’re Al Davis when…

 

David Murphy with a hell of a takedown of Temple’s ill-advised football stadium:

We as a country have spent the last couple of years working ourselves up into a lather about stagnating middle-class wages, the exploding cost of higher education and the disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street. This week, Temple approved a 2.8 percent tuition increase. If this year’s middle-class income is anything like previous years’ middle class income, it will not have grown by 2.8 percent by the time the new school year rolls around. That means the average middle-class family paying for college just got poorer. If you were to plot the annual cost of college attendance on one line and the average income of a college-attending family on another, the space between the two would keep getting larger as the X axis kept extending into the future. That is not sustainable. At some point in our extrapolated future, four years of college ends up costing more than the 40 years of increased earnings a degree is supposed to provide. That point is called bankruptcy, also known as the point where an individual takes a hard look at his or her financial decision-making over the years and starts to identify things he or she probably could have done without. Like, say, a college with a Division I football program and a fancy on-campus stadium.

Well stated. But allow me to hop on with significantly less faux intellect and substantially more disregarding snark: Or, if you want to improve your facilities, win the National Championship and then have a rich hedge fund guy pay for it.

 

Dario Saric heard about our flight tracking, and he loved it. In an interview on 97.5:

Were you ready for people to interview you right in the airport?

DS: I didn’t know like people are so interesting about me, people like so excited because I’m coming. But now I see how is the town like ready for me to come here to try to help these guys, to try to help this team, and to celebrate games what they mean together with that fans. That’s the most important thing in whole story.

I mean is it scary at all? You had half this city tracking your flight, we knew what country you were flying over and when you were doing that.

DS: Yeah I heard that story, you follow my airplane on the internet to see when I am come, how many hours I need to come in Philadelphia, but I promise before two years I would come the only important… I coming for three hours or six hours doesn’t matter. I’m happy, I’m happy because everyone is excited in this story and I will give hundred percent to everybody. Make happy.

CB make Dario happy. Even if he does have stone on back.

 

https://twitter.com/taylorswift13/status/754894689900359680

#TeamTaylor

 

Mets fan playing Pokemon at the ballpark:

Fun fact: Saw a kid riding his bike around the neighborhood the other day, looking at his phone, stop in the middle of the street, without looking up, to capture a Pokemon. Same kid, Saturday night, slightly after dusk, is still riding his bike, alone, through the neighborhood, staring at his phone. Strange times, we’re in.

 

Strong metaphor here:

 

Emmanuel Acho – bless you – arranged a summit between athletes and cops in Austin.

 

SHOCKING: Russia was cheating:

Evidence has confirmed a Russian whistle-blower’s claims of government-ordered cheating at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, a two-month investigation commissioned by the World Anti-Doping Agency found, intensifying pressure on the International Olympic Committee to discipline Russia ahead of this summer’s Rio Games.

In Soviet Russia, drugs take you!

 

This is apparently John Smallwood in the comments of a Keith Pompey article about the Sixers. Behold, idiocy:

Voila_Capture 2016-07-18_09-32-32_AM

OK, Smallwood is probably referring to Jerryd Bayless and Gerald Henderson – low-mid-level free agents the Sixers signed to form at least some semblance of a real basketball team – but the fact that he, like so many others, can’t grasp that Hinkie was trying to lose to eventually improve the talent is mind-boggling. There was a scene in Billions this season where Bobby Axelrod’s wife, Lara, confronted her ex-boyfriend, Mikey, a firefighter upset that Axe profited off 9-11, about the outrage directed at her husband despite the fact that he had donated tons of money to the department over the years:

Lara: After all the support? I mean, all the money that Bobby’s poured into the Firefighters Foundation?

Mikey: I guess the sentiment is his money’s cheap and dirty.

Lara: Quarter of a billion dollars cheap? Over the past dozen years?

Mikey: I don’t give a fuck.

Lara: Nobody did anything to hurt you guys. It’s just circumstance. I’m hoping you can carry that message.

Mike: Nah, I don’t see it like that. And I’m not carrying that message anywhere.

Lara: Then you’re a fucking simpleton, and that is why it didn’t work out between us.

Smallwood, Hayes, Eskin et al. are fucking simpletons. They can’t set aside their own emotional response to Hinkie violating some unwritten code to see the bigger picture.

 

Maybe someone should show this to Marcus Hayes:

 

OH COME ON AS IF 76 WASN’T BAD ENOUGH:

Technically, as we’ve learned from Harrison Ford, that’s not Air Force 1, because the President is not on-board. It’s not even the 747 he usually flies. But still, cool pic.

 

Ichiro has four games in Philly to get the now only six hits needed to reach #3,000.

 

The Phillies are batting .222 at home this year. Not gonna be witty or clever about that fact.

 

The Sixers traded the rights to Chu Chu Maduabum to the Cavaliers for Sasha Kaun and cash. Kaun was immediately waived. This feels like a bad parody of a Hinkie trade: Give up low-level asset to take on contract someone doesn’t want just to waive them? Very Hinkie. Doing that and not getting a draft pick for your trouble? Not very Hinkie.

 

Jahlil Okafor and Jerami Grant are both part of the Team USA Select Team of your players chosen to practice with the big boys on the national team, but Okafor will be limited to non-contact work.

 

Johnny Manziel going around dressing like background characters in Beetlejuice now?

 

Some baseball players still want to be able to yell at a person, and not a robot, about balls and strikes.

They could always call it Mr. Robot.

 

Podcast:

Newest episodes. More coming this week.

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/273841709″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/273387714″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]