DeSean Jackson posted a faux macho picture with his dogs today in a Tweet I interpreted as: Go ahead, break into my house again. At first blush it seems a little threatening, but that’s until you OH MY GOD THE RED ROCKET. RUFF RUFF RUFF RRRRRAARRR RUFF RUFF RUFF RUFF RUFF RUFF RUFF.
Poor guy didn’t expect that thing to end up on Instagram. The pitfalls of social media, I tell ya.
PICK A SIDE, EVERYONE! PICK A SIDE! SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS.
DESEAN JACKSON IS OUT. HE’S A BAD GUY. LIL TERRIO IS A BAD INFLUENCE.
DESEAN JACKSON IS NOT OUT! HE’S NOT A BAD GUY. LIL TERRIO IS STILL A BAD INFLUENCE.
In the out camp, we have slightly-nerdier-looking Jimmy Kimmel, Geoff Mosher of CSN Philly, who says that the Eagles have had it – HAD IT! – with Jackson and his irresponsible behavior of… people breaking into his house while he’s away:
For a variety of reasons, mostly financial, Jackson’s days with the Eagles are likely numbered. His salary this year jumps to more than $10 million and remains over $9 million annually through 2016. His lithe body frame doesn’t really fit with coach Chip Kelly’s preference for big bullies. And despite his world-class speed, Jackson isn’t an irreplaceable piece of Kelly’s spread offense, which also features NFL leading rusher LeSean McCoy and rising tight end Zach Ertz.
Although he’s not nearly the malcontent who, by his own admission, handled his 2011 contract dispute with poor judgment and petulance, Jackson remains an enigmatic figure for a head coach who is agitated quickly by me-first behavior.
According to multiple sources familiar with the team’s thinking, two incidents haven’t gone unnoticed by the front office. First, Jackson lobbied for a new contract less than 48 hours after the team’s first-round playoff loss to the Saints. Then shortly thereafter, police in January reported $250,000 in stolen cash and jewelry along with a handgun from the receiver’s South Philadelphia home during a break-in while Jackson was vacationing.
In the in camp, we have a guy who was once punched by Les Bowen, Jeff McLane of the Inquirer, who says that the Eagles have not had it – NOT HAD IT! – with Jackson and his irresponsible behavior:
Media reports surfaced this week that the Eagles could be open to trading Jackson or that he is one more slipup away from being released, but they are purely speculative, according to several NFL sources.
Jackson is not close to being cut, and even if he was one misstep away from forcing the Eagles to move him, they most certainly would not release him without getting something in return.
The Eagles do not respond to rumors. It wouldn’t be in their best interest to feed a reporter this sort of information without attribution – as a “team source” – because refuting speculation would be acknowledging it.
But after checking in with almost a dozen sources from around the league, it’s clear the Eagles aren’t interested in dealing the 27-year-old Jackson – not by a long shot.
Look, McLane is the Eagles’ go-to guy when they want to leak a story or give their side. He writes for the big boy paper (a sentiment similar to something Lenny Dykstra once said to Frank Fitzpatrick). So consider me skeptical on the Eagles not commenting on this.* However, I’m still inclined to side with McLane here. Mosher’s argument is essentially that Chip Kelly won’t tolerate a player like DeSean Jackson. But this is the NFL– what DeSean does in his free time, to date, is tame compared to other guys on the team and in the league (you can argue that LeSean McCoy and Jason Peters and Riley Cooper are more destructive off the field). It wouldn’t make much sense if the Eagles wanted to part ways with DeSean because he raps. He also catches deep balls, many of them. And despite all his nonsense, he’s a good player. His biggest crime may be the way-too-heavy filters he uses on Instagram.
*Not saying this is the case with McLane, but this is the way it works, folks. Sources close to the team, familiar with the situation are usually the actual person or team or whatever. They can’t speak on the record, but they need their side out there regardless. It’s really not unethical because the net result is information getting out. It’s just the way this thing works. It’s how your sausage is made. And it can be very delicious.
I’ve been beating this drum for years: the Eagles really, really need to do something about the Midnight Green and embrace the whole Nike design aesthetic. And since Christina Lurie, a big proponent (read: the reason) for the MGs, is now outside the circle of trust (replaced with a younger, more exotic being!), help may be on the way, dear.
It’ll be Nike’s job whenever it happens. But for now, one graphic designer, Jesse Alkire, has taken it upon herself to mock up some concepts*, and the results are pretty outstanding:
I don’t like the shape of the wings– they’re too Oregon. The colors– too Michigan State. But this is a really good start.
Alkire explains:
A lighter, more nimble look for the Eagles leaves behind the often clunky and heavy mix of dark green and black. Silver shoulders feature stitching representative of wings. An aerodynamic custom letter and number type, with strong edges and points reminiscent of an eagle’s tapered feathers.
Good stuff. Modern, not too ridiculous, almost Kelly Green.
See the rest of Alkire’s NFL concepts here.
*Logo and uniform concepts have become the hipster thing on the webzzzzzzz. All good for now, but we’re one “NBA logos as K-Cup lids” portfolio away from them jumping the shark.
via (@TheMightyEROCK)
“I’m… dumb?” Photo credit: Joe Camporeale-USA TODAY Sports
I am all for the NFL doing away with the extra point, forcing a two-point attempt, shrinking the goal posts or having a dance-off for the seventh and final point with the loser getting death. But this, this makes no sense:
The NFL Competition Committee has discussed experimenting this preseason with a longer — much longer — extra-point try. According to one member, the committee’s meetings this weekend included preliminary talks about placing the ball at the 25-yard line for the extra-point kick — which would make it a 43-yard attempt — rather than the 2-yard line, where it is currently placed.
Last season, kickers missed just five of 1,267 extra-point attempts, a conversion rate of 99.6 percent –so good that Commissioner Roger Goodell recently suggested the demise of the extra point could be imminent, because it is almost automatic, and thus not exciting enough. A longer extra-point try certainly would make things more interesting and require significantly more strategizing. The conversion rate of field goals between 40 and 49 yards last season was 83 percent. The last time the extra-point conversation rate regularly fell below 90 percent was in the 1930s and early 1940s. That surely would give coaches something to ponder when weighing whether to kick for one point or try for two, with the success rate for two-point conversion attempts typically around 50 percent.
You know what, good idea. In fact, let’s make it one point from the 2, two points from the 20, three points from the 43, and four points when you set the net at 20 feet and Jonathan Taylor Thomas is your kicker*:
The extra point is a joke. Teams spend all this effort going down the field and then, once in a blue moon, get screwed because their kicker stinks or a long snapper isn’t married to Julie Dorenbos. All the concept of the extra point does is add a variable to what should be a fixed scoring system. It, by its very nature, is not a fair measure of the better team. It’s like the shootout in hockey, or if baseball decided extra inning games with a home run derby. But since the NFL is insistent on keeping it around, then it should be a two-point attempt or nothing. At least there’s some skill involved in that. I’m sure that’s the goal with moving the kick back, encouraging coaches to go for two, but, as pointed out by Deadspin, coaches are risk adverse and will just take the higher percentage shot– the kick. But at 83%, a game with six touchdowns, which should be 21-21, will have one team that misses one kick, causing someone to lose 21-20. That’s what’s going to happen. Tie games with more than five touchdowns combined won’t be tied because the NFL is ratings obsessed and wants to ruin its product. Dumb.
*Apparently the NBA is seriously considering this and I am flummoxed.
#Eagles confirm the release of Jason Avant. "There have not been any players who've represented Eagles with more class and dignity" — Lurie
— Eliot Shorr-Parks (@EliotShorrParks) March 4, 2014
Goodbye, Jason Avant. Your sure hands will be missed.
I’ve always kind of liked Bob Ford, so I’ll go easy here.
In the Inquirer on Friday, Ford wrote about Riley Cooper and why the controversy this summer couldn’t have happened without the help of friends and this website:
In the interim, a lot of things happened. The video made its way from the phone of a young lady who was hanging on the periphery of the action that evening and into the hands of some high-quality friends who eventually thought they would like to make some money by messing up someone else’s life.
The argument can be made that Cooper messed up his own life with his actions, and that is beyond debate, but the denouement couldn’t have taken place without the help of some dirtbags seeking fortune they hadn’t earned and a website willing to trade a little money for a lot of attention. You are free to pick out the villain of your choosing, but there aren’t any heroes in this little story.
I am so baffled by this reaction for so many reasons.
1) It’s worrisome to me that a longtime reporter at a major newspaper would disparage the common folk for running to the media (I use that term since the video was offered to many outlets) when they witnessed – and recorded – what was undoubtedly a newsworthy event– a professional football player dropping nigger in the middle of a crowd on the field he plays on. The media wouldn’t be able to function without eyewitness accounts and tips. And these people weren’t friends… they were in the vicinity of Cooper at the concert and they saw something noteworthy, hateful and mean.
2) It’s also absurd to me that a longtime reporter would disparage a website – in this case: me – for seeking out a newsworthy video and posting it. From now on I’ll just assume that every time the Inquirer discovers and breaks a story, Ford has a problem with it. The paper will be the villain for drawing attention to an unfortunate incident.
3) Willing to trade a little money for a lot of attention. This continues to be the reaction to the Cooper thing that is most puzzling to me. I get why some – roughly 10% – of Eagles fans had a problem with me, a fan, paying for and posting something that was well beyond tongue-in-cheek snark and actually damaging to a local player and team (never mind the fact that Cooper had a career year and just signed a $25 million contract). I think they’re wrong and, given the chance, would’ve done the exact same thing. But I get it. Some people can’t hold dichotomous views. They can’t separate the intangible nature of being a sports fan from the real world. That’s cool. But how does Ford, someone who is paid by a (dying) business to comment and report on the world, write that sentence with any sort of a negative connotation and follow with “the villain of your choosing”? I don’t pay any writers (yet). I don’t have people out in the world as my eyes and ears. I see literally no difference between paying for a photo or video that already exists and paying a photographer, proactively, to take that photo or video. It’s a different world, one in which people like Ford aren’t comfortable. It’s a world where I can sit back and wait until something happens and then decide if it’s worth paying to cover. It’s smart business. It makes total fucking sense. I paid $150 to break a national story. Willing to trade a little money for a lot of attention? No shit. Somewhere, a business professor is concerned that Ford doesn’t see the merit in this sort of thing. Ford’s bosses wish they could figure out how to operate that efficiently. Knowing what would happen, they would’ve paid a videographer $5,000 to show up and get the video. I probably lean a little left, but I hate the idea that there’s something wrong with making a no-brainer decision like that. If it was a nonsensical TMZ thing where a guy’s drunk at a bar doing nothing wrong? Fine. There would be plenty of room for criticism. But you won’t find a media outlet or reporter who could realistically argue that something like the Cooper thing wasn’t worth covering. Some are just too weirdly liberal to understand Business 101.
Keep up the good work, Bob.
Donovan McNabb is still working on the Twitter thing. Still working on the media thing. Still working on not being a complete egotistical jackass.
He played here throughout a large portion of Allen Iverson’s career and, in many ways, was the anti-AI. Five was a clean-cut guy from a stable family who stayed out of trouble and rarely was involved in controversy away from the practice facility. He was also a superstar and led his team to the Super Bowl. Iverson was rough around the edges, the child of a young single mother, was always in (legal) trouble and made all sorts of headlines away from the court. He was also a superstar and led his team to the Finals.
On the surface, you’d think that it would be McNabb who is beloved in Philly. But nope. It’s Iverson. And it’s not even close. This you know: Iveron’s brutal honesty and balls-firmly-outside-the-shorts style of play endeared him to Philly fans almost immediately. McNabb’s laugh-and-stick-your-tongue-out-and-blame-someone-else style is from Part 1 of the How to Get Philly to Hate You missive.
I’m sure Five never quite grasped why fans gravitated toward AI more than him. [Actually, he probably thought it was someone else's fault.] But when last night he tweeted his congrats to Iverson, it seemed like a nice, thoughtful gesture:
A few hours later he found the retweet button, and in doing so answered the question posed in the Tweet from Mr. Hays:
You see, the difference is that everything Iverson says is real, is visceral. He says and does what he’s feeling– good or bad, right or wrong. He could park his Bentley in front of an emergency room entrance to run in and grab a Coke out of the hospital’s vending machine causing someone to die in the process because they couldn’t get to the operating room in time… and he’d say something so honest and profound afterward that we’d be like, yeah, you know what, everybody makes mistakes and this was one of his. McNabb, on the other hand, he’s so goddamn self-absorbed that he can’t string together a sentence (literally, sometimes) without straining it through a filter of self so thick that it comes off as though he rehearsed it 20 times in front of the evil queen’s mirror, which undoubtedly told him that he is indeed the Fivest of them all. It’s always about me. Me. Me. Me. I. I. I. Fuck you!
Howie Roseman isn’t fucking around this week. The Eagles announced today that they extended Jeremy Maclin on a one-year deal worth $5.5 million and up to $6 million.
Jeff McLane points out that Maclin will make more next year than Riley Cooper, which may indicate who the Eagles think will be their number two receiver. But. But Cooper signed a multi-year extension, Maclin didn’t. If Maclin is close to what he was before his injury, than he’s probably the number two. But if he starts off slow, it’ll be Cooper.
Good video on Eagles website about Maclin’s injury narrated by Scott Graham, who’s now the voice for anything within a 40-mile radius of Philadelphia. He’s the only guy who can make a round of golf sound profound.
UPDATE: Love this:
Maclin: We couldn't agree on a mult-year deal, so I agreed to a one-year deal. #Eagles
— Eliot Shorr-Parks (@EliotShorrParks) February 28, 2014
