Let's chat about the National Football League. This week's schedule (all times Eastern):
Sun 2024-11-17 1:00PM Green Bay Packers @ Chicago Bears
Sun 2024-11-17 1:00PM Jacksonville Jaguars @ Detroit Lions
Sun 2024-11-17 1:00PM Minnesota Vikings @ Tennessee Titans
Sun 2024-11-17 1:00PM Las Vegas Raiders @ Miami Dolphins
Sun 2024-11-17 1:00PM Los Angeles Rams @ New England Patriots
Sun 2024-11-17 1:00PM Baltimore Ravens @ Pittsburgh Steelers
Sun 2024-11-17 4:05PM Atlanta Falcons @ Denver Broncos
Sun 2024-11-17 4:05PM Seattle Seahawks @ San Francisco 49ers
Sun 2024-11-17 4:25PM Cincinnati Bengals @ Los Angeles Chargers
Sun 2024-11-17 4:25PM Kansas City Chiefs @ Buffalo Bills
Sun 2024-11-17 8:20PM Indianapolis Colts @ New York Jets
Mon 2024-11-18 8:15PM Houston Texans @ Dallas Cowboys
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Notes -
Week 12 thread now live: https://www.themotte.org/post/1258/weekly-nfl-thread-week-12
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I managed to snag $66 tickets for me and my buddies to see the Chargers play on Sunday night (the game got flexed to 5:20 PST) at SoFi Stadium. (There are a ton of tickets still available, to the point where the team is apparently all but begging people to purchase them, despite it being a primetime game.) It won’t be my first NFL game - I saw the Chargers play the Titans at the old Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego pretty much right before it got demolished - but it’ll be my first time at a proper modern NFL venue. I’ve heard SoFi is an absolute beauty.
I’m ready to fully pull the plug on my decade-long sojourn as a Jaguars fan, and go all-in on the team of my childhood; the vibes around the Bolts are just too immaculate, while the Jags have revealed themselves to be exactly as rudderless as their worst detractors have always claimed. Having an owner that just doesn’t understand American football on any level opens the organization up to be run by incompetent silver-tongued sycophants like Trent Baalke, long after a competent owner would have fired him. Not that the Chargers ownership has any great record of competence and football sense either, but I have to trust in Harbaugh and Hortiz to steady the ship; certainly they’ve given me no reason to doubt them thus far.
Much to my chagrin as a Raider fan, Harbaugh really does seem to be doing an admirable job of turning the Chargers around. It's infuriating that all three of our division rivals (even the Broncos are much improved) have had the good fortune and sense to hire known quantity, "can't go wrong" coaches and should be set for the next decade while we're going to have to undergo a total rebuild.
On the bright side, seeing the Charger turnaround at least leads me to believe that Tom Telesco can drastically improve the talent level on the Raider roster, assuming he can get us an at least decent quarterback. The Chargers have always had a talented, if underachieving roster while the Raider roster has been chronically talent-poor such that it's hard to tell where the roster problems end and coaching problems begin. The two feed each other given that only risky young coaches or known mediocre retreads will touch our current roster. Unfortunately nothing about his Chargers tenure or what we're doing this year leads me to believe that he can find the right coaching staff. We wasted Carr's prime years on a rebuild that never produced even an average defense and I'm afraid that we're going to run Maxx Crosby into the ground before we get an offense worthy of his effort.
As much as I don't want to blame Mark Davis for everything (IMO JDR and Gruden were probably the best coaches available in those given years, even though he overpaid for Gruden by giving him GM powers.), hiring Josh McDaniels (He really must have a silver tongue.) was so monumentally stupid that I'm at a loss for words, especially after we had a front row seat to his wrecking of the Broncos.
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In the week 7 version of this thread Rov_Scam had a long effort post about college football https://www.themotte.org/post/1209/weekly-nfl-thread-week-7/259169?context=8#context
Towards the end of his thread he made a prediction that at some point the traditional NCAA eligibility limits of playing 4 years out of 5 years at school would come into question.
Well, 4 weeks later, we have movement on that.
Vanderbilt QB Diego Pavia has sued the NCAA over it’s eligibility limitations.
https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/42286584/vanderbilt-qb-diego-pavia-suing-ncaa-eligibility-rules
So, it appears the basis of the lawsuit centers around the distinction between how years at a prep school and years at a junior college are counted.
Prep school years are basically counted as extra high school years, and don’t count against eligibility, junior college years are counted as college years, and do count against eligibility.
Pavia spent 2 years at New Mexico Military Institute, a junior college.
(Oddly, NMMI occasionally has prep schools on the schedule in 2018 and 2019 they played against Air Force Prep https://www.nmmiathletics.com/sports/fball/2019-20/schedule though the years I checked they never had more than 1 game against a prep school)
Anyway, as it stands now, it appears that this represents a fairly limited challenge to the eligibility structure, he doesn’t appear to be arguing that he should have open ended eligibility.
That said, the language the espn article quoted from the lawsuit, it’s not obvious why any of those arguments shouldn’t apply to open ended eligibility.
I’ll quote at some length:
“ "The JUCO Eligibility Limitation Bylaws neither promote competition nor benefit college athletes with respect to their impact on persons who attend junior colleges before transferring to NCAA schools," the lawsuit says. "These rules stifle the competition in the labor market for NCAA Division I football players, harming college athletes and degrading the quality of Division I football consumed by the public.
"These harms are contrary to Defendant's stated mission of promoting the well-being of college athletes and are the very ills federal antitrust law seeks to remedy. Pavia, and other former JUCO football players who are harmed by this illegal restraint, have a small window of time to compete in Division I football."
The lawsuit argues that the NCAA and its member institutions "have entered an illegal agreement to restrain and suppress competition" and are violating the federal Sherman Act.
The lawsuit says junior college transfers face eligibility restrictions that "are not placed on athletes who choose to delay entry to a Division I NCAA college to attend prep school, serve in the military, or even to compete professionally in another sport."
…
"Because Pavia cannot relive his short college career, the harm inflicted by the JUCO Eligibility Limitations Bylaws is irreparable and ongoing, and temporary and preliminary injunctive relief is necessary," the lawsuit says. "Pavia brings this action to put a stop to the unjustified anticompetitive restriction on universities who seek to compete for college athletes, and to restore freedom of economic opportunity for himself and other college football players."
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If you’ve watched Ted Lasso, Welcome to Wrexham makes for an interesting companion piece.
If you’re not familiar with the premise Hollywood actors buy a lower level soccer club. And then it follows their process of trying to get promoted up the various levels of UK soccer.
There are a lot of interesting things going on with the show, but of the things that stood lower level UK soccer is stand alone from the highest level of UK soccer in a way that struck me as unusual for American sports.
What I mean by that is the Wrexham is decidedly not a developmental set up. Of the players they follow, several of them are in their mid 30s, really good player in the lower levels is sort of where they’re going to top out in their careers, one goalie they follow was a prominent Premier League player, who they bring in for 1 last go around at the very end of his career.
We don’t really have that here, in baseball if you’re still hanging around the minors as a 30 year old, it’s a matter of time before you’re put out to pasture in order to open up a spot for a younger prospect, even if you’re on of the better players at that level. The lower level is subservient to the higher level (that’s basically the premise of Kevin Costner’s character in Bull Durham).
Anyway, it seems unlikely that Diego Pavia will ever be a great NFL prospect, he probably could be a quite good 32 year old college QB, he probably won’t get that opportunity.
The crumbling away of the NCAA institutional rule making ability seems likely to continue.
A federal judge on Tuesday denied Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia's request for a temporary restraining order that would grant him another year of eligibility https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/42367444/vanderbilt-qb-diego-pavia-denied-tro-request-added-eligibility
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Except we do. Minor league baseball teams have been controlled by their parent clubs since the 1920s, and exist specifically as developmental leagues for the majors. There's no similar arrangement between the NFL and college football. Given that the recent trends in college football have been toward maximizing the amount of money for all involved, there would be no real downside to colleges continuing to field older players if they thought it would make them more competitive. When you consider that most college players will never make the NFL, and that winning schools make more money, there are strong incentives toward a school keeping the best available players.
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