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San Diego will travel 5,478 miles to play New Orleans.
PHOENIX (Reuters) – The National Football League is returning to London next season for another regular season game with the San Diego Chargers playing the New Orleans Saints, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell announced on Friday.
The Saints will host the Chargers at Wembley Stadium on October 26, Goodell said.
In another international development, the commissioner said the Buffalo Bills would cross the border into Canada to play a regular season game every year in Toronto over the next five years starting this season.
Goodell, who did not specify the Bills’ opponent in this year’s game in Toronto, also said Buffalo would play a pre-season game every other year there.
Last season saw the NFL’s boldest international move to date when the New York Giants beat the Miami Dolphins 13-10 at Wembley in October in the league’s first ever regular season game held outside North America.
NFL Europe went bust in 2007. There was a team in London, but the Monarachs eventually moved to Berlin due to lack of fan support. Then why does the NFL feel the need to play regular season games in this city?
This season’s opener was played in London. On Saturday, the NHL announced its intention to play two games in Europe to open the 2008-09 season. From AP-
ATLANTA – Basking in the spotlight of its All-Star game, the NHL decided Saturday was the perfect time to unveil a big announcement for the start of next season: Four teams will get the honor of opening in Europe.
Maybe the league should have made sure the players were on board.
Saying there were still details to be worked out, the leader of the NHL Players’ Association objected to the league announcing two games would be played in both Prague and Stockholm to start the 2008-09 season.
Commissioner Gary Bettman said the New York Rangers are scheduled to meet the Tampa Bay Lightning at Sazka Arena in the Czech Republic, while the Ottawa Senators would face off against the Pittsburgh Penguins at the Globe Arena in Sweden’s capital city.
The games would be played Oct. 4 and 5 — assuming the Players’ Association signs off on the plans.
That might be a problem. Paul Kelly, the NHLPA’s executive director, said he was aware of the European games but warned the league not to make a firm announcement until the two sides worked out all details.
“If they want the Players’ Association to be a true business partner, then they have to include us in discussions about these matters at the earliest stages,” Kelly said. “We shouldn’t read about it in the press and we shouldn’t find about it after the fact.”
Kelly said he was approached by league officials Friday night and asked to sign off on the European games, which would mark the second straight year the NHL has opened its season on the other side of the Atlantic.
His response: “Look guys, you know we have a lot of details to work out. Travel, promotional issues, NHLPA involvement, accommodations, the schedule, etc. So there’s still lots of details to work out, but if you want to announce it generally, that’s fine.’
From Kelly’s statements, it appears the NHLPA is unhappy because they weren’t included in the decision making process. They should have been, but that’s water under the bridge now.
As to playing games in Europe, I don’t like it from the point of view of the Sports US fans. Both Pittsburgh and Tampa Bay will be losing one home game. If you’re a season ticket holder of either team, you have a right to complain. Why should your team have to play a home gain 1/3rd the way around the world? I didn’t like it when the Miami Dolphins agreed to play The New York Giants in London last year. Dolphin fans had more reason to be upset, considering they only get 8 home games a year, and the Giants were making a rare appearance in South Florida.
US football in Europe if it wasn’t a financial bust, was hardly a success either. As to hockey, most countries have their own hockey leagues. How many Czechs and Swedes are playing in the NHL now? Quite a few. I think local fans prefer to watch their own teams. Not ones brought in from another continent. Even if interest is generated, I’d bet it is only temporary.
It will be the second year in a row a regular season game was played there. From AP-
The league, which held its first regular season game outside North America in London last October, said Thursday it would come back again in 2008.
The teams, date and venue will be announced during Super Bowl week late this month or in early February.
The New York Giants beat the Miami Dolphins 13-10 in front of 81,176 fans at Wembley Stadium on Oct. 28.
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In 2006, NFL owners agreed to play one or two regular-season games outside the United States for the following five years. The Dolphins and Giants essentially volunteered for the 2007 game and are not expected to be asked to return in the near future.
You mean the Dolphins volunteered for this? If they did, management deserves one of my Knucklehead awards. The team’s fans in Florida deserved the home game, particularly those of us with New York ties. See the New York Giants never played a game at Miami till 1993. In 1970, the NFC and AFC began playing against each other’s teams. Through the quirks of the scheduling process and the 1987 strike, the Dolphins and Giants met only twice between 1970 and 1992(72 and 90) and both games were in New York. Only twice have the Giants played in Miami, 93 and 1996. The next time the teams will be slated to play in Miami is 2012 or 2016!
All NHL teams will meet again once every season. From AP-
PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. – The NHL’s board of governors approved the sale of the Nashville Predators and changed the league’s scheduling format Thursday night to allow every team to face each other at least once every season.
Paul Kelly, the new executive director of the NHL Players Association, also addressed the league’s owners during a late-afternoon session to open the board’s two-day meeting at an elite resort on the Northern California coast.
After a three-year experiment in developing rivalries in hockey’s far-flung outposts, the NHL voted to go back to the scheduling format used before the 2004-05 lockout, most notably decreasing the current eight games against every team’s divisional opponents to six.
Starting next season, teams will play just 24 total games against their four divisional foes, 40 against the rest of the conference and 18 against the other conference — one game against all 15 foes, and three home-and-home series against wild-card opponents.
First let me state, my interest in hockey was only rekindled in the last year. Otherwise I had watched little of the sport since the end of the NY Islanders Dynasty in the early to mid eighties.
The arrangement where teams didn’t all meet seemed dumb to me. Fans in the west miss out on seeing players like Sidney Crosby and fans in the east miss getting to see……. well see what problem I have. LOL, make that former Florida Panther and ace goaltender Roberto Luongo. Now I can learn about the LA Kings, San Jose Sharks etc. To be honest I’m sick of Atlanta. You would be too if you had to see the Thrashers and Panthers cross sticks eight times a year.
First the Miami Dolphins play a home game out of town, next up could be the Marlins.
Major League Baseball and Puerto Rican officials are working toward bringing the Marlins back to San Juan.
El Nuevo Dia reported discussions were underway to have the Marlins and Mets play a three-game series at Hiram Bithorn Stadium sometime next season. With Puerto Rican stars Carlos Beltran and Carlos Delgado, the Mets would be an attractive opponent for the Marlins, who would be the home team.
Yet the Marlins could end up playing another opponent on the Caribbean island if the numbers aren’t right. The Marlins are prepared to give up three home games only if it’s financially worthwhile. Mets-Marlins games generally are among the best attended Dolphin Stadium.
What’s next? The Florida Panthers playing playing the New York Rangers in Bangkok, Rio de Janeiro, or Gaborone?(Capital of Botswana)
Moving a New York series to another location is a kick in the balls to those Marlins fans who attend these games. The money matters more than the team’s fans. Then that has been the Marlins’ history for ten years at least.
The last Hurricane game will be played there on Saturday night. From the Miami Herald-
Yes, Hurricane fans, we know you love the Orange Bowl — and you will miss it. But you can’t take it with you. Not even one fistful of sod.
So said University of Miami football coach Randy Shannon and university President Donna Shalala on Monday in a jointly issued plea for decorum. They asked that fans please not storm the field and grab things — be they hunks of grass or chunks of goalpost — after Saturday’s 7:15 p.m. game against the Virginia Cavaliers.
The Virginia game will be the last played by the Hurricanes at their home for the past 70 years.
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In case some fans disregard their plea, Shalala and Shannon warned that there will be 300 Miami police officers on the field at the end of the game to ensure that no one tries to snatch a memento.
In addition to arrest, students would also face sanctions from the unversity, they said.
While the Hurricanes will be done with the OB, the stadium isn’t closing yet. So the seats will be needed for other events, including maybe high school football games. I know as recent as two years ago a State Championship HS game was played at the Bowl.
What a waste of manpower if 300 police have to be on duty at the game. Don’t police in Florida have something else to do? Like shooting out innocent people’s car tires or sue a family for a slip and fall after responding to call where a child almost drowned? Criminals can pretty much expect a free hand on Saturday to do their mischief.
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| Sunday, October 7, 2007 |
A classic movie line informs us there’s no crying in baseball. As Tim Tucker reminds us, there’s no loyalty, either.
Only two players in Atlanta Braves history have played more games for the team than Andruw Jones. Only two have more hits, more home runs or more RBIs. And none, of course, have made more game-saving defensive plays. Yet, when the Braves said an abrupt goodbye to Jones this past week, their fan base hardly revolted.
[...]
“In the 1970s and ’80s, even through the ’90s, it was upsetting to people when a player left,” said Dale Murphy, the Braves’ two-time National League MVP of the ’80s. “Now it’s part of the game. It’s more acceptable, more understandable, and fans move on a lot easier.”
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Baseball players began moving on with the advent of free agency 30 years ago, and the pace has accelerated with the soaring salaries of the past decade. Most teams annually juggle their rosters to balance their budgets. Players move around so much that it has become a laughing matter. A current television commercial for delivery company DHL has fun with the career of vagabond outfielder Kenny Lofton, who has been with 11 teams in 17 years, including the Braves.
In the past five years, Braves fans have said goodbye to a parade of entrenched stars — Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, Javy Lopez, Rafael Furcal. Now, Andruw Jones.
[...]
Only seven other active players have been with their original big-league team longer than the 11-plus years Jones had been with the Braves. And with the retirement last weekend of Houston’s Craig Biggio, the major leaguer with the longest tenure with his team is Braves pitcher John Smoltz (19-plus years).
To stay with a team for an entire career often requires concessions by the player, said Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn, who played all of his 20 big-league seasons with San Diego. “I made a point of never getting to free agency, because if you get to free agency you’re not sure how your team is going to handle it,” Gwynn said. “I always tried to get an extension two years before. You’re usually not going to max out on the dollars that way, but in San Diego, if you made it appealing for them to keep you, they jumped at it.” He wonders if a similar approach might have worked for Jones here. “With the agent he’s got, I don’t know if that was an option,” said Gwynn, referring to the hard-driving Scott Boras.
It’s a shame to see Andruw go. The bottom line, though, is that there are only so many people teams not named the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, or Cubs can afford to hand $20 million a year to.
Fans expect “loyalty” from their teams and players but it’s simply not realistic. The Braves can’t justify paying Jones the money he’s demanding and Jones can’t be expected to sacrifice $10 million a year or more to stay with the team if someone else out there is willing to give it to him.
Certainly, none of us would stay with our current employer if a similar firm was offering to double our salaries; it’s not fair to ask athletes to do that either.
Some how I knew this was coming.
NEW YORK – A New York Jets season-ticket holder filed a class-action lawsuit Friday against the New England Patriots and coach Bill Belichick for “deceiving customers.”
The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Newark, N.J., by Carl Mayer of Princeton Township, N.J., stems from the Patriots being caught illegally videotaping signals from Jets coaches in New England’s 38-14 season-opening win Sept. 9.
“They violated the integrity of the game,” Mayer’s attorney, Bruce Afran, told The Associated Press. “This is a way of punishing Belichick and the Patriots.”
Mayer is seeking more than $184 million in damages for Jets ticket holders.
Belichick was fined $500,000 by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, and the team was fined $250,000 for violating a league rule that prohibits clubs from using a video camera on the sidelines for any purpose — including recording signals relayed to opposing players on the field. New England also must forfeit a first-round draft pick next year if it makes the playoffs or a second- and third-rounder if it doesn’t.
“They were deceiving customers,” said the 48-year-old Mayer. “You can’t deceive customers.”
But how were Jets fans Patriot customers? The Jets are who the fans bought the tickets from. If Mayer’s clients sued the Jets, the team may not want to sell them tickets any more.
I wonder if I could sue Theodore Bikel then. Some years ago, my wife and I saw the stage musical version of Fiddler on the Roof at the local playhouse. Because of a musicians strike, the only music that night was supplied by piano. Bikel had fun with the Tevye dream sequence line in the show. “There were even musicians.” I didn’t pay one hundred dollars for my wife and I to see ‘Piano on the Roof’!
Mayer and Afran, who consider themselves public interest lawyers, have been thorns in the side of New Jersey politicians for years, filing lawsuits and demanding investigations to advance their grievances. They are well known in the state but generally have had little success in their causes.
Both have lost bids for elected offices, and Mayer once served as a presidential campaign adviser to Ralph Nader.
Now we know these lawyers are crackpots. Anyone who can advise Ralph Nader to run for President is certifiable.
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| Monday, September 24, 2007 |
Gregg Easterbrook believes we’ve just seen the tip of the iceberg on the cheating scandal involving the New England Patriots and that it could knock the NFL off its perch as the world’s most popular sports league.
And the Patriots’ cheating might have been more extensive than so far confirmed. Fox Sports reported that former NFL players believe Belichick had microphones installed in the shoulder pads of defensive linemen so the Patriots could tape other teams’ offensive audibles and line calls. Needless to say, putting microphones on players violates NFL rules. Andrea Kremer of NBC reported that several teams might charge the Patriots this week with having stolen playbooks from the visitors’ dressing room. The convenient “malfunction” of visiting teams’ headphones at the Patriots’ two fields under Belichick seems to have happened far too often to be an IT department error. The rumor mill says Belichick, Richard Nixon-style, has file cabinets of info on opposing coaches and assistant coaches – some gleaned honestly, some obtained by cheating.
It seems more than just an eerie coincidence that Belichick’s unethical behavior involves illicit taping, the same offense that made Nixon’s actions so sordid. The parallels to Nixon don’t stop there. Caught, Belichick – like Nixon – tried to hide the true extent of the prohibited acts; Belichick – like Nixon – tried to claim his prohibited action hadn’t been prohibited; Belichick – like Nixon – immediately stonewalled. It would be tempting to break the unhappy tone of this column with a Nixon joke – when the league plays Belichick’s tape of the Jets’ sideline, will there be an 18-and-a-half minute gap? But for all lovers of the NFL, there’s just nothing to laugh about now.
What else is there about New England cheating that the team or league isn’t telling us? Are the Patriots one bad apple, or is cheating common in the league? Worst, did the Patriots cheat in their Super Bowl wins? If New England was cheating in the Super Bowl, this will become the darkest sports scandal since Shoeless Joe and the Black Sox. If you don’t think Goodell and all owners, including Robert Kraft of New England, are in abject terror of any possible disclosure that the Patriots were cheating in the Super Bowl, perhaps you just don’t understand the situation.
The weasel wording of Belichick’s Nixonian statement shows the New England coach full of contempt for the NFL fans, and the NFL enterprise, that made him a wealthy celebrity. Belichick declared that his super-elaborate cheating system was only a “mistake” caused by his “interpretation” of the league’s rule. Wait, “interpretation”? The NFL rule bans teams from filming each other’s sidelines. There’s no room for interpretation, it’s a ban! Here’s the NFL policy, from a memo sent to all head coaches and general managers Sept. 6, 2006: “Videotaping of any type, including but not limited to taping of an opponent’s offensive or defensive signals, is prohibited on the sidelines, in the coaches’ booth, in the locker room or at any other locations accessible to club staff members during the game.” Prohibited. There’s nothing there to “interpret.” Videotaping opponent’s signals even after getting this warning isn’t a “mistake,” it’s cheating. Belichick’s cheating was not some casual spur-of-the-moment blunder but rather an elaborate staffed system that took a lot of work to put into place and that Belichick worked hard to hide. And you don’t hide something unless you are ashamed of it.
This is indeed worrisome, especially combined with other recent scandals involving athletes and even referees in other sports.
During last night’s Cowboys-Bears game, for example, there were three absolutely dreadful calls against the Cowboys in the first half, along with several questionable calls and non-calls that seemed to go one way. It certainly crossed my mind that the fix could be in.
Those fears were allayed when the Cowboys pulled away and won in a blowout in the second half. Still, that it even struck me as a real possibility is bad news for the game.
UPDATE: It’s not just my boosterism kicking in, either. SI’s Peter King:
I think this is my advice to officiating czar Mike Pereira after viewing a day of football Sunday: You have got to talk to your crews this week about some of the biggest phantom calls in recent times. They were all over the place, particularly from Ron Winter’s crew Sunday night. A phony interference call on Terrell Owens and a terrible illegal-block-in-the-back call on Jason Witten … those calls just can’t be supported on video. And they weren’t the only ones Sunday.
Quite right. Just bloody awful. The question is whether the officiating is incompetent or rigged. Neither answer redounds to the League’s benefit.
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| Saturday, August 25, 2007 |
The Atlanta Braves have just a few more games on TBS.
Over the past three decades, thousands of Braves games have been televised nationally on TBS. Just 10 more to go.Sunday’s Braves-Cardinals game and nine September games will end a tradition that began in 1977, when Ted Turner had the seemingly outrageous idea of bouncing his bad baseball team’s games off a satellite and across the nation.
It was an idea that would help shape the fledgling industry of cable television, as well as the business of sports media. For a while, the ubiquitous Braves even earned the moniker “America’s Team.”
But after years of declining ratings for Braves games outside the Southeast, TBS next season will replace the team as national programming with a package of Sunday afternoon league-wide games. TBS also will carry postseason games for the first time starting this fall, airing all four division series plus the National League Championship Series.
Braves games will continue to air locally next season on over-the-air channel WTBS, which will be renamed Peachtree TV, as well as on regional cable networks SportSouth and FSN South.
Truly a shame. The Braves are back to being a regional team and, as a Braves fan living outside the region (even though I’m in the South), that means no more Braves games on free TV. And I’m not willing to pay exorbitant fees to subscribe to a package containing mostly games that I won’t watch. Which means, inevitably, that I’ll eventually lose interest in the Braves and Major League Baseball.
MLB brought this on themselves, though. By allowing teams in gigantic media markets like the Yankees to make a fortune in “local” revenues while teams like the Braves and the Cubs were required to share revenue earned via their “national” superstations, the incentives were to move more games to niche stations. In turn, that meant that fans never knew where to turn for their games and stations like TBS couldn’t get into a programming rhythm.
The NFL has figured out how to make sure that its most attractive teams get on national television on a routine basis. MLB hasn’t. Which is why the ceased being “America’s pastime” years and years ago.
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