I understand what you all are saying about standing out in those temperatures with an injury, but aren’t those sidelines kept warmer with heaters and other paraphernalia? I doubt the people on the sidelines are as cold as those in the stands.
I know Jordy Nelson has been traveling with the Packers for every game, but it was about 50° warmer in Washington today than Minnesota.
It’s a tradition in Philly to throw batteries.
http://www.theonion.com/article/d-battery-elected-to-philadelphia-sports-hall-of-f-32026
Yes I know that’s the Onion, but there is an uncomfortable amount of truth there. 
It was warmer than it would have been without the heaters but not warm at all according to players who were interviewed. Jordy Nelson tore his ACL and is not returning for the season (unlucky non-contact injury). That has nothing at all to do with someone who is attempting to get back for a game or 2 or 3 in the playoffs next week. Jordy is in long term rehab for next year.
Oh, I know Jordy is not expected back this year, but he has traveled with the team for every game. I did not see any of the interviews with the players on the field, but I doubt it was as cold on the sidelines as it was on the playing field. This is not the age of the Ice Bowl - they have technology to protect players on the sidelines; where it gets dangerous is when they’re out on the field for extended drives.
I say again: pfft. You’re a world class athlete who practiced in full all week. And I think the Seahawks should be glad about Marshawn leaving. He’s not who he used to be. I am though surprised at the Vikings fan sites where they all want to get rid of AP. Right after he won the rushing record again even after missing games.
re hating teams. Um. Hyperbole (for the vast majority of us fans). C’mon, you know that!
Re: hating teams. My mild-mannered, laid-back husband (the Packers owner!) hates the Vikings with a ferocious intensity. His favorite t-shirt shows an empty bookcase with the caption “Vikings Trophy Case.”
But even he felt sorry for the Vikings’ field goal kicker yesterday.
As a born and raised Packer fan, having suffered through a few decades of “meh” teams, and a couple of more recent decades of really exciting teams… We watched them slouch towards the playoffs during the last half of this season. We did not have much hope that they would win any playoff games this year.
The second half of last night’s Packers win reminded me of this line from Bull Durham:
“for one extraordinary June and July, the Durham Bulls, for whatever perverse reason, began playing baseball with joy and verve and poetry.”
“Has anyone ever seen anything like the Bengals’ fans throwing trash on the field? Sure, I’ve seen it in football/soccer matches around the world but I’ve never seen it in an American context.”
Philadedelphia fans are notorious for that kind of behavior, besides throwing snowballs at santa, they were known for throwing crap on the field. I have seen such kind of behavior more in baseball in the old days, like when Pete Rose slid into Bud Harrelson in the 73 ALS, and Mets fans started throwing stuff at the Reds players, to the point that the refs threatened to forfeit the game. They clamp down a lot more on that stuff today, from what I am led to understand back in the 50’s and 60’s, fans used to throw all kinds of things (back in the 1950’s, fans would have glass bottles at games, there weren’t the restrictions with bringing things in), I hear when the Dodgers and Giants played back then it was akin to civil war:).
I was more concerned when they were cheering when Rothlesberger got hurt, that really was low, the hardest thing for me in watching a football game is when players get hurt, especially when it looks serious, one of the nice feelings is when someone is laid out, and they are able to walk off the field or at the least, you can see they are responsive (having seen games where players were paralyzed, there is nothing scarier or sadder), and that fans from either team cheer that they are okay. I understand why they were angry, the hit on Bernard was dirty, I don’t care what the announcers or Mike Carey said, it was helmet to helmet, but that doesnt’ justify what happened, not at all.
Wow, I didn’t know that, @musicprnt. What is wrong with some people?
I missed the 3rd quarter so I missed the cheering. That makes me sick. I am a big hockey fan and there tends to be a lot of injuries during hockey games. I’ve seen some really bad ones and no matter which team a player was on, there was ALWAYS cheering at Joe Louis (Red Wings) when it became clear that the player was OK. You put your rivalries aside when it comes to health and safety. At least… you should.
On a related note… Pacman claims Brown was faking injury and winked at him: http://espn.go.com/nfl/story/_/id/14548113/adam-jones-cincinnati-bengals-says-antonio-brown-pittsburgh-steelers-was-faking-winked-him
Burfict got three games.
Really wish the Patriots were playing the Bengals instead of the Chiefs.
Brown was faking the injury?! I saw the replay along with the rest of America, and anyone can see Brown’s head ricochetting. What bs.
My father was at the Ice Bowl in Green Bay many years ago. It was cold. Remember Lombardi didn’t allow heaters on the Packers’ bench but did allow them for visitors (wimps). Anyway, at the Ice Bowl, my father and friends all had their hunting gear on so a lot of bright orange and red coats, hats, gloves. I remember him taking the brand new sleeping bags my brothers had received for Christmas. When they got to the parking lot, anyone in a station wagon (just about everyone!) parked them facing out in case they were needed as ambulances to take people to be treated for frostbite.
He came home and it took him 3 days to thaw out.
^ Hey, @twoinanddone - my father-in-law was at the ice bowl, too!
On a somewhat-related note, did you see Bud Grant at Sunday’s Vikings game? He walked out for the coin toss in a short-sleeved polo shirt! Even my Vikings-hating husband got a kick out of that.
That’s one of the genuine qualities of “Seattle Culture.” You just have to look down the road at the shenanigans in San Francisco during a Giants-Dodgers game (fan assaulted and ends up brain damaged), or across the country in the Bronx when a Red Sox fan wears his jersey at Yankee Stadium. Whatever happened to just enjoying the game experience in the stadium?
Bud grant when he was a coach was a tight-***, he was another coach that refused to let his players have heaters on the sideline (Minnesota played outdoors at the time he was coach), visiting teams had the heaters, and back then the teams were on the same side of the field, so the Minn players used to go over where the visitors heaters were. Personally, I think that is idiotic, all players being cold does is you end up with more injuries, it doesn’t toughen you up or make them play better.
I kind of wonder if the kicker missing the kick had to do with the air pressure in the ball. At those kinds of temps, below 0, a ball blown up to league specs indoors would be 9.5-10 pounds.
I heard this comment on the radio this afternoon and thankfully was able to find it in print. Carroll’s theory on the kick is that after Sherman came within a hair’s breadth of blocking the previous kick, the Vikings hurried their kicking mechanics which likely contributed to the imperfections in the snap, hold and kick. The tough conditions including a hard, flat ball left less margin for error.
Saw the movie Concussion today. I don’t dislike football because of it, but it makes me dislike the NFL even more!
^ I would be careful about treating it as an impartial documentary.
Another quote from the article:
Interesting…
It’s not a documentary, that would be League of Denial, which focuses more on the NFL’s CYA than it does on Dr. Omalu. At the end of Concussion, it says that the NFL estimates that 28% of players have a brain injury such as CTE. The researchers in the article below found it to be 79%-96%. Dr. Omalu thinks it is 100%. Neither of those numbers are mentioned at all in the film.
The film takes creative license with things to make it seem like the NFL was behind things like Dr.Omalu’s boss getting investigated at the Pittsburgh coroner’s office, when the investigation against him started before the paper was published, or implying that NFL goons were shadowing his wife and caused her to have a miscarriage.
The real thing the movie does bring up is how long the NFL spent denying the reality of traumatic head injuries, and how the culture around football actually made light of terrible injuries (in the movie, they show clips from sports shows on ESPN and the like, where you see some receiver getting knocked out by a helmet to helmet hit, and the talking heads laughing and joking about the guy ‘getting his head knocked off’). The one part the movie underplays was the role of the head of the NFL’s committee on head injuries, Pellman (who not surprisingly, was once the NJ Jets team doctor), and how he did everything he could to deny what was coming out, and to this day still claims there is no big deal with head injuries (meanwhile, the schmuck is a rheumatologist, not a neurologist), worse, after all those years stonewalling, he is still a consultant to the NFL, which tells you how f’ed up they are. One of the ironies was when you see Dave Duerson, who worked for the NFL for player affairs, denying retired players trying to get medical care for brain injuries, when this first came out he was one of those viciously attacking Omalu’s results, but then himself ended up screwed up.
The film also was toned down, the NFL lawyers did put pressure on Sony, the original screenplay was a lot more harsh on the NFL, especially on Pellman, who basically was the equivalent of the doctors working for the tobacco companies denying smoking caused health issues.
Deadspin had an interesting take on this, it was a writing of Peter King, a long island congressman, and it was in response to the Cincinnati/pittsburgh game, and the dirty play. King basically blasted the players, telling them to clean up their act with helmet to helmet and so forth, but Deadspin pointed out that King used as an example of the way players should play, a brutal hit that a player put on a receiver, where the receiver was literally knocked out, and because that was ‘legal’ it thus was okay…leaving out that that kind of hit causes the receivers head to decelerate at rates near 100gs, which is what causes the brain to get injured.
As far as the studies showing that pro football players live longer than average people, that is a bit of a deceptive statistic, because it talks only about longevity. A better study would be to show how football players fare with things like cognitive ability (what percent of football players end up with diminished mental capability versus the non football population; for example, one study I saw suggested that people who have played football are significantly more likely to develop dementia-like symptoms as they age versus the general public. Not to mention, of course, the players who end up addicted to drugs , things like painkillers, or the players who end up literally spending their last couple of decades crippled, those would be better studies.
I suspect that a lot of players, outside maybe kickers, have some level of the brain damage we are talking about, while he lived to a ripe old age and didn’t seem to suffer from negative effects, so what that indicates is that while many NFL players may end up with the syndrome, not all will develop the devastating effects.
The real answer is that those running the NFL have every reason to try and deflect, it is a 9 billion dollar industry whose brand is in marketing terms, incredible. For example, despite the claims of Goodell (who reminds me of an overpaid used car salesman), how the league does what it does ‘for the fans’ (I loved when he said during the lockout how the league was doing that to ‘protect the fans ability to go to the games’, when the reality is they were doing it to make more money for the owners and to support the corporate box holders and the like…most of the cost of new stadiums is in the luxury boxes and suites and the like, which ordinary seatholders end up paying for with the infamous PSL’s). Yeah, I have heard those talking about what NFL players can make, but the reality of the NFL is most players don’t last long enough to make the really big money, and does that really compensate them for being left invalids or worse? Among other things, the one thing we still don’t have is a reasonable way to let players know the risks, or how to if not prevent the brain injuries themselves, so that they can be treated or at a level where they don’t impair the player…and the NFL isn’t exactly going out of its way to seriously address those risks, most of what they have done so far was in the face of lawsuits that they knew they couldn’t win, either in court or in the court of public opinion.
I am not anti football, far from it, but I also want it to be a sport where players have a reasonable chance of playing it and living their lives normally as possible, and I also would like to see the NFL actually give a crap about the guys who are the ones drawing people to the games or watching them (and the players association isn’t much better, they were just as guilty, if not more so, than the NFL trying to deny the brain injuries).