very surprised to see no discussion about this yet: did the right 4 teams get into the playoff? i think so.
Army did it! Woo hoo! One happy Corps tonight. 
@musicprnt – what a game to attend! Hope you kept warm. Any comments? We saw our cadet on TV in the sea of faces right after the first turnover. So happy.
Go Army!
Uh oh. SEA vs GB today. This is always rough at my house because I’m a 12 and DH is a Cheesehead.
AZ lost to Miami, so the Hawks can clinch the NFC West with a win today.
4 picks and a 42 passer rating for Wilson… Seahawks aren’t clinching anything today.
I was watching the Seattle game, and they inexplicably switched coverage to Tampa Bay/New Orleans.
@Nrdsb4, yep I was watching too.
Going to be rooting my Boys on and clinching the east!
They switched because Sea-GB was a blowout! If you are a Seattle fan maybe you care, but everyone else (well… me at least) would rather see a close game.
But I wanted to see Pete sweat, and they denied me that pleasure.
Here in Seahawks country we never get to watch my Pack, so hurrah!!! And a beat down to boot-- sweet.
@choatiemom:
We didn’t go to Army-Navy, we were at their last home game against Morgan State (whom they destroyed). The Army-Navy game was one for the ages, I know people will say Navy didn’t have their QB, etc (no one said that last year when Army lost with their 2nd string QB), it was an exciting game, to say the least.
Well, the Jets won in another version of the Tidy Bowl, two crap teams playing out the string (Chip Kelley should be fired for losing the Jets game as for anything). The only highlight was watching Billal Powell tear up some yardage, it just goes to show that if the Jets keep Chan Gailey they deserve what they get, the man is absolutely clueless. Nothing against Forte, he is a great back, but the Jets could put both of them in the backfield and have a field day, because both can catch as well, but Gailey is playing college spread offense BS, and has about as much creativity as a block of stone grrr.
I expect Todd Bowles to get a 10 yr extension of his contract after this “brilliant” win, it is the way the Jets management thinks, win a game against a crap team and suddenly you are a superstar blah. Meanwhile, the Jets gave up how many yards rushing in this game, supposedly their strong point? And Bowled is a defensive genius? I don’t think Bowles or the GM should be fired, they do deserve to have at least another year to show where they are headed, but I am not optimistic. If they bring back Gailey as the OC, that tells you this is a dead string, he is not a great HC or OC, and he certainly is not the person to turn Petty into a decent quarterback (for all the talk of Gailey as this QB whisperer, when you look at how QB’s have played for him, the ones who went on to be great QB’s did only average under him). Only thing scarier was someone mentioned trying to get Norv Turner as OC, god help us, he turned Phillip Rivers from being a near elite QB into being a loser, not to mention what he did other places…
Has anyone heard anything about this?
I don’t think Harbaugh is going anywhere. He’s worshiped on campus. But hey, I don’t know that much about him so maybe he does want to go back to the NFL.
Why would Harbaugh subject himself to the masochistic experience of coaching the Rams? He’s paid $7M a year to be at Ann Arbor, one of the best football coaching jobs in the world. He’d be crazy to leave after this season.
Harbaugh isn’t going back to the pros, I guarantee it, after his experience with the 49ers, plus as a college coach having the kind of power he does with recruiting and controlling the program (pro football players are not the serfs college football players are, a pro team will sack a coach if a diva player doesn’t like him, no college fires a coach for a player). Plus being worshipped the way he is (and it shows just how much a coach can do, anyone remember just how pathetic Michigan was under the prior coach?), would be kind of stupid to give up that power and that kind of money for the NFL, being the head coach at U Mich might be more prestigious than being the coach of the Rams or other mediocre franchises.
Interesting thought question, how much does the ownership of a team matter? I ask this question in light of something Jets fans have known (and pundits are starting to realize), a lot. With the Jets, they blame Woody Johnson because he doesn’t really have the connection to the game other ownership groups do, and yet he meddles in the affairs of the team without having anyone to bounce those ideas off of. Obviously, the Jets malaise goes back before he owned them, but a lot of the same things could be said for Leon Hess as well. Who else would hire an executive search firm to hire a GM (the late, unlamented “Idzik!”, the rant of the Jets faithful)? Right now, we have a team where the coach and the GM report to the owner, which works in some cases (somehow, I doubt craft would have Belichick reporting to a GM), but here can pit them against each other. Then, too, a lot of football executives off the record have been quoted as saying that Woody made a mistake using Charlie Casserly as his advisor on searching for a coach and GM, that his track record would have made other owners give pause…
Leaving out the cesspool that is the Jets (being proud of beating SF would be like being proud of beating the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople club team) for now, assuming this is true (and I do), then what kind of things make for a successful ownership? I don’t think there is one magical formula, I expect it depends on how the team is owned and run (Green Bay is going to be very different than Dallas, a ‘people’s team’ versus a Stalinist dictatorship lol), but what makes for a successful owner? (Unfortunately, other than Woody realizing he is a loser and selling the team, or he gets named ambassador to a country that has a revolution and they decide to get rid of all ambassadors in the country, not likely to happen) or ownership group?
There’s no football like Michigan football. Go Blue!
$7M to live and play in Ann Arbor? Who in their right mind walks away from that? 
Nice P.D.Q. Bach reference!
Ownership matters, but more in the negative sense, IMO. That is, “bad” ownership can actively reduce your team’s chances of winning, but “good” ownership is not in-and-of-itself sufficient.
If you look at the most successful teams recently - Patriots, Seahawks, Steelers, Packers, Broncos, Giants, maybe Ravens - I think the modus operandi of the owners is to put good football people in place, and then don’t meddle. Robert Kraft never overrides Belichick about player decisions, even when the entire region is screaming for him to pony up a few million to keep a popular player. He’ll go on the radio and say things like “he’s one of my favorite players and I hope we can sign him”, and that’s totally in his control but he never overrides Belichick. The Steelers have had 3 head coaches in 40 years.
Green Bay, of course, doesn’t have an owner to meddle.
Jerry Jones thinks he’s a GM, and the Cowboys have been mediocre for a long time. When the owner replaces the coach every year or two because they don’t see instant success, they are never going to succeed. Does anyone want Dan Snyder to own their team in place of the current owner? When owners don’t pick good football people to run the football operation, and let them do their job, the team will suck.
There’s a lot of luck involved as well, mostly around getting legit QB. Where would the Patriots be if they hadn’t drafted Brady in the 6th round? Would Belichick still be there 16 years later? Maybe, but they wouldn’t have gone to 6 Super Bowls. Almost all successful teams have great qbs, and that makes ownership’s job easy.
Here in Chicago we have the same question. Does the Bear’s recent ineptitude point to problems in ownership, the QB, the GMs, the coaches, or all of the above?
The team is still quite profitable and the value is increasing, so maybe ownership doesn’t really care about winning? Or just a combination of bad decisions snowballing to leave us in this current mess?
Does a good owner make a huge difference? Or is it really the GM? Or is coaching the key? Or is it really just a few years of good luck?
I don’t know.
Obviously luck plays into things as well, injuries can decimate a promising team, and the draft is a crap shoot, as is draft order.
I think that it can be a subtle thing. Sure, we can point to Dan Snyder, or the moron who owns the Cleveland Browns as prime examples of bad owners, or the guy who owns the Jaguars, where the meddling is outright, changing coaches, signing players the coach and/or gm don’t really want then insisting they play, etc. It is even worse when there is an ownership group, look at the Giants with the Mara siblings, where the league basically told them to step back in the early 80’s and got them to hire George Young, who built a multi superbowl winning team.
I tend to agree that the best owners are hands off, but that comes at a price, too. The Jets had Leon Hess, who gave the jets a succession of bad coaches and gm’s in between some seasons of doing somewhat well, or for example fired Pete Carrol after one season while leaving a putz like Rich Kotite to drag the team down, so the owner has to be involved enough to see when things are going south, yet also give a coach and GM the chance to implement their strategy. Part of the problem with the Jets and Giants in the 1970’s was they didn’t have to win, the teams had 15 year waiting lists at one point for season tickets, you couldn’t buy individual tickets for many years (the new stadium and PSL did a number on that). Part of the problem is that financially, owning a mediocre team still pays off, in the form of the shared tv revenue and the merchandising and such. The NFL doesn’t penalize bad teams by telling them “your team stinks, you drive down ratings, so you only get X% of the tv revenue”, it is shared evenly whether you are Cleveland or the NE patriots.
I think the best owners are people like Bob Craft or the Rooney family or even the Tisch/Mara ownership of the Giants. I can criticize the Giants for letting Jerry Reese run the team into the ground, including letting the defense become horrible, but I am pretty certain that the owners after last year put the screws to Reese and he responded by actually building a great defense, literally turning it 180, from the dreck he had Coughlin put on the field last year (I thought they should have canned Reese and kept Colonel Tom personally). Craft hasn’t had to do much, he trusted Belichick from the start and let him guide things, even though at times people wondered (like for the more than a few years where the pats won on Brady’s arm, where their pride and joy defense became generic).
I think the line in the end comes from accountability versus panic, that the best owners understand accountability but also realize to make coaches and gm’s accountable, they need to be the ones in charge. One of the reasons Craft and the Rooney Family and the Mara/Tisch giants ownership, or the executives running the packers, have been so good is they are tied into the rest of the NFL, Mara and Tisch are active in ownership groups, they watch practice, they talk to other executives, get to know them, whereas from what I know Woody and the guy who owns the Browns and the guy who owns the Jaguars don’t network, don’t get involved in the league affairs much,and don’t have a feel for finding the people they need to build their teams.