Posting the night before the Tennessee Titans crushed the Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving Day, FanHouse blogger Matt Snyder asks if the Lions are the worst team in NFL history. If they lose their next four games, they’d be the first ever 0-16 team. That’s hard to beat, especially when you factor in the ownership and the state of the local economy. Just brutal.
Oddly though, the Lions went 4-0 in pre-season.
I think I’d still take some of those Tampa Bay Buc’s teams from the late 70’s as the worst every.
Speaking of NFL blunders, Plaxico Burrress’s little accident offers a good reminder that guns can be dangerous. I blog on this from the persepctive of a small twon doc in Washington state at The Country Doc Report (http://thecountrydocreport.wordpress.com)
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The Bucs at least had the excuse of being an expansion team.
Plaxico? I’m not sure he has any excuses at all… :)
I am not the sports fan I once was, but I wonder where the Detroit Lions got their starting free safety. It was closing time at Moe’s and Barney told them he could play? Watching him get torched made me think, “I could have watched that receiver burn me.” Watching Kyle Orton last night made me think, “I could have thrown that interception.” Watching Brian Urlacher dance around the play last night made me wonder why people think he is a playmaker.
Football (including NCAA Div 1, where the football coach is the highest paid school, and sometimes the state’s highest paid public, official) is big business. I couldn’t give more than two shits about them, for the most part.
And don’t forget that the Motor City Kittens got screwed by the government as well, when they reversed course on Army safety Caleb Campbell, who the Lions drafted in the 7th round on the assumption that the Army had released him from his service obligation under a policy that allowed Academy athletes to play in the pros immediately after graduation if said athlete would serve as a recruiter while in the pros (a PR move, but a good one for the military), only to find that the DoD had struck down the policy two years earlier, and didn’t bother to inform anyone about it until Campbell had been drafted, and had completed his first minicamp with the Lions.
Yo, Broadway Joe, they didn’t get screwed by the government (did I misread your post? were you trying for irony?) USMA cadets sign a contract to serve on active duty at a two for one rate, one year of education for two years of active duty, if memory serves me well. If they guy wanted to play football, there are 100 D-1 schools that would have played him. USMA graduates are expected to serve in combat arms, i.e., armor, artillery, infantry, combat engineers. Some get commissioned into other areas, but they are expected to be leaders, not recruiters.
A few years back, DoD insituted a policy in which athletes at the Academies could be allowed to postpone their active service to play professionally. This was on a case-by-case basis, and it was seen as an attempt to raise the profile of the service academies, and the military in general.
Here’s the rule, from Wikipedia:
Cadets accepted into the program, “will owe two years of active service in the Army, during which time they will be allowed to play their sport in the player-development systems of their respective organizations and be assigned to recruiting stations. If they remain in professional sports following those two years, they will be provided the option of buying out the remaining three years of their active-duty commitment in exchange for six years of reserve time.”
The Army had suspended the rule (pending review), and ordered Campbell to return to his active-duty station, but didn’t notify the Lions for two weeks afterwards. The irony is that the same day he returned Active Duty, he was offered a three-year contract by the Lions.
Oddly enough, while Campbell chose Air Defense Artillery as his specialty, he’s currently an assistant coach at the Army Prep School.
We all know the commitment one must accept when you sign on the dotted line to enter a service academy. Campbell went willingly, and while he was disappointed at his sudden reversal of fortune, he knew what he’d gotten into when he went to West Point. It wasn’t his fault that the bureaucracy screwed him over. Not to mention the Lions.
Great. My response got rejected. Go read Campbell’s profile on Wikipedia.
Okay, I obviously was talking through my hat. I didn’t know the policy had changed.