Friday, July 30, 2010

Future lame headline: "Tebow Jockeys for QB Position"

As expected, Tim Tebow's contract got done before Denver's real training camp actually commences this weekend. Now comes the potentially annoying part of things. Once we get into the season, Tebow will likely either not play or see limited time in a specialty role of some sort. Between now and then there is lots of room for insane levels of over analysis about each day's workout and what it means. The answer is: nothing. Even preseason games, where there's almost no gameplanning, will mean very little unless Tebow looks completely befuddled out there. All rookie NFL QBs who eventually turned out to be solid pros have still taken their lumps, from Peyton Manning on down. They didn't all have "First Around the PTI on SportsNation" debating every move they make daily. I hope this next month doesn't go that way, but given Tebow's stature I suspect it will.

Peter King of Sports Illustrated is doing a daily "postcard" from whichever NFL camp he happens to be visiting, with the Cincinnati Bengals yesterday's team. As you'd expect most of it focuses on skill position guys and so forth, but one part of it is hilarious to me. (I'm not a Bengals fan.) According to King, Cincy coach Marvin Lewis is upset with Alabama's coaching staff. He feels they weren't honest enough in warning him that last year's first rounder Andre Smith might have a suspect work ethic. That's the same Andre Smith who appeared to have prepared for the predraft combine by eating a honeybaked ham per day and then left the event early without telling anyone. It's the same Andre Smith who became a punchline throughout the football world for his flopping manboobs after a shirtless run during a disastrous workout. To not have grasped that Smith was a major question mark when it came to work ethic required an astonishing level of naivete and incompetence that only the Bengals were able to provide. Lewis's complaint is ridiculous - if Nick Saban had hired a banner plane to fly around Cincinnati with a sign saying DON'T DRAFT ANDRE SMITH BECAUSE HE'S A FAT LAZY BUM the situation couldn't have been any more obvious. The Bengals simply chose to ignore that and much like when they ignored Odell Thurman's well known character issues and took him in round two it appears to have blown up in their face.

USF football is trying to move forward with Skip Holtz as their coach, but the recent past keeps returning to haunt the Bulls. An academic adviser claims she was dismissed on racial grounds and that the school is trying to cover up NCAA violations. The attorney for her case is the same one being used by former coach Jim Leavitt, so he's already been preparing to hit the school with anything damaging he can. Now he'll get the chance to take whatever embarrassing stuff he can scrape together before a pair of juries rather than just one, which might make USF more willing to look at the possibility of settling. It sure sounds like there's been some shady stuff going on around the USF program - I'll be curious to see how much eventually gets out.

On a normal day, a story about a guy calling 911 repeatedly to demand the return of the Winnipeg Jets to their home city after a decade and a half in Arizona would be the oddest thing I'd see online. (Drinking was involved? Stunning.) Thanks to WAFF in Huntsville's report on a break in and attempted assault, it wasn't. The interviews during this clip are very high on the unintentional comedy factor. Hope you have a good weekend - follow along on Twitter @heathradio for random news notes or observations during the weekend and I'll see you back here Monday.

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