Former Giants coach Jim Fassel dead at 71. He helped NY recover from a period of mediocrity in the late 90s and led them to the Super Bowl in 2000 (lost to Ray Lewis and the Ravens). Underrated coach - RIP.
Aaron Rodgers is a no-show at the Packers' mandatory minicamp. Clearly there is a critical gruntle shortage in Green Bay. (Fuck Green Bay. I spent my freshman year of college there and that area is a desolate wasteland filled with despair and the wails of the wretched and the damned.)
AJ Brown tried to give his #11 to Julio Jones and Jones declined. Jones is wearing #8 (NFL rule change!!!!), his college number.
I can't imagine any team wants to be in the DeShaun Watson business right now. I have a hard time thinking of a scenario in which he actually plays this year. Edit: I mean, with Watson, it's a triangulation problem. There's the obscene cap hit, there's the question of who would give up draft picks, and the Texans also need to find a trade partner with a market that has its head in the sand and thinks a gigantic fucking billow of smoke doesn't mean fire.
You can't help but think that the Texans may have had some inkling of this and kept it quiet while he was their star. Since he asked for a trade and spoke out against black injustice, they let the flood gates loose.
Given how much of a clusterfuck the Texans organization is (Jack Easterby lol), and what turboracists the McNair family are, I have absolutely no problem believing this to be the case.
If I were Chicago, I would sue the team so it couldn't use the word "Chicago" in its name. https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/...b-that-sits-35-miles-away-from-soldier-field/
I can't wait for the team to demand billions of dollars to get a mallpark stadium at the Arlington site. And I don't even want to imagine how awful the traffic would be on gameday Sundays. Already, that area around Route 53 and US-14 gets snarled on a daily basis.
I don't think there ever has been a valid plan, whereas the McCaskeys have been making noise about the Arlington Heights property for at least a decade, probably more. They like to scream bloody murder about having the smallest seating capacity in the league, but then they try to hide the fact that they only pay $5.7 million a year to lease Soldier Field from the City of Chicago. But this is all just a transparent ploy by the McCaskeys to get some public welfare, never mind that the economies of both Chicago and the northwest suburbs were utterly demolished by the 2017 recession and then the year-plus of COVID, and while there's never a time in which public financing for facilities for private teams is acceptable, it's especially egregious right now.
That saga seriously went on for more than 25 years and was just becoming a tremendous boondoggle. I'm glad the Illinois Tollway authority finally gave up on it and threw in the towel. Also, this might be the only good thing Lori Lightfood has ever said, throwing major shade at the Bears' historic levels of suck:
Lori Lightfoot is an idiot and her term as mayor of Chicago has been incredibly awful, but that was a pretty impressive bodyslam and I'm amazed her PR team OK'ed it. Possibly the first good thing she's ever done. Well, okay, she once got caught on a hot mic calling a CPD cop an "FOP clown." So, second good thing.
I think it was more like 40+ years, I remember when they turned 53 in the south into 355, it had already been a thing for a long time. And IMO, not only did we need that extension up here, but we desperately needed it in addition to the 120 bypass (which I supposed could be done without 53). Problem is, they waited so long that all those whiners that bought houses along the ROW didn't want it in their back yards. It should have been done on day 1 before 90% of those housing developments were built.