After the San Francisco 49ers went 6-10 during the 2010 season, firing Coach Mike Singletary along the way, Alex Smith was clearly ready to move on.
The 2005 first-overall pick was talking in the locker room with a reporter from the San Jose Mercury News who asked him if he could see himself coming back for a seventh season in San Francisco.
His response, according to this story, was: “Are you being serious? … Uh, no.” (more…)
I canceled my NFL Sunday Ticket subscription tonight.
I actually started having second thoughts about it over the weekend, despite writing a week or so ago that I would do so if the NFL did not solve its labor issues by July 15.
They seem to be close to arriving at a deal. But they have seemed close to coming to a deal for two or three weeks now. Enough is enough.
Even as early as this morning, however, I thought DirecTV might get a reprieve. A friend emailed me information that DirecTV was offering its Sunday Ticket package for free for the season. That would seem to be a reasonable offer. But after a little reading and a couple of phone calls, I learned that, of course, DirecTV was only offering that deal to new subscribers.
Existing subscribers, I was told, are appreciated, but ineligible for the service. So DirecTV is competing with most cell phone companies and who the hell knows how many other businesses in treating new clients better than existing ones. Does nobody remember how much it costs to get a lost customer back?
So, anyway, for the 2011 season DirecTV is ineligible to keep my business, at least as far as Sunday Ticket goes. I can use that $300-and-change on other things.
Again, as I have written before, I am aware that my little protest alone is not going to have much of an impact on the business of the league or DirecTV. But I share in the hopes of AOL FanHouse Columnist David Steele, who writes at SportingNews.com that he hopes fans do not “give their love back to the NFL for free.”
I agree. Regardless of whether they return in time to play a full season or not, the owners and the players have cost us virtually the entire offseason. Let’s have some pride as fans and make them pay in the pocketbook enough so they can feel it.
The first NFL preview magazines have showed up on the shelves of my local bookstore. For the first time in many years I didn’t make a special trip to go find them. I stumbled on to them while I was in the store looking for something else.
I bought two fantasy football publications: Sporting News 2011 Fantasy Football and Fantasy League Football 2011. The NFL is largely about money for owners and players so I’ve made it at least somewhat about money for me too – I play in several fantasy football leagues and have had a fair amount of success over the years.
But as for buying the actual preview magazines, it seemed a bit pointless given the lockout and lack of a free agency period to this point. We’re a couple weeks off of when training camps would normally start and there has not yet been anything resembling an offseason.
Lindy’s, which publishes my favorite preseason annual, seemed to recognize this. They published their typical June version with a publisher’s note saying they planned to publish again in August if there was movement toward the season taking place.
With all due respect to Lindy’s, I’ll wait until then to buy the magazine.
The NFL lockout is becoming a drag in more ways than one. Sure, it’s kind of cute … well, no, it’s really not cute at all … when players and owners get up in front of cameras or type away on twitter telling fans not to worry because they expect to make a deal in time to ensure that games are not canceled.
Or when the league moves forward with their farcical plan for a two-hour special on NFL Network introducing the schedules for the season that may or may not be played.
The truth is even if the league and the players miraculously settle during forced negotiations this afternoon, the lockout has already gone on long enough to ensure that the quality of play on the field in 2011 will suffer.
Free agency has been postponed for more than a month, leaving teams unsure how they will fill holes from last season. Minicamps have been lost, especially hard for teams with new coaches and new systems. And at this point there is little indication the collective bargaining process will conclude by next week’s NFL draft, so rookies and other new entrants to the league are almost inevitably going to lose at least one and likely more opportunities for pre-training camp instruction with coaches.
That means we are also closing in on the point where, assuming football is played in 2011, the lockout will have a direct effect on fantasy football this season as well. What teams and players benefit from this situation? Will there still be rookies who are worth drafting for your teams in 2011? We at Zoneblitz feel continuity will be key this season but we contacted fantasy football writer Ryan Boser, who contributes to a number of fantasy sites, to see what he thinks.
Zoneblitz: With a shortened free agency period and minicamps already being canceled it would seem to us that continuity and lack of roster turnover will be key to success in 2011. Do you agree? (more…)
Reports out of San Francisco indicate that the 49ers have a contract on the table aimed at keeping former first-overall pick Alex Smith in the fold for at least one more season.
The on-again, off-again starting quarterback for San Francisco has shown flashes of competence but has been mostly injured or disappointing (not always through faults of his own) during his first six years in the league.
At the end of the season, Smith talked pretty openly about being ready to move on to a new situation where he could get a fresh start. The fans turned on him pretty aggressively at the end of the season and, with a new coach on board in Jim Harbaugh, in a normal year my guess is Smith would already have signed somewhere else.
But this is not a normal year. (more…)
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