Some thoughts on current happenings in the NFL.

1. The Adam Jones Experiment looks like it is not working out for the Cowboys. Jones is once again suspended from the NFL, despite the Cowboys desperately trying to laugh off his altercation with a security employee last week. Quite clearly Jones is still failing to act like a responsible adult, and Roger Goodell has (in my opinion, correctly) stepped in and done what the Cowboys themselves seemed unable or unwilling to do.
I'm not sure that suspending Adam Jones significantly impacts the Cowboys. It may be my imagination, but Jones hasn't exactly been setting the playing field on fire. The Adam Jones of 2008 does not look like the "Pacman" Jones of 2006 vintage, who was a game-changing impact player. This Jones looks to be lacking in both fire and skill.

2. The Cowboys are suddenly upside-down with injuries. Sam Hurd is on IR, Terence Newman is recovering from surgery, Felix Jones (the talented Jones) is likely to be out 3-4 weeks with a hamstring pull, and Tony Romo is out for a month with a busted pinky finger on his throwing hand. In addition, Greg Ellis, not normally a talkative player, is suddenly making negative comments about team cohesion and motivation. Something is not right in Valley Ranch TX. The big trade for Roy Williams also looks debatable when you compare the performance of Williams to the price the Cowboys paid (including their 2009 first round pick). It is my belief that the Cowboys panicked, and overpaid for Williams.

3. The ony good thing that the Lions have done all season is to get 3 draft picks for Roy Williams. Other than that, the team is showing that the front office couldn't manage it's way out of a paper bag. They just placed Jon Kitna on IR after failing to trade him, but since he officially has a back injury, the decision to try and trade him smells fishy. This smacks of a clumsy attempt to move Kitna out of the picture while they evaluate their other two quarterbacks. The idea that any of the Lions leadership have any credibility right now is a quaint one...

4. The Patriots are suddenly an average team, and this is only partially due to the loss of Tom Brady. When you give up plays because players are standing around like topiary instead of running to the ball or tackling, which happened more than once in the loss to the Chargers, that's not a quarterback problem. It's a team cohesion and motivation problem.
The most interesting event (which was briefly shown on TV but not discussed) was the sight of the Patriots offensive co-ordinator Josh McDaniel giving Bill Belichick an earful as the Patriots walked off the field at half time. McDaniel was clearly steamed, and was yelling at Belichick, who was walking along with his head down, seemingly saying nothing. Whatever that was about, it does not portray an image of a unified coaching staff.

5. Michael who? The Atlanta Falcons seem to have a great replacement for the V Man in Matt Ryan. I watched him run the no-huddle offense on Sunday and he looked like he had been doing it for years. Ryan's success may prove that it is better to have a solid conventional quarterback under center than a flashy but inconsistent converted running back.

6. The Giants were not simply beaten by the Browns on Monday night - they were buried. They were outplayed in almost all phases of the game. More strangely, they seemed unwilling or unable to play with any urgency in the fourth quarter. After the Browns hit a 2 point conversion to go up by 3 scores, the Giants had the ball back with around 6 minutes of time left. They started off running no-huddle, but the time between snaps seemed to get longer and longer as the time ticked away, until by 3 minutes they were back huddling up between plays. Eegads! You're down by 3 scores and you are slowing down between plays...what's wrong with this picture? At the rate that the Giants were moving on the field and between plays, they could have extended the fourth quarter by 10 minutes and the Giants would still have been behind on the scoreboard. Utterly inexplicable. It was like there was no sense of urgency whatsoever. Even Tom Coughlin, who is usually one of the first coaches to start jumping up and down when things are not going well, seemed almost resigned to the inevitable. The Giants looked like they were simply going through the motions. Not the hallmark of a team that deserves another bite at the Superbowl.

7. The Kansas City Chiefs, clearly in rebuilding mode, cannot accept a trade for Tony Gonzalez...WTF? What a way to piss off and reward one of your outstanding veterans, a sure-fire hall of famer, who merely wanted to end his career in a better winning situation. Somebody in the Chiefs leadership needs to be tarred and feathered for this.

8. The Rams win...against the Redskins...who would have forecast that? Compelling proof (if any more were needed) that the team had quit on Scott Linehan. Jim Haslett has a real chance to turn the season around and cement his status as a head coach again.

9. The Seahawks look like a team in disarray. Matt Hasselbeck's mystery knee injury becomes more mysterious by the week...and with Seneca Wallace also injured, the team is being forced to use third-rated quarterback Charlie Frye, who is not setting the world on fire. However, the whole team seems to be unfocussed, giving away penalties like sweeties throughout games, and generally exuding an air of confusion.

10. Talking of mysterious injuries...somebody is not being honest about Carson Palmer's elbow. When you visit a surgeon known as a Tommy John specialist, that screams three words - ulnar, collateral and ligament. Palmer's throw distance and velocity have gone, and the Bengals defense is having to do all of the work, since the offense cannot move the ball and stay on the field. My guess is that Palmer will soon be placed on IR, with or without surgery.

11. Mike Nolan is a dead man walking in San Francisco. The 49'ers continue to disappoint, and there is a ready-for-hire head coach on the staff in Mike Martz. Nolan is in a no-win situation right now. If the team does well, Martz will get most of the credit, and if it continues to struggle, Nolan will be the fall guy.

12. If fan sentiment fired head coaches, Brad Childress would be gone as the Vikings head coach. The team is winning, but only just, and the decision to bench Tavaris Jackson after 2 weeks, while understandable, begs the question of why they even announced him as the starter to begin with. Somewhere along the line, Jackson did not inspire that much confidence if they were prepared to pull him after 2 weeks. This is either panic from the coaching staff, or rank poor decision-making to begin with.

13. The Dolphins are still succeeding with the "Wildcat" offensive formation, even after opposing teams have had the best part of a month to study it, and other teams are starting to use it also. For the first time in a long while, it seems that a common staple of high school and college football is going to enter the NFL and stay there for more than a few weeks. The success of this formation tends to suggest that the NFL is hidebound by conservative play-calling and thinking. Steve Spurrier certainly failed in his NFL career to bring the "Fun and Gun" offense in from the college game, but that may have been because he picked personnel to execute it who were marginal in terms of NFL capability. Quarterbacks like Danny Wuerffel and Scott Mitchell were not bona fide #1 quarterbacks for any NFL team.

Gregg Easterbrook has suggested on numerous occasions that many NFL coaches are more concerned with reducing the margin of defeat than actually going for a win, and I see examples every week of play-calling that seems to fit that mindset. Exhibit A - Giants in fourth quarter against Browns. Exhibit B - Brad Childress this past weekend. Asked why he had not gone for 2 after scoring, which would have required the Vikings' opponents to score a field goal just to tie the game, Childress pointed out that the overall NFL 2 point conversion rate is only 42%, meaning that in his world, the odds were against a 2 point conversion succeeding. Since he had put the journalists on the back foot by asking them if they actually knew this statistic (nobody spoke up and said that they did), no journalist asked the most obvious follow-up question: never mind the NFL conversion rate, what is the Vikings conversion rate? The decision should not have been based on league-wide numbers in the first place, It should have been a combination of (a) team capabilities (b) opponent capabilities (c) game situation. Ahead by only 1 point in a very tight game, going for 2 should have been a serious consideration. An even more interesting question would have been whether the Vikings playbook for the game even contained a 2 point conversion play. A few years ago, the Dallas Cowboys lost a close game, which turned on a seemingly inexplicable decision to take a field goal instead of scoring on fourth and short from close to the opponents goal line late in the fourth quarter. It emerged afterwards that the Cowboys playbook for the game did not even contain a play for fourth and short in the Red Zone. The Cowboys offensive co-ordinator was gone not long afterwards.