Not much money and a lot of accountability – the life of an NFL kicker

The recent release of Roberto Aguayo by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers has shone the spotlight firmly on the lives and challenges of NFL kickers.
Aguayo’s release was long expected. He had been drafted in the second round by the Buccaneers in 2016. That was unusual, since teams seldom use high draft picks on kickers or punters. The last time a team used a first round pick on a kicker was the Oakland Raiders’ selection of Sebastian Janikowski. That pick definitely worked well – Janikowski is still playing 15 years later and still booting the ball a great distance.
Needless to say, when Aguayo began performing poorly, the excoriation was loud, with all manner of comments about how the Buccaneers could have used the pick on a much better player.
Aguayo had kicked poorly all of last year, missing numerous kick attempts during the season, which had put him on thin ice. The Buccaneers brought Nick Folk in to compete with him this offseason. Both men have not exactly set the world alight, but Aguayo’s continued misses in pre-season led to the Buccaneers terminating his contract last week. (the Chicago Bears claimed him on waivers. It will be interesting to see how he performs in a different place).
However, kickers are more likely to have a shorter shelf life in the NFL. The role is as much a mental one as a physical one. The “yips” can affect kickers just like golfers. Suddenly a kicker will begin to mis-hit kicks and send them in other directions than the correct one. The NFL being what it is, this is usually obvious in a game situation, where the team asks the kicker to hit a field goal to tie the game or win it. If the kicker then misses, and the team loses, the kicker is Goat of the day. A couple of those kinds of misses, and the kicker is either fired, or on thin ice.
There are plenty of kickers in reserve.So teams with a kicking problem can fire the kicker. However, that does not guarantee that their kicking situation will improve. The Buccaneers are discovering this. Having fired Aguayo, they only have Nick Folk on the roster, and he is not kicking well either. The Buccaneers week 1 kicker might still be a player who is not currently on the roster.
Churning the kicker and punter positions usually never works well. A few seasons ago, when Tom Coughlin was still their coach, the Jacksonville Jaguars went through about 4 kickers in a season. They had a revolving door at the position, picking up kickers, and then firing them rapidly after they missed in games. The approach led to appalling kicking and punting play, and Coughlin was fired at the end of the season.
Kickers who are “money”, who consistently boot the ball between the uprights in any kind of game situation, are thin on the ground. Adam Vinatieri is still kicking well at age 42, but for every Adam Vinatieri there a couple of dozen kickers who hang around for a couple of seasons before washing out, or hitting consistency issues.
Kickers fall into the same category as quarterbacks in that there is only one player at that position on the field, so if the extra point attempt sails wide right, it is usually the kicker who gets the entire blame. It is like the quarterback who throws the ball to The Other Guys when his receiver is in the right place on the field. In other areas of the game, accountability is more diffuse. Blown assignments in a defensive scheme might result in the opponents scoring a touchdown, but you don’t often hear fans or coaches intimating that an individual player is on thin ice.
Yet kickers are usually paid minimum salary or close to it. They seldom make more than $2m in a season, which is low compared to many other position or skill players who work as part of a unit. They are also treated as expendable in a way that other players are not. The attitude appears to be “Easy come, easy go”. If the kicker misses in a big game, he is often booted himself and replaced by yet another enthusiastic replacement, who may turn out to be no better over the medium term.
I suspect that the fungibility and lack of longevity of kickers is partly due to that attitude.

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Kellen Moore and the Cowboys’ QB situation

Once again, after a stuttering performance in a pre-season game, people are asking “why is Kellen Moore the #2 quarterback in Dallas?”
It is a good question, which speaks to some tendencies in the NFL, but also shows up the appallingly persistent tendency for the Cowboys to rely on the #1 quarterback being healthy all of the time. One would have thought they had learned the hard way in the Tony Romo era about the downside of that approach, but it seems not.
First off, the persistence in using Kellen Moore is not surprising. The NFL is a fundamentally conservative league, with many coaching and personnel decisions made from a viewpoint of Better Be Safe Than Sorry.
Kellen Moore, as most people can see, does not have a strong arm. His arm strength may not even be at the same level as Chad Pennington. However, lack of arm strength did not stop Pennington from being a multi-year starter in the NFL. That was because Pennington, despite his physical limitations, was smart, accurate, almost never turned the ball over, and was a great on-field leader.
You have to contrast that with the sheer numbers of quarterbacks who entered the NFL able to chuck the ball a mile or more, but who quickly proved that while they might be able to throw the ball out of the opponent’s end zone, they had a lot missing in the smarts department. Jeff George and Ryan Mallett could throw the ball a mile, but nobody would ever be able to accuse them of being flush with football IQ. Ditto JaMarcus Russell. Big-armed busts abound in the NFL quarterback department. They tend to think that all they have to do is tell the wide receivers to get open, and they are bound to be able to throw TD passes. The arm will bail them out.
Since Moore did not have a strong arm in college, he learned to be smart with his play, and where he threw the ball. He did well at Boise State by becoming a smart player, knowing when and where to throw the ball and when to play safe. Coaches like that. They don’t have much patience for quarterbacks who consistently throw the ball to The Other Guys.
This is the “system adherence” scenario. Many averagely-talented players stay with NFL teams because they are “system guys”. They know the coaches’ system, which makes them valuable in terms of execution consistency and reliability. What most coaches dislike more than anything else is players freelancing and getting teams into “wild card” positions. That is one reason why Tim Tebow is no longer in the NFL.
The Cowboys therefore like Moore because he does not take unnecessary risks with the ball, and he knows the offensive system well, having been with the team for multiple seasons.
However, it is probably fair to say that Moore has reached his ceiling. What you see is what you are going to get going forward.
Moore’s presence as the #2 also creates playbook issues, because of his lack of a strong arm. Teams playing the Cowboys with Moore under center know that he is not going to be throwing the ball deep, so they can bring up the secondary, pack the box and try to shut down the running game and the short slants that Moore most often likes to throw. Dak Prescott is able to throw the ball deep, so they cannot do that with him in the game.
The problem for the Cowboys is that right now, the NFL has a quarterback problem everywhere. Many teams do not even have a viable #1 quarterback, let alone a quality backup. (ahem! Jacksonville!).
The big question is unanswered: if the Cowboys send Moore packing, who do they sign instead? Bear in mind that every short-term quarterback who the Cowboys signed for backup purposes in the last 5 years has been at best mediocre and at worst awful in game situations. Whether that is the quarterback or the system and the coaches is an interesting question. When a team is unable to bring a backup quarterback up to speed so that he is at least competent in a game situation, I tend to look at the coaches and the system as much as the quarterback. Matt Cassel was not exactly a useless quarterback, but he looked terrible playing for the Cowboys.
The Cowboys may huff and puff about Kellen Moore, but they have no experienced alternative, and the pickings are slim in the free agent quarterback market. There is, of course, a quarterback who remains unsigned, with the initials CK, but whether Jerry Jones can bring himself to sign off on that idea is a good question…

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The edges of legality in F1 – the FIA approach evolves and not for the best

An interesting article in Auto Motor Und Sport (WARNING: It is in German) explains how the FIA, in its attempts to crack down on cheating by the top teams in F1, has been relying on complaints or observations submitted by other teams, and as a result, have been tightening regulations and modifying comppliance testing processes.
The article gives some examples from this season:

1. The suspicion that one or more teams (the suspect team was ID’d rapidly as Ferrari) were using engine oil partly as a fuel, diverting some oil into the combustion process. The FIA has reacted in two ways (a) they have reduced the allowable consumption limit per 100km, and (b) they will be fixing the precise specification of oil at the end of the season
2. The use of special airflow devices on the front axle of the Ferrari cars in Baku to increase straight-line speed
3. The excessive deflection observed on the t-wings of some cars early in the season, believed to be an attempt to increase straight-line speed
4. A ban on pre-heating hydraulic suspension actuators in the garage prior to running the car. The practice was designed to ensure that the cars enjoyed a constant ground clearance from the moment that they entered the track.
5. Further evidence of flexing of car floors and underbodies has been countered with a new series of expanded deflection tests.
6. More stringent deflection tests for front wing components, after Red Bull (surprise surprise) was caught with a wing part that was clearly deflecting at speed to reduce drag.

While superficially, the changes seem to be perfectly sensible and smart, there is a point made in the article (my tidy-up of the translation of the article):

The policy of the long leash has been well received by the big teams. They can experiment at the edge of the rules without being disqualified. The smaller teams are annoyed by the new approach of the World Federation. Because they do not have the means to bring risky technology tricks to the car, with the fear that they end up in the dustbin.

In my opinion, the FIA is being way too lenient with the top teams. If teams are violating the regulations, then they should be penalized. The “fix this by the next race or there will be trouble” approach may be non-confrontational and ensures that there are no public rows, but it is the equivalent of a “tsk tsk ” slap on the wrist. This is not going to stop teams from attempting to circumvent the regulations. The objections of the smaller teams are correct. If they cannot afford to try numerous different evasion tactics to circumvent the regulations, they will perpetually be watching the large teams to see what innovations they bring to the race track and what circumventions are allowed or ignored by the FIA. This is not a correct way to enforce technical regulations.

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Debates over Confederate statues are stuffed full of irony

There is a spirited debate going on in the USA about what should happen to the hundreds of statues erected over the last 150 years commemorating leaders involved in the US Civil War.
The debate is not entirely based on logic or courtesy, since we live in stressful times, with self-identified nativists, racists and Nazis showing up in public appropriating the Confederate flag.
Or more correctly, what passes these days as the Confederate flag. The flag most commonly used is not the official Confederation states flag, if indeed there ever was one. It was the battle flag of a Confederate Army unit commanded by Ronbert E. Lee, who, after the Civil War was over, disavowed the public display of Confederate symbols, including at his own funeral.
So, the flag that people wave in public, affix to cars and trucks, display on t-shirts etc. is the flag of a defeated army. To use dismissive American vernacular, the symbol of a bunch of losers. Given the sneering way in which people in this country dismiss the idea of “participation trophies”, I find the use of a defeated army’s flag as a symbol to be quite amusing.
But, on to the more interesting irony. The majority of the current statues and monuments erected to commemorate the Civil War do not date from the period immediately following the war, unlike the collections of war memorials in (say) Europe. Instead, they date from periods in the 20th Century, as this article explains
This tells me that the primary purpose of these monuments was not war casualty or war leader commemoration. The people responsible for erecting the monuments were, in many cases, not even alive at the time of the Civil War. These monuments were almost certainly erected for another purpose entirely. And this chart of when the monuments were erected reveals that protesting advances in civil rights for all might be one of the drivers for the erection of those monuments in the 20th century. Josh Marshall provides a summary commentary here.
More interestingly, monuments are still being erected at the present time. As the article explains:

…some continue to be built – USA Today notes that 35 Confederate monuments have been erected in North Carolina since 2000.

This is not commemoration of war events, leaders or casualties. This is a different kind of commemoration or virtue signalling. The people pushing for these monuments were either not interested in Civil War history, or chose to ignore it. In my opinion, they were protesting the outcome for a collection of reasons, some of which had to do with racism, some to do with regional solidarity and dislike of all forms of central government. But anybody who tries to convince me that any monument erected since 1900 was for Civil War commemorative purposes is going to have an uphill struggle.
The focus on leaders is also instructive. The real losers in any mass war are common people, who are pressed into service in large numbers and used as expendable cannon-fodder by military and political leaders. If there is any type of memorial that should be erected, it is to the people who lost their lives. In the UK, most World War II memorials are not statues of leaders, although there are a small number of statues of key figures in World War II, such as Winston Churchill and Gen. Bernard Montgomery. Most of the memorials are to war casualties. This is not the case with the Civil War memorials in the USA. When you start to erect statues of wartime leaders, you always ignite controversy, since many of those leaders issued orders that sent numerous people into battle, and many then lost their lives. The controversy in the UK over memorials to Air Marshal Harris is an example of this. He ordered the firebombing raids on Hamburg and Dresden that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, and as a result, commemorating him has become a lightning rod subject. Ditto the exploits of the 503rd Composite Group in the US Air force, the unit, led by Brigadier General Paul W. Tibbets, that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. Controversy over how that effort should be memorialized has been going on for decades. The fact that these statues were apparently erected without any discussion of the war casualty dimension tells me, once again, that this was not about the war itself. It is defiant symbolism.
I therefore find the complaints that removal of the statues is “erasing history” to be both intellectually bankrupt and ironic. The complaints are unserious because removing a statue does not “Erase history”. It merely removes a symbol from public view. People in the UK would still know all about World War II even if every symbol and monument was removed.
If you subtract the whining about erasing history, you are therefore left staring at the irony that most of the proponents of the memorials are ignorant of history. They need to go learn some history first.

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If I Ruled The World, F1 Style…

Revenue Distribution
1. All current distorting “legacy” payments that do not form part of the constructors performance prize money system to be scrapped
2. System shall reward teams for positions in constructors championship in a transparent and consistent manner, with no teams enjoying special prize money increases due to “legacy” or other status
3. A special bonus of $5m shall be given to the team that wins the Drivers championship

Technical and Sporting Regulations
1. All significant technical regulation changes to be stable for 10 years, after an adjustment period at the end of year 1. No constructor is allowed any preferential input or veto on any aspect of the F1 technical regulations.
2. Allow underbody ground-effect downforce once more
3. Severely limit size and shape of front wings
4. Limit the size and downforce generation from rear wings
5. All components not considered to be the source of competitive advantage such as wheel hubs, uprights, differentials will be standardised and provided from a common supplier to all constructors.
6. Introduce an engine formula based on limited development avenues, but with no token system and less onerous engine life requirements
7. Minimum weight of the car to be reduced.
8. Weight limits on car/driver combinations to be measured in a way that does not penalize taller and heavier drivers, while still allowing for movement of ballast to strictly defined areas of the car
9. DRS to be converted to a limited-use push to pass tool
10. Penalties for engine usage or regulation infractions and car regulation conformance infractions to be levied as constructor points and fines, instead of car starting grid penalties, unless significant performance advantage can be proven, in which case disqualification, up to the entire team for a race event, is an option
11. Driver penalty point system to be abolished. Initial driver infractions to be dealt with by putting a driver on probation for a set number of races. Further infractions will result in the driver being immediately suspended for one or more race weekends.
12. Appeal management – if an appeal by a driver or a team is deemed to be frivolous, the FIA shall, at its discretion, have the ability to (a) immediately impose the penalty, (b) increase the penalty or suspension by up to a further 50% as a penalty for the waste of governing body resources.

Broadcasting and Media relations
1. Teams to be required to make most telemetry data available to broadcasters in real-time, with some more sensitive data (such as fuel usage and engine modes) available on time delay.
2. Teams to be required to perform a minimum number of media functions every race weekend with both drivers present

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The challenge with hiding toxic beliefs from the public…

…is that sooner or later, the mask slips.
When you work for a volatile, capricious narcissist, and that starts to happen multiple times, you have a tough decision to make.
Do you continue to work for said person, and risk zeroing your credibility? Or do you move on?
These are not easy decisions to make. People have mortgages to pay and families to raise. However, when history is written, enablers will not be venerated.

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Today’s quick thought

As we watch the slowly unfolding spectacle of a clueless narcissist attempting to occupy the job of President of the United States, there is an uncomfortable reality that we have to confront as a nation.
We tend to tolerate, and in some cases, enthusiastically embrace people who, in many respects, behave like assholes.
In business, politics, and athletics, and showbusiness, it is easy to find examples of top practitioners who, while respected and revered for their achievements, were defective (in some cases horribly defective) as people. Some of them were weapons-grade assholes.
Adding to the problem in the USA is the fascination with celebrity. When showbiz people regularly run and get elected to political office, that tells me something about how easily voters can be persuaded to support celebrities when they try their hand at politics.
Donald Trump is not some one-off outlier. He is merely the latest in a long line of celebrities to try his hand at being elected to political office.
There is a conceited assumption driving many successful people that they can be successful at Anything they turn their attention to. They believe it, those around them validate that belief, but the ultimate validation is if they get elected to office.
We are complicit in all of this at several levels.
Firstly, we allow assholes to rise to positions of power. Very rarely is an asshole told to STFU and learn to treat people better on the way up. Instead rationalizations abound like “he may be an asshole but he gets shit done”. We make excuses, and by doing so we enable the behavior.
Secondly, we venerate the assholes at the top as “Stars”, even while understanding partially that they are deeply flawed people. It is deemed to be impolite to point out the asshole tendency. At least until the person topples from grace, at which time it is like feeding time at the shark tank, and suddenly they are torn to pieces.
Thirdly, we cement the veneration by accepting blithely that the part-time celebrity with asshole tendencies can do Anything. When Ross Perot tried to run for President in 1992, hardly anybody had the bravery to point out that a country is not like a business, only bigger, which was the conceit driving Perot. He thought that he could run USA Inc. just like EDS. (He would have been severely disappointed).

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Arguments about condemnations miss the point

There has been a lot of Light Heat and Sound expended over the last 2 days over whether Donald Trump did or did not adequately condemn the events in Charlottesville.
Whatever you think about what Trump did or did not say (I happen to believe that on this topic, as with many other topics involving his extreme fringe supporters, Trump behaved like a duplicitous shitweasel), the discussions miss the point.
In these kinds of situations, most people remember only the initial event or statement. Any subsequent modification gets a fraction of the publicity and attention. This is the origin of the famous quotation that a lie will be halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on.
Politicians know this of course, which is why authoritarian shitweasels routinely utter nonsensically inflammatory statements in public. When challenged on them, they first “double down”, repeating the original statement, perhaps in a slightly different form, while professing surprise that it should be at all contentious. If that fails to damp down outrage, their next tactic is either to issue a Notpology, or to qualify the original statement in some way to address the outrage.
both the Notpology and the qualification are not aimed at the politician’s core supporters, who tend to remember the original statement anyway, and will regard the later weasel words as window-dressing for snowflakes who Cannot Handle The Truth. (One also sees the usual whining about “political correctness fascism” or similar).
So, circling back round to Donald Trump, his original weaselling equivocation is now firmly etched in history. There is no real point in anybody demanding that he change his position, since even if he does, most people will only remember the original statement

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So what will the NFL teams do now?

So, after a currently unanimous decision by all 32 NFL teams to not employ Colin Kaepernick because he sat or kneeled for the National Anthem, despite the fact that numerous other players also sat or kneeled that season, what do we have here?
Three more prominent players all declining to stand for the National Anthem.
I don’t think I will be holding my breath until the teams of the players suspend or sit them for this action. That is probably not allowed under the CBA, especially since SCOTUS has ruled that nobody can be forced to stand for the National Anthem.
However, their employing teams could terminate their contracts to put them into the same place as Colin Kaepernick.
They won’t do that. Marshawn Lynch is the Oakland Raiders’ local talisman, the local boy made good, returning to this hometown, where the Raiders are playing out two seasons before relocating to Las Vegas. The other players are articulate team leaders. Their teams are going to do somewhere between diddly and squat.
Which leaves us with the scenario where the originator of the protests is kicking his heels waiting for a job offer, despite having taken one team to the Superbowl.
The NFL teams, collectively, do not seem to know the First Law Of Holes.

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Incoherence in argument

In the past 24 hours I have observed the following on social media:

1. Different commenters describing the opposition by IBM to the Texas “bathroom bill” as “political communism” and “fascism”.
2. A commenter on LInkedIn declaring that the campaign to force BenchMark Capital to divest their investment in Uber (following the scandals that led to the departure of the previous CEO Travis Kalanick) is the revenge of “the PC Lib stranglehold”
3. An assertion that I am “biased” because I posted a couple of rather pointed messages to Facebook about the demonstration in Charlottesville (which, I have to remind readers, featured a drive-at-a-crowd murder by a man who seems to have been on the same side as the original demonstrators).

(1( and (2) are excellent examples of attempted argument by cutting and pasting slogans. This is about on a par with attempting to argue using memes, which for some reason people seem to think is an effective method of persuasion on social media.
Here’s the problem. Cutting and pasting slogans and memes is not making an argument. It simply demonstrates that the commenter can cut and paste. It is analagous to plagiarizing content for your high school essay and expecting the teacher to give you a good grade. Most teachers, if the determine that the content is cut and pasted, will give a failing grade, because absolutely no original thought went into the process. Ditto arguing in slogans and memes. That’s not your voice. It’s the voice of a sloganeer, who in all probability did not have a cogent argument in the first place, hence they used slogans. I cannot take this form of communication seriously. it is fundamentally lazy and unserious. It also tends to show that the commenter is confused or incoherent, as in calling IBM “communist” and “fascist” simultaneously.
3 is interesting. So, I am biased.
OK.
We all have biases. This is not revelatory, nor is it an argument.
On one level it is a statement of the obvious. On another level, however, it is a form of indirect speech. It is an attempt at a shut-down of the conversation, as in “I am not taking you seriously because you are biased”. It is, in some respects, a form of the ad hominem fallacy.
If somebody wants to be taken seriously in discussion, they need to stay away from rhetorical tricks like this one, and, you know, construct an argunent that contains a proposition for which they offer evidence.

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