Pro Football Grapevine

Other than a very odd refrence to coach Lewis being his dad, it is very refreshing to see Chad Johnson say he is sorry.  From STLtoday…

Ocho Cinco talked about the punishment for the first time Wednesday, declining to go into detail about what happened while acknowledging that the one-game benching was merited. The receiver expects to play Sunday against Baltimore if he’s healthy.

“I put (Lewis) in a tough position, and he made a call he had to make,” Ocho Cinco said. “It is what it is.

“I didn’t get a chance to play. My dad (Lewis) deactivated me, punishment for his son. Other than that, I’m back this week, ready to have some fun against some very good friends of mine. I’m looking forward to spoiling their playoff chances or whatever we have the chance to spoil.”  (Source)

I gotta go check to make sure hell has not frozen over.

Terry Pluto of Cleveland.com has made his case against Romeo Crennel.  And it gets started like this…

He comes across as a wonderful man to have in the foxhole with you when the bombs are falling. He will support you, and he has your back covered.

But Crennel does not inspire most men to charge up the hill and plant the flag. He does not explain himself or his approach to the game with much passion or clarity. He seems surprised when Braylon Edwards, Kellen Winslow or another players acts up, and appears in physical pain when they require any sort of discipline.

As long as Crennel is the head coach, the Browns will seem like a team that is muddling through, making it up as they go along. There can be a dictionary of Crennel’s baffling coaching decisions.

The story then goes on to play a game of alaphet soup with all the mistakes Crennel has made.  It makes quite a compelling case that Romeo must die…or at least be fired.  You can read the story, here.

First he drops his pants, and now he can’t seems to make out what is reality, so says Ann Killion of the Mercury News…

“Lopsided in what way?” he said, “When I look at lopsided, I say this team went out and got the crap kicked out of it. I don’t think there’s any other team this year — maybe the last couple years — that played Dallas more physically, more sound than we did yesterday.”

Well, the Cowboys lost to Washington, New York, St. Louis and Arizona, so I’m pretty sure at least one other team played Dallas as sound. And if the 49ers were so physical, why did they forget to jam Terrell Owens at the line of scrimmage?

On Monday, Singletary sounded disconcertingly like his old boss Mike Nolan. So we really are back to square one, with a team that not only gets crushed on the field but also with a coach engaging in delusional thinking.

To this point, Singletary’s honesty has been refreshing. He hasn’t been afraid to say what’s on his mind, even when it’s not politically correct.

He apologized after a lousy home performance, he made it clear he wouldn’t tolerate nonsense from players, he yanked a disastrous starting quarterback and he stood up to offensive coordinator Mike Martz. All of that was a needed move toward reality, away from the fantasyland of the Nolan years.

But on Monday, Singletary seemed ensnared by the 49ers’ mantra of “we’re on the right track.”

Check out this information from Peter King of SI on free agent to be Matt Cassel…

Now this stat is eerie: After Tom Brady’s first 11 starts in the NFL, his completion percentage was 66.3. After Matt Cassel’s 11 NFL games this season, his completion percentage is … well, 66.3.

“Wow,” Cassel said from Miami after the Pats’ 48-28 win. “That’s pretty good.”

It’s crazy and all-too-soon and slightly irreverent. But it is also unavoidable. Life is imitating art. The career path of Cassel is following Brady’s. Brady’s record after 11 games: 8-3. Cassel’s: 7-4 — and if the Pats had won the overtime coin flip a week ago Thursday, I bet those records would be the same. Brady’s rating: 91.6. Cassel’s: 90.5. Cassel leads Brady by 377 passing yards, thanks to Cassel’s back-to-back 400-yard passing games. (Been on Mars? That’s no misprint.) As for touchdowns, Brady leads Cassel by three.

It’s hard to fathom what we’re seeing. Brady, the 199th pick in the 2000 draft, has won three Super Bowls and will be a Hall of Famer on the first ballot. Cassel, the 230th pick in 2005, hasn’t won anything big yet, but he has thrown for more yards than Brett Favre this season (2,615 to 2,461) and for a higher passer rating than Peyton Manning (90.5 to 87.2) and for more yards per pass attempt than Eli Manning. The Patriots’ system works, and it works wonders.  (Source)

The Seahawks are not getting better with Matt Hasslebeck, back.  They may be getting worse.  Why is that?  Health?  Lack of Practice?  Hard to say but whatever the reason, the results stink.

From the Seattle times…

For the second time in two weeks, Hasselbeck and the Seahawks had the ball with a chance to win with a touchdown. For the second time in two weeks, Hasselbeck’s final pass of the game was picked off.

A week ago it was Arizona. This week, Washington’s Shawn Springs intercepted a ball Hasselbeck never should have thrown, punctuating a game in which he finished with his fewest passing yards in what projects to be his worst season since coming to Seattle.

“I will definitely look back on this one for a long time,” Hasselbeck said, “and regret it and realize how foolish it was.”

Hasselbeck is hurting. That’s clear just watching the man play. Seattle didn’t have a reception longer than 21 yards Sunday and he completed as many passes to running backs as he did to wide receivers.

But he hasn’t been healthy this whole season. He played all of one half of one exhibition game in August, was diagnosed with a bulging disk before he played a game and missed more than a month because of a nerve condition in his back. (Source)

I was shocked to see Denver lose at home to the Raiders…The Raiders.  Check out what Mark Kiszla of the Denver post had to say about the Mile High Magic…

“They gave up on ‘em. The fans gave up on ‘em. I never witnessed that while I played here,” said Raiders defensive tackle Gerard Warren, targeted in a roster purge of Denver veterans during the many painful months since a devastating loss in the AFC championship game to Pittsburgh, a thumping at Invesco Field from which the Broncos have yet to recover.

Since having their Super Bowl dreams dashed nearly three years ago, the Broncos have been in a near-constant state of upheaval, awkwardly pushing quarterback Jake Plummer out the door and saying a sad goodbye to linebacker Al Wilson.

The Denver defense is in tatters, ranking among the worst in the league, surrendering 31 points to a Raiders team that had been averaging a paltry 12.8 per game.

One of the most renowned home-field advantages in sports has gone poof, with a maddeningly mediocre 12-11 record in the last 23 games in Denver. (Source and the rest of the bad news for Denver fans)

The Detroit Free Press has a very funny and informative piece out on the beleaguered Lions and their march towards an 0-16 season.  It has the 6 explanations of how they are doing it.  Here is the best one…

3. Do Nothing Well

One reason it’s hard to go 0-16 is that even bad teams have a matchup advantage against somebody. Not the Lions!

They are 24th in the 32-team league in rushing yards per carry and 27th in passer rating. And those are their good stats.

The defense is allowing a league-worst 5.1 yards per carry. How bad is that? Well, Barry Sanders only averaged 5.0 yards per carry for his career.

So forget about forcing the opponent into third-and-long. The Lions can’t even force third down, period.

The Lions’ pass defense is actually worse than the worst-in-the-league rush defense, and if this sentence confuses you, you now know how their safeties feel. Lions’ opponents have a passer rating of 109.5. If a quarterback puts up a 109.5 rating for a season, he probably wins the MVP.

The Lions don’t have a single impact player on defense, and their only true impact guy on offense, Calvin Johnson, is hamstrung by mediocre quarterbacking, poor play-calling and constant attention from defenses.

How do you beat the Lions? However you’d like.

It is a really good article.  It also points out that from here on out every game for the Lions is against one with a winning record.  Click on over and check it out, here.

Ashley Fox of The Philadelphia Enquirer checks in and says, among other things, that this should be the last season that Donovan McNabb is the quarterback of the Eagles.  That being said, she argues that he deserves a graceful exit.  From her piece…

After 10 years in this town with this franchise, that’s only fair to McNabb. When it is time, and it certainly appears as if that time is just about here, McNabb deserves a graceful exit.

During an atypically introspective day-after news conference yesterday following the Eagles’ stunning 13-13 tie with the Cincinnati Bengals, Reid publicly backed his starting quarterback. He said there was no situation right now in which he would consider getting a look at Kolb in a game.

“No,” Reid said flatly, “that’s not what I’m doing right now. Donovan will continue to be the quarterback. Donovan, for every throw that he didn’t make there, he’ll get himself back. I know that he has already talked to you guys after the game and put the blame on his back, which quarterbacks do. He’ll continue to fire and get whatever is wrong straightened out and get it right.”

Sure, there is mounting evidence that McNabb is on the downward slope of his career. The Eagles’ offense has been erratic this season, and McNabb has been a brutally slow starter these last four weeks and hasn’t been able to lead the Eagles back from behind once all season.

His passes at times have sailed way above the heads of his receivers, and at other times have landed awkwardly at the receivers’ feet or out of their reach.

Despite saying he’s finally 100 percent healthy after a knee injury prematurely ended his 2006 season, McNabb hasn’t tucked the football and run often enough when plays have broken down. He hasn’t been able to make something out of nothing, that unique gift that made McNabb so special earlier in his career.

And then there was the gaffe to beat all gaffes on Sunday. Every time I hear the clip, it sounds more absurd that McNabb didn’t know that regular-season games that are still tied after 15 minutes of overtime end in a tie.

You can read the rest of the piece, here.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Terry Pluto of Cleveland.com checks in with and early review of Brady Quinn.  This is a sample of what he thinks thus far…

…he didn’t give points to the other team with negative plays. In his 71 passes this season, Quinn has no interceptions. He has been sacked only once. He stressed that staying away from turnovers is a smart way to give his team a chance to win, and that’s so true — especially in dismal weather conditions such as this.

Quinn looked as if he has been through this before. He was not bothered by the noise from a hostile crowd, or by a variety of Buffalo stampedes and blitzes. He was often knocked down after making throws, but stayed away from costly sacks…

You can click through and read the rest of this favorable review, here.

Not only is is possible, but there seems to be a few people who are actually for it!

One of them is Rob Parker of the Detroit News.  This is what he had to say…

The Lions (0-10) have six games remaining to make history, becoming the only team to lose them all in a 16-game regular season. And with this horrid defense, they have a real shot.

But getting into the NFL record book isn’t the reason you should wish for continued bad play and misfortune. Such an embarrassment — a “perfect” winless season — would almost certainly assure the Lions would have to totally change, from top to bottom.

The long-needed fumigation of the franchise would take place. And we mean everybody being shown the door. Yes, everyone … even the ball boys probably need to be replaced.

Such a complete embarrassment might finally cause William Clay Ford to pick up the phone and ask for outside guidance. (Source and more reasons why going 0-16 might be good.)

Nothing else has sustained success in this franchise, so why not?