According to NFL.com

http://www.nfl.com/news/story?id=09000d5d80fbaa5d&template=without-video-with-comments&confirm=true

The actual schedules haven't been released yet, but the NFL is giving us this teaser.

I think someone had posted before that the AFC East was playing the NFC East, right? We have a pretty tough season ahead of us fellas.

I have to say though, I hate seeing the Steelers and Cardinals at #29 and #27, after they played eachother in the Super Bowl.

In case anyone has been living under a rock during this free agency, you'll notice that some high-profile players have been released by the their teams. Not necessarily "high profile" as in the best players in the game, but rather as in players that have defined the face of their franchises for a long time.

 

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Just thought I'd share this with everyone.

http://www.phinzmania.com/forums/view.php?pg=salarycap

I've got a lovely bunch of words to write, deedle-ee-dee-dee, there they are a counting to 75, dum dum dum, big ones small ones some as big as your head, give them a twist, a flick of the wrist, that's what the phins fan said. I've got a lovely bunch of words written.

This is going to be a long one.

Sometime around 2005, I was surfing Amazon.com for some football books, and came across something interesting. It was called the "2005 Football Prospectus" written by a group of guys calling themselves the Football Outsiders. I bought the book, read, and thoroughly enjoyed it. They had put together a group of people to study film and record statistics far beyond what the NFL normally records, and came out with two interesting statistical numbers, DVOA and DYAR.

Now, I'm not going to get into what these are, as you can go to their website, www.footballoutsiders.com and read to your hearts content. What I do want to get into, is the effect of these statistics on football, and what statistics really mean to football.

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I know this is an NFL forum, but I think there's enough future NFL players in this game to qualify.

Ohio State and the rest of the Big 10 need to be relegated to Division III. I mean my god, they looked like a high school team against USC tonight. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if some Florida high school teams could actually beat OSU this year the way they played in that game. (Put Miami Northwestern or St. Thomas Aquinas vs. Ohio State, hehehe)

I mean, what else do you expect from the Ohio State Chokeyes, but damn.

At least this means we won't have to watch another SEC team crush OSU in the National Championship game again. But it does mean we have to endure listening to how great USC is while they trounce the rest of the Pac 9+1.

Check out this little game .

I'm usually not one for mmorpgs, especially ones that don't active involve any action, but this is one of those interesting little things that take about 5-7 minutes a day and can be quite entertaining.

You create your own players and set their skills and train them, then sign on with teams that compete against eachother.

It's all free, so there's no worries there. The only thing that'll cost you is if you want to buy and build your own team, but all of the teams for this season are already bought anyways.

I've already created 2 players, an OT named Wayne Moore and a DE named Bill Stanfill (those names sound familiar to anyone? :P) And I'm starting to enjoy it.

Anyways, check it out. It's a nice little time waster while most of us wait for our real time waster - fantasy football - to get started again.

I love TMQ. If you've never read it, it's here: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=easterbrook/080429&sportCat=nfl&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab4pos1

Gregg Easterbrook is probably one of the best writers ESPN has.

Anyways, he makes this comment about the Jets:

Jersey/B Jets: Net of the Jets' Dewayne Robertson deals: Jersey/B traded two first-round draft choices to obtain Robertson, and just unloaded him for a conditional late-round choice in 2009. The picks the Jets gave up were the 13th and 22nd selections in 2003. Had the Jets simply stayed at 13th and 22nd that year, and taking into account their needs then, they could have selected Ty Warren or Troy Polamalu 13th and Dallas Clark 22nd. Imagine how much better the Jets would be today.

Sometimes, making fun of the Jets is just too easy.....

If anyone here has enjoyed my ramblings in The Phinsider diaries, I've joined The South Florida Fan as the main Dolphins contributer, so you can head over there to see my blogs. (http://thesouthfloridafan.blogspot.com)

There's a lot of great content there for other Florida teams as well, and ASponge has some big plans, so keep an eye on the place.

Of course I'll still be contributing in the comments for ThePhinsider because I love this place, but any kind of main blog written by me will be posted over there now.

Thanks,

Rate

Prompted by the post about Josh Johnson, I went in search of the round which each starting QB currently in the NFL was drafted. I looked at the QBs for every team in the league last season, and listed every QB that either started a game last season, or has been an NFL starter before (example: B.Johnson). I'm sure I missed a few, but I have a total of 57 QBs listed here, which should definitely be considered a representative sample.

The full list is at the bottom, but here's some roundup stats.

First off, # of QBs by round:

1st---21     2nd---6
3rd---9      4th---3
5th---2      6th---4
8th---1      9th---1
UD---10

Now, your initial reaction would be that, wow, 1st round has the highest number by far, but, keep in mind that the 1st round only makes up 36.8% of all of the QBs. In fact, 2nd day picks (which, note, is now from the 3rd round till the end), make up 35%, and Undrafteds are another  17.5%.

Next, look at the number of active super bowl winning QBs by round.

QB------Rings---Round
Brady-----3-------6
Roeth-----1-------1
P. Man----1-------1
B. John---1-------9
E. Man----1-------1
Favre-----1-------2
Warner----1-------UD

With the exception of Brady, this chart tends to favor the first round guys. But wait. Lets look at all of the Super Bowls since 1970, and see where the winner of each was drafted. Again, the full list is available later, for now, here's a recap chart.

Round---# of SB
1st--------19
2nd--------2
3rd--------5
4th--------1
6th--------5
9th--------2
10th-------2
UD---------2

Again, similar to before. The 1st round only claims 50% of the Super Bowls since 1970. In that chart, note that I counted number of super bowls, so multiple-time winners such as Brady or Montana were counted more then once. This is the chart if you take out multiple winners:

Round---# of SB
1st-------10
2nd-------2
3rd-------2
4th-------1
6th-------3
9th-------2
10th------1
UD--------2

Note that after taking out multiple winners, the first round only has 43% of the QBs.

There's no point here to prove or anything, I just got curious and couldn't find the information readily available anywhere, so decided to do it myself. I'm sure I missed some names, and some numbers may be slightly off since I'm doing this at 1am, so feel free to give me any corrections that you know of.

As for the list, I tried to group QBs with who they were with last season, but the list I was working with included all of the transactions that have already happened, so there's probably a few QBs with the wrong teams, too, but that's not really that important for what I was doing here, anyways.

Finally, I would like to point everyone to this great article by Ted Kluck before last year's draft that studied the risk of drafting each position. Note that QB has the highest bust percentage at 53: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=kluck/quarterbacks/070425

I hope everyone finds this interesting. If you can think of any other ways to extrapolate information from this data, please do so, or at least suggest different things to look at. I kind of enjoy researching this kind of stuff, so I may go even further if there's enough interest. Anyways, without further ado, here's the lists. QBs sorted by Team/Division, Super Bowls are by years.

(I'm not sure how this extended copy thing works, you might have to click read more or something like that.)

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I'm not sure how much anyways has talked about or noticed this, but this is the first time that I can remember that the real "stars" of any draft have been lineman. Usually all the talk is dominated by the "skill positions" (more on that term later). Reggie Bush, Matt Leinart, Calvin Johnson, Adrian Peterson, Ronnie Brown, Braylon Edwards, Eli Manning, Larry Fitzgerald, the list goes on.

But this year, look at most people's mock drafts. This draft is dominated by the most dominating forces on the field.

The Lineman.

Now, going by projections, the actual number of picks aren't that much different. McShay has 24 lineman going in the first two rounds in his mock draft. Here are the counts of number of lineman chosen in the first 2 rounds for the past 5 years:

2008 (projected): 24

2007. 23
      
2006. 17
      
2005. 18
      
2004. 20
      
2003. 21

But, for the first time, the lineman ARE getting more air time. I, personally, love this, because to me, the game of football is played in the trenches, every good team begins and ends with how well their lineman can control the line of scrimmage.

Look at Edgerrin James. Pro Bowl running back with the Colts behind one of the best lines in the league. Moves to the Cardinals behind one of the worst? Statistically average. I also believe that you could stick a monkey behind the Patriot's offensive line, and it could throw to their receivers enough to make them a solid playoff team .

Or look at the Giants, what is the strength of their team? Eli has become a good leader, but he's no elite QB. Their offense doesn't really have any superstar players at all. Now, given, they did have a lot of players on offense that stepped it up quite a bit when the respect card was played, but they still weren't the stars of that team.

No, it was the defensive line. Their O-line is pretty solid as well.

The fact is, all good teams MUST have solid play along both the offensive and defensive lines. With a good enough line, Samkon Gado could look like LaDainian Tomlinson (Well, ok, in that example it better be an entire line of Hall of Famers, but still). And as we saw in the Super Bowl, with a good enough pass rush, you can even make a future Hall of Fame QB look like Jay Fiedler.

Which is why I'm glad that the emphasis on the draft is finally on some of the guys that deserve it. For years lineman have gone through the league, many have even piled up Pro Bowl visits, with most people hardly even knowing who they were. 10 years ago, how many people could honestly say they knew who Will Shields was, even though he had been to 4 Pro Bowls by 1998?

Now, they're nearly the headliners. Alan Faneca was headlined as one of the biggest movers in free agency, the two Longs are dominating talks at the top of the draft, and when it's not focused on them, it's on Gholston or Dorsey.

Finally... FINALLY, we get more talk then just how strong QB1's arm is vs. QB2, or how much higher WR1 can jump then WR2.

And one last thing (since I left you dangling earlier) - I hate the term "skill positions." It implies that the only positions that use "skill" are QB, RB, WR, and TE, when, quite frankly, if you aren't skilled, you aren't playing in the NFL at any position.