Hundreds of players were cut from NFL teams Saturday. This article was written by Bill Bradley and appeared in the Sacramento Bee.
Yet, for the first time in decades, many of them will have a shot at playing fall football somewhere other than the NFL.
These castoffs will be eyed closely by the four teams in the United Football League, which opens play this fall. While many of us are unsure what to make of this new four-team, six-game league, it presents a new opportunity for these players.
Still, if a released 49ers linebacker is offered a deal by the new California Redwoods, the decision won't be easy.
Does he wait to see if he is offered a spot on an NFL team's practice squad, or does he sign with the UFL, which opens play in October?
Either way, the goal is to make it to an NFL 53-man roster. He has to decide which path gets him back there quicker.
At least for this season, the choices made by those players sitting on the waiver wire will be watched like a hawk by scouts, agents and other NFL officials. This article was written by Bill Bradley and appeared in the Sacramento Bee.
lunes, 7 de septiembre de 2009
Redskins show some "heart and soul"
The Washington Redskins notified a Fairfax County woman Friday that the team plans to ask a court to vacate a $66,364 court judgment against her after she defaulted on a multiyear contract for season club tickets.
A real-estate agent, Pat Hill, 72, had signed a $5,300-a-year, 10-year contract through 2017 for two seats at FedEx Field, but was unable to make payments in 2008 after the housing market crashed. The Redskins sued Hill in October for the duration of the contract and won a default judgment in March.
She was one of 125 people and firms who had been sued by the Redskins in the past five years after they defaulted on multiyear contracts to purchase premium seats.
Redskins General Counsel David Donovan wrote to Hill in an e-mail Friday afternoon: "I have directed our outside counsel to notify the courts that your obligation to the Redskins has been satisfied and to vacate the judgment against you. That means you no longer owe the Redskins anything, and you are released from all of your contractual obligations."
Donovan and other Redskins officials did not return phone calls or e-mails from The Washington Post on Friday.
Donovan's e-mail began: "I was sorry to read in the Post your account of your financial difficulties that prevented you from being able to pay for your Redskins Club Seats in 2008. I wish that you had returned our calls in 2008 or reached out to me in response to the letters I and others had sent you and explained your situation. If that had happened, we never would have proceeded with the claim against you."
Hill said she phoned Donovan when she got home Friday night from a day at a real-estate office where she is trying to jump-start her flagging sales practice. She said she told Donovan that she had called the Redskins repeatedly and once drove to the team's ticket office at FedEx Field.
Hill said she had attempted to get a waiver of a year or two in her contract. "I must have talked to them eight or nine times," she said. "I talked to a number of different people."
She said she couldn't afford a lawyer and never responded to the lawsuit.
Hill said Donovan told her that she should have called him directly. She said she told him: "I didn't even know you existed. I don't know you."
Hill said Donovan also told her she should have responded to the team's letters, but she told a reporter Friday, "I got no letters, and every call that was ever made to me was returned, and I physically went down to the Redskins office and explained my situation."
After her phone conversation with Donovan, Hill told The Post: "It is like he is blaming everything on me."
Donovan's e-mail said his decision was unrelated to a Post story this week featuring Hill's financial problems and describing the lawsuits filed against ticket holders.
"This is not the first time I have done something like this with respect to a Club Seat or Suiteholder who has fallen on hard times, and it has nothing to do with your decision to go to the Post with your story," Donovan wrote.
In the phone call, Hill said she told Donovan, "I didn't go to The Post. The Post came to me."
A reporter contacted her after finding the Redskins' lawsuit and judgment during a review of records in Prince George's County Circuit Court.
Hill has returned to her real estate practice to earn money. She said she was unaware of Donovan's e-mail for hours because she was taking a client to sign a lease, for which she will get a $200 commission. "I'm showing houses again today, and I'll show houses again tomorrow," Hill said. "I'm trying really hard."
A grandmother who has lived in the Washington area most of her life, Hill said she first started going to games in 1962 at the old D.C. Stadium, later RFK Stadium, where her daughter danced in half-time shows. That year, she tapped an official in the locker room, where the girls dressed before the shows, and asked for season tickets. He obliged. She has held them ever since, purchasing club seats when FedEx Field opened as Jack Kent Cooke Stadium in 1997.
Hill still hopes to get to some games this year. She said she had hoped that Donovan might offer her some tickets. She has received many phone calls since the story appeared, she said, and fans have offered to take her to games.
She's planning to go. (source Washington Post)
A real-estate agent, Pat Hill, 72, had signed a $5,300-a-year, 10-year contract through 2017 for two seats at FedEx Field, but was unable to make payments in 2008 after the housing market crashed. The Redskins sued Hill in October for the duration of the contract and won a default judgment in March.
She was one of 125 people and firms who had been sued by the Redskins in the past five years after they defaulted on multiyear contracts to purchase premium seats.
Redskins General Counsel David Donovan wrote to Hill in an e-mail Friday afternoon: "I have directed our outside counsel to notify the courts that your obligation to the Redskins has been satisfied and to vacate the judgment against you. That means you no longer owe the Redskins anything, and you are released from all of your contractual obligations."
Donovan and other Redskins officials did not return phone calls or e-mails from The Washington Post on Friday.
Donovan's e-mail began: "I was sorry to read in the Post your account of your financial difficulties that prevented you from being able to pay for your Redskins Club Seats in 2008. I wish that you had returned our calls in 2008 or reached out to me in response to the letters I and others had sent you and explained your situation. If that had happened, we never would have proceeded with the claim against you."
Hill said she phoned Donovan when she got home Friday night from a day at a real-estate office where she is trying to jump-start her flagging sales practice. She said she told Donovan that she had called the Redskins repeatedly and once drove to the team's ticket office at FedEx Field.
Hill said she had attempted to get a waiver of a year or two in her contract. "I must have talked to them eight or nine times," she said. "I talked to a number of different people."
She said she couldn't afford a lawyer and never responded to the lawsuit.
Hill said Donovan told her that she should have called him directly. She said she told him: "I didn't even know you existed. I don't know you."
Hill said Donovan also told her she should have responded to the team's letters, but she told a reporter Friday, "I got no letters, and every call that was ever made to me was returned, and I physically went down to the Redskins office and explained my situation."
After her phone conversation with Donovan, Hill told The Post: "It is like he is blaming everything on me."
Donovan's e-mail said his decision was unrelated to a Post story this week featuring Hill's financial problems and describing the lawsuits filed against ticket holders.
"This is not the first time I have done something like this with respect to a Club Seat or Suiteholder who has fallen on hard times, and it has nothing to do with your decision to go to the Post with your story," Donovan wrote.
In the phone call, Hill said she told Donovan, "I didn't go to The Post. The Post came to me."
A reporter contacted her after finding the Redskins' lawsuit and judgment during a review of records in Prince George's County Circuit Court.
Hill has returned to her real estate practice to earn money. She said she was unaware of Donovan's e-mail for hours because she was taking a client to sign a lease, for which she will get a $200 commission. "I'm showing houses again today, and I'll show houses again tomorrow," Hill said. "I'm trying really hard."
A grandmother who has lived in the Washington area most of her life, Hill said she first started going to games in 1962 at the old D.C. Stadium, later RFK Stadium, where her daughter danced in half-time shows. That year, she tapped an official in the locker room, where the girls dressed before the shows, and asked for season tickets. He obliged. She has held them ever since, purchasing club seats when FedEx Field opened as Jack Kent Cooke Stadium in 1997.
Hill still hopes to get to some games this year. She said she had hoped that Donovan might offer her some tickets. She has received many phone calls since the story appeared, she said, and fans have offered to take her to games.
She's planning to go. (source Washington Post)
Making fantasy football faster - Ingles
Before the Internet and cell phones and TV packages that let you watch every pro football game, playing fantasy football took a lot of work. It sounded geeky – football fans who were so hard-core that they selected individual NFL players to be on their “team,” then figured out if they won by scouring USA Today box scores for player statistics on Monday mornings.
Today, though, as football season kicks into high gear, fantasy football has become mainstream. From its small roots in the 1980s, it has now played by an estimated 20 million people in North America, making it easily the most popular fantasy sport.
An industry has grown up around it, too, with legions of companies touting products to give players an edge. There are companies that can text message you updates on players, sell you software with complex algorithms to tell you what players to pick and iPhone applications that allow you to manage your team on the go.
There's no doubt that technology has changed fantasy football. The Internet, with gobs of instant information, has made the hobby more accessible to a greater number of people, especially as mobile devices and Web access from home become more popular.
At the same time, though, to compete with friends who are managing their teams using smart phones or round-the-clock Internet access, some players feel pressure to devote more time to the hobby than they would like. The average time spent managing a fantasy football team increased 56 percent between 2002 and 2006, to 4 hours and 18 minutes a week, according to a 2007 study.
“It's an arms race,” says J.C. Bradbury, an economist at Kennesaw State University in Georgia who studies the economics of sports. “If you can get better technology, you can win your league. … Part of the fun of being in the arms race is trying to be one of the leaders.”
Now, though, with player information more widely available, managers can see if a player is active for a game or not and make changes just minutes before a 1 p.m. kickoff on Sunday. Or when out to dinner during the week, managers can look on their smart phone and see that, say, Washington Redskins running back Clinton Portis is predicted not to play that week and immediately pick up his backup, Ladell Betts.
“Now it's more enjoyable, but it's also more stressful,” says Hansen, who lives in New Jersey and publishes Fantasyguru.com magazine and runs a Web site that provides tips. “There are ways for people to have an advantage that can be annoying.”
Still, he says the ability to play with a widespread group of people and use different scoring formats make playing more fun than in the past.
Go into any bookstore, and there are likely to be several fantasy football magazines. On the Web, dozens of companies – typically small, one- or two-person operations – offer services to fantasy football managers.
Experts say that with the recession, sites are moving toward a model that's free to users and that makes money by selling advertising. Fantasy players are a desirable demographic, says Kim Beason, a professor who studies leisure behavior and consumer behavior at the University of Mississippi.
According to Beason's yearly survey of more than 500 fantasy players, the average player is between 36 and 41, white-collar, with at least a bachelor's degree and an annual income of more than $80,000 a year. More than 80 percent are men.
And it's a dedicated audience, too. Beason says the average male fantasy owner thinks about his fantasy team 31 minutes a day during the season.
“The only thing going through a man's mind that permeates it more is sex,” he says. “It's not work, it's not home life. During the season, (fantasy football) is pretty powerful.”
Ryan Stewart, 35, says he spends about 10 hours a week online researching football and managing his four fantasy football teams – about triple what he spent a decade ago. Technology, he says, has improved fantasy football, because “you can do more of the smack talk” on e-mail because everyone easily and quickly sees results.
But some competitors who lack Internet access at home have complained that they cannot make the same roster moves as those who are constantly plugged in. “They are the bottom-dwellers in the leagues,” Stewart says. “We say, you just need to get a laptop and Internet access.”
Though technology helps, it's no guarantee of success. Stewart, who manages a call center in Charlotte, raced to his computer last November after he heard starting New York Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress shot himself in the thigh in a New York nightclub. Stewart added backup Domenik Hixon, but Hixon came nowhere close to replacing Burress' numbers.
“It was an Internet projection that went wrong,” Stewart says.
There are also high-powered draft tools that try to predict which players will perform best during the season. One such program promises to “take the guesswork out of your fantasy football draft” using an algorithm developed by computer scientists. There are also more than a dozen fantasy football applications for the iPhone, most of which offer help in drafting a team.
Fantasy football is the most popular fantasy sport. Its growth has flattened in the last couple of years, industry experts say, perhaps in part because of the down economy. The No. 1 reason people quit playing is they say it takes too much time, which could be a challenge to growth in the future as technology advances.
One of the next big developments in fantasy sports technology could be the widespread introduction of Internet-ready television, which could eventually, for instance, allow players to get up-to-date player news scrolled across the bottom of the screen as they and their spouse snuggle up on the couch to watch “Lost.”
“If your spouse doesn't like the level of fantasy sports in your life now, it's only going to get worse,” says Paul Charchian, president of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.
Charchian says technology has created a distinction between casual and hard-core players. He says typically, there are three managers in a league who are “really really hard-core” and monitor player news minute-by-minute. That doesn't always sit well with other players.
“If you're a casual player and you want to win, you should really take the temperature of the other owners in your league and ask yourself, ‘Am I swimming with sharks?'” he says. “If you're not going to be following it every day, you'll probably lose. If you're OK with that, that's great.” (source Charlotte Observer)
Today, though, as football season kicks into high gear, fantasy football has become mainstream. From its small roots in the 1980s, it has now played by an estimated 20 million people in North America, making it easily the most popular fantasy sport.
An industry has grown up around it, too, with legions of companies touting products to give players an edge. There are companies that can text message you updates on players, sell you software with complex algorithms to tell you what players to pick and iPhone applications that allow you to manage your team on the go.
There's no doubt that technology has changed fantasy football. The Internet, with gobs of instant information, has made the hobby more accessible to a greater number of people, especially as mobile devices and Web access from home become more popular.
At the same time, though, to compete with friends who are managing their teams using smart phones or round-the-clock Internet access, some players feel pressure to devote more time to the hobby than they would like. The average time spent managing a fantasy football team increased 56 percent between 2002 and 2006, to 4 hours and 18 minutes a week, according to a 2007 study.
“It's an arms race,” says J.C. Bradbury, an economist at Kennesaw State University in Georgia who studies the economics of sports. “If you can get better technology, you can win your league. … Part of the fun of being in the arms race is trying to be one of the leaders.”
Now, though, with player information more widely available, managers can see if a player is active for a game or not and make changes just minutes before a 1 p.m. kickoff on Sunday. Or when out to dinner during the week, managers can look on their smart phone and see that, say, Washington Redskins running back Clinton Portis is predicted not to play that week and immediately pick up his backup, Ladell Betts.
“Now it's more enjoyable, but it's also more stressful,” says Hansen, who lives in New Jersey and publishes Fantasyguru.com magazine and runs a Web site that provides tips. “There are ways for people to have an advantage that can be annoying.”
Still, he says the ability to play with a widespread group of people and use different scoring formats make playing more fun than in the past.
Go into any bookstore, and there are likely to be several fantasy football magazines. On the Web, dozens of companies – typically small, one- or two-person operations – offer services to fantasy football managers.
Experts say that with the recession, sites are moving toward a model that's free to users and that makes money by selling advertising. Fantasy players are a desirable demographic, says Kim Beason, a professor who studies leisure behavior and consumer behavior at the University of Mississippi.
According to Beason's yearly survey of more than 500 fantasy players, the average player is between 36 and 41, white-collar, with at least a bachelor's degree and an annual income of more than $80,000 a year. More than 80 percent are men.
And it's a dedicated audience, too. Beason says the average male fantasy owner thinks about his fantasy team 31 minutes a day during the season.
“The only thing going through a man's mind that permeates it more is sex,” he says. “It's not work, it's not home life. During the season, (fantasy football) is pretty powerful.”
Ryan Stewart, 35, says he spends about 10 hours a week online researching football and managing his four fantasy football teams – about triple what he spent a decade ago. Technology, he says, has improved fantasy football, because “you can do more of the smack talk” on e-mail because everyone easily and quickly sees results.
But some competitors who lack Internet access at home have complained that they cannot make the same roster moves as those who are constantly plugged in. “They are the bottom-dwellers in the leagues,” Stewart says. “We say, you just need to get a laptop and Internet access.”
Though technology helps, it's no guarantee of success. Stewart, who manages a call center in Charlotte, raced to his computer last November after he heard starting New York Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress shot himself in the thigh in a New York nightclub. Stewart added backup Domenik Hixon, but Hixon came nowhere close to replacing Burress' numbers.
“It was an Internet projection that went wrong,” Stewart says.
There are also high-powered draft tools that try to predict which players will perform best during the season. One such program promises to “take the guesswork out of your fantasy football draft” using an algorithm developed by computer scientists. There are also more than a dozen fantasy football applications for the iPhone, most of which offer help in drafting a team.
Fantasy football is the most popular fantasy sport. Its growth has flattened in the last couple of years, industry experts say, perhaps in part because of the down economy. The No. 1 reason people quit playing is they say it takes too much time, which could be a challenge to growth in the future as technology advances.
One of the next big developments in fantasy sports technology could be the widespread introduction of Internet-ready television, which could eventually, for instance, allow players to get up-to-date player news scrolled across the bottom of the screen as they and their spouse snuggle up on the couch to watch “Lost.”
“If your spouse doesn't like the level of fantasy sports in your life now, it's only going to get worse,” says Paul Charchian, president of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association.
Charchian says technology has created a distinction between casual and hard-core players. He says typically, there are three managers in a league who are “really really hard-core” and monitor player news minute-by-minute. That doesn't always sit well with other players.
“If you're a casual player and you want to win, you should really take the temperature of the other owners in your league and ask yourself, ‘Am I swimming with sharks?'” he says. “If you're not going to be following it every day, you'll probably lose. If you're OK with that, that's great.” (source Charlotte Observer)
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