KSpan

Just to play devil's advocate here, that means 3 of the top FAs signed this off-season at positions of need are injured (Erving), look bad (Elflein), or gone (Perryman). Not ideal.

Probably about the same as he's played for 7 years now.

I think it depends on how one defines a starting QB. If defined as one of the 32 QBs in the league who trots out for their team's opening snaps on gameday, then yeah, and he might even be one of the top 32 overall. If defined as a QB who can do enough that one reasonably believes they can overcome better opposition, I don't think he or a fair number of other of the 32 'starting' QBs really meet that definition. Perhaps though that second definition treads more into quality QB territory than starting.

"Do you know who Mike Martz is? No? Well, want to go prank call him with me anyway?"

Good luck with that, Denver. Maybe this truly will be the year he turns it on and transcends beyond 'Discount Alex Smith'.

Consider your sources there. Lo and behold, the first citation has some significant potential conflicts of interest: For your second citation, that looks at one specific type of product, conveniently the one that the company sells. However, the studies I cited also note that this particular type of product may not carry the same risk profile, which I noted in the very first sentence of my initial comment.

While risk levels of specific lesions can vary by product, several of those statements are incorrect. A general study about disorders resulting from smokeless tobacco use: https://www.cda-adc.ca/jcda/vol-66/issue-1/22.html As one example regarding cancer risk: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15470264/ Another regarding oral cancer: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4268996/ Smokeless tobacco also quite literally elevates blood pressure upon use (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12704595/), and while far from the only activity to do so this represents an unnecessary risk factor, particularly for regular users. Also a strong association with CHD: With respect to the second half of your post I'm not sure how that's relevant to a discussion about risk of tobacco products and no one made the type of claim you're seemingly attempting to refute but yeah, those are known to be unhealthy as well. I won't make any more comments about this here so as to avoid further derailing.

Maybe fair to say it doesn't harm the lungs like smoking but it's still a major factor for heart disease, store/blood pressure, and cancer, and even worse in other ways such as oral cancer and disorder due to the direct contact with oral tissues. Not to derail the thread, but having had an old acquaintance need a portion of his jaw removed due to oral cancer really drove home the myths around dip vs cigarettes.

Interesting. This Football Outsiders analysis showed the opposite in some cases, though it is several years old at this point. https://www.footballoutsiders.com/stat-analysis/2017/turf-type-and-nfl-injuries-part-i "Here we see a bit more variation. For knees, natural grass (2.8 per 1,000 AEs) has the lowest injury rate. Matrix Turf is elevated at 3.2 but includes a lot of uncertainty. Once again Momentum Turf and A-Turf (both 3.8) have the worst injury rates; Field Turf is also substantially above grass (3.6). The difference between Momentum/A-Turf/FieldTurf and grass is about one per 1,000 AEs, which translates to four fewer knee injuries a year for a team strictly working on grass versus these turfs. It's important to take account of the uncertainty in our data, but grass does appear to beat out at least certain kinds of turf for knee injuries. Ankle injuries are more muddled. Here grass is near the middle with an injury rate of 2.0 per 1,000 AEs. Fieldturf is somewhat elevated (2.4). Momentum is once again at the top with 2.8, but a lot of uncertainty. All other artificial turfs are basically in line with grass." An analysis by stadium is here and it isn't overly positive for FieldTurf, which is what Carolina installed. https://www.footballoutsiders.com/stat-analysis/2017/turf-type-and-nfl-injuries-part-ii "FieldTurf still looks bad, though -- those stadiums hold the second-, third-, and fourth-highest rates of lower leg injuries. The other two FieldTurf stadiums also rank in the top half. The stadiums with the six lowest lower leg injury rates are all natural grass. Houston remains essentially tied with Tennessee for the worst grass ranking. ... Conclusions All else being equal, natural grass fields seem the safer choice, especially for lower leg injuries. The issue, of course, is that they may not be suitable for all climates and stadium types. There's also a lot of stadium-to-stadium variation -- if you choose grass but use Houston's tray system, that's not helpful. Getting the right turf can pay huge dividends, as the difference between average and bad turf can be around half a dozen injuries per season. Any extra upfront costs of making the right choice pale in comparison to the cost in wins and game checks of getting it wrong."

I'd call it a grace period more than a honeymoon. Throwing that much money and/or control at a college coach has rarely, if ever, worked out, and Rhule's performance against ranked teams and in bowls was not impressive. He was Tepper's choice though and deserves his shot, but skepticism was, and may still remain, justified IMO.

They seem to have ditched the green QB jerseys in practice after talking it up last year, so I expect this to meet a similar fate. Interestingly, that article also links to another last year where Thule talked about how his practice plans were basically the same as what he ran at Baylor. https://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2020/08/17/green-means-go-for-panthers-quarterbacks/

I see you're feeling generous today.

We had an arena team here in KC that was called the Brigade. Seems on par with the quality of WFT football has put out for a while now.

Reminds me of the Sean Payton sign the Saints hung up the year he was suspended.

Cam had (has) amazing touch. Unfortunately, it was inconsistent and only showed at certain times.

Even though that's the guy he himself signed... Bit of a double-edged sword there. I think there were better options out there like Reiff that really didn't cost much more than Erving. Regardless though we're here now and let's see how things shake out. Hopefully these risk/reward OL signings pan out.

I'm not supporting that claim specifically but it was widely reported that Carolina asked Miami to back it down. https://www.charlotteobserver.com/sports/nfl/carolina-panthers/article31836102.html

Ah, gotcha. I read that as you proposing him moving to MLB.

I can't agree with you there. Chinn is a fantastic athlete but the position (which he's never played at the college or NFL levels) requires certain instincts and know-how, particularly at the NFL level. There's a reason guys like Beason and Kuechly weren't nearly as good on the outside and it goes the other way as well.

So he's basically the LT then.

Watch it be conditional and Carolina end up with nothing, though even if that happens at least they had a shot in getting something in return.

The problem is that your point is provably wrong, and dangerous to frame as truthful. There are no arguments for these vaccine mRNAs staying in the body since it doesn't happen. mRNA does not just hang out, full stop. It exists for the purposes of translation in the cytoplasm of the cell, and upon use in translation it is broken down. Full stop. Your own body has your own mRNA constantly in your cells doing work, with the only difference being that your mRNA was transcribed from your nucleic DNA. mRNA is a product of transcription and can not possibly interact with DNA since they are two entirely different things. The proteins do remain for a period of time just like any other protein but that's the whole point, to stimulate immune response at no risk of having the actual virus present. Also, there is no such thing as 'unnatural antibodies' - the immune system reacts to foreign compounds/materials/xenobiotics/etc that enter your body constantly, and this absolutely includes nucleic acids from outside sources through the food you eat, air you breath, water you drink, material that comes into contact with your eyes/open wounds, etc. The issue with what you seem to be proposing is also that acute infection is generally required to gain a strong immunity level, and that's the whole problem since long term outcomes are so variable. It is true that there are gene therapies our there that use things like retroviral vectors to edit genetic code, but that is an entirely different and unrelated technology to these vaccines. This is not something like Herpes simplex though, which is a DNA-carrying virus that does insert itself into code of nerve cells.

Looked to me like he was turning away from the guy, though it did start while he was facing him. If the NFL wants to call it this way then whatever, but this one was fringe.

In case you're serious about the DNA reprogramming comment, that's not at all how these mRNA vaccines work. The vaccine contains a bit of viral mRNA (not complete, just a protein-encoding portion) that causes your body to build the spike protein itself based off of that blueprint and that blueprint is quickly broken down and disposed of after use, just like your regular cellular mRNA. From there, the antibodies react and you are then equipped to deal with foreign infection with the full virus capsule that includes the specific protein that your body recognizes. Read here as well: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different-vaccines/mrna.html