The Screaming Viking

Check out this bullshit:

NO ROSTER EXEMPTION FOR BRYANT

Posted by Mike Florio on September 26, 2008, 1:55 p.m. EDT

Bucs kicker Matt Bryant’s infant son died this week, and it’s unclear whether Bryant will play on Sunday when Tampa Bay hosts the Packers.

If he doesn’t play, the Bucs won’t receive a roster exemption, according to Chris Harry of the Orlando Sentinel.

And so, if Bryant doesn’t play, the Bucs will have to acquire another kicker, cut a player already on the team, and deactivate Bryant for the Green Bay game.

In our view, the league’s position on this indirectly puts unfair pressure on Bryant to play, since he’ll understandably feel guilty if he gets a game check for not working while one of his teammates gets canned.

As Harry points out, teams get roster exemptions for players who are suspended.  The same approach should apply when a player has undergone a personal tragedy like a death in his immediate family.

I would expect there will be some adjustment made to the policy after the season, but you can’t tell me king Goodell isn’t capable of giving this the OK for a couple weeks.  Let them sign a kicker till Bryant ready to come back then have to cut back.  I can see a potential issue for Bryant, anytime an established player gives an underling some playing time it could lead to a potential loss of a job.  Still though….you’d have to give the guy the time if he wanted it, and there’s no reason he should lose his job for it.

The bears played an outstanding 1/2 of football, just magnificent.  If they put together complete games like they did the first 1/2 last night there is not a team in the league that could stay with them.  Who would have thought the offense would put up 21 points in a 1/2?  They capitalized on turn overs and good field position.  The general idea to use the hurry up offense was OK and executed fairly well by guys that don’t normally hurry up. There was an inordinant number of pass plays…and they were executed very well.  Orton had some pretty impressive throws and looked like an actual quarterback.  I was quite impressed.

Then came the 2nd half…

It looked like communication broke down a bit and the bears really didn’t know what to do on offense.  There was a fumble that was clearly a communication error.  On an end around, Orton tried to hand the ball off to jones then fake it to the end.  The ball bounced off of Jone’s arm…and found it’s way in to the eagle grasp.  What makes this stand out as a communication error is, as soon as the ball was fumbled, orton was the only one to react to it.  Jones didn’t seem to know the ball was on the ground.  He had his arms in a position across his chest to indicate he was carrying out the fake.  Orton also threw 2 (I think only 2) picks.  One was forced by a very good Eagles pass rush.  The 2nd was in the red zone and a little less forgivable.  During the first half of the game, Orton had the ball pretty much right where it needed to be when it needed to be there.  One fantastic example was the touchdown pass to hester on the sideline.  It was out of Orton’s hands before hester even looked to be open with beautiful positioning.  Again on the goal line, Orton was looking for Clark breaking aross the front of the endzone.  Clark made the cut on his break, Orton let it go but Clark was sealed off by a linebacker and prevented from being right where the ball was placed….an easy interception for the Eagles and a QB/TE mistake that would have been made by anyone in the league.

What can be said about the final goal line stand of the Bears D?  First and foremost, they shouldn’t have been in that position.  I’m not nearly as impressed by it as a lot in the media see to be.  The Eagles suffered from pretty unimaginative play calling inside the 10 and the bears simply stuffed the run.  It was awsome…it needed to happen…it just wasn’t spectacular.

Detroit next week.  Minn plays on Monday night, but GB plays at noon so I doubt we’ll be getting the Bears.  I need to spring for the Sunday ticket…

I have a feeling it’s going to be a -very- rough game…

I don’t care for Faith Hill’s performance at the begining of Sunday night football…she seems to just be going through the motions, there is no real feeling behind what she’s doing.

Looking at the season so far…the Bears should have been 3-0…but their defense let them down last week and their offense let them down with turn overs the week before that.  The Eagles are going to be a tuff tuff team.  Them being without Westbrook is really the best the Bears could have hoped for.

This is the kind of stuff that really makes this fantasy football crap suck hard…I’ve got  Buckhalter (Phi Starter with Westbrook out) and my opponent this week has Forte (Bears starter).  This is complete ass.

So I got this new cell phone for work.  It’s a pretty slick little device, all kinds of bells and whistles.  Since I started this job I’ve kept all my appointments on the phone’s calendar.  When something is about to happen it gives off a reminder sound.  This phone can also check my email at specific intervals, when a new one comes in it gives off a sound as well…then of course there are txt messages that also give off a sound.  By default all these sounds are the same.  Naturally I change them so I have a good idea what the phone is trying to tell me.  After looking around a little bit I found a gun-cock sound that I use for txt messages.  I get a lot of txt messages from work, notices of things down and so forth…the most predominate messags is backup missed.  It doesn’t require immediate attention.  I’m on call 24/7 so naturally I have this phone on me most all the time.  So, you can imagin what happened the first time I heard this sound…at 3am.  I now turn off the txt message sound when I go to bed.