Rams get ‘true’ home turf
News and views from around the NFL, with Week 11 under way:
Is the move of Monday night’s big game to L.A. a huge advantage for the Rams?
NEWS: The NFL on Tuesday relocated one of its most anticipated Monday Night Football games — featuring a pair of 9-1 teams (Kansas City Chiefs and Los Angeles Rams) — from Mexico City to the Rams’ home field at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The league deemed the shoddy turf at Azteca Stadium in Mexico City unfit and unsafe for an NFL game, regardless of how much emergency rehabilitation work crews might have been able to do to make it playable by Monday. VIEW: Is relocation an advantage for the Rams? Of course it is. In more than one way.
First, no one can predict how players or teams will respond to playing at altitude, specifically the 2.25km elevation of Mexico City. As part of its preparation, the Rams this week practised at the Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs, Colo., where the elevation is almost as high (2.21 km), far above any NFL locale including Denver (1.61 km).
The fact the game now has been relocated to Los Angeles, where the elevation is 0.087km, or 87 metres, eliminates the worry of elevation-adjustment being a factor either for the Rams or Chiefs.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it’s now a true home game for the Rams, in front of the home fans and on familiar turf. That’s a true advantage.
The big losers with the relocation are the thousands of fans who bought non-refundable airline tickets and hotel reservations in Mexico City.
An apology from the NFL won’t cut it. This was mismanagement. If the league is serious about staging games outside of usual venues, either within North America or outside, it must in the future insist that events such as a concert or soccer game that could potentially render the field unplayable not be staged leading up to the NFL game, as apparently was the case in Mexico City.
While both teams have had to scramble to make alternate travel and logistical rearrangements, consider ESPN’s woes this week. “We had 150 people that were mobilizing a ton of logistical, travel, security, transportation, equipment concerns to set up (at Azteca Stadium),” Monday Night Football producer Jay Rothman told reporters Wednesday. ESPN had covered the Monday Night game between the Giants and 49ers in Santa Clara, Calif., and the plan was to be at the Mexican border by Wednesday.
Instead, ESPN’s truck fleet was diverted to Tinseltown which, under these crazy circumstances, will play host to its first Monday Night Football game since 1985.
Have we seen the last of Nathan Peterman in the NFL? NEWS: The Buffalo Bills this week finally, mercifully, waived the struggling second-year passer and his historically prolific penchant for throwing ruinous interceptions: 13 in just 133 pass attempts over four starts and five relief appearances, including playoffs. No other team claimed him. VIEW: The answer to the above question, barring an injuryemergency return to the Bills, probably is yes. Everyone knew Peterman had a limited, substandard throwing arm coming out of Pitt. His instincts, accuracy and pro-level readiness were supposed to make up for it. They didn’t.
A failed NFL quarterback once told me he never could adjust to the faster speed of the game at the pro level, faster players, and faster decision-making. None of it slowed down enough for Peterman to succeed. Thus, he kept making too many mistakes because he kept thinking, wrongly, that he could make throws that had worked in college.
Part of his undoing was attempting throws he could sometimes get away with in NFL spring practices, in NFL summer training camp and even in NFL pre-season games when the threat of being hit did not exist, or when he often was playing with and against players who were likely to be cut. But he couldn’t get away with those throws once the games started to count.
Peterman tended to over trust his weak arm, and seemed to panic-throw too often in crunch situations. Lethal mixes. You have to admire him for the glowing reviews his head coach Sean McDermott and teammates gave Peterman about his work ethic, leadership and all those other intangibles.
Too bad his Bills bosses couldn’t see that Peterman’s physical skills and game-day decision-making weren’t up to NFL standards before they threw him out there, time and again, over the past 13 months.
Le’Veon Bell’s Steelers teammates looted his locker. NEWS: Ed Bouchette of the Pittsburgh Post- Gazette tweeted from the Pittsburgh Steelers locker-room Wednesday that players “removed Le’Veon Bell’s name over his locker and are now plundering it, dividing up his many football shoes and other stuff.” This, after Bell refused to report to the club and sign his franchise tag by the Tuesday deadline, which means he won’t be allowed to play in the NFL this season. He’s likely to become an untethered free agent in March. VIEW: Seeing as Bell hadn’t reported to the Steelers since cleaning out his locker after Pittsburgh’s divisional-round playoff loss to Jacksonville last January, he presumably didn’t leave much behind. And so what if he did. Want your stuff ? Come get it.
Bell and his agent are gambling that he’ll make it all up in a monster free-agent deal in March. And if he had signed the Steelers’ franchise tag, there’s the injury risk to consider. Who knows what kind of offers he’ll get after missing the entire season.
What we can safely presume, however, is that had he played in 2018 with the Steelers and not suffered serious injury, and shone as much or more than his dynamic low-cost replacement has (James Conner), then he probably would have been able to command as much or more on the open market come March than he will now, and be $14.45 million the richer for it.