Saturday, October 21, 2017

The NFL in the Moment – Saturday – 11am EDT – Week Seven 2017

It will be nice when the NFL has more than one set of games in Europe so that they can add a Saturday morning game. We do not bet NCAA Football because the necessary information just does not exist yet. It was nice to have guessed correctly on the Raider’s win, but seeing how it ended makes us wonder if the Officials had been mandated to ensure that Oakland won the game. When one considers how little Rob Gronkowski has to do to generate an Offensive Pass Interference call when it suits the Officials: (Open Link in New Tab)


Now, juxtapose that with Amari Cooper’s first Touchdown:


It is interesting to note that in the first clip you can tell that Solomon Wilcots is not a Gronk fan, and he says that Gronk initiates the contact during the third example, which clearly he does not. Curiously, the word “initiate” is not once used in the entire section on Pass Interference in the NFL. If you are interested, we added a page that we copied directly from the 2017 NFL Rulebook (we even left the grammatical errors in it) verbatim (upper right Pages Menu) so that you can read the actual rules and judge for yourself.

Jonathan Jones of the New England Patriots has looked pretty good at Cornerback for the most part since Rowe and Gilmore went out, but Julio Jones and Sanu are on an entirely different level than the Robbie Andersons of the NFL, not to take anything away form the Jets good, young receiver mind. Fortunately (for the Patriots), neither Jones nor Sanu will be at 100% for SNF, nevertheless they will still be a handful. It’s too bad that RFA David Jones is still languishing on the Practice Squad after being held up in Training Camp with nagging problems, since at almost 6’4” with good speed Jones could compete with Jones on those high throws.

This game could end up being a very high scoring affair, but we can’t see the Falcons turning things around enough to beat the Patriots. Philip Dorsett almost broke out last week, when Brady underthrew him twice on deep balls, but will break through very soon. If he does so this week, Brady will score even more frequently against the not-so-good Atlanta Defence. Adding another burner in Dorsett to Cooks and Gronkowski, with Amendola’s sure hands and James White’s versatility out of the backfield, would allow Brady to take it to the next level. We have never seen that level, which makes it so exciting.


The return of Adrian Peterson is pretty exciting itself, forcing teams to defend Arizona entirely different and taking a ton of pressure off Carson Palmer. Larry Fitzgerald benefits greatly from the new arrangement, which has already inspired the Cardinals Offensive Line to perform at a higher level. Much like the positive domino effect Bowman had on the Raiders when he came aboard, the Peterson acquisition could have the same effect on Arizona and elevate the play of the entire team.



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