Author Topic: football  (Read 5906 times)


Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 71948
    • View Profile
Re: football
« Reply #1 on: December 16, 2013, 06:08:50 AM »

Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 71948
    • View Profile
JKD-Kali with the Dallas Cowboys
« Reply #2 on: November 21, 2015, 05:40:00 PM »
https://www.facebook.com/TimTackettJKD/videos/630990720376369/

Though the effort was led by Guro Dan Inosanto, this is Tim Tackett working JKD-Kali with the Dallas Cowboys. (late 1970s?) The connection was made by the friendship between college team mates Guro I. and Paul Ward, who went on to become the conditioning and strength coach for the Cowboys.


Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 71948
    • View Profile
« Last Edit: December 25, 2016, 07:39:43 AM by Crafty_Dog »


Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 71948
    • View Profile

Crafty_Dog

  • Administrator
  • Power User
  • *****
  • Posts: 71948
    • View Profile
WSJ: Trump and the NFL
« Reply #6 on: May 30, 2018, 07:14:04 AM »

Link copied…

    U.S.

How Trump’s Pressure Influenced the NFL to Change Its Anthem Rules
Depositions in Kaepernick’s grievance indicate Donald Trumps’s criticism of player protests prompted league to shift stance

By Andrew Beaton
May 30, 2018 9:02 a.m. ET
184 COMMENTS

President Donald Trump didn’t mince words last fall when he explained to Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones that he wouldn’t relent in his criticism of NFL players who were kneeling during the national anthem to protest social injustice.

“This is a very winning, strong issue for me,” Mr. Trump said in a phone call, according to a sworn deposition given by Mr. Jones and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “Tell everybody, you can’t win this one. This one lifts me.”

Mr. Jones was deposed in a grievance filed against the National Football League by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who contends that NFL teams have blackballed him over his anthem protests.

A White House official said that Mr. Trump was advising Mr. Jones on what he believed would be good for the country and good for the sport. “The majority of the American people agree with the president, love our country, love our flag and believe it should be respected,” the official said.

Nearly two years since Mr. Kaepernick’s initial protest, NFL owners last week voted to change league rules: Players on the field for the national anthem are required to stand, or their teams could face repercussions. The overhaul allows players to remain in the locker room for the anthem, which was previously banned, but it also permits teams to punish players that violate the new protocol.


“I brought it out,” Mr. Trump said of the issue in a Fox & Friends interview after the rule change was announced. “I think the people pushed it forward.”

Depositions given by Mr. Jones and other owners indicate that Mr. Trump’s criticism pushed the league to shift its stance. League executives publicly repeated the NFL’s aim to stay out politics. But privately, they made political calculations in response to Mr. Trump’s repeated hammering of the issue.

The controversy over anthem protests had already been raging for a year when Mr. Trump—at a stump speech in Alabama last September—said that if a hypothetical player knelt during the national anthem, his team’s owner should “get that son of a bitch off the field now.” On Twitter , he later encouraged owners to fire those players and suggested a boycott.

“I was totally supportive of [the players] until Trump made his statement,” Stephen Ross, the Miami Dolphins’ owner and creator of programs advocating for social justice, said in his deposition. Noting that owners’ conversations with Mr. Trump were relayed during a league meeting, he said: “I thought he changed the dialogue.”

Mr. Trump’s stance is a key point in Mr. Kaepernick’s grievance, which was filed last October. It alleges that the league and its 32 teams colluded to keep him unsigned last season because of his political views.

Mr. Kaepernick, who ignited the anthem demonstrations in 2016 to draw attention to racial inequality and other social justice issues, has remained unsigned despite statistics superior to other quarterbacks who have gotten jobs. His grievance argues that Mr. Trump was an “organizing force in the collusion” because of the president’s relationships with various NFL owners, many of whom have backed him with campaign contributions.

When the 2017 season began, only a handful of players were still kneeling. But Mr. Trump’s fiery comments in Alabama—just before the season’s third weekend—changed that. The following Sunday, players knelt en masse to directly rebuke the president.

Many owners took a knee alongside their players. Mr. Jones, in a high-profile Monday night game Sept. 25, knelt with his players before the anthem—but they stood when it was played.

At a stump speech in Alabama last September, Donald Trump said that if a hypothetical player knelt during the national anthem, his team’s owner should ‘get that son of a bitch off the field now.’

At a stump speech in Alabama last September, Donald Trump said that if a hypothetical player knelt during the national anthem, his team’s owner should ‘get that son of a bitch off the field now.’ Photo: brendan smialowski/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Publicly, the NFL fought back and touted the moment as a display of unity. Commissioner Roger Goodell called Mr. Trump’s comments “divisive.” The league’s chief spokesman, Joe Lockhart, called the president “out of touch” and said, “everyone should know, including the president, that this is what real locker-room talk is.”

Behind the scenes, the kerfuffle rankled a league that was already grappling with declining ratings. Messrs. Ross, Jones and Bob McNair, the owner of the Houston Texans, both said in their depositions that they believed the protests were financially hurting their teams.

Some owners were upset with the comments made by Mr. Lockhart, a former press secretary for President Bill Clinton, who they believed was furthering the feud with the president. Mr. Lockhart, who declined to comment, left the league after the season.

“You cannot piss off a large percentage of your constituency,” Mr. Jones said in his deposition. Regarding Mr. Lockhart, he said: “I was proud to see him go.”

Mr. Jones relayed his conversation with Mr. Trump in a meeting between owners to decide how to handle these protests, according to Mr. Ross’s testimony. Many owners disagreed with the president and his tactics. Mr. McNair, the Texans owner, said he didn’t like the players kneeling, but he thought Mr. Trump’s language was inappropriate. “I wished he hadn’t said it,” Mr. McNair said in his deposition. Representatives for Mr. McNair didn’t respond to requests for comment.

After Mr. Trump’s comments, Mr. Ross met with various Dolphins players several times and asked them to stay off the field in lieu of protesting. Later, “they informed the coach that they couldn’t, in their conscience, stay in the tunnel. They wanted to go out.” Miami’s coach allowed them. And they did.

Mr. Ross said Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, also brought up a conversation with Mr. Trump with the owners. Mr. Kraft told the group he was friends with Mr. Trump, but thought the president was wrong in the way he handled this issue.

Mr. Goodell, the NFL’s commissioner who at the time was at the center of a budding war among the owners over his contract extension, was also influenced by Mr. Trump’s comments, Mr. Ross said in his deposition.

“We continue to abide by the confidentiality provision of the [collective bargaining agreement] and will not comment on the grievance,” an NFL spokesman said.

This off-season brought both new opportunity and scrutiny. The league’s owners had two scheduled meetings, in March and May, to discuss an array of topics, including the anthem. At the same time, a former teammate of Mr. Kaepernick’s who also had taken a knee during the anthem, Eric Reid, was going unsigned.

In May, Mr. Reid filed a collusion grievance against the league, like Mr. Kaepernick. The NFL Players Association also filed a grievance, saying a team violated league rules by asking Mr. Reid about his intentions during the anthem.

Then, when the owners met last week in Atlanta, the host city for next year’s Super Bowl, they changed the rule.

Mr. Jones declined to comment. In his deposition, which was taken before the rule change, he fought back against the idea that Mr. Trump reframed the conversation.

“Let’s [not] give him that much credit,” he said. “But I recognize he’s the president of the United States.”

—Louise Radnofsky contributed to this article.



ccp

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 19587
    • View Profile
wonder what it will be like
« Reply #9 on: January 05, 2023, 10:37:48 AM »
to become unconscious without warning

then wake up to find the whole nation had been praying and worrying about you
and your charity is now worth multimillions

(and your football career is over)

https://www.yahoo.com/sports/bills-announce-damar-hamlin-making-remarkable-progress-appears-to-be-neurologically-intact-160636154.html

Body-by-Guinness

  • Power User
  • ***
  • Posts: 3041
    • View Profile
The End of College Football (& Other NCAA Sports)?
« Reply #10 on: June 11, 2024, 08:58:24 PM »
I care not much at all about college sports or indeed about any pro sport beyond MMA, but found this piece worth mulling. Besides, anyone that drops the quote “football has the same relationship to education that bullfighting has to agriculture,” has gotta be worth reading:

College Football Is About to Change Forever

June 11, 2024

By RICHARD K. VEDDER

Also published in The American Spectator Fri. June 7, 2024

The legendary President of the University of Chicago during much of the first half of the last century, Robert Hutchins, once said (according to Joseph Epstein in his great new memoir Never Say You Had a Lucky Life) that “football has the same relationship to education that bullfighting has to agriculture.” Hutchins ended football at Chicago, but the problems football could cause universities were then just in their infancy. What would Hutchins say if he were alive today?

Fast forward to the present era. Alabama football coach Nick Saban’s timing was exquisite. He announced last fall he was retiring from his position as the highest-paid person in college football, indeed I believe in all of higher education—meaning he was almost certainly America’s highest-paid public employee. He was giving up his $11 million-plus annual compensation as coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide. He lamented that football was not the same today with NIL (name, image, and likeness) deals for players, transfer portals, and other recent changes. Then came the blockbuster announcement that the NCAA and the five major power athletic conferences had agreed to an arrangement allowing the direct payment of salaries to college athletes, belatedly and tacitly admitting what the world had long recognized, that college sports are a professional, not amateur, activity.

For generations, top-flight college football and basketball players have received far less compensation for their athletic services than they would have in a competitive labor market. A decade ago, a superstar quarterback might have received benefits worth $50,000 or so annually—payment of tuition fees and some modest amount for living expenses—while adding perhaps millions to the school in revenues arising from a successful team—bigger ticket sales, more television income, dollars from selling more parking places, tee shirts, hot dogs, and even overpriced beer to thirsty fans. A huge portion of revenues from big-time college sports went to pay multi-million dollar salaries to head coaches and their more accomplished minions. Offensive and defensive coordinators, for example, at Power Five Conference schools typically make more than the university’s president or lesser public officials like the state’s governor or the president of the United States.

Until a few years ago, we were in a world where the total compensation to a very talented 21-year-old quarterback competing at a highly ranked school may have been $75,000 a year, while that of a 23 or 24-year-old recent graduate playing in the professional National Football League was $5-10 million annually. Yet the college kid’s coach usually made as much or even more as the coaches of NFL quarterback wunderkinds. Income was artificially but massively transferred between talented young men and their coaches—a peculiar but powerful form of financial child molestation. I once estimated that the financial exploitation rate of the average superstar college quarterback was far greater than that of prime slave field hands on the eve of the Civil War. The system started collapsing when NIL payments to athletics modestly lessened the exploitation; the current decree that salary payments cannot exceed $20 million per school won’t last long.

The ancien régime is dying, albeit without the guillotine drama (e.g., the beheading of Marie Antoinette) of the French Revolution. Let’s look at the finances. Even before the latest capitulation of the collegiate cartel, college football’s future was somewhat shaky. Most top schools already lose money on sports, at a time when college budgets have become more stretched. Laying out millions to college athletes has to be financed somehow—raising tuition fees to finance high living by so-called “students” adept at throwing and catching balls would be, to put it mildly, unpopular. I predict pay for top coaches will start falling, maybe to levels only two or three times that of the university president. More money will go for high salaries for talented athletes and less for luxurious locker rooms. The NCAA (which derives most of its income from its “March Madness” basketball gold mine) becomes increasingly irrelevant. Schools outside the Big Five Power Conferences will be unable to compete well (for lack of resources) and will become increasingly akin to baseball’s minor leagues. Other disasters loom as well, such as the prospect of massive lawsuits arising over long-term medical disabilities facing former football notables, or the growing fascination with soccer leading to a decline in football’s market share of the sports entertainment market.

Colleges may get innovative and essentially try to sell the use of their name to professional teams and unload their massive investments in stadiums and practice facilities. Is that viable? I don’t know. Much of the loyalty to university teams relates to affection for the school, including the non-sports dimensions, such as outstanding success in turning boys and girls into educated men and women.

 
RICHARD K. VEDDER is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Economics at Ohio University, and author of Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14957