zn wrote:

Ben Obomanu says some Seattle players believe decision to throw was made to get Russell Wilson Super Bowl MVP

http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2015/02/20/ben-obomanu-says-some-seattle-players-believe-decision-to-throw-was-made-to-get-russell-wilson-super-bowl-mvp/

Conspiracy theories are fun right?

No matter how silly they may sound, there is something about believing in nefarious circumstances in an otherwise simple situation that captures the imagination.

However, the belief in such theories can be just as strong and real despite what actually occurred. With some members of the Seattle Seahawks, that could be the case in regards to the fateful decision to throw at the goal line at the end of Super Bowl XLIX.

Former Seahawks receiver Ben Obomanu joined Brian Abker of Sports Rado 950 KJR in Seattle on Wednesday and said he’s heard from current players on the team that believe the decision to throw on second-and-goal at the 1-yard line was rooted in a desire by the coaching staff to make Russell Wilson the MVP instead of running back Marshawn Lynch.

“I’ve heard a couple people express that sentiment,” Obomanu said. “A couple players, current players, have expressed that sentiment and I can give them some leeway because I know it’s hard to process and when you take a step back and you take a couple weeks post-game, post the emotions running, you start trying to find questions to ask yourself and when you get back with your parents, your friends, your buddies, all these kind of ideas creeping in. I think though some guys have expressed that same concept of actually believing that the organization in some kind of way was trying to allow Russell Wilson to be the star.

“With the whole thing with Marshawn and interviews and not giving interviews and the MVP conversation and cars and all those things that happen on the field, the guys have expressed ideas of it being easier to handle Russell Wilson accepting those kind of things and having that kind of thrust upon him as opposed to the possibilities that are unknown with Marshawn. I don’t know if guys actually believe it. I don’t know if they’re hearing it from family and friends but that’s one, I don’t know if you guys have heard it, but that’s one of the craziest kind of things that I’ve heard in my conversations with guys trying to process this whole thing.”

The decision to throw backfired horribly. Wilson was intercepted by Malcolm Butler to seal the victory for the New England Patriots. However, the thought the coaches were trying to do anything outside of winning the game seems pretty ridiculous for many reasons.

For one, the votes for MVP are collected before the end of the game, meaning the outcome of that play may have had very little to do with who won the award if Seattle had won. Also, Lynch got the ball on first down as well. If he isn’t tripped up a yard shy of the goal line, he’s the hero anyway.

Even though the play didn’t work, there is sound logic for throwing the ball on the play. New England had eight defenders near the line of scrimmage with one-on-one matchups on the outside. With one timeout left, throwing on second down would have allowed Seattle to run on both third and fourth down and get the plays off before the end of the game. The problem came in Jermaine Kearse getting jammed brutally by Brandon Browner at the line of scrimmage, which allowed Butler a free break at the pass intended for Ricardo Lockette.

It was the wrong decision to throw a slant and Seattle paid for it, but there is logical reasoning for Seattle to have handled the situation as they did. Pete Carroll and Darrell Bevell just never factored in an interception as a possible outcome of the play they called.

Obomanu said the root issues that players may be struggling with is their desire for Lynch to be back with the team next season and hoping the play-call doesn’t push Lynch toward possibly walking away.

“I think guys are more concerned about having Marshawn back and so I think that’s where that conversation and those ideas stem from is the need and the want to have Marshawn Lynch come back and be an effective player,” Obomanu said. “So they don’t want anything lingering from the Super Bowl to be a determining factor in him retiring or something.”

That part could be very real. Even if there was no intent to make Wilson “the star” over Lynch in that play-call, if Lynch and other players on the team believe there was, it could create just as many trust issues for the players to overcome.

That ‘theory’ is just totally absurd.

For starters a 1 Yard TD or a 1 Yard Run is
not gonna be significant in who gets the MVP.

But aside from that, there is no way Pete C
is gonna be thinking about anything other
than — just score.

w
v

======================================
Reading Statistics
Total percent of U.S. population that has specific reading disorders 15%
Total percentage of american adults who can’t understand the labels on their prescriptions 46%
Total percent of young people who claim they read more than 10 books a year 56%
Total percentage of U.S. adults who are unable to read an 8th grade level book 50%
Total amount of words read annually by a person who reads 15 minutes a day 1 million
Total percent of U.S. high school graduates who will never read a book after high school 33%
Total percentage of college students who will never read another book after they graduate 42%
Total percentage of U.S. families who did not buy a book this year 80%
Total percentage of adults that have not been in a book store in the past 5 years 70%
Total percentage of books started that aren’t read to completion 57%
Total percent of U.S. students that are dyslexic 15%
Total percentage of NASA employees that are dyslexic 50%
Total number of U.S. inmates that are literate 15%
http://www.statisticbrain.com/reading-statistics/
=================

Twilight Of The Books
New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/24/twilight-of-the-books?currentPage=all
…..see link…
……….There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century. They warn that it probably won’t regain the prestige of exclusivity; it may just become “an increasingly arcane hobby.” Such a shift would change the texture of society. If one person decides to watch “The Sopranos” rather than to read Leonardo Sciascia’s novella “To Each His Own,” the culture goes on largely as before—both viewer and reader are entertaining themselves while learning something about the Mafia in the bargain. But if, over time, many people choose television over books, then a nation’s conversation with itself is likely to change. A reader learns about the world and imagines it differently from the way a viewer does; according to some experimental psychologists, a reader and a viewer even think differently. If the eclipse of reading continues, the alteration is likely to matter in ways that aren’t foreseeable.

Taking the long view, it’s not the neglect of reading that has to be explained but the fact that we read at all. “The act of reading is not natural,” Maryanne Wolf writes in “Proust and the Squid” (Harper; $25.95), an account of the history and biology of reading. Humans started reading far too recently for any of our genes to code for it specifically. We can do it only because the brain’s plasticity enables the repurposing of circuitry that originally evolved for other tasks—distinguishing at a glance a garter snake from a haricot vert, say.

The squid of Wolf’s title represents the neurobiological approach to the study of reading. Bigger cells are easier for scientists to experiment on, and some species of squid have optic-nerve cells a hundred times as thick as mammal neurons, and up to four inches long, making them a favorite with biologists. (Two decades ago, I had a summer job washing glassware in Cape Cod’s Marine Biological Laboratory. Whenever researchers extracted an optic nerve, they threw the rest of the squid into a freezer, and about once a month we took a cooler-full to the beach for grilling.) To symbolize the humanistic approach to reading, Wolf has chosen Proust, who described reading as “that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.” Perhaps inspired by Proust’s example, Wolf, a dyslexia researcher at Tufts, reminisces about the nuns who taught her to read in a two-room brick schoolhouse in Illinois. But she’s more of a squid person than a Proust person, and seems most at home when dissecting Proust’s fruitful miracle into such brain parts as the occipital “visual association area” and “area 37’s fusiform gyrus.” Given the panic that takes hold of humanists when the decline of reading is discussed, her cold-blooded perspective is opportune.

Wolf recounts the early history of reading, speculating about developments in brain wiring as she goes. For example, from the eighth to the fifth millennia B.C.E., clay tokens were used in Mesopotamia for tallying livestock and other goods. Wolf suggests that, once the simple markings on the tokens were understood not merely as squiggles but as representations of, say, ten sheep, they would have put more of the brain to work. She draws on recent research with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technique that maps blood flow in the brain during a given task, to show that meaningful squiggles activate not only the occipital regions responsible for vision but also temporal and parietal regions associated with language and computation. If a particular squiggle was repeated on a number of tokens, a group of nerves might start to specialize in recognizing it, and other nerves to specialize in connecting to language centers that handled its meaning.

In the fourth millennium B.C.E., the Sumerians developed cuneiform, and the Egyptians hieroglyphs. Both scripts began with pictures of things, such as a beetle or a hand, and then some of these symbols developed more abstract meanings, representing ideas in some cases and sounds in others. Readers had to recognize hundreds of symbols, some of which could stand for either a word or a sound, an ambiguity that probably slowed down decoding. Under this heavy cognitive burden, Wolf imagines, the Sumerian reader’s brain would have behaved the way modern brains do when reading Chinese, which also mixes phonetic and ideographic elements and seems to stimulate brain activity in a pattern distinct from that of people reading the Roman alphabet. Frontal regions associated with muscle memory would probably also have gone to work, because the Sumerians learned their characters by writing them over and over, as the Chinese do today….see link….

• This reply was modified 11 years, 2 months ago by wv.
• This reply was modified 11 years, 2 months ago by wv.

So far, RG3 has turned out
to be the Anti-Russell Wilson.

w
v

znhater wrote:

Well well, very interesting. I wondered if it wasn’t lip service saying they were going with him.

Enh. I think the “permission to seek a trade” stuff
is meaningless. I think its just kinda
“standard procedure” for this kind of situation.
Let the agents test the waters to get an idea
of his worth, etc.

w
v

zn wrote:

My ideal Rams OL?

The one they field after:

Signing Barksdale.
Getting Saffold up to speed,
Coaching Robinson some.
Signing a free agent or 2.
Drafting a player or 2.
Working on the guys they have in-house already.

Putting it all in a blender.

Fielding the best 5.

I will say this. Last 2 years, the Rams had 2 different linemen in play. If Warford fell to them at 30 and Ogletree was gone, that was their pick. Last year, they were in the process of trading up for Martin when Dallas picked him.

So they had the 2 best guards of the last 2 drafts in play…which tells us a lot about their taste in guards. And btw the trade-up for Martin was in play after they took Donald. If they had pulled off the trade (it was with Baltimore) they would have had a 1st round consisting of Robinson, Donald, Martin. One for the ages.

So I will kick back with my feet up and just watch as the dust settles, pretty confident they will come away with a good line.

I know some disagree. There are less optimistic views of this than mine.

What if you could go back and choose
between Robinson and Martin — which would
you choose?

w
v

Gag me.

w
v

zn wrote:

Well I’d still like to know what round
those seven Free Agents were drafted in.

But hey if you wanna be
all lazy about it thats fine with me.
Have a White Russian and sit in your
bathrobe and post on.

Btw, to state the obvious just “getting a center”
doesnt mean the team got a “good one.”
I mean, maybe only the ones drafted in the
first and second rounds were “good”

w
v

Well the trick with that is, first just list the top 12 centers in the league, and see where they came from. Another way, which takes some waiting, would be to find who is replacing their centers. We already know the Giants are looking to do that.

I defend the “when you look for how a team acquired a player, FA is FA” approach, because otherwise, what you do is erase free agency as a category. The point is how teams acquire a player. So when the Rams signed Timmerman, they got a player through free agency, not by spending a draft pick. That;s a significant distinction.

The way I see the 1st round thing btw, is that all of the 1st round centers are good (Frederick, Pouncey, Mack, Mangold). But not all the good centers are first rounders. Either way I don’t think there’s a real 1st round center this year.

…

Well i dont want to eliminate the ‘free agent’ category,
i just like to have more context about where
the players were drafted. That way, i can get a better
sense about how a free agent center is likely to do.
If the free agent centers who had been drafted below
the second round, all sucked — it tells me something.

How do we know who the top ten or twelve centers are?

w
v

zn wrote:

How/where did teams get their centers?

Well I’d still like to know what round
those seven Free Agents were drafted in.

But hey if you wanna be
all lazy about it thats fine with me.
Have a White Russian and sit in your
bathrobe and post on.

Btw, to state the obvious just “getting a center”
doesnt mean the team got a “good one.”
I mean, maybe only the ones drafted in the
first and second rounds were “good”

w
v

Winnbrad wrote:

I think a good QB, staying healthy all year, solves nearly all of the Rams problems, including Tavon.

Exactly why they need to sign Geno Smith
and draft Kevin White.

w
v

Sure, LB is in play, i think. Not at 10, i wouldnt think
but if they can trade down and pick up an extra pick or somethin.

This is definitely a different kind of draft
than we’ve seen since Fisher came in.
For the first time in years, the Rams dont
have more needs than they can fill. This
draft has a more narrow focus, it seems.

If they can sign Britt and if Quick is
able to come-back, then they dont really
need to consider one of the top WRs who
may very well be the BPAs. They can
trade down, pick up a couple of OLinemen
, a QB and a LB. Sign a vet Guard or Center…

After that it all depends on Bradford. 🙂

I’m excited. Hope Springs Eternal.
16-0, baby.

w
v

Not much here really, but I thot I’d post it for the heck of it:

• This reply was modified 11 years, 2 months ago by wv.

He just seems like a classic, physical, strong
pro WR.

I just don’t think they will stay at 10 and pick a WR.

It would be fun to have three WVU receivers though.

w
v

Well, so far,
if there’s any kind of “identity”
for this team — its the pass rush.

Thats what all the national celebrity-tv-pundits
always talk about when they talk about the Rams:
The pass rush.

Mix that with
Bonehead Mistakes,Injured OLines
and Second-string-QBs,
and you have the Rams
Identity.

w
v