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July 10, 2020 at 4:39 pm in reply to: NFL on having a season w/ pandemic (thread 1, to 7/17)) #117838
znModeratorJohn McClain , Houston Chronicle
from https://www.houstonchronicle.com/texas-sports-nation/john-mcclain/article/Mailbag-Texans-2020-NFL-season-COVID-19-15398638.php?utm_campaign=CMS%20Sharing%20Tools%20(Premium)&utm_source=t.co&utm_medium=referralQ: I am starting to have serious questions about restarting professional sports. Players are testing positive for COVID-19 in baseball. I don’t hear much about football, but I have real concerns. After all, football is more contact-related with hard breathing and fluids. If even one player in any sport were to become seriously ill or die from COVID-19, that would be a tragedy. — Ronald J.
A: Yes, it would, Ronald. Because NFL players haven’t reported, we have no idea how many have tested positive, but you can be sure when they report to camp, there’ll be many positive tests. The NFL wants the show to go on, so I expect the season to start on time without fans. As long as teams have enough healthy players, I think they’ll play. There’s a lot of money to be made. I do think there’ll be interruptions. We’d be foolish to think the season will go smoothly.
Q: I don’t see the NFL, MBL, NBA or NHL playing this year. One does not have to be a medical researcher to see that the virus is not leveling off but is instead accelerating. I seriously doubt Division I college football will play as well. The owners can ride this out for a year and still pay their staffs. Likewise, all but the bottom-tier players can handle one year without a paycheck. Many minimum wage workers are having to do it. Those players who cannot should turn to their union for assistance. The union can tap the strike fund for those few who need it. Never thought I’d say this but missing sports these past four months has not brought the world to an end. Call 2020 a mulligan and shoot for 2021. — Eric R.
A: Ultimately, you might be right, Eric, but players want to get paid. Because they’re young and healthy, most believe it’s worth the risk and want to earn their money. The owners are going to lose a lot of money without fans, so they’re determined to play unless there are so many positive tests they’re forced to shut down. I don’t see that happening. I think the players who test positive will be treated like injured players in that they’ll have to deal with it the best way teams know how.
Q: It seems MLB has their protocol for testing in place like the PGA Tour. Do you know what the NFL is going to do? What happens if a star player like Deshaun Watson tests positive? I assume he’ll have to quarantine for two weeks. What happens if half the team tests positive? Do you think the NFL will play this year? I think we’ll know a lot more after training camp. — Glen K.
A: I agree about training camp, Glen. Any player who tests positive has to be quarantined and can’t return until he has two negative tests. They’re hoping most players won’t be very ill or some will be asymptomatic and can return to play as soon as possible. I think Roger Goodell is determined to start the season on time. I’d delay it at least a month, including cancelling games if I had to. I think it’s ridiculous to start the second week of September. After the first weekend of games, if there are a lot of positive tests, Goodell will have to decide to play or delay.
znModeratorWhat’s Missing From the Biden-Bernie Task Force Plan? Medicare for All.
The recommendations are an improvement on Biden’s previous healthcare plans, but a public option won’t cut it. We need free, universal coverage.However beefy a public option turns out to be, there are things it can never do.
On Wednesday, the “unity task forces” set up by presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden rolled out a set of policy recommendations for the candidate, and, by extension, for the party writ large. Launched in May, the group behind the proposed platform was comprised of a core of establishment-aligned politicos as well as allies of Bernie Sanders, the primary’s runner-up whose campaign advanced an agenda squarely to the left of Biden.
While the task forces provided recommendations on issues ranging from climate change to criminal justice, the healthcare group attracted much attention as observers wondered how the group would square the wide gap between Sanders’ unwavering calls for a single-payer Medicare for All system, and Biden’s commitment to maintaining the private insurance system enshrined by the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Unsurprisingly, the task force did not endorse Medicare for All, which would essentially liquidate the existing version of private health insurance and replace it with a single public system that covers everyone and provides all necessary and effective care free from the point of use. But the presence of former Michigan gubernatorial candidate and single-payer advocate Abdul El-Sayed as well as Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)—who each endorsed Sanders, and the latter of whom is the lead sponsor of the Medicare for All bill in the House—was evident in more left-leaning measures than Biden has previously embraced. If the healthcare platform as presented were to be fully implemented under a future President Biden, it would amount to a significant improvement on the status quo—albeit with persistent gaps that can’t be resolved without abolishing private health insurance as it’s currently constituted.
The recommendations front-load a temporary phase of coronavirus-related emergency measures, many of which have emerged as consensus demands from Democrats—including free coronavirus testing irrespective of immigration status, federally-bankrolled expansion of contract tracing, and a period of 100% premium subsidies for those eligible for COBRA coverage throughout the duration of the pandemic. The document also calls for a special enrollment period for ACA marketplaces, which will include a stopgap low-fee platinum option for people who run out of, or don’t qualify for, several months of full COBRA subsidies.
More broadly, the task force seeks to reinvest in critical public health infrastructure at the local and state level, much of which was financially hollowed out during the Great Recession and has been left in disrepair since. It also calls for permitting Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices, funding for research into racial health inequities, repealing the Hyde amendment and securing protections for LGBTQ people that were rolled back under President Trump.
The task force also advances a blueprint for a public option, which includes critical details that gesture toward left-wing activist pressure, as well as ambiguities that could bolster the sort of profit-seeking gamesmanship that renders the current system so dysfunctional.
For starters, the proposal hints that the public option may actually be a set of options, à la Medicare, which offers “consumer choice” while in practice curbing access to care while lining insurers’ pockets. Still, according to the proposal, at least one public option plan available on the marketplaces must be publicly administered and have zero deductibles, which is far preferable to the kind of privately-administered “public option advantage” plans these recommendations leave the door open to. The public option, as laid out here, would also be extended for zero premiums to individuals who qualify for Medicaid but live in non-expansion states, automatically enroll low-income people who earn too much for Medicaid, and be available as an alternative to employer-based coverage. Meanwhile, the Medicare eligibility age will be lowered from 65 to 60, and barriers will be lowered for states seeking waivers to build state-based single-payer programs.
All of these changes would be an improvement upon the healthcare system as it exists now, an abysmally low bar that Republicans are nonetheless desperate to limbo beneath. In the wake of their unsuccessful attempts to repeal and replace the ACA in 2017, the GOP has consistently chipped away at the law however possible, through pushing Medicaid work requirements, bottoming out budgets for navigators and advertising to help inform and guide patients through enrollment, and loosening restrictions on short-term junk plans. Even more gravely, the Trump administration recently encouraged the Supreme Court to strike down the entire ACA.
But assessing just how much Biden’s task force’s plan would improve the lives of patients depends on details we simply don’t have. The proposal stipulates that premiums will be capped at 8.5% of income (more for a family), which could potentially mean that a slate of relatively robust public option plans would force private plans to improve substantially to compete. Or, more likely, private insurers could take a cue from Medicare Advantage and find ways to cherry-pick healthier patients while off-loading sicker ones onto the public program.
Cost-sharing is also partially unresolved—a public option plan with zero deductibles, for example, may well entail higher copays and coinsurance, perhaps going so far as to foist enrollees into private supplemental plans parallel to “Medigap” coverage for Medicare recipients.
Furthermore, the crucial issue of provider networks goes unmentioned. As networks have narrowed in recent years with insurers trying to save money by covering fewer and fewer providers, many ACA plans have failed to adequately cover certain types of care, like mental health. Traditional Medicare, by contrast, doesn’t have networks and thus affords patients free choice of providers. What kinds of benefits and cost-sharing will be applied to which public option plans will make a world of difference—and will require even more expertise to suss out than the notoriously confusing ACA exchanges already do.
Ultimately, however beefy a public option turns out to be, there are things it can never do. By offering one more insurance product to a list of several others—even if it’s the best of the bunch—the public option does little to alleviate the misery of navigating the administrative quagmire endemic to our healthcare system. It still leaves gaps for patients to fall into, and forces them to beg claims assessors for coverage by phone. And it still casts us as healthcare consumers, shopping for the best-valued access to a foundational human need that shouldn’t be commodified to begin with.
znModeratorHow Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders joined forces to craft a bold, progressive agenda
Where Biden and Sanders’s policy-focused task forces go from here.https://www.vox.com/21317850/joe-biden-bernie-sanders-task-forces-progressive-agenda
Democratic presidential hopefuls former US Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders greet each other with an elbow bump as they arrive for the 11th Democratic Party 2020 presidential debate in a CNN Washington Bureau studio in Washington, DC, on March 15, 2020. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
A “unity” task force created by Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders has released a detailed set of policy recommendations for an incoming Biden administration, if he wins the November election.The administration it imagines — while not so progressive that it would embrace plans like Medicare-for-all or a jobs guarantee — would push for one of the largest public sector investments in decades. On Wednesday night, a senior campaign aide described Biden’s forthcoming economic plan as the “largest mobilization of public investments in procurement, infrastructure and [research and development] since World War II.”
It’s also a sign of Biden’s success in his ongoing push to unite the party: Numerous progressives on the task force chosen by Sanders told Vox they were happy with the mark they made on the final product.
The final report weighs in at over 100 pages, covering six key domestic policy areas: health care, the economy, climate change, criminal justice, education, and immigration.
Perhaps one of the most ambitious goals in the report, released Wednesday, is its commitment to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, plus more immediate benchmarks on climate — including a national goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions for all new buildings by 2030, and eliminating carbon pollution from power plants by 2035. The report also advocates the creation of a postal banking system to expand banking access for low-income families, and a ban on for-profit charter schools.
Progressives see a list of ideas “that goes beyond a status quo and goes beyond where Biden had campaigned in the primary,” Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s presidential campaign manager in 2020 and an integral member in creating the task forces, told Vox. “If you look across all these documents, you’re going to see a massive public sector investment in job creation.”
Numerous people Vox interviewed said Biden’s thinking about how bold to be is being pushed by the Covid-19 pandemic, the resulting economic woes, and the national conversation around systemic racism in America.
The convergence of all three things has pushed Biden to adopt the mantle of New Deal President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in recent months. On Thursday, Biden will deliver a speech unveiling the first plank of his campaign’s economic plan — expected to be its policy centerpiece.
“Much like FDR faced a structural crisis of economic insecurity, we’re at a similar place,” said Jared Bernstein, Biden’s former chief economic adviser in the Obama White House and a member of the economy task force. “The vice president recognizes that the extent of market failure here is not something you can fix with a Band-Aid, and that structural reforms are necessary.”
Biden and Sanders each praised the report in a joint statement on Wednesday.
“Though the end result is not what I or my supporters would have written alone, the task forces have created a good policy blueprint that will move this country in a much-needed progressive direction and substantially improve the lives of working families throughout our country,” Sanders said.
Biden said that President Donald Trump’s current response to the still-raging coronavirus in America means that “this election offers the chance to usher in a stronger, fairer economy that works for our working families.”
“I commend the Task Forces for their service and helping build a bold, transformative platform for our party and for our country,” Biden added.
What’s in the task force report — and what’s next for the task force
While it’s still unclear how many of these specific policy recommendations Biden’s campaign will adopt or work into their official policy, Democrats will know soon. The next concrete step for the task force report is for participants to advocate for it to be incorporated into the Democratic Party’s platform at the 2020 Democratic National Convention, which starts on August 17.But Sanders’s allies are clear that they don’t see the report as the final stop. They are lobbying Biden’s campaign to make sure any incoming transition team or administration contains a number of progressives.
“Phase two is continuing to shape and alter the Biden campaign’s positions,” Shakir told Vox. “We obviously are advocating for some of these members to be involved in transition planning. They send a symbolic message of what kind of administration are you trying to form. Here, you’ve got a progressive policy blueprint; now you need the progressive policy personnel to make it happen.”
Progressives told Vox they felt especially good about the wins they secured on two task forces: education and climate. On the economy task force, a big sticking point was a federal jobs guarantee program, which did not make it into the final list of recommendations (even though language saying the “government must enact measures to create jobs and jobs programs like those effectively used during the New Deal” did).
“Particularly on climate, I think we actually made far more progress than I think I even anticipated,” Sunrise Movement co-founder Varshini Prakash, who served on the climate task force and was a Sanders pick, told Vox. “In large part, that was because many of the advisers on climate on Biden’s side were also equally amenable to ambitious action as many people on the Bernie side.”
On education, American Federation of Teachers president and task force member Randi Weingarten, a Biden pick, told Vox she thinks the task force recommendations could encourage Biden’s education plan to go much further than either the Trump or Obama administration did.
“It’s a paradigm shift from the tearing down that you have right now with Trump and [Education Secretary Betsy] DeVos and their defunding, destabilizing, undermining philosophy,” Weingarten said. “But it’s also different than ‘accountability is the be-all, end-all’ of the Obama administration.”
While the Biden and Sanders teams may have started out in more agreement on climate, there was a clearly differing view on health care, with Sanders supporters in favor of Medicare-for-all and Biden’s campaign favoring a public option. And on issues like this — and criminal justice — the campaign didn’t move as far left.
“Though we have disagreements, I believe we’ve come together with something that reflects the average of where we stand and allows us to fight for a health care policy that would extend health care for millions of people,” said Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a single-payer advocate who was a Sanders pick for the health care task force.
“I feel they made a constructive contribution to that end,” said Chris Jennings, who was a health care policy adviser during the Obama administration and was a Biden pick for the health care task force. “I do believe the outcome is a stronger product and a more unified party.”
Here are some of the most notable policy recommendations it contains; the full report can be read here.
Economy
Broad public investment into infrastructure like America’s roads and bridges, in addition to retrofitting American homes and buildings to be more energy-efficient. Biden is expected to release more details and numbers on a green infrastructure plan in the coming weeks.
Encourage more publicly owned and municipal broadband networks.
Expand public and private caregiving jobs in health care, child care, and elder care; and increase compensation, benefits, bargaining power, and training in these jobs.
Create a postal banking system to expand banking access for low-income families.
Health careA public option plan administered by Medicare. This plan would cover a range of people, including low-income Americans who are not eligible for Medicaid, and anyone who elects to choose the public option from the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Those who currently get health insurance from their employers would also be eligible.
Medicare would directly negotiate the cost of prescription drug prices for all public and private purchasers.
The age to enroll in Medicare would be lowered from 65 to 60, and older Americans could choose between their employer-provided health insurance, Medicare, or a public option.
ClimateSet a national goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions for all new buildings by 2030, in an attempt to create a 100 percent clean building sector.
Commit to eliminating carbon pollution from power plants by 2035 through new technology-neutral standards for clean energy and energy efficiency, including the installation of 500 million solar panels and 60,000 made-in-America wind turbines.
Commit that all jobs in the clean energy economy will be unionized.
EducationEstablish universal prekindergarten for 3- and 4-year-olds.
Ensure early childhood educators have the right to organize and collectively bargain.
Triple Title I funding and fully fund the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act.
Ban for-profit charter schools, and appoint a federal task force or committee to study the effects of charter schools on public education.
Criminal justiceCreate a federal civilian corps of unarmed first responders including as social workers, EMTs, and trained mental health professionals to handle nonviolent emergencies in communities, so as to cut down on the use of police in those situations.
Reduce the militarization of police by reinstating a rule to limit the sale and transfer of military weapons to police departments and domestic law enforcement agencies.
Decriminalize marijuana and legalize medical marijuana at the federal level; the report recommends individual states have the discretion to legalize recreational marijuana use.
End the use of private prisons and detention centers, including for immigration-related offenses.
ImmigrationTerminate the Trump administration’s discriminatory travel and immigration bans.
Extend Affordable Care Act benefits to DREAMERs, immigrants with temporary legal status under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
Support legislation to treat the spouses and children of green card holders as immediate relatives and end family separation, and work with Congress to eliminate the 10-year waiting period for waivers to the permanent bars that keep families separated.
Support the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights to give immigrant workers in the US expanded rights.znModeratorJoe Banner@JoeBanner13
Record deaths in Florida yesterday. Damn testing is costing a lot of lives.July 10, 2020 at 11:34 am in reply to: NFL on having a season w/ pandemic (thread 1, to 7/17)) #117833znModeratorIan Rapoport@RapSheet
Update on where things stand 18 days out:
— Almost everything is done and agreed to except for number of preseason games and testing protocols.
— No fans will be at training camp, but teams can have up to two fan events at stadiums this preseason with strict protocols if allowed
Other notes:
— Where fans are allowed at games, they will wear face coverings.
— Actual training camp schedule of practices can be tied to the preseason game questions, so not there yet.
— The economics are not yet finalized, either.==
NFL, NFLPA still have major issues to negotiate
The NFL and NFL Players Association have approached the negotiations on the 2020 season like negotiations on a broader labor deal: Start with the easy issues, and then move to the difficult ones.
As to football in a pandemic, the easy ones are done. The difficult ones remain.
Ian Rapoport of the NFL reports that “[a]lmost everything is done and agreed to except for number of preseason games and testing protocols.” Those are two very significant issues, however.
The NFL wants two preseason games, the NFLPA wants none, and the two sides are stuck at an impasse on the issue. The testing protocols remain a point of contention, given that the players want testing more frequently. Throw in the fact that it may not be easy to get results quickly (and that doing so could slow down the process of finalizing tests for the general public), it will not be a simple process to reach a consensus on how often testing will be conducted and how quickly teams and players reasonably will obtain results.
Rapoport’s final point is this: “The economics are not yet finalized, either.”
That’s perhaps the most significant remaining area of tension. It was Rapoport and his colleagues who first floated, under the umbrella of the league’s in-house media conglomerate, the notion of salary givebacks. Then, NFL Media reported on the fact that the league suggested placing 35 percent of 2020 player salaries into escrow, which will make it easier to claw back money later.
The NFLPA recognizes that lost revenues now will impact salary-cap calculations later, but the suggestion that any player should take less in a season during which players will be assuming a greater risk is nonsensical. Plenty of the men who play in 2020 won’t even be in the league in 2021, whether due to injury, retirement, or erosion of skills relative to younger, cheaper options. Why take less now (while absorbing all the risks of football in a pandemic) so that there will be more later, if the players who take less now won’t be around to get more later?
Taken together, these aren’t small issues. They are major points of contention that must be resolved before anything can happen. Meanwhile, rookies are due to report for COVID-19 testing in only nine days.
That leads us back to the point that J.J. Watt made earlier this week on #PFTPM: What’s the rush? It makes much more sense to get it right and delay things a bit than it does to rush into a headwind that could blow down what ultimately could be a house of cards.
znModeratorStudy of 17 Million Identifies Crucial Risk Factors for Coronavirus Deaths
link https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/health/coronavirus-risk-factors.html
An analysis of more than 17 million people in England — the largest study of its kind, according to its authors — has pinpointed a bevy of factors that can raise a person’s chances of dying from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
The paper, published Wednesday in Nature, echoes reports from other countries that identify older people, men, racial and ethnic minorities, and those with underlying health conditions among the more vulnerable populations.
“This highlights a lot of what we already know about COVID-19,” said Uchechi Mitchell, a public health expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago who was not involved in the study. “But a lot of science is about repetition. The size of the study alone is a strength, and there is a need to continue documenting disparities.”
The researchers mined a trove of de-identified data that included health records from about 40% of England’s population, collected by the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. Of 17,278,392 adults tracked over three months, 10,926 reportedly died of COVID-19 or COVID-19-related complications.
“A lot of previous work has focused on patients that present at hospital,” said Dr. Ben Goldacre of the University of Oxford, one of the authors on the study. “That’s useful and important, but we wanted to get a clear sense of the risks as an everyday person. Our starting pool is literally everybody.”
Goldacre’s team found that patients older than 80 were at least 20 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than those in their 50s and hundreds of times more likely to die than those below the age of 40. The scale of this relationship was “jaw-dropping,” Goldacre said.
Additionally, men stricken with the virus had a higher likelihood of dying than women of the same age. Medical conditions such as obesity, diabetes, severe asthma and compromised immunity were also linked to poor outcomes, in keeping with guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States. And the researchers noted that a person’s chances of dying also tended to track with socioeconomic factors like poverty.
The data roughly mirror what has been observed around the world and are not necessarily surprising, said Avonne Connor, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the study. But seeing these patterns emerge in a staggeringly large data set “is astounding” and “adds another layer to depicting who is at risk” during this pandemic, Connor said.
Particularly compelling were the study’s findings on race and ethnicity, said Sharrelle Barber, an epidemiologist at Drexel University who was not involved in the study. Roughly 11% of the patients tracked by the analysis identified as nonwhite. The researchers found that these individuals — particularly Black and South Asian people — were at higher risk of dying from COVID-19 than white patients.
That trend persisted even after Goldacre and his colleagues made statistical adjustments to account for factors like age, sex and medical conditions, suggesting that other factors are playing a major role.
An increasing number of reports have pointed to the pervasive social and structural inequities that are disproportionately burdening racial and ethnic minority groups around the world with the coronavirus’s worst effects.
Some experts pointed out flaws in the researchers’ methodology that made it difficult to quantify the exact risks faced by members of the vulnerable groups identified in the study. For instance, certain medical conditions that can exacerbate COVID-19, like chronic heart disease, are more prevalent among Black people than white people.
The researchers removed such variables to focus solely on the effects of race and ethnicity. But because Black individuals are also more likely to experience stress and be denied access to medical care in many parts of the world, the disparity in rates of heart disease may itself be influenced by racism, said Usama Bilal, an epidemiologist at Drexel University who was not involved in the new analysis. Ignoring the contribution of heart disease, then, could end up inadvertently discounting part of the relationship between race and ethnicity and COVID-19-related deaths.
The study was also not set up to conclusively show cause-and-effect relationships between risk factors and COVID-19 deaths.
Regardless of the methodological drawbacks of this study, experts agree that “the causes of disparities, whether in COVID-19 or other aspects of health, are intricately linked to structural racism,” Mitchell said.
In the United States, Latino and African American residents are three times as likely to become infected by the coronavirus as white residents, and nearly twice as likely to die.
Many of these individuals work as front-line employees or are tasked with essential in-person jobs that prevent them from sheltering in place at home. Some live in multigenerational households that can compromise effective physical distancing. Others must cope with language barriers and implicit bias when they seek medical care.
Any study publishing data on an ongoing and fast-shifting pandemic will inevitably be imperfect, said Julia Raifman, an epidemiologist at Boston University who was not involved in the study.
But the new paper helps address “a real paucity of data on race,” Raifman added. “These disparities are not just happening in the United States.”
With regard to the racial inequities in this pandemic, Barber said, “I think what we’re seeing is real, and it’s not a surprise. We can learn from this study and improve on it. It gives us clues into what might be happening.”
znModeratorznModeratorCam's ready 🙌 pic.twitter.com/srhPhQjBmP
— LA Rams Nation (@RamsNationCP) July 10, 2020
July 10, 2020 at 10:11 am in reply to: NFL on having a season w/ pandemic (thread 1, to 7/17)) #117821znModeratorNFL, NFLPA discussing plan for potential player opt-outs in 2020
https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-nflpa-discussing-plan-for-potential-player-opt-outs-in-2020
With veterans expected to report to training camps in 20 days, the NFL and NFL Players Association have a host of issues to continue to sort out before players return.
Among the questions lingering in the air amid the COVID-19 pandemic is the potential for players opting out of participating in 2020.
NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero reported Wednesday on NFL NOW that the league and union anticipate player opt-outs would be available, but would need to be communicated by a certain date.
“My understanding is both the union and the league intend to have an opt-out for players who have either a pre-existing condition, family (members) with pre-existing conditions, just general concerns over COVID-19, would not want to play this season,” Pelissero said. “General managers were told on a call earlier this week there would be a specific date by which players would need to opt-out. That date is still to be determined.”
We’ve seen players in the MLB and NBA opt to sit out as their respective sports return to play. It’s unclear how many NFL players would consider sitting an entire season. Several veterans, including the McCourty twins in New England and Stefon Diggs in Buffalo, recently have voiced concerns about playing amid the pandemic.
With any potential opt-outs comes the question of how that would affect a player’s contract.
Pelissero reported that possible tolling of contracts of players who opt out is still to be determined and is something that would need to be agreed to prior to the start of training camp
znModeratorTrump the victim: President complains in private about the pandemic hurting himself https://t.co/j0xRXvBMxz
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 10, 2020
znModeratorBREAKING: THE CAPITOL COMMISSION VOTES TO REMOVE THE KKK GRAND WIZARD BUST FROM THE TENNESSEE STATE CAPITOL!!!!🚨🚨🚨🚨🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/XFnQ7PC4kv
— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) July 9, 2020
znModeratorKEEP SWIMMING: Huge stingrays are seen swimming past Florida beachgoers who appear completely unaware of their passing. https://t.co/WCpbi6uY64 pic.twitter.com/jDegt4zTYf
— ABC News (@ABC) July 10, 2020
znModeratorAnother 1 of the 5 Gabriel TD's from that day! https://t.co/c0ULsl15Fg pic.twitter.com/BCuNSPq6GC
— Roman Gabriel for Pro Football Hall of Fame (@RGabriel4HOF) July 10, 2020
znModeratorThe commissioner of the Big Ten just said this on Big Ten Network: "We may not have sports in the fall. We may not have a college football season."
— Michael David Smith (@MichaelDavSmith) July 9, 2020
znModeratorRams legend Kurt Warner hopes movie about life and career will continue to “inspire and impact people”
Stu Jackson
https://www.therams.com/news/kurt-warner-hopes-movie-will-continue-to-inspire-others
Scheduled to hit theaters Dec. 18, “American Underdog: The Kurt Warner Story” will be based on parts of Warner’s memoir, All Things Possible: My Story of Faith, Football and the First Miracle Season, as well as separate interviews with the Rams legend.
The possibility of his journey being made into a movie never crossed Warner’s mind during it, but as he reflects on it many years later, he understands why and hopes it continues to inspire and impact people.
“We look at it now, how grateful we are for the journey. A long, big part of it, we weren’t really feeling grateful for the journey, we were wondering, ‘Why me? Why do I have to take this route to get to where I want to go?'” Warner told theRams.com in a phone interview Thursday morning. “But looking back now, it’s a once in a lifetime-type journey, and I think that’s one the reasons that A) you get a movie made about you, but B) it’s had such an impact on so many people, because it crosses the lines of the football field and resonates with a lot of people, that life isn’t always easy and life’s not always perfect. And sometimes you got to do what you got to do while you’re waiting to do what you were born to do.
“So those things happen in life, and so many people I believe can associate with our story because it is different, because it is unique from other athletes, but similar to what most people go through. Just grateful for the journey, grateful that we find ourselves here, and grateful that we get another opportunity to use the platform and the story to hopefully inspire and impact people.”
While Warner’s football career is an important part to the story, it is really the story of both he and his wife Brenda, given they’ve been by each other’s side throughout the journey as well as the prominent role she’s had.
Before becoming a two-time NFL MVP, Super Bowl champion and Hall-of-Famer, Warner’s journey to the Rams included:
– Signing with the Green Bay Packers as a free agent after graduating from the University of Northern Iowa in 1994, then getting cut during training camp.
– Returning to Northern Iowa after getting cut to work as an assistant coach while also working shifts at a local Hy-Vee grocery store to support Brenda – at the time his girlfriend – and her two kids.
– Playing three seasons in the Arena Football League with the Iowa Barnstormers.
– Playing one season with NFL Europe’s Amsterdam Admirals.Off the field, Brenda’s parents were tragically killed in a tornado in Arkansas in 1996. When Kurt left to play overseas in NFL Europe, Brenda, while pregnant with their third-oldest child Kade, received results of a Pap smear which came back positive, potentially jeopardizing her ability to deliver a healthy baby. Fortunately, she delivered a healthy Kade, and a biopsy doctors conducted on a piece of her cervix shortly thereafter revealed no cancer.
Zachary Levi has been cast to play Kurt, but whoever gets cast to play Brenda will also have a prominent role in the film.
“Her life journey was way more difficult than anything that I dealt with,” Warner said. “Strength, the ability to endure and overcome I think is a big trait. The ability to show that strength but also be very compassionate and very loving. That’s kind of a unique contrast, because a lot of times when we think of people being strong, we don’t see them as being as compassionate, but Brenda has both qualities. So I’m excited. I think it can be a powerful role. It’s going to take a unique individual to play it and pull it off.”
Though the Warners initially weren’t grateful in the early stages of their journey, what got them through it and continues to give them perspective today is their Christian faith.
Kurt said they feel it is their calling to display Jesus in whatever way they have to, and “to be able to connect with people where they’re at, not just where you’re at.” Additionally, It was important to them during the process to work with people who understand that faith as an underlying theme in a movie can be portrayed in different ways, and that the film didn’t have to look like whatever someone automatically thinks of when they initially hear faith-based movie.
Developed by Lionsgate, the film is being produced by the Erwin Brothers through their Kingdom Story Company with partner Kevin Downes. It is being written by David Aaron Cohen (“Friday Night Lights”), Jon Gunn and Jon Erwin. The Erwin brothers previously collaborated with Lionsgate on faith-based films like the 2018 drama “I Can Only Imagine” and the March 2020 biopic on Christian musician Jeremy Camp.
“I think that for us becomes the challenge and the exciting part of this movie, is we’ve got people involved that understand that,” Kurt said. “We want to make a movie that reaches as many people as possible, with the true essence of what the story is and who we are. That to me is why we’re excited about our team and what they know and what they understand about the story, and who they are as people. I believe we have a chance to do something extremely unique and special because of those perspectives, and bring the right story to the big screen, whatever that looks like.”
Warner played at the highest level of professional football and won one Super Bowl, during that miracle 1999 season, while appearing in two more. However, he said winning a Super Bowl – among other qualifiers that the world uses to deem a person as successful – is not the only definition of a successful life.
He hopes the movie not only teaches that, but also inspires viewers and fans to find a great confidence and be very content in whatever their dreams are, regardless of what the world says.
“The bottom line is, we want people to believe that with faith in yourself, with faith in something greater, that all things really are possible,” Kurt said. “That even though circumstances might say something different or people, outside forces may say something different, those things do not have to define us, and define who we are and what we can be.”
znModeratorfrom COVID-19 Cases Are Rising, So Why Are Deaths Flatlining?
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/why-covid-death-rate-down/613945/
For the past few weeks, I have been obsessed with a mystery emerging in the national COVID-19 data.
Cases have soared to terrifying levels since June. Yesterday, the U.S. had 62,000 confirmed cases, an all-time high—and about five times more than the entire continent of Europe. Several U.S. states, including Arizona and Florida, currently have more confirmed cases per capita than any other country in the world.
But average daily deaths are down 75 percent from their April peak. Despite higher death counts on Tuesday and Wednesday, the weekly average has largely plateaued in the past two weeks.
…
What follows are five possible explanations for the case-death gap. Take them as complementary, rather than competing, theories.
1. Deaths lag cases—and that might explain almost everything.
You can’t have a serious discussion about case and death numbers without noting that people die of diseases after they get sick. It follows that there should be a lag between a surge in cases and a surge in deaths. More subtly, there can also be a lag between the date a person dies and the date the death certificate is issued, and another lag before that death is reported to the state and the federal government. As this chart from the COVID Tracking Project shows, the official reporting of a COVID-19 death can lag COVID-19 exposure by up to a month. This suggests that the surge in deaths is coming.
In Arizona, Florida, and Texas, the death surge is already happening. Since June 7, the seven-day average of deaths in those hot-spot states has increased 69 percent, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
The death lag is probably the most important thing to understand in evaluating the case-death gap. But it doesn’t explain everything. Even where deaths are rising, corresponding cases are rising notably faster.
2. Expanded testing is finding more cases, milder cases, and earlier cases.
… That’s just wrong. Since the beginning of June, the share of COVID-19 tests that have come back positive has increased from 4.5 percent to 8 percent. Hospitalizations are skyrocketing across the South and West. Those are clear signs of an underlying outbreak.
Something subtler is happening. The huge increase in testing is an unalloyed good, but it might be tricking us with some confusing weeks of data.
In March and April, tests were scarce, and medical providers had to ration tests for the sickest patients. Now that testing has expanded into communities across the U.S., the results might be picking up milder, or even asymptomatic, cases of COVID-19.
The whole point of testing is to find cases, trace the patients’ close contacts, and isolate the sick. But our superior testing capacity makes it difficult to do apples-to-apples comparisons with the initial surge; it’s like trying to compare the height of two mountains when one of the peaks is obscured by clouds. The epidemiologist Ellie Murray has also cautioned that identifying new fatal cases of COVID-19 earlier in the victims’ disease process could mean a longer lag between detection and death. This phenomenon, known as “lead time bias,” might be telling us that a big death surge is coming.
And maybe it is. Maybe this is all as simple as nationwide deaths are about to soar, again.
But there are still three reasons to think that any forthcoming death surge could be materially different from the one that brutalized the Northeast in March and April: younger patients, better hospital outcomes, and summer effects.
3. The typical COVID-19 patient is getting younger.
The most important COVID-19 story right now may be the age shift.
In Florida, the median age of new COVID-19 cases fell from 65 in March to 35 in June. In its latest daily report, the Florida Department of Health says the median age is still in the high 30s.* In Arizona, Texas, and California, young adults getting sick have been driving the surge.
If the latest surge is concentrated among younger Americans, that would partly explain the declining death count. Young people are much less likely to die from this disease, even if they face other health risks. International data from South Korea, Spain, China, and Italy suggest that the COVID-19 case-fatality rate for people older than 70 is more than 100 times greater than for those younger than 40.
The youth shift seems very real, but what’s behind it is harder to say. Maybe older Americans are being more cautious about avoiding crowded indoor spaces. Maybe news reports of young people packing themselves into bars explain the youth spike, since indoor bars are exquisitely designed to spread the virus. Or maybe state and local governments that rushed to reopen the economy pushed young people into work environments that got them sick. “The people in the service economy and the retail industry, they tend to be young, and they can’t work remotely,” says Natalie Dean, an assistant professor at the University of Florida. Texas Governor Greg Abbott blamed reckless young people for driving the spike, but the true locus of recklessness might be the governor’s mansion.
No matter the cause, interpreting the “youth surge” as good news would be a mistake. Young people infected with COVID-19 still face extreme dangers—and present real danger to their close contacts and their community. “We see people in their 20s and 30s in our ICUs gasping for air because they have COVID-19,” James McDeavitt, the dean of clinical affairs at Baylor College of Medicine, told The Wall Street Journal. Young people who feel fine can still contract long-term organ damage, particularly to their lungs. They can pass the disease to more vulnerable people, who end up in the hospital; a youth surge could easily translate into a broader uptick some weeks from now. And the sheer breadth of the youth surge could force businesses to shut down, throwing millions more people into limbo or outright unemployment.
4. Hospitalized patients are dying less frequently, even without a home-run treatment.
So far, we’ve focused on the gap between cases and deaths. But there’s another gap that deserves our attention. Hospitalizations and deaths moved up and down in tandem before June. After June, they’ve diverged. National hospitalizations are rising, but deaths aren’t.
The hospitalization and death data that we have aren’t good enough or timely enough to say anything definitive. But the chart suggests some good news (finally): Patients at hospitals are dying less.
Indeed, other countries have seen the same. One study from a hospital in Milan found that from March to May, the mortality rate of its COVID-19 patients declined from 24 percent to 2 percent—”without significant changes in patients’ age.” British hospitals found that their hospital mortality rate has declined every month since April.
So what’s going on? Maybe doctors are just getting smarter about the disease.
In early 2020, the novelty of the coronavirus meant that doctors had no idea what to expect. Health-care professionals were initially shocked that what they assumed to be a respiratory disease was causing blood clots, microvascular thrombosis, and organ damage. But millions of cases and hundreds of white papers later, we know more. That’s how, for example, doctors know to prescribe the steroid dexamethasone to rein in out-of-control immune responses that destroy patients’ organs.
Finally, it’s notable that mortality declined in Italian and British hospitals when they weren’t overrun with patients. This is another reason why flattening the curve isn’t just a buzzy slogan, but a matter of life and death. As hospitals across Texas and Arizona start to fill up, we’ll see whether hospital mortality increases again.
5. Summer might be helping—but probably only a little bit.
….as more people wear masks and move their activities outside in the summer, they might come into contact with smaller infecting doses of COVID-19. Some epidemiologists have claimed that there is a relationship between viral load and severity. With more masks and more outdoor interactions, it’s possible that the recent surge is partly buoyed by an increase in these low-dosage cases.
znModeratorOhio State athletic director "really concerned" about season https://t.co/It0ESWRwW9
— ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) July 9, 2020
July 9, 2020 at 5:44 pm in reply to: NFL on having a season w/ pandemic (thread 1, to 7/17)) #117798znModeratorAs badly as we all want the NFL back ASAP is it really feasible in this COVID world? https://t.co/JGrPlKT3My
— Hub Arkush (@Hub_Arkush) July 9, 2020
znModeratorNext to the definition of “deep-threat” in the dictionary is a picture of Willie “Flipper” Anderson. Flipper ranks 4th all time with a career average of 20.1 yards per reception!
This one – on a nice 55 yard snag against the Eagles in the 1989 playoffs pic.twitter.com/5KEOlNVcVi
— RAMS ON FILM (@RamsOnFilm) July 9, 2020
znModeratorHighest-graded defenders on 3rd and 4th down in 2019:
➤ Aaron Donald (92.5)
➤ Jamal Adams (91.2)
➤ Chris Jones (91.0)
➤ Eric Kendricks (91.0) pic.twitter.com/vtWUiO2jJc— PFF (@PFF) July 9, 2020
znModeratorSweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale
Its decision to carry on in the face of the pandemic has yielded a surge of deaths without sparing its economy from damage — a red flag as the United States and Britain move to lift lockdowns.
link https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-coronavirus.html?searchResultPosition=1
LONDON — Ever since the coronavirus emerged in Europe, Sweden has captured international attention by conducting an unorthodox, open-air experiment. It has allowed the world to examine what happens in a pandemic when a government allows life to carry on largely unhindered.
This is what has happened: Not only have thousands more people died than in neighboring countries that imposed lockdowns, but Sweden’s economy has fared little better.
“They literally gained nothing,” said Jacob F. Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “It’s a self-inflicted wound, and they have no economic gains.”
The results of Sweden’s experience are relevant well beyond Scandinavian shores. In the United States, where the virus is spreading with alarming speed, many states have — at President Trump’s urging — avoided lockdowns or lifted them prematurely on the assumption that this would foster economic revival, allowing people to return to workplaces, shops and restaurants.
In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson — previously hospitalized with Covid-19 — reopened pubs and restaurants last weekend in a bid to restore normal economic life.
Implicit in these approaches is the assumption that governments must balance saving lives against the imperative to spare jobs, with the extra health risks of rolling back social distancing potentially justified by a resulting boost to prosperity. But Sweden’s grim result — more death, and nearly equal economic damage — suggests that the supposed choice between lives and paychecks is a false one: A failure to impose social distancing can cost lives and jobs at the same time.
Sweden put stock in the sensibility of its people as it largely avoided imposing government prohibitions. The government allowed restaurants, gyms, shops, playgrounds and most schools to remain open. By contrast, Denmark and Norway opted for strict quarantines, banning large groups and locking down shops and restaurants.
More than three months later, the coronavirus is blamed for 5,420 deaths in Sweden, according to the World Health Organization. That might not sound especially horrendous compared with the more than 129,000 Americans who have died. But Sweden is a country of only 10 million people. Per million people, Sweden has suffered 40 percent more deaths than the United States, 12 times more than Norway, seven times more than Finland and six times more than Denmark.
The elevated death toll resulting from Sweden’s approach has been clear for many weeks. What is only now emerging is how Sweden, despite letting its economy run unimpeded, has still suffered business-destroying, prosperity-diminishing damage, and at nearly the same magnitude of its neighbors.
Sweden’s central bank expects its economy to contract by 4.5 percent this year, a revision from a previously expected gain of 1.3 percent. The unemployment rate jumped to 9 percent in May from 7.1 percent in March. “The overall damage to the economy means the recovery will be protracted, with unemployment remaining elevated,” Oxford Economics concluded in a recent research note.
This is more or less how damage caused by the pandemic has played out in Denmark, where the central bank expects that the economy will shrink 4.1 percent this year, and where joblessness has edged up to 5.6 percent in May from 4.1 percent in March.
In short, Sweden suffered a vastly higher death rate while failing to collect on the expected economic gains.
The coronavirus does not stop at national borders. Despite the government’s decision to allow the domestic economy to roll on, Swedish businesses are stuck with the same conditions that produced recession everywhere else. And Swedish people responded to the fear of the virus by limiting their shopping — not enough to prevent elevated deaths, but enough to produce a decline in business activity.
Here is one takeaway with potentially universal import: It is simplistic to portray government actions such as quarantines as the cause of economic damage. The real culprit is the virus itself. From Asia to Europe to the Americas, the risks of the pandemic have disrupted businesses while prompting people to avoid shopping malls and restaurants, regardless of official policy.
Sweden is exposed to the vagaries of global trade. Once the pandemic was unleashed, it was certain to suffer the economic consequences, said Mr. Kirkegaard, the economist.
“The Swedish manufacturing sector shut down when everyone else shut down because of the supply chain situation,” he said. “This was entirely predictable.”
What remained in the government’s sphere of influence was how many people would die.
“There is just no questioning and no willingness from the Swedish government to really change tack, until it’s too late,” Mr. Kirkegaard said. “Which is astonishing, given that it’s been clear for quite some time that the economic gains that they claim to have gotten from this are just nonexistent.”
Norway, on the other hand, was not only quick to impose an aggressive lockdown, but early to relax it as the virus slowed, and as the government ramped up testing. It is now expected to see a more rapid economic turnaround. Norway’s central bank predicts that its mainland economy — excluding the turbulent oil and gas sector — will contract by 3.9 percent this year. That amounts to a marked improvement over the 5.5 percent decline expected in the midst of the lockdown.
Sweden’s laissez faire approach does appear to have minimized the economic damage compared with its neighbors in the first three months of the year, according to an assessment by the International Monetary Fund. But that effect has worn off as the force of the pandemic has swept through the global economy, and as Swedish consumers have voluntarily curbed their shopping anyway.
Researchers at the University of Copenhagen gained access to credit data from Danske Bank, one of the largest in Scandinavia. They studied spending patterns from mid-March, when Denmark put the clamps on the economy, to early April. The pandemic prompted Danes to reduce their spending 29 percent in that period, the study concluded. During the same weeks, consumers in Sweden — where freedom reigned — reduced their spending 25 percent.
Strikingly, older people — those over 70 — reduced their spending more in Sweden than in Denmark, perhaps concerned that the business-as-usual circumstances made going out especially risky.
Collectively, Scandinavian consumers are expected to continue spending far more robustly than in the United States, said Thomas Harr, global head of research at Danske Bank, emphasizing those nations’ generous social safety nets, including national health care systems. Americans, by contrast, tend to rely on their jobs for health care, making them more cautious about their health and their spending during the pandemic, knowing that hospitalization can be a gateway to financial calamity.
“It’s very much about the welfare state,” Mr. Harr said of Scandinavian countries. “You’re not as concerned about catching the virus, because you know that, if you do, the state is paying for health care.”
znModeratorfrom Facebook
Samuel James on what policing looks like in Portland, Maine, when you are Black:
“One summer evening a few years back, my white girlfriend and I were returning home from a nice dinner out. As we approached our apartment she took out her keys to unlock the front door. She walked up the steps first. I stood behind her waiting. We weren’t arguing or yelling. We weren’t even talking. She was standing there unlocking the door and I was standing completely still behind her. This is important because right then we were suddenly illuminated by a police-car searchlight.
‘Hey! What are you doing? Miss, are you alright?! Miss! Are you alright?!’ an officer shouted from behind the light.
Being completely alright, my girlfriend turned around startled and confused. I was also startled, but being the only Black person in five blocks, I was not confused. I was angry. It is infuriating to be reminded once again that the police so often see the color of my skin as a signifier of crime. In this case, potential robbery or perhaps attempted rape.
I do not have words to express the frustration and rage I feel knowing that even though I am not living in the 1800s and not running through the woods escaping a plantation, I am nonetheless, in this moment, held to account for my presence by white men with searchlights and badges and guns because they view my skin color as a threat to a white woman. Again.”
znModeratorTexas may not have high school football in 2020 https://t.co/ZWXrCOGO6e
— ProFootballTalk (@ProFootballTalk) July 9, 2020
znModeratorfrom RANKING NFL OFFENSES BY ANALYTICS USAGE
https://www.rotoworld.com/node/189871
4. Rams (HC Sean McVay)
4th Down Aggressiveness: 26th
Pass Rate on Early Downs: 4th
Pass Rate While Trailing: 1st
Play-Action Rate: 3rd
Downfield Pass Rate: 19th
Middle of the Field Pass Rate: 20th
Pre-Snap Motion Percentage: 13th
Outside Run Rate: 15th
Shotgun Run Rate: 32nd
Offensive Pace: 2nd
McVay and the Rams are a candidate to climb into Tier 1 next season if they become way more aggressive with their fourth-down decision making (26th). It’s the primary blimp on McVay’s in-game analytical profile, and it’s the one that’s easiest to fix overnight. Outside of that, McVay runs one of the few under-center offenses that I like, largely because they are uptempo (2nd) and utilize play action (3rd) and pre-snap motion (13th). McVay also adjusts his pass rate to reflect his team’s in-game winning percentage, jumping up all the way to an 84% pass rate (1st) when the Rams have a 25% or lower chance of winning. If his offensive line wasn’t so bad and if Jared Goff wasn’t so affected by pressure, we’d likely see McVay utilize more deep passes (19th), too. I’m still in on McVay as one of the top offensive minds in the game. With that said, I believe the Rams have some work to do with their salary cap and drafting strategies.
znModeratorHotdaddyWags@hotdaddywags
There’s definitely some irony in the fact that all of these NFL owners donated to the Trump campaign and now his mismanagement of COVID is going to cost them all far more than the tax breaks he gave them.Doug Farrar@NFL_DougFarrar
You know the whole “Nickel is the new base” thing? Very true, as nickel made up 59% of all dropbacks. But this surprised me — in 2019, defenses played more dime (20.9%) than base (18%). Which means that defenses are putting six DBs on the field more than they’re putting four.Michael Giardi@MikeGiardi
Which then makes you wonder when a team is gonna go 2 and 3 tight ends and shove it down opponents throats? I mean aside from Baltimore.July 9, 2020 at 10:38 am in reply to: One-On-One with Sean McVay podcast … 7/9 … updated w/ new vid, 7/20 #117780znModeratorfrom https://theramswire.usatoday.com/2020/07/08/nfl-sean-mcvay-coach-10-years-burnout/
McVay appeared on Albert Breer’s MMQB NFL Podcast this week and was asked where he thinks he’ll be in 10-15 years.
“That’s a good question. Hopefully still with the Rams unless I’ve gotten myself so worked up that I wasn’t feeling good enough to still coach,” McVay said.
Breer quickly responded by asking if burning out is something the coach has to worry about, since that’s something he’s heard about McVay before.
“Yeah, absolutely it is,” McVay said. “That’s something that I do need to be aware of because if you’re not careful – I just know the way that I’m going at it, you’re like, realistically, this isn’t the right way to do it, but you’re such a grinder and it’s kind of being able to step back, being still is going to be a key thing. And I am confident that we’ll be able to achieve a better balance and will lead to more sustainability moving forward.”
…
As McVay has grown as a coach in the last three years, he’s learned the importance of having a work-life balance. That will become even more apparent in the future, too, after he gets married and starts a family.
“The other thing, too, is what I’ve really seen from a lot of my close friends, once you get into that point where, hey, I’m gonna get married next year, obviously want to be able to have kids. That perspective of, all right, now you’ve got a real reason to live when you’ve got a family, you’ve got something else,” he said. “I think that balance and that appreciation for those things where it’s not just all football will help toward a goal of just being able to sustain and be healthier overall.”
znModeratorAfter giving ~$3.7M to Native American communities in Year 1, the Original Americans Foundation’s giving dropped. The state of VA lists it as "not in good standing" as tribe officials say they've been ghosted, and recently, turned down for COVID-19 relief: https://t.co/rbC3Evamls
— Jenny Vrentas (@JennyVrentas) July 8, 2020
znModeratorMarc Bulger could thread the needle in his heyday! He couldn’t throw it 70 yards through the air but he threw with elite velocity and zip! #10 had one the fastest throwing motions in the league when he played. A beautiful release! pic.twitter.com/jERXSdNVKg
— RAMS ON FILM (@RamsOnFilm) July 9, 2020
znModeratorznModeratorESPN’s NFC West All-Decade Team
Voted on by ESPN’s NFC West reporters.https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/29178868/nfl-all-decade-best-player-nfc-west-team-every-position
OFFENSE
QB: Russell Wilson, Seahawks, 2012-present
RB: Marshawn Lynch, Seahawks, 2010-2015, 2019
RB: Todd Gurley, Rams, 2015-2019
WR: Larry Fitzgerald, Cardinals, 2004-present
WR: Doug Baldwin, Seahawks, 2011-2018
LT: Joe Staley, 49ers, 2007-2019
LG: Mike Iupati, 49ers, 2010-2014; Cardinals, 2015-2018; Seahawks, 2019
C: Max Unger, Seahawks, 2009-2014
RG: Rodger Saffold, Rams, 2010-2018
RT: Russell Okung, Seahawks, 2010-2015
TE: George Kittle, 49ers, 2017-presentDEFENSE
DE: Chandler Jones, Cardinals, 2016-present
DT: Aaron Donald, Rams, 2014-present
DT: Justin Smith, 49ers, 2008-2014
DE: Calais Campbell, Cardinals, 2008-2016
LB: Bobby Wagner, Seahawks, 2012-present
LB: Patrick Willis, 49ers, 2007-2014
LB: NaVorro Bowman, 49ers, 2010-2017
CB: Richard Sherman, Seahawks, 2011-2017; 49ers, 2018-present
CB: Patrick Peterson, Cardinals, 2011-present
FS: Earl Thomas, Seahawks, 2010-2018
SS: Kam Chancellor, Seahawks, 2010-2017SPECIAL TEAMS
KR/PR: Tyler Lockett, Seahawks, 2015-present
K: Stephen Hauschka, Seahawks, 2011-2016
P: Johnny Hekker, Rams, 2012-present -
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