The Eagles Sign Some Guys: Beware The Free Agents Of March

The guys with knives are agents

So my Eagles have been very active on the first day of NFL free agency, and this is where fans with a memory should curl up into the fetal position, right? Between the Nnamdi Asomugha Scream Team and Nero Kelly's Adventures in Less Running Running Backs, free agency has been the absolute misery for this franchise. It's also been more proof, not that anyone has needed it, that the draft classes have also been not up to snuff, given that there's always glaring holes for your shopping spree. Let's just close our eyes, go back to fantasy baseball draft prep, and not pay so much attention to...

Well, no. We can't, and not just because there's precious little else going on right now that won't encourage alcoholism. But I keep not meaning to write on my sports blog about politics, so let's exercise a little discipline. and keep it on the football.

Here's what the team has picked up so far:

CB Leodis McKelvin, from Buffalo, to a 2-year deal.

CB Ron Brooks, from Buffalo, to a 3 year deal.

LB Nigel Bradham, from Buffalo, to a 2 year deal.

G Brandon Brooks, from Houston, to a 5 year deal.

S Rodney McLeod, from St. Louis / Los Angeles, to a 5 year deal.

QB Chase Daniel, from Kansas City, to a 3 year deal.

I better hurry up and cover all of this before the list gets longer.

First, the ex-Bills. All of these guys are being seen as binkies for DC Jim Schwartz, who ran that defense before Rex Ryan got to town and made everything worse. McKelvin is the oldest at 30, and he works as a borderline litmus test. If he starts and gets CB1/2 snaps, the team is in trouble. If he backs up and/or plays the nickel, things might be OK. Brooks is seen as a depth guy and STer, but as an ex-4th rounder from LSU just getting off his rookie deal, he might be a little more than that. Bradham is pretty much the same story. The most notable thing about all of these guys is that training camp should be a lot more competitive, and McKelvin has returned punts in his past career, but not well recently, especially when it comes to ball security.

Next, Brooks the G. The football line nerdery that I read about him says he's big, quick and borderline freakish as a road grader, less so as a pass protector. While that doesn't generally make for Pro Bowls, the plain and simple is that Brooks is a quality NFL starter, and he just signed with a team that didn't have any of those to play G last year. I'm generally not a huge fan of locking down guys from poor franchises, but the Texans did make the playoffs last year (look it up!), and did so with something like a running game, and terrible QB play. This is one of those qualified enthusiasm moves that, if nothing else, makes sure that you don't have to reach for an OL in the first round if the board goes badly for you.

The single most satisfying move of the day for the bulk of the fan base will likely be McLeod. He's the first truly big hitter that the team has had at safety since the last days of Saint Brian Dawkins, and there's footage of a play where he vaporized Emmanuel Sanders that is downright porny. While the Rams weren't exactly a great defense last year, they certainly had some moments, and what McLeod put on tape is fun, even if it is a little worrisome that the league has tended to legislate this kind of violence out of existence. It's also the most that the team has ever committed to the safety position, when you combine his deal with the one they inked with Malcolm Jenkins. It's a long way from Nate Allen, Macho Harris, Patrick Chung, Kurt Coleman and way too many others, really. Or, at least, it better be.

Wrapping things up is Daniel, the undersized binkie for new HC Doug Pederson. I've always had a bit of a soft spot for him, in that he's always seemed like he's got a hair more arm and legs than expected. He's also got an awful lot going for him, in that he's Not Mark Sanchez, and honestly, being Not Mark Sanchez will probably be enough for me for the next decade.

What's different about this flurry of signings is, frankly, the expectation level. No one is counting on any of these guys winning your fantasy league, or being part of "Philadelphia is our pick to be a surprise Super Bowl contender" piece. No one is going to say the team won March with these moves, or that the rest of the NFC lEast is quaking in their boots over Howie Roseman finally having full control over the hiring and firing.

But what *has* been done here is entirely defensible by, well, sane decision making, or a method of building a team that you've actually seen before. No one is coming off an abuse carry year. No one is coming with dust for ACLs and unrealistic hopes of full bounce-back from career-threatening injury. No one cost the best RB in the team's history, got monster money to be a back up, or is famous to people who don't really watch football very much or very hard, or only ever watch where the ball is.

Oh, and most of these guys are just coming off their rookie deal, rather than getting their guaranteed final contract in the league.

We have no idea, and can have no idea, how all of this is going to shake out. It's extraordinarily rare for one of these to hit 100% on all picks, the same way that it's extraordinarily rare to hit on all of your draft picks.

But none of these moves is crazy on its face, irresponsible on the money, locks the club into an ungodly number of years, or prevents the team from taking the best available player with their picks. None of these moves screams out that Roseman is in over his head, making moves in a desperate and short leash fashion, or over-rating the talent on his roster.

So today? Probably a good day.

But more importantly?

Almost certainly not a disastrous one.

By the recent personnel standards of this franchise, that's about as good as you can hope for, really.

Calvin Johnson Leaves, And No One Survives Detroit

Exit, Stage Sad

Today, at the ripe old age of 30, Lions WR Calvin Johnson called it quits officially. He does so while holding 15 NFL records, including the most yards in a season (1,964), a half dozen Pro Bowl trips, seven years where he breached the 1,000 yard mark, and a clear path to Canton.

What makes the departure striking is how much it mirrors what happened with Barry Sanders, the best RB in the history of this cursed franchise. That player also left money and milestones on the table, and meat on the bone. Johnson didn't even come to a podium and take questions about his decision, choosing instead to send in his announcement.

I watched Johnson very strongly last year, having him on my fantasy team in a tight race, and while he wasn't quite what he was in past years, he was still clearly Detroit's best player. In their best game of the year, the Thanksgiving evisceration of the Eagles, he absolutely toyed with CB Eric Rowe, who more than held his own for the rest of the year as a rookie CB on an island.

No one has any real idea how hurt Johnson was, or is; that's the nature of football, where health is a constantly diminishing asset. But I do know that there has to be a fantastic sadness to the world of being a Lions fan. You don't get to see your heroes leave when its time; instead, they just go when the losing gets to be too much, and you have to wonder if they just couldn't take it any more. They fought against the dying of the hope, but in the end, it's Detroit. Hope never works out.

So why now?

Well, the money, probably. Johnson was due $24 million against the team's salary cap in 2016, one of those balloon payments that teams never wind up making. If he wanted to come back, he probably would have had to take less, for no good reason at all. There was a real chance that the team could have moved him along to some other laundry, which was something he just didn't want to do. He's never been in any kind of trouble, and probably banked enough to not have to do anything he wants to do for, well, ever. It's football; your brain is at risk, even when you aren't on the line.

It might also have to do with an unwillingness to accept anything less. Johnson's fought a bunch of injuries, and while the height and hands are still there, the speed really isn't. Separation is the first thing to go for a wideout, and Johnson's yards per catch dropped to human levels this year. If he wanted to go somewhere else, and retirement was all just a Carson Palmer-esque ploy, 31 other NFL teams would be willing to start him tomorrow.

But instead, he's just gone. Man alive, the idea that your franchise just ends people. How do you shake that off? Ever?

The Eagles Clean House, Or Night Of The Long Howies

Nero, You Broke My Team

When last we left the Phila- delphia Eagles, the off-season seemed relatively straight forward. Re-sign QB Sam Bradford for the least possible money and the least possible years, since he's an incredible injury risk, but also the best available option to start in 2016. Extend the small number of promising young and/or valued players (Zach Ertz, Lane Johnson, Vinny Curry, Najeh Goode, Malcolm Jenkins) to club-friendly contracts. Cut the obvious dead wood (Riley Cooper, DeMecco Ryans). Prepare for the draft with, preferably, a bolstering of the front office, since Prodigal GM and Jeffrey Lurie Compromising Photographs Owner Howie Roseman looked out of his element in doing this before.

But there were aspects of the 2015 club -- Bradford, RB DeMarco Murray, LB Kiko Alonso, CB Brandon Maxwell -- that, while clearly over-valued and over-paid by disgraced ex-GM / Coach / Franchise Killer Chip "Nero" Kelly, well, probably weren't going to go anywhere. Finding another club that would take on their salaries, let alone picks of any value, was going to be difficult, especially for a quasi-noob GM. We were just going to have to live with these guys, and hope like hell that competent and sane coaching might get something more out of them, especially on defense. And since the unit wasn't likely to be out there after 18 seconds of non-offense, or have the no adjustment stylings of ex-DC Billy Davis, well, there was hope for that.

Well, until Roseman decided that today was the day he was going to go into Full Purge Mode.

Maxwell and Alonso, shipped out to Miami. Murray, off to Nashville. Ryan Mathews, said to be on the trade block, though one expects with Murray gone, maybe (maybe) not. And suddenly, this franchise looks like it's going to be as changed and unsettled in 2016 as it was in 2015.

Now, there's all kinds of speculation as to what the pick and contract cap situation is going to look like after this. Most of the hubbub puts this work at pick swaps in the first, and maybe late picks, rather than the missing second round pick from the Bradford deal. There's every possibility that, given that Roseman chose dance partners that aren't known as the sharpest knives in the drawer in Miami and Tennessee, that Green won this deal clean, and got rid of three poor clubhouse guys in the meantime. The list of guys who find stardom on their third team, which will be the case for all of these players, is not long.

But man alive, what a whipsaw this franchise has been in the past year. Three different RB1s, three different CB1s, and oh by the way, they now are in the market for secondary help for what only seems like the tenth straight year. We won't even get into the offensive line.

Teams that are worth a damn take time to gel, rather than just auto-assemble like Legos. If Roseman isn't right with the rest of the season -- and hell, even if he is -- the idea that the Bradford signing made for a competitive 2016 might just be NFC lEast fool's gold.

But in the meantime?

We don't have to hold our nose and root for any of those guys any more. Murray with his slide runs from contact, Alonso running away from blockers like a skittish golden retriever puppy, Maxwell taking penalties all over the field, or trailing guys into the end zone...

Well, it's not as is if Kenjon Barner, Nolan Carroll and Goode have as high of a ceiling. But somehow, that's so much easier to root for.

The Sixers Fail Charity

Miss And A Prayer

Imagine the following narrative.

In the Patriots-Broncos game that decided who would go to the Super Bowl for the AFC, the Patriots were unable to defend Von Miller, in particular, from pressuring Tom Brady. It might have been the margin of the game.

So, rather than snap play after play in which Miller disrupted the offense, they just went to the ref before the play began, and told him that they were going to hold Miller on this play. The refs would then make Miller try a field goal, and if he missed, the Patriots would benefit.

That makes no sense at all, right?

Let's try baseball instead. Justin Verlander plunks David Ortiz, but rather than taking first base, the Boston slugger takes a moment to contain himself, then gets to face a batting practice pitcher for two throws. If he can hit a home run to a certain area of right field on either of the next two pitches, Boston gets a run.

That's also nuts, right?

And yet, this is pretty much how basketball is run, because the game is just, well, like that. Players have to do lots of different things, and an uncontested shot that seems easy and borderline effortless, and yet is missed by the best shooters in the history of the game at least 1 time out of 10, because the context of when it happens is in the midst of an exhausting athletic contest.

Since free throws are just something that happens so often as to be trite, while still being more or less unparalleled in any other sport, people don't generally think about them very much. But I do. Free throws are, to me, a supremely hidden statistic, both from the matter of how often they occur, and as to how many points are left on the table. And they are also a fine indicator, at some level, of the overall quality of the player, especially when it comes to guard play. (I also have a relatively functional case of OCD, and I do analysis for a living. So.)

Look at the top players in the league when it comes to free throws made per game. You'll find James Harden, DeMarcus Cousins, DeMar DeRozan, Danilo Gallinari, Jimmy Butler, Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and Paul George -- in other words, some of the best offensive players in the league this year. With the exception of Cousins, all of them shoot in the mid to high 80s from the stripe. And it seems like an easy corollary to make. Good form in free throws, good ability to draw contact and get to the line, hey presto, effective offense. If this is true for players, it's true for teams.

Now, let's take a look at free throw percentage at a team level.

Philly is 19th in the league on free throw attempts per game. That may not sound too bad, but it actually is, because they play at a faster offensive pace than most. Then we get to how many of them turn into points, and there's where the rubber hits the road. Third fewest, or 28th, because from a percentage standpoint, only Detroit is worse. 68.8%, and in general, the league average is just over 75%. On a team average of 20 to 25 attempts per game, that's a hole of 2-3 points, just from the stripe. (To be fair, Philly is also terrible at avoiding turnovers, and in the past month, defense. But I digress.)

It's not even just a case of one terrible shooter who gets hacked when the team is ahead, the way things work for Detroit, Houston or the Clippers. Philly has a half dozen guys that make between 1.8 and 2.5 free throws a game (the list: Jerami Grant, Jahlil Okafor, Nerlens Noel, Ish Smith, Rovert Covington and Isaiah Canaan), and only Covington and Canaan are actually any good at it, coming in at over 80%. (Notice that they aren't actually very good at it, just better than average.)

The rest? Ye gads. Noel is at 61%. Smith is at 65%, and honestly, that's inexcusable for a point guard. Grant and Okafor troll around 68%, and even the shooting guards who rarely get there because they only shoot from the arc, Nik Stauskas and Hollis Thompson, come in at 68 and 72.

So while it seems like a relatively small thing, it's really not, given the pace they play at. It's more like a five points per game hole that this team has to try to crawl out of. It's one of the big reasons why they've been utterly terrible at protecting fourth quarter leads. It's unlikely to turn around next year, even if the team gets a massive infusion of significant talent (Joel Embiid, Dario Saric, several high draft picks), because all of that new talent is going to do the same thing that the young talent does...

Which is, well, struggle to make their free throws.

Look back to that list of individual players that I referenced earlier. Notice anything in common?

Yeah, none of them are all that new to the league, right?

So maybe next year they get a little better about this. Maybe they get to 2 or 3 points a game in the hole. But it's not going to become a net positive for a long while, and for a team whose best assets are inside, rather than outside...

Well, if you are looking for reasons to doubt The Process, you aren't lacking for reasons right now. And until this gets to the point where the team has an edge at the line, rather than a hole?

That's when they might be able to win a game when everything *doesn't* go right...

FTT Off-Topic: Why So Mad?

I'm going to try, and in all likelihood fail, to not talk about politics very much during this election year. It's not that I don't hold such views or have opinions about these things, it's just that (a) I can't imagine you care that much, and (b) I also can't imagine that I'm going to change anyone's mind about, well, anything.

That's one of the wonderful things about our age of disruption and social media. Everyone's not only entitled to their opinion, it's almost as if they are required to have one, and the less informed, the better. I'm the first person in my family to go to college, and I hold a political science degree from one of the best schools in the country for such things. At no time, in the 25+ years since I achieved that diploma, has anyone that I am related to deferred to my more qualified viewpoint. All while praising to the skies my accomplishment and alma mater. It is what it is.

But having said all of that, let me take the broom out of the closet and go push the ocean for a few words. To wit, this:

To my friends and relatives who are very much against the Obama Administration, and convinced that things are so bad that we should get enthused about a self-promoting serial failure of a businessman who would be the least qualified major party candidate in this country's history, um...

What, exactly, is going so badly in the country to justify your electoral equivalent of grenade addiction?

I fueled up my car today for $12. (No, seriously.) I did so in a country where the unemployment rate is approaching historically low levels, with the rate of unemployed people dropping every month. When I drove to work, I did so on a road that included cars from American companies that were saved from bankruptcy, and paid back all assistance, by the Administration that you oppose.

My home is worth about 90% of what I paid for it... coming up on ten years ago. The reason why that valuation dropped though the floorboards was stuff that happened due to the actions of the second Bush Administration, which pretty much threatened the economy of the entire world. When the value fell to 65%, this Administration worked to make sure that I could refi my home anyway, and save thousands every year on interest rates.

Last year, my job went away, and for a time, I needed health insurance. This Administration's signature program allowed me to save a few thousand more over what COBRA would have cost, when I really needed it. This let me start a consulting business without having to cash in my 401K or kill my kid's college fund. It also let my wife and kids go to the doctor despite my troubles. Last year really stunk, but without this President, it would have been much worse.

There are people in this country, who were born with a condition that they did not chose, who get to marry each other, raise kids and have a relatively normal life now. They only get to do this because of this President, and none of that cost me, or you, a dime. In all likelihood, it made us both money, since all of those folks started spending on such things. Fewer of our countrymen are at war now than before this President. The national debt, which is a bullspit concept that only seems to matter when a Democrat is in office, is down, and the percentage of federal spending is also historically low. We've probably *hurt* our economy because we're not *more* in debt, given the amount of easy and necessary infrastructure projects that have gone waiting, but it's not as if this Congress was going to approve deficit spending anyway. Despite, well, two majority voting wins.

Want more? There really hasn't been a defining scandal of the age. Obama hasn't presided over a Katrina disaster, committed infidelities in office, reneged on a tax promise, traded weapons in a blatantly illegal scheme, and so on. You also really can't claim that the media has hushed up anything that might come out, given the fact that your side has media channels, and such things get noticed.
Let me back this up with a few points. I'm really not in love with the guy, honest. I grant that he might play golf too much, irritate with a professorial attitude, and pander to his base. None of that's what really bothers me, though. I'm much more concerned by the drone strikes (cheap warfare, terrorists will have them within a decade), the wiretapping and Guantanamo Bay's continued existence. I worry that we haven't done enough on global warming, ocean acidification, and that fracking is going to cause massive tectonic problems later... but you aren't, and in the grand scheme of things, in seven years, that's relatively light. By nearly all statistical and quantifiable levels, he's been one of the best Presidents in the history of the nation, and in my lifetime, maybe the best. (Yes, I understand your side's love for Reagan, but you don't get to cry national debt only when it suits you, and Reagan went nuts on that.)

Now, I get why people wouldn't want to vote for the person I'm going to vote for. I'd much rather have a third Obama term, and a Congress that wasn't historically obstructionist, then what we're likely to get. Clinton's decision making on Iraq, willingness to play the big donor game, and constant triangulation to a mythical middle is the reason why Bernie Sanders has gotten so much oxygen. Bernie's not electable, because he'd get wiped out by strong public scrutiny, and I'm too old for noble causes, anyway. (That progressive ship sailed with Dennis Kucinich in 2004, actually.)

But what I don't get is why you are all so convinced that the world's ending, that the country is going to hell in a handbasket, and that any time your guy isn't in office, the person that is in office is a strong candidate for Antichrist status. (When your guy is in office, I usually just think Thief, or maybe War Criminal, and by the way, Trump would just be the former. It's not that equivalent.) That your 19% viewpoint that abortion is never acceptable, unless its your kid and kept very quiet, is in any way defensible. That your gun hobby is more important than any other public safety concern, despite how the rest of the world does it. That there's nothing that can be learned from how the rest of the world handles health, or law, or education, or, well, anything.

Honestly. My side isn't competent enough to vote in midterm elections, let alone run a death panel, conspire to give the world away to the UN, enforce Sharia law, turn your kids gay, make Hollywood re-make "Ghostbusters" for no good reason, and so on, and so on.

So can you maybe take down the anger and hate a notch or twelve, and maybe stop beating the crap out of people who disagree with you, or threatening them with your guns?

Because no matter who wins the train wreck that we're in right now, and the train wreck to come, we all have to live near each other, if not quite get along.

At least, until y'all secede, and we get to see how committed you are to building walls...