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Archive for February, 2011

RAYONSPORTS.COM WILL RETURN ON MARCH 1ST

25 Feb

RAYONSPORTS.COM WILL RETURN FROM HIATUS ON TUESDAY, MARCH 1ST, 2011. THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

 
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Posted in General

 

NFL – Super Bowl Prediction

04 Feb

                                        Green Bay rookie RB James Starks

 

Super Bowl XLV should be a classic game, being played between two of the National Football League’s premier franchises – the Pittsburgh Steelers and Green Bay Packers. To top it off, the teams will square off in Dallas owner Jerry Jones’ new billion dollar palace in front of over 100,000 fans and millions of television viewers. It will most likely set a new record for most fans attending the game, and with such a classic matchup may break TV ratings records also. The Pittsburgh Steelers have to be considered the favorite to win, regardless of what the oddsmakers say. They are the model NFL franchise. The consistency in how the team is operated is amazing. They have been owned by the Rooney family since the beginning. They were a losing franchise throughout the 1960s, but since 1970 have shown the rest of the NFL how it’s done. They’ve had only 3 head coaches in the 41 years since Chuck Noll turned the franchise around – Noll, Bill Cowher and the current coach, Mike Tomlin – and all 3 have won Super Bowls. When it comes to hiring minority head coaches, the Steelers are head and shoulders above the rest of the league. The rule directing teams to at least interview a minority candidate is called the Rooney Rule, since it was proposed by Steeler president Dan Rooney. While all the other teams give token interviews to minority candidates, then go ahead and recycle the same old coaches, when it came time to replace the retiring Cowher, the Steelers took the process seriously, and wound up hiring Tomlin, possibly the best young coach in the NFL who is on the verge of winning his second NFL title. It’s a little known fact that in 1957, the Steelers also hired the first African American assistant coach in history when they named Lowell Perry their receivers coach after his playing career was cut short by a serious injury. Of course, none of this has anything to do with how they’ll play on Sunday, but the fact is they are the most professionally-run franchise in the NFL and they haven’t won six Super Bowl titles, more than any other franchise, by accident. They know how to get it done. Then there are the Packers, another storied NFL franchise. They have had success under Curley Lambeau, Vince Lombardi and Mike Holmgren. Overall, they have won twice as many titles as the Steelers, 6 under Lambeau, 5 under Lombardi and one more for Holmgren for a total of 12. Their success spans nine decades, with a lot of mediocre football played in between the championship eras. They are clearly a team with a winning tradition, and current coach Mike McCarthy has done a great job of guiding them back to the top. The Packers are unique in that they are a small market team that is community-owned. Their general manager, Ted Thompson, deserves a lot of credit for the team reaching the Super Bowl also. He took the heat for dumping Brett Favre a few years ago and making the decision to go ahead and turn the team over to Aaron Rodgers. That decision looks pretty good at this point.

As for this Sunday’s game, I believe, even though the Steelers have much more championship experience on their roster, that the Packers will win. Green Bay, in my estimation, has the perfect offense to attack the vaunted Steeler defense. The Packers don’t run the ball that often, which isn’t a problem in this game since it’s almost impossible to run on the Steeler defense anyway. Green Bay will spread the defense out by using a lot of 4 and 5 receiver sets, with Rodgers beating the blitz with quick passes. Pittsburgh is vulnerable in the secondary if Green Bay’s line can pick up the Steeler blitzers and give Rodgers the extra seconds he’ll need to find open receivers. Rookie running back James Starks, the Niagara Falls and University of Buffalo product, will be a key player in the game. If he accomplishes what he has so far in the playoffs – picking up valuable yards on the ground when the Pack DOES run the ball to keep the defense honest – then Green Bay will win. Starks will also have the tough job of blitz pickup in the backfield – trying to sort out who is coming from where and getting over quickly enough to pick up the blitzers. Green Bay’s defense is good enough to handle Pittsburgh’s offense also. The Steelers run the ball with Rashard Mendenhall very effectively, and the Packers can be vulnerable to a power running game. Green Bay could be in trouble if the Steelers play a ball control game designed to control the clock and keep Rodgers off the field. The Packers’ defensive coaches have got to figure out ways to take advantage of Pittsburgh’s patchwork offensive line, that has lost starters all year long and will likely be missing their best player – rookie center Maurkice Pouncey – on Sunday. The player protecting Ben Roethlisberger’s blind side on Sunday, at left tackle, will be Jonathon Scott, who was one of many players shuffled in and out of the lineup on Buffalo’s oft-injured line in 2009. There have to be strategic ways to match Scott up with Pro Bowl linebacker Clay Matthews and cause Big Ben problems.

I feel the Packers will maintain drives and not allow Pittsburgh to play keepaway with a power ground game, and will win the game by more than a field goal. Green Bay 27, Pittsburgh 17.

 
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Posted in Football

 

Classic Team Logo of The Day

04 Feb

The logo of a football team that entered the NFL in 1961, the Minnesota Vikings. The Vikings, along with the Buffalo Bills, have the distinction of having lost 4 Super Bowl games, and never having won a single title. They were upset in Super Bowl IV by the Chiefs, when CFL veteran Joe Kapp was their quarterback, then lost 3 more times in the 1970s with Fran Tarkenton at the helm. Bud Grant was the coach for all 4 losses. Despite their Super Bowl failures, the Vikings were one of the strongest NFL teams throughout the late 1960s and into the ’70s. To add to their hard luck, in 1998, the Vikes won 15 of 16 regular season games and advanced to the NFC Championship game, where they were upset by Atlanta. Their kicker, Gary Anderson, who had been a perfect 35 for 35 on field goal attempts during the season, missed for the first time all year from 38 yards out with a chance to win the game, and they wound up losing in overtime.

 

Classic Sports Card of The Day

04 Feb

1971 Topps football card of former Miami Dolphins’ placekicker Garo Yepremian, who made one of the all-time “blooper” plays in Super Bowl history in Super Bowl VII. Yepremian, from Cyprus, somehow managed to get his hands on a bobbled snap on a Dolphin field goal attempt, then tried to apparently throw a pass. The ball just floated straight upward into the waiting arms of Redskins’ DB Mike Bass, who returned it for a touchdown and turned a 14-0 Miami lead into a close 14-7 game. The Dolphins wound up holding on to win to cap off an amazing undefeated 17-0 season with their first Super Bowl title. Yepremian lasted 16 seasons in the NFL, 14 with Miami, and was named the kicker on the NFL’s All Decade  team for the 1970s. The picture used on this card was probably taken during an early training camp practice, since he wore jersey # 1 for his entire career with the Dolphins.

 

NFL – Super Bowl III – The Game That Changed The Game

03 Feb

 

                                             Pro Football HOF Super Bowl III Display

The Games That Changed The Game is the title of a book written by Ron Jaworski, chronicling games over the years in which creative, innovative coaches like Sid Gillman and Bill Walsh introduced wrinkles that changed the way the game was played. I haven’t read the book so I don’t know which specific games Jaworski mentions, but without a doubt Super Bowl III was a game that definitely changed the landscape of the entire sport. The third NFL-AFL World Championship game, which was the first to actually be called the “Super Bowl”, didn’t have any amazing strategic developments that drastically changed the way the sport was played, although the methodical way Joe Namath and the New York Jets’ offense attacked the vaunted Baltimore Colts’ defense was pretty amazing. Most sports fans know the general storyline of the game. The Jets, representing the young, upstart American Football League, entered the game against the Colts as 18-20 point underdogs. The NFL’s Green Bay Packers had won the first 2 title games between the leagues, dispatching Kansas City and Oakland in games that were mostly one-sided. In this matchup, the Colts were considered a juggernaut, coached by young genius Don Shula, with an overpowering defense, generally thought to be even better than Vince Lombardi’s Packer teams. At the same time, the Jets were a long shot to even get through the playoffs in their own league, and even though they advanced to the Super Bowl, were not considered the overall best team in the AFL. According to all the football experts at the time, this game was going to be a monumental blowout. Shockingly, at a pre-game event at the Miami Touchdown Club (the game was played at the Orange Bowl), Namath, in response to a heckling Colt supporter, boldly proclaimed,”We’re gonna win the game. I guarantee it.” He then went out and backed up his words, engineering a conservative, ball-control game plan that resulted in a 16-7 win for the Jets, and for the entire AFL. Namath, in the 1968 regular season leading up to this game, didn’t have a spectacular year, throwing only 15 touchdown passes compared to 17 interceptions, with only a 49% completion percentage. Also, he didn’t have an outstanding statistical passing day in the Super Bowl. He mostly did what modern day coaches would call “manage the game”, beating the Colts’ blitzing defense with quick, short passes to his backs and tight end to keep drives alive. The Jets scored only one touchdown, on a short run by Matt Snell, and amazingly, Namath didn’t complete a pass in the fourth quarter of the game.

At the time of the game, nobody, except for the Jets themselves, believed the mighty Colts could lose. After they blew out the Cleveland Browns 34-0 in the NFL championship game, they were being touted as “the greatest team in pro football history”.  Looking back now, it was a classic case of a team being over-hyped. The Colts’ roster was actually full of aging players near the end of their careers – like Earl Morrall, Tom Matte, Jimmy Orr, Bobby Boyd and Lou Michaels. Their 34-0 thrashing of the Browns was revenge for the 27-0 pasting the Browns had put on the Colts in the 1964 title game, but that was misleading. By 1968, Jim Brown had moved onto an acting career, and QB Frank Ryan had been replaced by journeyman Bill Nelsen. The Browns were in the beginning stages of a downward fall, and that hammering by the Colts in the title game made the Colts look more dominating than they really were. The Colts’ defense overwhelmed the NFL that year using a blitzing zone scheme that confused the rest of the teams in the league. What was overlooked prior to the Super Bowl was the fact that the Jets faced a lot of zone defenses in the AFL, and were well-equipped and confident that they could beat the Colts’ defense. The result of the game was a shocking Jets’ victory that changed the perception of the AFL as a second tier league. In the early 1960s some NFL owners laughed them off as a “Mickey Mouse” league, but this game established the AFL as equals to the older league, and a year later the Kansas City Chiefs added an exclamation point by upsetting the heavily favored Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV. Again, the pundits overlooked the fact that the Vikings were led by an old recycled QB from the Canadian League, Joe Kapp, and had a roster peppered with aging players like Mick Tinglehoff, Karl Kassulke, Roy Winston and Bill Brown. At the same time, the Chiefs were led by dynamic young players like Mike Garrett, Otis Taylor, Willie Lanier and Buck Buchanan. The problem was the AFL was very much underpublicized at the time compared to the older NFL. That changed completely going into the 1970s.

 

Classic Team Logo of The Day

03 Feb

This is the iconic logo of one of pro football’s winningest franchises, “America’s Team”, the Dallas Cowboys. The logo came into use starting in 1964, which is just about when the franchise began winning with regularity. The Cowboys have played in eight Super Bowls, and won 5 of them. The franchise had a record 20 consecutive winning seasons under coach Tom Landry, winning 2 titles during those years. When Jerry Jones bought the club in 1989 he unceremoniously dumped the legendary Landry, the only coach the franchise had known in its’ history, and replaced him with flamboyant college coach Jimmy Johnson. Jones took a lot of flak for the move, but it turned out to be the right one as the ‘Boys won 2 Super Bowls under Johnson, then another under Barry Switzer.

 

Classic Sports Card of The Day

03 Feb

From www.CheckOutMyCards.com , this is a 1981 Topps football card of the player many consider the greatest quarterback in NFL history, Joe Montana. He led the San Francisco 49ers to 4 Super Bowl titles, and is the only player in NFL history to be named Super Bowl MVP three times. “Joe Cool” earned so many accolades in his career that it’s hard to list them all, but here are a few: 8 time Pro Bowler, 2 time league MVP, named to both the All Decade team for the 1980s and the NFL’s 75th Anniversary All-Time team. Montana was above all a winner, and his jersey # 16 is retired by the 49ers. He was elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2000.

 

NFL – Super Bowl V – The Blunder Bowl

02 Feb

                                                                 Dallas LB Chuck Howley

 

Super Bowl V may have been the strangest of all of the 44 NFL title games played since the Super Bowl began. It was played following the 1970 season, the first year the NFL and AFL merged into one league with 2 conferences, after Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Baltimore were transferred from the old NFL into the American Conference of the new NFL. After the AFL had established itself as the NFL’s equal with 2 consecutive stunning Super Bowl wins, by the Jets and Chiefs, suddenly the game wound up with 2 old NFL teams playing each other, which took some of the competitiveness out of the game which existed when the young AFL was trying to make a name for itself in earlier years. Both teams entered this game with issues – the Cowboys had gained a reputation for being a good team that “couldn’t win the big one” after failing in the playoffs every year since the early ’60s. The Colts returned to the game where they had suffered the “embarrassment” of being upset by the upstart AFL Jets 2 years earlier, only this time were representing that upstart league as AFC champions. Nonetheless, both teams entered the contest needing to win badly to erase a losing stigma, despite being successful, winning franchises.

The game was an artistic mess, and it looked as if neither team was going to be able to erase that losing stigma, or if either was even capable. The game, which became known as the “Blunder Bowl”, featured 11 combined turnovers, including 7 by the winning team (a record that still stands today), 14 total penalties and a boatload of punts. The Cowboys finished with 113 passing yards, the Colts had 69 yards rushing. All 3 quarterbacks who played in the game, John Unitas and Earl Morrall for Baltimore and Craig Morton for Dallas, completed less than 50% of their pass attempts. A rookie kicker, Jim O’Brien, won the game by kicking a field goal with 5 seconds left, but only after Cowboy RB Dan Reeves let a pass slip through his hands that LB Mike Curtis intercepted, to set it up. Baltimore’s Don McCafferty became the first rookie head coach to win a Super Bowl, but obviously his coaching genius wasn’t much of a factor in the win. For the first and only time in Super Bowl history, a player from the losing team – linebacker Chuck Howley of the Cowboys (pictured above) – was named the game’s MVP. Howley refused to accept the award, saying it was meaningless to him after his team lost. So the Colts, ultimately, erased the stigma of being embarrassed by the Jets in Super Bowl III, but, instead of winning back the glory for the old guard NFL, their win gave the upstart AFL, now the AFC, a 3-2 lead in title games between the leagues. The Cowboys’ story finally got a happy ending also, as they returned to the Super Bowl the next season and soundly defeated Don Shula’s young up-and-coming Miami Dolphin squad in Super Bowl VI to finally give Tom Landry his long-awaited championship. One thing this game accomplished – it firmly established the fact that the old battleground days of the NFL and AFL were over, and that the NFL was now just one big happy family. From this point, the game grew immensely in the 1970s and beyond into the monster it is today.

 

Classic Team Logo of The Day

02 Feb

Logo of the National Football League’s San Francisco 49ers, used from 1968 until 1995. The franchise has won 5 Super Bowl titles in its’ history, 3 under the late Bill Walsh and 2 more under George Siefert. The Niners were born as a franchise in the old All-America Conference in 1946, and entered the NFL in 1950. Their 5 Super Bowl titles rank them tied for second among NFL teams, but they have the distinction of being the only team with multiple Super Bowl wins that has never lost in the game.

 

Classic Sports Card of The Day

02 Feb

1965 Topps football card of former American Football League defensive back Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, who played 7 seasons for Oakland and Kansas City. Williamson was a notorious self-promoter, and as a Chief, prior to the inaugural Super Bowl, boasted that he would knock both Green Bay starting receivers out of the game with his famous “hammer”, a vicious “clothesline”  forearm  that he used regularly, that would get him fined, suspended and probably banned from today’s game. Ironically, “The Hammer”  himself was knocked out of the game when he caught a knee to the head from Packer back Donny Anderson. After his playing days, Williamson had a successful acting career, specializing in what was called “Blaxploitation” films, and briefly served as an analyst on Monday Night Football.