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naming redshirt freshman Sam Darnold the starting quarterback. Sm
in Fragen 06.11.2018 03:51von t123 • 2.563 Beiträge
Things just dont get any easier for the Seattle Seahawks. When the Russell Wilson era began in 2012, they immediately developed a built-in rivalry with the divisions strongest team, the brutally dominant San Francisco 49ers. After Wilson lost his first meeting against the Niners, he threw four touchdowns in a 41-13 rout in Week 16 of his rookie season. Seattle split its?2013 regular-season contests with San Francisco before famously vanquishing the 49ers in that postseasons NFC Championship Game (the Sorry Receiver game). Since that loss, the Niners have gone through three head coaches while posting a 13-19 record.At the end of the 2013 season, though, a new rival began to peek through the clouds. The Arizona Cardinals hired Bruce Arians, traded for Carson Palmer and narrowly missed out on the playoffs with a 10-6 season. That run included a rare 17-10 defeat of the Seahawks in Seattle in Week 16. The Seahawks swept a Palmer-less Cardinals team in 2014, but with Palmer recovered from a torn ACL, the Cardinals roared to the top of the NFC West in 2015. Arizona went 13-3, including a 39-32 comeback win over Seattle in the Pacific Northwest, before things went south at the very end of the year. The Cardinals were blown out by the Seahawks in Week 17, only for the NFC champion Panthers to destroy both the Seahawks and Cardinals in consecutive weeks in the postseason.Now, as we enter 2016, the Cardinals and Seahawks rank among the favorites to win Super Bowl LI. The biggest obstacle in their way, unfortunately, is each other. The easiest path to the Super Bowl, as last year reminded us, is with home-field advantage along the way, and its always going to be more difficult for a team like the Cardinals to finish with the conferences best record when they have to play twice against a team as good as Seattle. The Panthers were excellent last year, but they finished behind Arizona and Seattle in DVOA and faced the leagues easiest schedule. The second-place team in the Panthers division was the 8-8 Falcons. It might not surprise you to remember that the Panthers went 5-1 against the NFC South and outscored their brethren by 81 points in those games.Seattle and Arizona have it rough. But how rough? How often do teams as good as the 2015 Cardinals and Seahawks end up in the same division? And, with the expectation that both teams will again be among the leagues best in 2016, how does the presence of such talented competition nearby impact each teams respective Super Bowl chances?History Says...It would be great if we had an advanced metric like DVOA dating back to the beginning of time, but unfortunately, it runs back only through 1989. Our best simple measure of team performance, one that predicts future performance better than win-loss record itself, is point differential. To try to find teams and divisional races similar to the one Arizona and Seattle fought last year, I went back and ranked each team in each given year by point differential.Then, I took the top two teams in each division going back to the AFL-NFL merger in 1970 and found what the average of their point-differential rankings was to get an estimate of their skill levels. Even I can admit that sentence was no fun, but it gives us a good idea of how great the teams at the top of each division were. This sort of methodology confirms that the Seahawks-Cardinals race in the NFC West last year was one of the toughest in modern league history. The Cardinals ?(+176)? ranked second in point differential, and the Seahawks (+146) were just behind them in fourth. Their average ranking, then, was third. (For AFC North fans, the Bengals and Steelers were fifth and seventh, respectively.)Thats just about as tough as it gets. There are 17 other times since 1970 in which the top two teams in a division have had an average point differential of three, most recently the 2013 race between these same Seahawks and 49ers. The Seahawks finished that year by winning their first Super Bowl, but they were the exception to the rule: Of those 34 teams, each among the four best in football in their respective years, five won the Super Bowl.Five races in league history have involved even tougher competition, including three 1-2 divisional punches that included the two best teams in football by point differential. Lets run through those five races chronologically in advance of the possibility that Arizona and Seattle might join them in 2016:1997 AFC WestKansas City Chiefs?(13-3, +143 point differential, second in league) and?Denver Broncos?(12-4, +185 point differential, best in league)This was a matchup, by point differential, of the two best teams in the league. Only the Packers (+140) and arguably the 49ers (+110) were in the same ballpark as the Broncos and Chiefs; nobody else in the league had a point differential better than +80. These two teams split their season series, with the Chiefs eventually winning the division by virtue of a narrow victory over the Broncos at home when Pete Stoyanovich hit a 54-yard field goal as time expired. Ironically, the Chiefs special teams collapsed in horrific fashion during a playoff loss to the Broncos, who went on to beat the Packers and claim the first of their back-to-back Super Bowls.1992 NFC WestSan Francisco 49ers?(14-2, +195 point differential, best in league) and?New Orleans Saints?(12-4, +128 point differential, third in league)This matchup of Nos. 1?and 3?wasnt quite as meaningful of a rivalry as the one between the Chiefs and Broncos. The Saints had the leagues top-ranked defense, a fact that seems ancient given their defenses in recent years, and they played the Niners tough but lost both their games against San Francisco after winning the division the previous year, when the 49ers started Steve Bono at QB for six games. (To be fair, Bono went 5-1.) The 49ers were about to kick off their rivalry with the newly dominant Cowboys, who posted the leagues second-best point differential at +166. Dallas beat San Francisco 30-20 in the NFC Championship Game, the first meaningful Cowboys-49ers matchup of the Jimmy Johnson era, and then promptly dispatched the Bills in the Super Bowl by 35 points. The Saints were beaten 36-20 at home by the Eagles in the wild-card round and didnt post another winning record until the 2000 season.1987 NFC WestSan Francisco 49ers?(13-2, +206 point differential, best in league) and?New Orleans Saints?(12-3, +139 point differential, third in league)Theyre back! This was the year when Jerry Rice scored 22 touchdowns in 12 games and somehow didnt win league MVP (on the AP ballot), which went to John Elway instead. Again, the 49ers arguably had another larger rivalry brewing in the Northeast. This time, it was against the Giants, who had knocked the 49ers out of the playoffs in the two preceding postseasons. The Saints held their own, though: They handed the 49ers one of their two regular-season losses, knocking Steve Young out of the game with a concussion before seeing Morten Andersen atone for a missed field goal?that would have beaten the 49ers earlier in the year by hitting a game-winning 40-yarder. The competition didnt help either team, and both lost their opening playoff games.1980 NFC EastPhiladelphia Eagles?(12-4, +162 point differential, best in league) and?Dallas Cowboys?(12-4, +143 point differential, second in league)There is little arguing that Cowboys-Eagles was, and is, a long-standing rivalry, of course. This specific matchup was a weird one: The Eagles had been in second place behind the Cowboys in the each of the previous two seasons under Dick Vermeil, with a Week 15 loss to Dallas in 1979 handing the Cowboys the NFC East that year, but this wasnt the same Cowboys team. Roger Staubach retired after 1979, turning things over to Danny White, but the Cowboys didnt skip much of a beat. The Eagles instead improved, beating the Cowboys before losing the rematch in Week 17 after the division had already been decided. Philly won the deciding third game in the playoffs, beating Dallas 20-7 in a game played in temperatures as low as minus-17 degrees, only to lose to Oakland (+58 point differential) in the Super Bowl. The Eagles wouldnt win another playoff game until 1992.1970 NFC CentralMinnesota Vikings?(12-2, +192 point differential, best in league) and?Detroit Lions?(10-4, +145 point differential, second in league)The most impressive pair of teams in one divisional race, coincidentally, came in the leagues very first post-merger season. The Lions had a point differential 22 points better than that of the third-place Rams, and nobody else was in triple digits. Detroit also faced a far tougher schedule than Minnesota, so theres a good chance the Lions were every bit as good as the first-place Vikings. In all fairness, the Vikings handled their business against the Lions in the regular season, winning two games against Detroit in a three-week stretch during early November. (One of Detroits two other losses came on Tom Dempseys then-record 63-yard field goal.)Neither team could turn its regular-season play into postseason success, though. The Vikings turned the ball over five times during a 17-14 loss to the 49ers, and the Lions suffered an even more ignominious defeat: They lost to the Cowboys in the first of two 5-0 games in league history.Thats a bit of a concern if youre a fan of todays Cardinals or Seahawks. Theres not a big enough sample to say anything definitive, but at the very least, the anecdotal evidence doesnt seem to suggest that the sharper competition hones teams for success in the postseason. Rivalries are fun, and the games between the Cardinals and Seahawks will be highlights of the regular season, but both teams would probably be better off with a less impactful team looming in the West on the way to January. NFL Jerseys Outlet . Scott Kazmir allowed four hits in seven shutout innings, Michael Brantley hit a two-run homer in a three-run first inning and the Indians maintained their hold on an AL wild-card spot with a 4-1 win over the Houston Astros on Saturday night. Cheap Football Jerseys China . 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LOS ANGELES -- When Southern California needed a big play on offense last season, wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster or running back Ronald Jones usually stepped up.With the offense searching for consistency, the pressure is on Smith-Schuster and Jones once again.A quarterback change helped Smith-Schuster get more involved in the Trojans 31-27 loss at No. 18 Utah on Friday night, but Jones was all but invisible. The sophomore had 15 yards on eight carries.For offensive coordinator Tee Martin, trying to find the right balance between run and pass, and where those touches are allocated, is still a work in progress.You try to roll with it, Martin said Tuesday.The distribution of carries between Jones, senior Justin Davis and sophomore AcaCedric Ware against the Utes was criticized on social media after USCs last-second loss dropped the Trojans to 1/3 for the first time since 2001. Davis rushed for 126 yards and a touchdown on 10 carries, but did not touch the ball in the fourth quarter.Martin said the intent going into the game was to rotate backs while also allowing for the possibility of relying on the hot guy. The rotation happened, but Martin did not say why Davis did not carry the ball in the critical moments.Justin ran well, Martin said. Ronald ran well. And Ced came in, had a big third-down conversion, and ran well.After nearly becoming the first USC freshman to rush for 1,000 yards, Jones began this season with immense expectations. But he has not demonstrated the same explosiveness so far.In four games, Jones has rushed for just 132 yards and one touchdown, though he was limited in the win over Utah State because of a rib contusion. The majority of that production came on a 46-yard run in the third quarter of a blowout loss to Alabama in the opener, and Jones does not have a rush longer than 16 yards inn two Pac-12 games.dddddddddddd.Martin believes Jones has grown as a back and is displaying a better understanding of the position, rather than simply relying on his speed and athleticism. Martin said information overload can cause a young back to become paralyzed at times but he expects Jones to work through his struggles.He is going to break loose, coach Clay Helton said. He is ultra-talented and we are going to keep on feeding him the ball.For Smith-Schuster, the initial struggles seemed to be resolved by naming redshirt freshman Sam Darnold the starting quarterback. Smith-Schuster caught eight balls for 98 yards against Utah, both season highs, and he expects to build on that performance Saturday against Arizona State.While opponents have used bracket coverage with two defenders in an attempt to limit Smith-Schuster, the Sun Devils use a wide array of pressures that leave the secondary having to defend receivers one-on-one. Though Arizona State coach Todd Graham has reduced the use of blitzes to take pressure off of his inexperienced defense backs, USC expects that to change against a quarterback making his second career start.That should give Smith-Schuster chances to deliver the big plays that have been missing.There is nobody else on the field, Smith-Schuster said. When its man-to-man, all I see is the person that is covering me and myself. Just beat that man, do your job and the ball will come.Game notes Defensive tackle Noah Jefferson could miss the next two to three weeks because of injury and academics, Helton said. 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