bukie

Philly's three corners, though, wow. Just get clear to their secondary and you may just break it all the way.

Here is the 2014 CONCACAF WC Qualifying setup: Second Round (group winners advance): A - El Salvador, Suriname, Cayman Islands, Dominican Republica B - Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Barbados, Bermuda C - Panama, Dominica, Nicaragua, Bahamas D - Canada, St. Kitts and Nevis, Puerto Rico, St. Lucia E - Haiti, Antigua and Barbuda, Curacao, US Virgin Islands F - Grenada, Guatemala, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize Third Round (Top two in each group advance): A - USA, Jamaica, Round 2 E/F winners (Haiti, Grenada) B - Mexico, Costa Rica, Round 2 A/B winners (El Salvador, Trinidad and Tobago) C - Honduras, Cuba, Round 2 C/D winners (Panama, Canada)

So far, then, the Bears have upgraded P and WR (whether or not Roy Williams is a top WR now, he's still better than Aromashodu/Davis), two of the weakest positions on the Bears last year, and traded a player that likely has a lot more perceived value than actual value. They also had the highest bid for the best available OL, their biggest need, but he took less money to return to the Steelers. And it's now day 1 of FA transactions. That about cover it?

Look, it's easy to explain away almost anything as a team-related issue, except catch rate, which is pared down to only catchable balls thrown his way. If you are in the bottom 5 in the league in catch rate, and your only job is to catch passes, then you are not very productive.

Here are my feelings on Olsen: - He was the least efficient offensive player on the team last year, and isn't irreplaceable, even if they just threw the Olsen passes to Kellen Davis. - There was always hope he'd be better, and he did make some great catches, but the many disappointing efforts just seem to get glossed over by the Bear fans. - He wasn't re-signing with the Bears next year unless he hugely improved anyway, so it was either gamble that he'd improve drastically this year or hope to trade him and hope another team valued him highly so you got something of value for him. They got a decent young LB for him with an injury history, which is meh, but at least the defense gets a little younger.

Just because Martz is too stupid (stubborn?) to utilize him properly does not mean that he is not a very valuable football player. They threw plenty of passes to him. He just didn't catch near enough of them. How ever will the Bears replace Olsen's one good catch every 3 games now? Its tough to catch lots of passes when you have to stay in to block most of the time because your O-Line is on roller skates, or when the defense focuses on you all day because you are the only real threat on the team....let's just trade Cutler now. He has no one to throw to, and I don't give a crap if they get Roy Williams. He got the second most targets on the team and the fifth most catches, and was the 9th most efficient target on the team. He's not irreplaceable, and had a catch rate as bad as Knox, except everyone accepts Knox can't catch and apparently had no idea Olsen couldn't catch either.

Apparently the entirety of Bears fandom shoved a pound of chuck into their brains the past couple days.

Just because Martz is too stupid (stubborn?) to utilize him properly does not mean that he is not a very valuable football player. They threw plenty of passes to him. He just didn't catch near enough of them. How ever will the Bears replace Olsen's one good catch every 3 games now?

Wow, people overvalue Greg Olsen by a lot.

If Olsen is gone, the Bears found someone to take one of the least efficient TEs in the NFL last year. His catch rate is terrible.

Eagles just traded Kolb to the Cardinals for Rodgers-Cromartie.

According to FO, the Jags punting efficiency was top 25% in the league last year, while the Bears were below average. Theoretically, then, net boost to the weakest area of their special teams. Unless it was the coverage team that was the problem.

What is the point of cheering for sports, dealing with watching your team lose year after year, having rivalries with opposing fan bases, etc when you can't enjoy a championship to its fullest when your team wins? Yes there's more to enjoying a title than rubbing it into your friends, but that is certainly part of the fun. In fact, you don't even have to be obnoxious while doing it, although some certainly choose to be that way and remind everyone every chance they get. Probably 30% of the reason I want the Cubs to win the world series is so that I don't have to take (as much) crap from Cardinals/White Sox fans about our futility. Obviously I did jack [expletive] to help them win the (hypothetical) title, but I invested a crapload of my time, spent money, etc. to feel like I'm at least a distant part of the team, and so when they win the title, I don't feel bad celebrating like I myself hit the game winning HR. There's plenty of difference between celebrating victory and trash talking as a result of it.

He was a great directional punter his whole career, but in the last couple years he was good in every direction but forward.

Quade really butchering the use of the pitching staff quite regularly these days.

If he'd have given it a little more effort, he may have gotten a 2-run homer out of it.

If you're a team with a big payroll, it's only worth making a trade if it makes the team better long-term. If you're trading away one of the 3-4 consistently good 3B over the past 5-10 years, you need to get an amazing return to make it worth it. Making the team worse for the sake of "a couple prospects" isn't worth it unless either those prospects turn out to be more valuable than Ramirez going forward, or the money "saved" by trading Ramirez can be used more efficiently. Consider me skeptical of either.

2008, and to a lesser extent 2007 were the clear outliers of the past decade. People talk about the Cubs "waiting for the three run homer". That's nonsense, they don't wait for anything. What makes it even worse is that Pena and Fukudome are actually good at drawing walks, and they're both likely gone at the end of the year. Everyone else is abysmal.

Remember the Cubs hitting approach just 3 short years ago? Second in the majors in walks. Now they're tied for last in the majors in walks. Put that together with also being (by far) worst in the majors in pitchers issuing walks, and that makes for a bad combination for winning.

Nearly any manager should've been able to win with the Cubs in 2003 and 2004. They had a solid lineup 1-8 and the best rotation 1-5 in baseball. Dusty turned what should've been a budding Cub dynasty with a stacked farm system of pitching into crap in just 3 years. At least Piniella can say he managed the Cubs to be easily the best team in the NL in 2008. I don't know if we can call the 2003-2004 team a budding Cubs dynasty. Maybe by 2004 since Lee, Ramirez, and Barrett had shown up, but that 2003 team was going to need almost all the major offensive pieces replaced very quickly. And the farm system was not nearly as stacked as had been thought. Dusty ruined the young pitching which was a huge blow, but the Cubs were still going to have to make a lot of good moves to become elite going forward. In 2003-2004, they had a rotation of mid-20s pitchers in Prior, Wood, Zambrano and Clement, along with a pen of young arms in Farnsworth, Wuertz, Cruz, and even Todd Wellemeyer, Francis Beltran and Jon Leicester. Their oldest arm in the pen was LaTroy Hawkins, who was totally unfairly remembered on that squad and possibly the best reliever they had. On the offensive front, they had quickly morphed from a team with Sosa and Alou and little else by trading for or signing Ramirez, Lee, Barrett, Todd Walker, and a 30-year-old Nomar Garciaparra. Patterson getting injured and coming back slowly had killed them in CF, but they still had guys like Murton waiting in the wings. Poor positional drafting probably hurt them long-term more than anything on the offensive end, since the players they acquired to take over for Alou/Sosa/Patterson either were expected to be something they weren't (Murton, Jones, Soriano, Fukudome) or just old and/or bad from the start (Hollandsworth, Burnitz, Grieve, Lawton, Pierre, Nevin, Floyd).

Nearly any manager should've been able to win with the Cubs in 2003 and 2004. They had a solid lineup 1-8 and the best rotation 1-5 in baseball. Dusty turned what should've been a budding Cub dynasty with a stacked farm system of pitching into crap in just 3 years. At least Piniella can say he managed the Cubs to be easily the best team in the NL in 2008.

It's reasonably arguable that Jeff Samardzija is the second-best reliever on the Cubs this year.

that's fine if that is your position, but you're never going to get any good relief pitchers to come pitch for you... well maybe the guys who are coming off injury or terrible years and are looking to prove something, but not the guys who have been consistently good for a few years. My position is more that middle relief should be the last thing to focus on for a team. If a team has above average players at every spot and a boundless payroll, sure, then you can overpay for middle relievers like Boston or New York. There's no reason to think the Cubs can't get there at some point, but they have to build the rest of the team first, IMO. And if that means spending more on position players and starting pitchers, and using young fringe prospect fill-ins for middle relief, I'm good with that.

Hendry's worst moves that aren't hindsight only: 1. Hiring Dusty Baker - Taking on the manager that had somehow botched a team that had a player a full league better than anyone else in baseball and only made the playoffs once, and already had a terrible reputation for handling pitchers. It was a bad move ahead of time, and it turned into a nightmare move when a Cub farm system full of young strikeout pitchers were subjected to him. 2. Trading for Juan Pierre - It was a terrible move from the get-go, trading for a lineup spot. Even worse, they traded for a player whose only tool was useful as a pinch runner. Even worse than that, they gave up three players who each have been more valuable than Pierre since that time in Mitre, Pinto and Nolasco. 3. Signing veteran relief pitchers to 3-year contracts - John Grabow, Scott Eyre, Bob Howry, Mike Remlinger. Remlinger probably worked out the best, but there's no reason to ever sign free agent middle relief to more than a year. They're middle relief for a reason, and the most volatile of a volatile position. 4. Fixating on absurd non-issues during each offseason - It's as if he tried to implement his own version of Moneyball, but instead of using statistics, he used Dusty Baker's hunches and psychics to find an underappreciated skill. Various offseasons were focused on clubhouse morale, catching the ball, becoming more left-handed (although this one isn't totally unreasonable), and finding leadoff hitters. Hendry was at his best when he was simply trying to make the team better, and not focused on one of these absurd fixations. 5. Trading for Cesar Izturis - Not that they needed to keep Greg Maddux at that point, but the insane desire for Izturis was mind-boggling, even at the time. Trading Maddux for nothing would've been a better idea. Other than that, everything has been defensible to some extent, even things like signing Milton Bradley and Soriano.

Well . . . Brazil missed all four today in the Copa America . . . This makes me very very happy. Argentina and Brazil out in the Quarters is pretty shocking. A Peru-Venezuela final would be really weird.