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Meanwhile, if the Steelers win in the AFC they will only have been 4 AFC champions during that time and only 3 since 2003.

You can now. You couldn't originally, but after that debacle in the Cleveland game a couple of years ago where the ball hit the post right behind the crossbar and there was confusion if it was good or not they changed the rule.

? It was 3rd and 7 at the time so it would either be 3rd and 2 or 1st and 10.

Exactly. That's why 1) you can't challenge 10-15 yards of field position on the opening kickoff and 2) why the challenge rules need to change. Tomlin lost only one challenge on a call that possibly could have been overturned and now he's out of challenges in a game that seems rife with potential for close/challengable calls.

This doesn't look anything like that. They just signed their preferred backup catcher. Agreed. I don't think the backup catcher is set in stone yet, but Hill seems to have the edge headed into spring training. One of the others will have to tear the cover off of the ball during ST to have a decent shot.

Hill has thrown out 28% of baseruners in his career despite playing more good running teams than a normal catcher would. That's pretty solid. Is it enough to make up for his putrid hitting? Absolutely not. But there's no reason to denigrate the one thing he actually does reasonably well.

I am not sure exactly how he fits on a 5 man bench. He would fit perfectly on a 6 man bench (but that era in MLB is pretty much gone and the Cubs are not exactly the type to have 1 less pitcher than everyone else). If he is willing to play in the minors he would be good insurance as well.

Atlanta is 2.5 point favorites. I didn't mean in Vegas. I meant in everyone I hear predict the game. I just don't see how you can say everybody is picking GB and they are the overwhelming favorite. Because every website I've seen so far that picks the games has picked GB and every radio show I've heard is picking GB too. I cannot honestly remember one person picking ATL that I've heard/seen. That is what I meant by everybody. I'm sure lots of gamblers are picking Atlanta, as the line has gone up since it opened. I'm not interested in a semantics discussion beyond that. Even if that were true (which I'm not sure it is) it's easy to see why the Packers are being picked. If people think it's a close game, you pick the road team because it looks better for you if you pick an upset than just picking the #1 seed. There are more Packer fans out there so they could be placating those fans. And many people also look ahead and see that Packers-Bears is the most scintillating championship matchup and that could also be their tiebreaker on who to pick between the Packers-Falcons because they want to see that game next week.

There's potential there for him to but I'd have a hard time seeing a scenario where he would prove himself enough to give him the job barring a major injury to Pena or Soto this year.

What stat do you prefer? I personally like HR/FB ratio. Colvin's is completely unsustainable unless he's on par with the Adam Dunns and Albert Pujols' of the world. Combine that with one of the worst zone recognitions in the league and I think there's a very high likely hood of regression. Colvin's HR/FB will probably go down. If he played 10 years, he probably would have a couple that were up that high but most will be lower. He also does need to improve his BB/K ratio. His BB ratio is poor but not absurdly poor (Corey Hart, Aramis Ramirez, Carl Crawford, Adrian Beltre are just some examples of guys who have survived with worse BB ratios in their careers than Colvin has had). The strikeouts have to come down though. His strikeouts were better after the All-Star break than before. If he can continue to lower that into the 23-25 percent range which would be more in range with his minor league numbers than he can be successful even when his home runs/FB drop. It's not absurd to put Colvin in as a starter. He's not a great choice for starter because he's probably going to be around league average with more chance of a downside than upside. But it's not like corner OF has been that big of a premium offensive position lately. If he did put up an .800+ OPS, that would be just fine at any of the OF spots even as a starter and even with a relatively low OBP. It would be a position the Cubs would have to upgrade if he didn't get any better as he got expensive but to get cheap league average production is fine for one spot.

I would be stunned. The Colts are typically not reactionary like that no matter how much it might be deserved.

Just curious, out of all the people that were traded how many were his picks? Only Guyer. Wilken's department did have significant input into the other three (Lee was signed under Wilken, Archer was traded to the Cubs under Wilken's watch, and Chirinos was switched to catcher after Wilken took over)

It would be a major hit to his career path. 2B requires about 30 more OPS points per year than at SS. Castro's probably going to improve into a good enough defensive SS that he simply won't be as valuable at 2nd.

So would I (and it would have been in the 48-50 range). Folk hasn't been great beyond 40 this year so I would have taken my chances with him. Caldwell almost got really lucky though because Edwards could easily have been called for offensive pass interference on the final play from scrimmage. I'm not surprised that wasn't called in that situation though.

Caldwell paraphrased on why he used the timeout "They were in field goal range. We were going to make them snap the ball as many times as possible. We weren't going to let them just run it all the way down"

Because Caldwell has no idea how to work the clock. That's the second loss this season he's contributed to with a bad timeout call. Oh well. The Colts were probably going to struggle considerably against Pittsburgh anyway. The problems the backups were having were showing up all over the field tonight. Still an interesting season.

Which is funny because the Colts lost their 4th string safety in the first half and their 5th and 6th string safeties are both out as well so they're stuck with a guy who has only been with the team around 2 weeks. Sanchez should be able to destroy him but he hasn't yet.

Getting Greinke probably would have required a few tweaks to increase the quality, but nothing so substantial as to completely overhaul the deal. What pisses me off is that I think this is also the kind of package that could have netted Adrian Gonzalez. Maybe the Padres wanted the Red Sox prospects, I don't know. But, when you compare that package to what the Cubs gave up, again, I think a minor change or two to the Cubs' prospects to increase the overall quality would have been comparable to what the Red Sox traded for Gonzalez. Also, why do people think the NL Central will be weak this year? As far as I can tell, the Reds, Cardinals, and Brewers will all roughly be the same as or better than last year, while the Pirates (yeah, yeah) should start seeing dividends from bolstering their farm system. I get the feeling that this will be a difficult division to win, even with a good team. Some of the reports of the time were exactly that. The Cubs made a strong offer but the Padres were familiar with the Red Sox prospects and so that was a more comfortable deal for them to make. TT brings up the greatest point IMO. The prospects that were traded all have inflated values right now (at least according to rankings like BA-I have no idea how GM's value these guys). If I had to bet on if each of their indiviual rankings to go up or down next year, I'd bet on all 4 of them going down. That would have been especially true in the Cubs system. Chirinos has nothing left to prove in the minors but is a huge question mark for the majors. So another year in the minors would have just left him older and make him lose value. Guyer broke out last year and while I like him seems like a classic guy that will fall back to the pack a little bit next year. Archer's issues with control will become a bigger question mark as he needs to be major league ready soon. And Lee's value can only go up from here if he develops some power quickly. I'm not down on all the Cubs prospects but these prospects especially were projected to have higher bets of hitting their ceiling than I believe they really have. And if all of them have inflated values, their trade values being too high for this deal only applies to this offseason. By next offseason, this package of players almost certainly won't be able to get somebody better than Garza.

Tom Coughlin and Steve Marrucci haven't done too badly. The jury is still out on what Carroll is doing in Seattle. Overall though, it hasn't been the greatest of ideas. Harbaugh would seem to be ideally suited to beat that though between his playing experience, his NFL coaching experience, the fact that he hasn't been coaching in college so long that he's married to what works in college, and the fact that his brother already coaches an NFL team.

I figured the Cubs might have been waiting for a bench signing until they cleared 40 man space. Kotsay would be a terrible option for the bench though.

They've got a better, younger, cheaper guy to replace him with in Hellickson? Even more reason why they would be motivated to get less in return for Garza. Not only did the Rays need to move Garza because of his salary doubling, but they already had his replacement waiting in the wings. I think Hendry got played. It wasn't a salary dump because of the competition. The Cubs had to outbid 3 other teams for Garza. Even if Tampa would have been willing to give a discount if there was no other interest, the competition quickly drove Garza's price right back to its true value.

my god, you're being so annoyingly contrarian at this point it couldn't have made the kick any worse. Crosby kicks the ball, it goes right towards the upright, odds are like 48% it goes left, 48% it sneaks in, and like 4% or something it just clanks off the post I.E. COIN FLIP A.K.A. LUCK, HOW MUCH CLEARER CAN I MAKE THIS You're acting as though the kicker has no impact. Of course the kicker has an impact. All they're saying is that if Crosby kicks that kick the exact same way the next time, almost 50 percent of the time that kick is going in. There will be absolutely no change in talent/execution and yet sometimes there will be a different result. Obviously the team tries to be good enough to leave themselves out of such coin flips. If the Packers were 16-0 or 15-1 good, then they wouldn't have left themselves in 6-8 games where the bounce of the ball made a difference. But they aren't that good. But they probably are better than 10-6 and had some bad bounces of the ball that cost them games.

So you're saying Silva is a lock to the rotation, or the team really loves Cashner as a starter? Or both? If Gorzelanny was traded then I would guess that Silva would get the last spot although Cashner would have a strong chance at it. If he didn't then I'm not sure which of Silva/Gorzelanny would get that spot and Cashner probably would only have a token chance.

Randy Wells. And I'm not sure Gozelanny is a lock to still be on the team as of March.

I'm pretty sure he made Tampa's top 30 list last year. He's probably our 4th OFer, with our current roster. Perez has had some major injuries in his career. I am trying to find out how many options he has left. At best he would be the 5th OF behind Soriano/Byrd/Fukudome/Colvin.