NFL starts tonight!

rrfield

rrfield

New Member
It's here! It's here!

GO VIKINGS!

What's really getting me pumped is that after this week, I'm going to see the Vikings in person for weeks 2 and 3! WOO! I like exclamation marks!
 
Baseball attempts to attract a worldwide audience. I think they may have employed the same marketing guys who tried to introduce american football. Although timings wise they picked about the only time when no major competitions are going on.



Baseball seeks to set up home at the Oval
By Nick Szczepanik





AUSTRALIA today, tomorrow the Boston Red Sox? The 2007 baseball season could begin at the Oval rather than Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park after negotiations at “a senior level” between Major League Baseball (MLB) and Surrey County Cricket Club for England’s oldest Test-match venue to stage two regular-season games — the first played in Europe.

The Times understands that a ten-day period in late March and early April 2007 has been provisionally set aside to allow the staging of an exhibition match, followed by two games that will count in the official standings. The Red Sox, the World Series champions, and the Atlanta Braves, one of the most consistently successful teams of the past decade, have expressed interest in being involved.

The move is part of baseball’s desire to widen its appeal beyond the traditional territories of the Americas, South Korea and Japan. Although it has lost Olympic status after 2008, next March will see the inaugural World Baseball Classic, a 16-team world cup.

“The World Baseball Classic represents the next step in the international development of baseball, and this type of event in London would be a further indication of the momentum of that development,” a source close to MLB said.

The previous time the season opened outside North America was in 2004, when the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays played two games in Tokyo. Other regular-season matches have been played in Puerto Rico and Mexico, but taking the opening games to London, well outside what has been seen as natural baseball territory, would represent “a huge statement”.

Other dates were mooted around the mid-season All-Star break, when daylight and weather conditions would be more likely to be favourable, but the teams are understood to have indicated a preference for April, after spring training, which is good news for London’s desire to be seen as a natural setting for prestige sporting events.

The opening day of the baseball season is one of the most significant dates in the American sporting calendar, when the opening pitch is often thrown by the President, so expect Tony Blair to be taking lessons well in advance.

Although Italy and Holland are the strongest baseball-playing nations in Europe, both being invited to the World Classic, neither nation has a stadium of sufficient playing area as well as capacity. Both are blessed with plenty of football grounds, but while their pitches are too narrow, cricket grounds have all the space required.

Discussions between Bill Gordon, the Oval’s head groundsman, and Murray Cook, baseball’s special adviser on fields, over the positioning of home plate and the pitcher’s mound have proved satisfactory.

Recently completed ground developments have increased the Oval’s capacity to 23,000, including 5,000 premium seats. The exercise thus became more financially viable, with the teams needing to be compensated for the loss of gate revenue in their home cities. Anyone doubting whether that many seats would be required need only consider that viewing figures for last season’s World Series games on Five were around the million mark, quite apart from the demand that would be expected from London’s large population of expatriates from baseballplaying countries.

The Oval has other advantages. It stages floodlit cricket, which could be useful given the likely requirements of television in the United States, whose East Coast is five hours behind London. It also has experience of hosting other sports, including Australian Rules football, as well as a minor league game between the New York Mets and the Red Sox in 1993.

It may lack the cachet of, say, Lord’s, but if the 2007 experiment proves a success, the gasometers that form its idiosyncratic backdrop could become as distinctive a part of the fabric of baseball as the Green Monster at Boston’s Fenway Park, or the ivy- covered outfield walls of Wrigley Field in Chicago.
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SouthernN'Proud said:
go Bucs!
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My favorite Jon Gruden story from when he was still with the Raiders:

A few years back, Oakland was playing against San Diego. There was almost no offense at all in that game. San Diego had gotten two field goals for a 6-0 lead. Gruden was getting pretty frustrated... and then at the last minute the Raiders got a touchdown and won the game 7-6.

Gruden got a DUI that night.
 
SouthernN'Proud said:
Edit: Oh, and go Bucs!
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I used to hate the Bucs, when they were in the NFC Central. I started to like them a bit when Dungy became coach, then even more when Brad Johnson became their QB. I was happy to see Johnson win a Super Bowl. If he had been the Vikings starter for the playoffs in 1998, we would have won it all.
 
Gonz said:
Bite me.
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Am I to conclude that someone is a Raiders fan?


2003superbowlcollage.jpg



:banana: :beardbng: *peace* :jump: :laugh2: :toast: :clap: :nanabang: *poke*
 
My roommate was very upset with the performance of the Texans...I thought of Tonks during the game and wondered if she was throwing her football snacks at the TV :D

Edit: The only reason I remembered Tonk's team was the Texans is cause I know she wanted a longhorn skull and was gonna put red and blue beads on it to make it into the symbol of her team and I saw that symbol on their helmets...I know poo poo all about football...
 
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