Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 72 i Gridiron

THE BIG PICTURE The Bills more than met their lofty preseason expectations as they romped to a 31-10 over the Rams on the opening night of the season. Josh Allen and the Bills offense were the talk of the offseason, but it’s the addition of future Hall of Famer Von Miller that has pushed the Bills to a new level and could turn Buffalo from contenders into champions. Dropping an 80-pressurea-year pass-rusher onto the best defense in the league from last season was borderline cruel, and Miller is already living up to his billing. He flat-lined the Rams offense in LA, at times, single-handedly. Miller’s contract might not age well. If you’re looking for the most analytical approach to team building, penning a 33-year-old pass-rusher with a history of PED…

@OllieConnolly At what point do you think Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti cast his eyes to the sky, Gob Bluth style, and admitted he’d made a huge mistake? Was it when Lamar Jackson hit Rashod Bateman in stride for a 55-yard score during the team’s opening week win over the Jets in New York? Or when the quarterback dropped a 25-yard touchdown toss to Devin Duvaney, right in the bucket, the kind of throw that only the league’s upper-tier pocket passers can make? Or when Jackson rounded out his hat trick of opening-week touchdowns against the Jets with a no-look pass? While Ravens fans were celebrating the pasting of a hapless Jets team, Bisciotti was probably eying the dollars draining out of his account. The Ravens and their star quarterback have…

ADAPT OR DIE CONTRIBUTOR @TomKislingbury Andy Reid is truly one of the great coaching names in NFL history. He’s been in the league since 1992 (that’s 30 years!) when he started coaching the Packers’ tight ends and offensive linemen. He’s been a head coach since 1999, which is probably before some of you reading this were born. In that time, he coached Brett Favre to greatness, built an incredible Eagles team that went to a Super Bowl and four straight NFC Championships, then moved onto the Chiefs where he’s built an incredible offense that has stood up to the young gun coaches taking the league by storm, and won the team’s first title since 1969. He is undoubtedly one of the greatest offensive minds of the modern era and will…

MITCH WISHNOWSKY The San Francisco 49ers signed their Australian-born punter to a fouryear contract extension, keeping him through 2026 on a $13m deal worth just shy of $3m a year. Seattle's Michael Dickson remains the highest paid punter at just over $3.6m a year. A Bad Month For… JOE BURROW AND THE BENGALS If the Los Angeles Rams were suffering a Super Bowl hangover, it was nothing compared to the headache their opponents in SB56 were nursing, going 0-2 to start the season following turnover and sackladen defeats to Pittsburgh and Dallas. Quote Of The Month "[Coach] McDaniel’s gonna need a wheelbarrow to carry his nuts around because he’s got a lot of cajones!” Hill happily told the press after beating the Patriots.." Miami Dolphins' Tyreek Hill was clearly impressed…

@OllieConnolly For the first time in its 15-year history, the NFL’s International Series will host the league’s most historic franchise. The Packers will rock up in London in early October to face a feisty Giants side at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. The latest edition of Gridiron looks at the key storylines heading into the game. Simon Clancy digs through the successes and controversies that have followed Aaron Rodgers in recent years. Nicholas McGee details how the Packers have shifted from a side built around Rodgers’ arm to one that now relies on its defense. Mike Carlson takes us back to the first year of Vince Lombardi in Green Bay, examining what lessons coaches and organisations across the league can learn from Lombardi’s early moves. Elsewhere, Neil Reynolds sits down with new…

@neilreynoldsnfl This was not the first time I have interviewed my longtime friend Henry Hodgson, and it definitely won’t be the last, but it is still a bit weird to be putting questions to a colleague and former desk-mate for many years at the NFL’s London offices. Myself and Henry have always shared a love of the NFL, a passion for the Miami Dolphins and Dan Marino and a sometimes-strange obsession with obscure players from NFL Europe. We would share an apartment at NFL Europe training camps in Tampa and, back in London, we enjoyed a unique Friday afternoon tradition to end our working weeks. Sitting opposite each other in the NFL UK office, one of us would whistle the theme tune to Fox’s coverage of the NFL and that…

@ch_skysports To label Deebo Samuel a ‘gadget’ player is wrong. To allow him into the broad ‘positionless’ club, is, to some extent, a misunderstanding of his trade. To lump him in with other ‘hybrid’ threats is to ignore the exclusivity of his game. There is only one Deebo. Samuel is not a torchbearer for the wide-back, but rather the wide-back. He isn’t one player within a position group. He created the position, thanks to being the very best at every position on Kyle Shanahan’s San Francisco 49ers offense. To put what Samuel does into context you have to move beyond football. Sure, you could point to Percy Harvin or Tavon Austin or other multipositional players from the past. But neither was the bedrock of the offense; they were tasty side…

Welcome to the newest section of your favourite football magazine. The Jump Cut will do exactly what it suggests, and change direction on a whim. It won't be forced to follow a specific direction from issue, but may tag onto a theme if the content is there. It intends to be both off the wall and off the game that perhaps you weren't aware of. But, most of all, it is for you and, in part, about you, as we look to incorporate your ideas and contributions in future editions. Enjoy!…

The pro wrestler Dick The Bruiser, perhaps bestremembered for his Detroit bar brawl with suspended NFL star Alex Karras before a big match, used to boast of his NFL career with the Green Bay Packers, saying he got out when Vince Lombardi came in and imposed discipline and worked the players too hard. He also said, when asked for autographs, he always signed ‘Johnny Lujack’. When I got too old to believe everything wrestlers said — that is, about 13 years old — I checked and, sure enough, Dick Afflis did play for the Packers. But his last season was 1954; five years before Lombardi took over. Still, in my mind, I thought that the great turnaround Lombardi made in that first season with the Pack — from 1-10-1 under…

PRODUCER @Michael_NFL It has been a whirlwind recently for NFL fans in Ireland. This was highlighted in the recent College Football game. To even begin to sum up the weekend that I experienced in August at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium, it’s important to take a step back and actually realise how we arrived at this moment. The modem College Football Classic started in Ireland in 2014, with the event then dubbed the ‘Croke Park Classic’ and featuring Penn State and the University of Central Florida. Croke Park is one of the largest stadiums in Europe and, for a Gaelic Games match, can hold up to 82,300 people. The Chicago Bears and Pittsburgh Steelers actually played a preseason game in the stadium in 1997, as part of the ‘American Bowl’ series, but…

CAN I KICK IT? On an opening weekend littered with missed kicks and wasted opportunities, an unexpected hero emerged in Kansas City Week 1 of the new NFL season was one of the worst ever for men paid just to kick balls through the uprights, with Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Atlanta, Tennessee and Denver all seeing potential game-winning kicks fall short or go wide. The Bengals and Steelers traded missed kicks in overtime, while Rodrigo Blankenship's similar snafu — and two wayward kickoffs — cost him his job with the Colts. Meanwhile, in Arizona, the Chiefs could have found themselves with the same situation after regular kicker Harrison Butker turned the ankle on his plant foot on the opening kickoff. Fortunately for KC, who racked up the points on the hapless…

@TheFootballGirl The quarterback is objectively the most important position in the NFL. He’s the leader, the implemented the improviser. He sets the tone for the team, and his ability to read a field and execute is the single biggest factor in a franchise’s success (or lack thereof). That makes the quarterback’s protector, the left tackle, arguably the roster’s second most important position. The protector of the blindside is akin to a catcher in baseball or a goalie in soccer. His position isn’t the flashiest, but mastery is crucial if the quarterback and, by extension, the team are going to have a fighting chance. Joe Thomas, voted the seventh best tackle of all time by NFL Network, in many ways experienced the inverse. Over an 11-season career from 2007-2017, he was…

Perhaps selecting the Green Bay Packers first up, simply to tie in with the wider theme of Issue 72, was a mistake! When you pick one of the longest tenured clubs, not just in the NFL, but in football — nay, sports in general — you're going to have to deal with more than the average number of uniform changes. In the case of Green Bay, that number is 25, stretching from 1919 through to the present day. Admittedly, many of those, and especially recently, are variations on a theme, but the Packers have, ahem, packed a lot into their lockers over the years! Despite having one of the NFL’s most iconic colour schemes, the Packers were not always green and gold; indeed, they started life playing in blue and,…

1 “Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.” 2 “The achievements of an organisation are the results of the combined effort of each individual.” 3 “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” 4 “A team that thinks it’s going to lose is going to lose.” 5 “Some of us will do our jobs well and some will not, but we will all be judged on one thing: the result.” 6 “Second place is meaningless. You can’t always be first, but you have to believe that you should have been - that you were never beaten - that time just ran out on you.” 7 “Winning is not a sometime thing… it’s an all the time thing” 8 “You don’t win once in a while…you don’t do…