Mar 15, 2021
Mickey Loomis gets reminders about the passage of time every time he takes his twins out to play for their flag football team. One of their teammates, a little boy named Bowen, has a pretty famous dad, and that pretty famous dad just so happens to be their coach.
Not every kid from New Orleans gets to learn football from Drew Brees.
And as Loomis, the Saints’ general manager for the last two decades, sees it, it’s just one more benefit he gets to have from his 15-year association with the most beloved athlete who’s ever played a professional sport in Louisiana. Of course, it didn’t take all that time for Loomis to know what he had. But just seeing Brees as doting dad and youth-league coach has a way of lending perspective to all that’s happened since 2006.
Mar 8, 2021
We’re still waiting for the 2021 salary cap number, which will lead to franchise tags being assigned and a bloodletting of high-priced veterans. Here’s what you need to know as of close of business Monday afternoon.
Kyle Terada/USA TODAY Sports (Williams); Isaiah J. Downing/USA TODAY Sports (Miller); Mark J. Rebilas/USA TODAY Sports (Godwin)
• The franchise tag deadline is, for now, hours away, set for 4 p.m. ET Tuesday. There’s a chance it’ll get moved, of course, since the cap is part of the calculation and the cap hasn’t been set yet. But it’s at least notable that 13 days into the tag period, there’s been just one executed the Broncos franchising Justin Simmons. In the case of Simmons, since it’s his second tag, Denver does have the benefit of knowing his number ($13.792 million, which is 120% of his cap figure from 2020). But there’s more to the fact that teams haven’t used the tags yet. One is that in some cases, like Tampa Bay’s (with Chr
Mar 5, 2021
Perhaps the one area in which Tom Brady has not been associated with complete transcendent greatness in his life is in the trading card market. To this point, there has not been a thin slice of cardboard with his likeness on it that has sold for more than a high-end Picasso.
But that is changing, thanks to guys like Mike. We’ll call him Mike because he doesn’t want his real name out there you wouldn’t either if you had just sold something to an auction house that might end up surpassing a million dollars. Mike bought a Brady Playoff Contenders Championship Rookie Ticket card on eBay about eight years ago, right in the middle of the Patriots’ Super Bowl slump, for about $3,000. Since that time, it has developed into
I’m still here! (Until about 8 p.m. local time.) .
Mark J. Rebilas/USA TODAY Sports (Fisher); Matthew Emmons/USA TODAY Sports (Gronkowski); Matthew Emmons/USA TODAY Sports (Godwin)
• Every year, there are little moves that wind up paying big dividends and one came for the champion Bucs on the first night of the draft. It seemed unlikely going in that any of the class’s top four tackles (Georgia’s Andrew Thomas, Louisville’s Mekhi Becton, Alabama’s Jedrick Wills, Iowa’s Tristan Wirfs) would fall to them. In fact, just about everyone was convinced that two would go in the first eight or nine picks, then the Jets and Browns would pick off whoever was left at 10 and 11. Didn’t work out that way. When the Jets hit the clock at No. 10, only Thomas had been picked. And while that 10/11 turn went as expected, the surplus allowed for one tackle, Wirfs, to make it through. The Raiders, set to pick 12th, were heavily invested at tackle. They took Henry Ruggs there, leaving jus