Labriola on over-officious zebras, finding freaks

Ready or not, here it comes:


• Rick Gosselin has covered the NFL for 44 years, has been a Pro Football Hall of Fame voter since the 1980s, and was the 2004 winner of the Dick McCann Award for “long and distinguished reporting on professional football.” Gosselin also is something of a go-to guy when it comes to NFL officials and officiating, often providing in-depth statistics of the different crews based on the numbers and types of penalties those crews call, etc.


• So when he tweeted earlier in the week: “There were 255 penalties assessed during the opening weekend of the 2018 NFL season. That's the second-most flag-filled weekend since 2007. There were an average of 15.9 penalties for 140.8 yards assessed per game last weekend,” you can take it to the bank.


• And to put those numbers in perspective: In the 16 games played, each had at least 10 penalties. Nine of the games had 15 or more. Four of the games had between 19 and 26. As a reminder, those numbers reflect only accepted penalties, and the 255 were 47 more than Week 1 last year and 69 more than Week 1 10 years ago.


• In Pittsburgh and throughout Steelers Nation, the Steelers’ dozen penalties in Cleveland against the Browns were attributed – as they typically are – to a lack of discipline that’s then blamed on Coach Mike Tomlin. But apparently there was some sort of league-wide epidemic of no discipline during Kickoff Weekend.


• Or maybe the zebras were a little too flag-happy. Or a lot too flag-happy.............

Read more @ https://www.steelers.com/news/labrio...finding-freaks

Kickoff weekends are becoming nothing more than Preseason game 5, sloppy , under prepared teams.

this didn't deserve a thread of its own and I struggled with where ot put it so decided to just drop it off in here and call it a day ....

carry on

:focus:

That was nice damn hit and clean as could be.