Last night, our Bleacher Nation Bears twitter account (@BN_Bears) was just 50 followers short of an even 16,000, the forecast called for extremely cold temperatures, and I smelled an opportunity. So I talked to the big boss, Brett, to see if we could get Luis a snow day today, if we could reach that 16K plateau within the hour.
It took a bit longer than that, but we got it done and Luis has the afternoon off. Not a bad win-win, eh? In any case, I humbly suggest you follow our account on Twitter and like us on Facebook, too. That way you can keep up with the latest posts, weirdest tweets, silly gifs, and …
LIVESTREAMS!
Yep. Luis used his half-day to dress up like Chewbacca (#Lubacca) and talk Bears football with you all. What a guy.
The Super Bowl is just days away and Tony Romo is set to be the voice of the game, to the pleasure of many. If you haven’t been following along lately, you may have missed it, but Romo has developed a bit of a reputation for correctly predicting plays just before they happen. The Wall Street Journal, having recognized this apparent skill, went back through his 46 hours of coverage from this past season to measure how accurate he had been, and the results are insane. With a total of 72 predictions during the year, Romo was right a stunning 68% of the time. SIXTY-EIGHT. Mind you, these are not always (or even often) binary predictions, where a simple guess and a big enough sample would leave you with a 50% shot at being right (even if they were, he blew that out of the water). And I’m just blown away.
So I guess we can pretty much bank on this, eh?
This season, the NFL will reportedly generate $15 billion (thats billion with a “B”) in revenue, which is absolutely nuts, though not particularly unexpected. As Awful Announcing put it, “There’s no doubt that the NFL is the king of all sports in the United States. It has the highest viewership, the largest media contracts, and the most sponsors.” So when the commissioner reaffirms his goal for the league to amass $25 billion in annual revenue by 2027, it’s hard to laugh at him or the target. In addition to newly-legalized gambling opportunities and expiring media contracts (up after the 2021-2022 season), the league will lean on new initiatives with companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter for more modern revenue streams. If they get it right – which is not easy to do in a quick-moving technology landscape – they could hit those goals sooner than later.
While we’ve got him on the mind, Commissioner Roger Goodell used the State of the League news conference earlier today to remind us that the league will keep focusing on opportunities to create a deeper pool of minority coaching candidates, while applauding the Rooney Rule, which was designed 20 years ago to do just that. It’s easy to overlook the importance of something like this, so I’m happy to see the commissioner bringing it up at a high-profile time. Hopefully, he’s more action than words.
Lastly (on the Commissioner), Goodell expects the investigation into running back Kareem Hunt to be over soon. If you somehow managed to miss this news, Hunt was dropped from the Chiefs and placed on the Commissioner’s Exempt List after a video of him hitting a woman went public. As of now, Hunt is eligible to sign with a team, but cannot play so long as he’s on the exempt list. Plus, he still faces a possible suspension, so there could be more time missed in the future. The Bears, from GM Ryan Pace and Head Coach Matt Nagy to Owner George McCaskey, have mostly avoided a straight-forward answer when asked if they’d consider picking up Hunt, but as of now it seems unlikely. If that changes, we’ll dive more deeply into the fit (both on and off the field), but for now, we’ll leave it there.
Along the same lines, the Commissioner noted that even though charges were dropped against Washington linebacker Reuben Foster doesn’t mean there wasn’t a violation of league policy. That investigation is also on-going.
On a much brighter note, Tom Brady tells a youngster how to deal with the haters:
Deshaun Watson hopes to have a Brady/Manning rivalry with Patrick Mahomes: “We’ve been boys since coming out of high school,” Watson said. “We’ve trained together all through college. It’s something we’ve talked about for a long, long time …. We’re both in the AFC, so, hopefully, we get that Peyton and Tom Brady type of match every year.” Okay, so first of all … YES, PLEASE. I love that kind of rivalry and those two will be a heckuva lot of fun to watch over the next, say, decade. But … where does that leave my boy, Mitch? Can it be more of a rivalry triangle?
I wish Marv would’ve won one of those Super Bowls
NEWSLETTER
