RapierFugue
Posts: 4740
Joined: 3/16/2006
From: London, England
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quote:
ORIGINAL: maybemaybenot
Agree with most of your points, RF.
My thought on the trash talk, however, isn't that it has a direct relation to the outcome of the game, but to fire the players up. As has been pointed out, the last time Rex was * quiet/respectful *, his team got beat pretty badly. And I'm not saying the outcome will be the same or that that was the reason. It's just uncharacteristic of how he handles upcoming games. I think it's his personal style< * trash talk * > to get the guys prepared, not in totality, but a part of the total plan. Rex took over a pretty crappy Jets organization, he brought in new players, high quality players, the Jets lived in the Giants shadows for years, Rex changed that. Alot of that has to do with his persona. He put the focus on the Jets with his mouth and his bravado, and has backed it up on the field with his coaching. I'm not taking anything away from his coaching, by saying his mouth is a big motivator.
The thing is, one can't always predict how players will react. The “rev them up and let them loose” theory only holds true if revving them up always makes good things happen. It doesn't always work that way; I've seen games where one team is clearly desperately trying to make it happen, but their degree of enthusiasm is actually making them make unforced errors. Or, worse, make them too aggressive, and you end up getting flags all over the field, incurring penalties, and losing yardage left, right and centre.
Then there’s the effect on what happens if things don’t go to plan. If you've whipped your team into a fever pitch of excitement and aggression and they score first, and stop the subsequent drive, then great, it’s all going to plan. But what if that doesn't happen? What if Team B hold your first few drives and score one or two themselves? Now you've dug yourself a huge hole; a more circumspect and methodical coach will stand there at half time and say “ok guys, we screwed the pooch on quarters one and two, but we all know what went wrong, so let’s get out there, change X, Y and Z, and take it to them!” – in other words, you've got somewhere to go. If you've already got them champing at the bit then what have you got left in the tank? Little or nothing. They’ll feel (from a psychological POV) like they've done everything they can, and still come up short.
Football is, as crazy as this sounds, a game of controlled aggression, and discipline wins games. I wouldn’t read anything into trash-talk, or a lack of it, other than maybe the coaches have run out of nasty things to say to one another.
On the other side of the coin, what if your players aren’t up for a game? Then you'll probably lose. So there's a balance and a tightrope, which only a good coach knows how to walk consistently without making a monkey of themselves. Thus I don't generally pay much attention to talk of this or that – I think most coaches probably say very similar things to their teams, in private, on Week One than they do Pre-Superbowl – tactics, players to watch, plays to go for it on, then get them geed up and send them out.
quote:
ORIGINAL: maybemaybenot
I know you live in the UK and may not know this.. but you can't point any fingers at Ben for his off field antics, in this game. Sanchez also was arrested for sexual assault when he was in college. Like Ben, nothing ever came of it. But they're evenly split on the sexual assault meter. 
Damn. I wanted to believe we led the league in at least one offensive (geddit!) category.
PS: I've been reviewing some of the various incidents online today and the thing that stands out is how shocked people appear to be that, if you give young, testosterone-filled men shedloads of money, more respect than they're entitled to for their fairly meagre life achievements to date, encourage them to lead a champagne and slut lifestyle, and give them a bucket-load of hangers on, bodyguards and associated troublemakers to hang out with, they then go out and start throwing their weight and their todgers around! Who’d have thought it? Well dur ... we’ve had similar situations with soccer players here for years, and until the media and society in general stop treating as "special" cocky young idiots whose only remarkable “qualities” are simply the ability to bung a bit of pigskin around on a Sunday you're going to have it happen time and again.
The problem is there's nothing much one can do about it – these guys are entitled to a share of the wealth in the game, and a right to be protected from the kind of intrusion and hassle their celebrity status brings, and since it’s the relative poverty of old-time players and their connection with their public (through association with “regular guys”) that kept them humble it’s unlikely to be reversed anytime soon. And unfortunately, money does give richer people the ability to, in most cases, duck around legal issues that would see the likes of thee or me locked up.
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RE: NFL Sob (or Brag) Thread - 
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