Craig Tyson Adams

  Yeah, hate is a strong word, but it’s the only word that covers it.  Look, I’m an old-fashioned guy.   I root for my team, the Los Angeles Rams . It’s difficult, but I’m loyal like that. Sure, they somehow won the Super Bowl last season and that great. But mostly in the last few seasons, they stunk. The thing is, when I’m watching a Rams game, I don’t want someone to come over to my house and root for some other teams player or some other teams defense when I’m intensely concentrating on sending my overwhelming positive juju to the Rams so that they’ll theoretically do well. They create a make believe football team so that they won’t pay as much attention to their families for a few months. If they don’t heed my first admonishment, I will take away all beer and wings privileges. Even if they brought the refreshments themselves. Well, I’ll draw the line there. I’ll drink the beer, but I’ll do it with a sneer. If they don’t like it, they can get out! I realize that the corporate takeov

So far in the NFL Playoffs the kickers have been displaying pivotal domination.  They’re usually forgotten and disrespected. But, this year, they’ve been the ones left in the lonely high pressure spotlight.  If you look at their stats and how many points they score, you’d think they must be 6’9” and weigh 255 lbs and run like a sprinter.  In reality they might be 5’11” and weigh around 180.  Kickers never catch or even fall on a football. They only touch a football to put in on a tee. A kicker gets to wear a uniform so that a referee doesn’t think a fan ran out onto the field.  A kicker never has to hit the weight room if he doesn't want to. He doesn’t even have to wear pads. A kicker is the only guy on the team that hopes someone runs into him. That way he gets another chance to score if he misses.  You know how some guys watch their diets and wear out exercise bicycles? Kickers could eat pizza and drink beer all day as long as he splits the uprights. Nobody cares how fast he can

This NFL Wild Card weekend was great if you’re a football fan. I mean the NFL, and not the international game where they don’t wear pads and where the players don’t automatically collapse in a heap when someone exhales on them. Even in these days of COVID, it takes a few days before exhaling on someone results in them collapsing.  There were five games this weekend and that was enough. There is one tonight on Monday, and that is the game I’m looking forward to the most because the team that I root for, the Los Angeles Rams, are playing the Arizona Cardinals.  The Cardinals are the oldest franchise in the National Football League, having been the first team to join in 1922. They were in Chicago then, and because they don’t win very often, they were kicked from city to city until they ended up in the desert.  That said, the NFL games played this weekend ranged from entertaining to almost unwatchable.  First up was the Las Vegas Raiders against the Cincinnati Bengals. The Bengals hadn’t w

NFL receiver divas treat Sunday like an unruly child in church. NFL receiver divas are ultra competitive and feel that all passes should go to them. When I’m playing Madden football , I always feel I need to throw to the number one wide receiver at least five times per game.That’s what they demand. As a quarterback, you’ve got to feed the number one receiver even if you have to force the pass into tight windows.  Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford fell for it recently. Last Sunday against the Ravens, Stafford threw a deep pass to Odell Beckham Jr. when he had two other receivers open underneath. By the time the bomb got to Beckham, there were three defenders on OBJ. A check-down pass would’ve gotten an easy first down. Instead, the Ravens got the ball and ultimately scored.  This is the thing with wide receivers. They are supremely confident in their abilities. It's an isolated position. They excel by getting the offensive coordinator to tell the quarterback to throw them the bal

For the first time since 1947, the NFL Cardinals franchise has an actual chance to win the league championship. To say it has been a long time is an understatement. Jackie Robinson was a rookie for the Brooklyn Dodgers the last time the Cardinals won a title. It was so long ago, the team was in Chicago. They were the Chicago Cardinals! That comes as a shock to most Chicago Bears . Joe Louis was heavyweight champion of the world. A horse named Jet Pilot won the Kentucky Derby. That sounds like a fast horse. Israel wasn't a country yet. The Cardinals made a Super Bowl in 2009. The club was lead by Kurt Warner and Larry Fitzgerald. They almost won, but were beat by the Pittsburgh Steelers on a last minute impossible pass by Ben Roethlisberger to Santonio Holmes for an equally impossible catch. Warner had one last chance but his luck finally ran out. Being out of luck is a normal state of being for the Cardinals. The team is actually the first professional American football team. T

He’s as predictable as the tides. Tom Brady is like the sun coming up in the east. He is the football equivalent of death and taxes. Father Time has nothing on him. Brady is like Wyatt Earp in a gunfight. He always wins. Sometimes Tom Brady momentarily falters. Like a car that needs a tune-up. You’ll be sitting at a traffic light and it idles rough. It's not enough to trade the car in, but it makes you realize some adjustments need to be made.  After routine maintenance is done, it’s back to high performance and ruling the road again. In that respect, Brady is like a machine. He had a couple of hiccups. There were two times that the human Eli Manning of the New York Giants somehow made Brady miscalculate. Something about the New York Giants’ defense disrupted Brady’s internal operating code. It didn’t compute. Brady was like a droid in a Sci-Fi movie that suddenly realized it had fallibility. He short-circuited. Then Brady's club got a tune-up. His team, the New Englan

Back in 2016, the Los Angeles Rams traded up to take Cal-Berkeley’s quarterback Jared Goff . They paid a king’s ransom for him. A massive trade with the Tennessee Titans that cost them multiple first, second and third-round draft picks over two years to move up in the NFL draft for the right to choose Goff as the number 2 overall pick. The Rams had a lot riding on Goff’s right arm.  Goff hadn’t done well at the NFL draft combine where college players run through drills to show their physicality and mental prowess to NFL coaches. He is 6’ 4” and 215 pounds and mobile enough to appear to be an excellent quarterback. It’s a textbook height and weight that makes NFL coaches work themselves into a tizzy. He looked like he was capable of doing it. If you were making a football movie, Goff was straight out of central casting.  He didn’t stand out at the physical workouts. Goff scored low on the mental aptitude exam. They thought that with the right offensive system and coaching, he should

It turned out that tackling topped Tim Tebow’s time at tight-end.  Tim Tebow won the Heisman Trophy as a quarterback in 2007 while playing college football at Florida State. His head coach while playing there was Urban Meyer. The NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars hired Meyer to be their head coach this year.  When Urban Meyer got to camp with the Jaguars, the team had a number one first-round pick in the NFL draft. They also had a dashing cultural phenom and a relatively proficient incumbent quarterback named Gardner Minshew.  The team used the first-round pick on what Jaguars general manager Trent Baalke called the most pivotal pick in team history. Clemson University’s Trevor Lawrence, considered to be one of the best college quarterbacks of all time. Coach Meyer wasn’t thinking he needed another play-caller. Why would he need Tim Tebow?  The Denver Broncos drafted Tebow into the NFL after college. The Bronco's head coach at the time was a former Bill Belichick disciple, Josh McDanie