Brady Unlimited III: Wolverines in the NFL & NFL News

[lineygoblue]

49ers by 4

[entropy]

Mike Bianchi, SPORTS COMMENTARY

On the day Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis announced he would be retiring after this season, my thoughts drifted back to a bitterly cold winter day in a cemetery in Akron, Ohio.

That's where Richard Lollar was buried and where his bespectacled grandmother, Joyce Lollar, showed me his grave more than a decade ago.

As I wrote then, she crunched through the snow with leafless trees etched against a gray Midwestern skyline. A frozen drizzle fell from above. With her shoe, she scraped the snow and the ice and the dirt from her grandson's grave site and said a short prayer that ended with: "We miss you, Richard. We love you."

And then she broke down and cried. And then the sadness turned to madness as she spoke bitterly about how she felt Ray Lewis and his "gang of hoodlums" literally got away with murder.

"They stabbed my Richard five times in vital places — the heart, the liver," she said angrily. "They don't even kill animals like that. This was no bar fight; this was a slaughter. This was a thrill-killing."

Amid this week-long celebration and commemoration of Ray Lewis' brilliant, Hall of Fame career, let us not forget that he was once charged with killing Richard Lollar and Jacinth Baker — two men whose murders were never solved. Two men whose families are, no doubt, still haunted by the fact that brutal, bloody killers are still out there somewhere running free.

Ray Lewis may or may not be the greatest linebacker of all-time, but he has certainly pulled off the greatest comeback story in the history of sports. He is considered a role model, a team leader, a man known for his hard work on the field and his charitable work off of it.

To fathom the scope of his redemptive powers, all you have to do is click on the two separate Wikipedia pages of Lewis and Michael Vick. In the opening paragraph of Vick's, it mentions his notorious episode of dog-killing. In Lewis' opening paragraph, it chronicles his Pro Bowls, his Super Bowl MVP, even the torn triceps that kept him sidelined for much of this season. But there is not a single mention of the fact that he once was charged with murdering two men.

"Everybody's gone on with their lives; everybody but us," Joyce Lollar told me in 2001, a year after her grandson was murdered and a few days before Lewis was named the MVP of Super Bowl XXXV. "Ray Lewis is living his dream, but what about my grandson's dreams? Our family's been destroyed, and now we have to watch Ray Lewis prancing around in the Super Bowl. It makes me sick to my stomach."

Joyce raised Richard Lollar, who was left dead in the street in the early morning hours on Jan. 31, 2000, — a few hours after the Rams defeated the Titans in one of the most thrilling Super Bowls in history. And then came one of the most chilling post-Super Bowl scenes in history. A brawl outside the Cobalt Lounge, an upscale Atlanta nightclub, turned into gory spectacle of steely knives, mangled flesh and a river of blood. The 24-year-old Lollar and his 21-year-old boyhood buddy from Akron, Jacinth Baker, were both stabbed multiple times in the heart, the knives savagely twisted into their vital organs. The killers knew exactly what they were doing.
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Lewis, his two good friends — Reginald Oakley and Joseph Sweeting — and nine others sped away from the crime scene in a 40-foot Lincoln limousine. Lewis, Oakley and Sweeting were charged with the killings and cleared in a controversial court decision that still leaves many questions unanswered.

Why, when Lewis made an appearance at a sporting goods store the day before the Super Bowl, did his friends buy knives at the store?

Why did witnesses say the limo pulled over and someone dumped bloody clothes into a trash bin?

Why was the white suit Ray Lewis wore that night never found?

Why did the limo driver change his story mid-trial after originally testifying that Lewis told everyone to "just keep your mouth shut and don't say nothing"? Originally, the driver told police he saw Lewis actively taking part in the bloody brawl and heard Oakley and Sweeting admit to stabbing someone. But he backed off those statements when he got on the witness stand.

Why did prosecutors reduce the murder charge against Lewis to misdemeanor obstruction of justice? It was a plea deal in which Lewis agreed to testify against his two friends, Oakley and Sweeting, who were later acquitted after Lewis' testimony failed to implicate them in the murders.

"Why were people changing their stories?" Joyce Lollar asked on the way to the cemetery that day. "… The jury didn't know who or what to believe. By lying and deceiving from the beginning, Ray Lewis helped set everybody free."

[hack]

Thanks for posting, ent. It's an interesting question. Ultimately we don't know, but some degree of ``remember that part of Ray Lewis too'' is going to be appropriate.

Go 9ers. Let's speed up the process of Jim Harbaugh getting bored with the NFL. The ultimate challenge: win an NCAA title with one hand tied behind his back (i.e., having to deal with Michigan's admirable principles and stupid administration in the process)...

[entropy]

[entropy]

Really interesting look at how stadiums are handling wi-fi, new technologies, etc.
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With the cost of attending live sporting events skyrocketing and the La-Z-Boy looking much more appetizing, professional teams like the San Francisco 49ers and super-sized arenas like the Patriots’ Gillette Stadium are trying more than ever to fill seats.

The desire to grow the bottom lines of professional sports teams has sparked a huge effort over the last few years to improve the in-person experience for fans.

Part of that effort has been focused on juicing up massive stadiums, wiring them with up-to-date networks that allow teams to increasingly meet the bandwidth-hungry needs of their fans and provide technologically-savvy services.

Theoretically, these so-called “stadiums of the future” would provide game goers unobstructed access to WiFi, allowing fans to give their 3G and 4G a break while accessing both usual and game-specific apps on their mobile devices that enable fans to, say, order concessions or check on bathroom wait times from their seat. Other services include finding empty parking spaces, checking up on fantasy teams and perhaps, most notably, seamlessly watching replays from inside the arena.

Game-day apps already exist. Dasdak, for example, partnered with the Washington Nationals last year to enable fans to order concessions via a mobile device. The reason there’s not more wide-use of these platforms is twofold: either there isn’t enough bandwidth to enable fans to access apps in a sold-out 60,000-seat stadium, or fans simply aren’t aware of their existence.

Cue companies like Silicon Valley-based Brocade (BRCD), which scored an exclusive contract to provide networking communications infrastructure to the 49ers’ new 68,500-seat stadium scheduled to open in 2014, and New Hampshire-based Enterasys, which is the official network provider of the New England Patriots and Boston Celtics.

The two have been busy over the last few years updating 15-year-old stadiums with modern capabilities, empowering tens of thousands of fans to simultaneously access an arena’s WiFi to take advantage of the plethora of apps that enrich the in-game experience.

“Certainly interactivity with fans is gong to be something that I think will be the big selling point,” said Michael Cramer, former president of the Texas Rangers and Dallas Stars.

Of course, rewiring a stadium as big as the Dallas Cowboy’s $1.15 billion monstrosity can be an extremely costly venture.

For many, though, improving the live-game experience for fans has become an imperative amid the ever-improving at-home experience -- where WiFi is abundant and 60-inch HDTVs show crystal-clear RedZone and replays – especially as the economy tightens its chains around fans’ wallets.

“Venue operators and teams are really challenged to make sure the experience rises to that level and justifies the expense they’re occurring for coming to a game,” said Courtney Brunious, Assistant Director of the University of Southern California's Sports Business Institute.

The most profitable teams might decide it's worth the cost. A vast majority of teams in the National Football League are in the black, with the league’s most profitable team, the Dallas Cowboys, being valued last season at $2.1 billion, raking in a whopping $500 million in revenue, according to Forbes. While television network fees help, much of their money was made from the stadium, including ticket sales, concessions and sponsorships with companies like Ford (F) and Bank of America (BAC).

The same, however, can’t be said for other sports, particularly the National Hockey League, where nearly half of the league’s teams lost money last season, according to Forbes.

Ticket sales, meanwhile, continue to be a sore spot. While the Red Sox set a record in 2012 for the longest regular-season sellout streak in major U.S. sports history, and the Vancouver Canucks extended their sellout streak this year to more than 407 consecutive home games, there’s no hiding the fact that economic realities have caused people to take pause when deciding whether to attend live games.

“They’re clearly concerned about the dollar now,” said Michael Cramer, who currently serves as professor of sports and media at the University of Texas at Austin. “With the price of tickets going up, there’s a real need to figure out a way to keep people sitting in their seats at games.”

In an effort to address that, teams are looking to leverage their stadiums’ assets “so that fans have a more immersive experience than they do at home,” said Brocade chief technology officer Dave Stevens.

Before the start of the 2012 football season, Enterasys installed high-density WiFi at the Patriots’ Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Mass. that essentially cuts through the usual bogged-down networks caused by excessive 3G traffic and provides all fans high-speed wireless connectivity. It was a quasi-test run, and after success this season, Enterasys and the Patriots plan to expand services going forward.

The Patriots’ game-day app allows fans to see camera angles and replays in real time, one of the biggest benefits of watching games at home. The NFL’s second most valuable team, which raked in some $380 million in sales last season, did this by implementing its own camera angles in the arena, giving it the ability to show replays in real-time just as networks do.

“One of the greatest things of going to a sporting event is the community that forms,” said Enterasys CEO Chris Crowell. “Now, you can get that same community while in stadium but also get the benefits of watching high-def TV at home.”

In the future, he said, the Pats would like to incorporate richer game-day apps, perhaps one day even allowing premium fans to listen into live audio between coaches and players in the huddle.

All of those improvements down the road can lead to increased revenues, whether it’s providing special services to premium fans for a fee or incentivizing them to buy concessions by eliminating the long-line factor.

“Theoretically, that can keep the price down on the main event, which should be helpful in keeping people in the seats,” Cramer said.

One last interesting, but possibly far-fetched, revenue driver for professional sports teams down the road could be using virtual technologies, such as holograms, to project a replica of the game into a nearby facility, allowing teams, in theory, to charge for the second-hand viewing.

Of course, some of that is far away. The key for now is just future-proofing current stadiums as much as possible.

“Unless you have a reliable, secure infrastructure, those apps don’t work,” Crowell said.

[*JD*]

Denard ran a 4.43 at the combine today. Good but not among the top 5 WR's.

[hodgkal]

I read today that his nerve injury is only 60% healed. He may yet have to have surgery. I think it is the ulnar nerve that wraps under the elbow that was injured. It is critical to the ability to grip or clasp things.

Anyway, 4.43 doesn't tell me as much as how quick his first step is and how well he can read the D and shift and feint while keeping his balance. Barry Sanders is a pretty good analogy.

I recall Denard was a sprint champion in his high school in Florida.

[WM Wolverine]

Up until the game he got hurt (Neb), Denard was 16-4 as starting QB as a junior/senior. Liked to have seen a senior Denard be healthy, those losses to Neb, OSU and SC were all winnable if M had a lil' more firepower.

[Mike]

Or brainpower.

[Hannibal]

IMHO it's a mistake for Denard to try and play receiver instead of RB. He has a lot less to learn at RB, and there's no guarantee that he'll ever learn to run good routes. His ability to set up blocks and/or see them before they happen won't be put to use catching passes. The only knock on him at RB is his size. But at RB, you can brace yourself for hits somewhat or at least minimize their impact and keep defenders honest. At WR, you might end up taking a brutal, blind hit. In terms of ability to carry the football, there's nobody better.

[Chuck Mallory]

Hanni, look at how many times Denard got "beat up" while playing QB at Michigan. I just think it would be even worse playing RB in the NFL, his body isn't built to take that kind of pounding. I'm not expecting much from him at the next level.

[hack]

Whoever drafts him will make that decision. Agreed you want him at RB, but more likely returning kicks and maybe a wildcat snap or two mixed in. Not going to be a high-usage player though.

[Hannibal]

I can't imagine him becoming a receiver at the next level. I just can't. It's a huge challenge for a guy who is already a great receiver in college to succeed at the NFL level. Much moreso for a guy who never played the position and has to learn stuff that his competition probably learned in high school. Denard has a lot of work to just get to the Roy Roundtree level, and Roundtree isn't considered a good NFL prospect.

[*JD*]

Nike says, "Suck it, Adidas! We can still out-ugly you! Remember, we were first."

[JRB]

The best case scenario for Denard Robinson at the pro level, IMO, is for him to become another Percy Harvin. Harvin isn't a pure NFL receiver, either, in that he doesn't run every route in the route tree and isn't usually split out wide, but he can be a very valuable part of an offense(when he's healthy) that can get him the ball eight to ten times a game. Denard's got to develop consistent hands-- the NFL doesn't waste a lot of time getting rid of lower round WR picks who can't catch-- and he has to get stronger. If he can do those things, he can be a productive NFL player.