August 6, 2013

NFL Preseason and other notes

With the Hall of Fame game on Sunday, the NFL preseason is officially under way.  What does this mean, exactly?  Well, as of now, less than a month until football starts.  Other than that, not much.

How did the Cowboys look?  Besides the fact that the starters didn't play, they looked fine.  I'm not entirely sold on the 4-3 defense (teams went to 3-4 en masse because it seemed like the best way to slow offenses); was it the defense that surrendered leads last season?  Usually, all that's accomplished by trying to fix something that wasn't broken is creating more problems.  I'm not sure the Cowboys have the personnel to run the 4-3 effectively.  Nor am I sure that it's better than the 3-4 as a defensive scheme.  It's up to the secondary to cover receivers downfield better than they did in 2012.  And Romo has to minimize mistakes in key situations.  In other words, there is no change from the previous season.

The NFL season starts on September 5th (Thursday), with the full slate on September 8th (Sunday).  Every Tuesday during the NFL season, I will be running my weekly Power Rankings.  They are a simplified version of what you would see on other sports sites; what I do is rank the top ten teams, give a little bit of analysis on the week that just ended, and then highlight a couple of games in the next week that I consider to be "must-watch".  For those who were/are members of CBS Sports' site, you'll probably recognize my work. Since that site no longer allows users to maintain a blog (and tossed years of work into the dumpster), they'll be posted here instead.

Oh, and one other note: the Red Zone channel is awesome.  I can't wait to watch football on it again.

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