"The Sunday Five" is a loosely-titled piece where I talk about five NFL- or Browns-related topics related to this past week. The theme recapping the events of this past week is the fact that there were some unusual experiences as an SB Nation blogger.
This is about as dead as you can get for the NFL. It would be a dead period to begin with in a normal football year because the exciting part of free agency would have passed by, the combine is over, and Pro Days are coming to an end. This year, we didn't even have the benefit of free agency, and fans are just worn out by the already-tiresome lockout situation (get used to it). To make things worse, you have the NCAA March Madness tournament driving attention away from football.
Another unusual instance came Thursday afternoon when I learned that the SB Nation NFL bloggers had a chance to chat with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and lead negotiator Jeff Pash. The upper management at SB Nation have done a great job slowly building a relationship with the NFL over the past couple of years, primarily through events such as the NFL Combine, the NFL Draft, and the Super Bowl. Having direct contact with the Commissioner is another step in the right direction for the SB Nation network.
After the Goodell interview, one of my colleagues wondered if scoring Goodell would entice a retaliation conference call from DeMaurice Smith and the "NFLPA." Sure enough, it did. While it was nice to see my fellow bloggers get their flavor of questions in, I can't say there was any sign of optimism. A few of our bloggers, via the SB Nation intranet system, questioned why the salary floor was not being brought up more. Over at Mile High Report, John Bena discussed the issue here.
This one speaks for itself: besides saying he would love to play for the Patriots and wouldn't mind playing for the Vikings again, Randy Moss randomly threw in the Cleveland Browns as one of two other teams he wouldn't mind playing for. Forget whether Moss would work well in our offense; what would compel him to mention Cleveland of all teams? It's just not something you'd expect to hear.
Lastly, the competition committee proposed significant changes to kickoffs, which would likely mean a lot more touchbacks. The purpose of the rule would be to improve player safety, but it comes at the cost of removing one of the exciting elements of the game. We should have a decision made by the owners at the owners meeting Tuesday or Wednesday. I hope they rule against it, because this would be another downer.