The world according to Jim:
• If you are a Rams fan or a Chargers fan, here’s another reason to be optimistic going into the 2022 season: You not only know who your quarterback will be, but given good health you also have a pretty good idea of what to expect.
It’s not always that evident in the NFL. ...
• Consider the NFC West, for example. Jimmy Garappolo took the 49ers to the NFC championship game in January. Now he’s trade bait, and Trey Lance is the Niners’ latest hopeful.
Arizona signed Kyler Murray for five years at a reported $230.5 million ($160 million guaranteed), but added an insulting “independent study” clause in his contract — implying he wasn’t working hard enough away from the facility — that they removed Thursday after Murray publicly called it “disrespectful and almost a joke.” He wasn’t wrong.
Meanwhile, Russell Wilson is now in Denver and Geno Smith and Drew Lock are battling for the quarterback job in Seattle. Feel free to insert your own punchline. ...
• It’s an NFL trend. A year ago, Baker Mayfield was the darling of Cleveland and pitching insurance on the side. Now Mayfield is in Carolina, the Progressive ads are gone for good ... and somewhere Odell Beckham Jr. and his people are nodding knowingly. (And here’s your periodic reminder that Beckham absorbed much of the blame in Cleveland but was a model teammate — and won a ring — with the Rams.)
Meanwhile, the Browns are all in with Deshaun Watson, at a jaw-dropping, forehead-smacking $230 million guaranteed, plus the possibility of a personal conduct suspension that they couldn’t possibly have anticipated, right? (Hashtag #sarcasm, for those who might have missed it). Thus, Jacoby Brissett may be the Browns’ opening day quarterback. ...
• Nick Foles won a Super Bowl for Philadelphia and now is backing up Matt Ryan in Indianapolis. Marcus Mariota is QB1 in Atlanta, Mitch Trubisky is Ben Roethlisberger’s successor in Pittsburgh — Bears fans can explain to Steelers fans how cringeworthy that could be — and Carson Wentz is in Washington after spending last year in Indy. ...
• And whatever happened to Sam Darnold? The No. 2 pick out of USC in 2018, who started 11 games for Carolina last year, is Mayfield’s backup. Meanwhile, former UCLA prodigy Josh Rosen is fourth on Cleveland’s depth chart. ...
• Meanwhile, consider what Herbert, the Chargers’ young ace, faces in the AFC West: Two games against Wilson’s Broncos, two games against Patrick Mahomes’ Chiefs, two games against Derek Carr’s Raiders. You want to become truly elite? Win more than your share of those shootouts, or at least enough to finally get your team into the postseason. ...
• But this basically is the stratification of the NFL: Quarterbacks who have won MVPs and Super Bowls (Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers, Mahomes), guys who have won a Super Bowl (Stafford now joins that list with Foles, Wilson and Joe Flacco, now a New York Jets backup), elite young quarterbacks who haven’t quite broken through to a championship (led by Baltimore’s Lamar Jackson, a former MVP, Buffalo’s Josh Allen, Cincinnati’s Joe Burrow and Herbert) and a bunch of teams that probably will be trying to draft another hotshot college quarterback in the next year or two. ...
• Best line of the day at Pac-12 football media day, from commissioner George Kliavkoff when it was noted that Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark said his conference was “open for business,” i.e. planning to try and poach some of his teams: “With respect to the Big 12 being ‘open for business,’ I appreciate that. We haven’t decided if we’re going shopping there or not yet.”
Touché. Two can poach. ...
• Then again, given that Kliavkoff confirmed the conference would be exploring expansion, maybe he should buck the trend of cross-regional conferences and keep the “Pac” in the Pac-12 by adding San Diego State (17th-largest metropolitan area in the country) and UNLV (29th). That would give the conference at least a foothold in seven of the country’s 30 biggest metro areas, all in the Pacific and Mountain time zones. ...
• For the moment, we’ll ignore the big one that’s getting away. ...
• A reminder to Dodger fans that life in other baseball precincts is far from what they’re used to. From Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy: “Three years in, can we all acknowledge that the Mookie Betts salary dump was one of the worst moves in modern Sox history? It was the warning shot that the Sox won’t keep their stars anymore and are more about the illusion of contention (boosted by the phony, inflated playoff format) than about winning.” ...
• Meanwhile, the stream of odds emails tumbling into the inbox reveals some interesting patterns. One betting service has the Padres as the favorites to trade for Juan Soto. Another picks the Padres as the overwhelming favorites to land Shohei Ohtani should the Angels opt to trade him. ...
• I really don’t expect Ohtani to be traded, but enough weird things have happened with the Angels the past decade that nothing would surprise me. In the meantime, I’ll delve into that subject further in Sunday’s paper, and if you are an Angel fan and want to be heard — in other words, vent — about the state of the franchise, get your emails in now.
I think I know where most of the blame will be laid. ...
• Incidentally, keep in mind that the Padres were also the favorites to land Max Scherzer and Trea Turner last year at this time before the Dodgers pounced. And I’ve been told that San Diego general manager A.J. Preller still regrets letting Turner go in the first place, to Washington in June 2015 to complete a three-way trade with Tampa Bay that brought Wil Myers and Joe Ross, among others, to San Diego. ...
• A proposition the oddsmakers haven’t given us but probably should: Who gets traded first — Juan Soto or Russell Westbrook?
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