Column

I never thought I’d see the day when everyone was begging for Ed Hochuli, the most famous referee in NFL history, to come back and do Hochuli type things. You know, wear tight shirts to show off his muscular arms, overly dramatic signals, and long explanations of simple calls and rules. Last I checked, Hochuli, though more than competent and entertaining, was on many peoples’ last nerve. 

Lest we forget: 

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Practice squad rules have always confounded me. Well maybe not confounded so much as made me kinda sad that guys can’t play on practice squads as a career. Anyway, Adam Caplan who is typically worth a follow on twitter gave out the practice squad rules again. And I figured I’d post it right from the horse’s sulia.

Again, here are the rules for practice squad eligibility

Teams may establish a practice squad of eight players by signing free agents who do not have an accrued season of free agency credit or who were on the 46-player Active List for less than nine regular season games during each of any accrued seasons.

A player cannot participate on the practice squad for more than three seasons.

Teams may begin to fill out 8-man practice squads beginning this Saturday after 12 p.m. ET.

For even more information on practice squads visit SBNation’s concise breakdown here.

Interesting nugget:

Practice squad players are free to negotiate contracts to join other team’s active list (53-man roster) at any time. One exception to this is that practice squad players may not sign a contract with his team’s next opponent after 4pm ET six days preceding the game. That deadline is pushed back to ten days during bye weeks.

As players like Maurice Jones-Drew learn, unfortunately your contract is not just about you.

Since the Jags and Maurice Jones-Drew entered their standoff I’ve been reminded of a few things that people don’t seem to understand about contract negotiations and I wanted to quickly address them here.

1. Owners don’t want to be told how to conduct business

2. It’s not just about how  ”great” a player is but whether his presence on the team makes “enough” of a difference with all things considered 

3. The value of a player can go up or down with a contract already in place prompting either side to request a restructure. 

When negotiations and hold outs happen too often people are focused on the fact that the player was given a FAIR deal in the beginning and whether or not the player is “worth” more money based on play alone. But these other factors I’ve mentioned matter just as much and more in many cases.

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I was happy to be able to contribute for the second time to the NY Times Room for Debate. This time we talked about what sport in the Olympics should be eliminated. I cheated the rules a little bit…I didn’t eliminate anything entirely. I just chopped one sport into pieces. Read what I said here. 

I love finding tools that make mundane tasks easier. One of things I needed to do was to find a way to get all my blog posts into a list. That way, I could have them at the ready for editors who ask for samples. Additionally, it’s good to have your blog posts listed out so that you can link back to yourself-a great way to keep traffic. 

For a while I was trying to copy and paste posts but I fell off from doing that rather quickly. No surprise there. But then @digitalmiss started praising the site If This Than That (on twitter) and I saved her tweet to instapaper (one of my favorite ways to save sleuthing for later!) and then researched it. Using IFTTT, you can make “recipes” that tell apps and web tools you use how to communicate with one another. Think: rules in email. “If I get an email from Joe send it to trash.”

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