Highlights
Lamar Jackson and the Ravens defeated the Bears in the Pro Football Hall of Fame Game to open the 2018 preseason. Watch all the highlights from the first game here.
Megan Uhrynowski never wants to lose her Tom Brady autograph. The 19-year-old got a tattoo of the signature the QB put on her arm at training camp this week. Plus: The Saints bring their own relief from the heat, and Peyton visits Raiders training camp.
Here's what you need to know from camps across the league.
Photos of the Saints' new cooling container - 25 degrees inside to offer players a quick refresher during practice. pic.twitter.com/qiylyfYgmJ — Mike Triplett (@MikeTriplett) August 2, 2018
ESPN.com The NFL preseason starts tonight with Ravens-Bears. According to ESPN Stats & Info, Baltimore (-2.5) enters tonight having covered in nine straight preseason games. Since John Harbaugh became its head coach in 2008, Baltimore is 27-13 ATS in preseason games.
play 0:21 Gender reveal at Redskins camp Redskins long snapper Nick Sundberg assists Eric Fauth and his wife Sarah with their gender reveal.
Everyone meet Antonio Callawag! 🐶
This retriever mix has the fastest paws you'll ever see. Although this good boy is small, he'll catch anything you throw his way.
Find him and more puppies up for adoption at our #BrownsCamp Puppy Pound! pic.twitter.com/CkqmUBMkYn — Cleveland Browns (@Browns) August 2, 2018
@David_Njoku80 thanks so much for taking the time to sign my sons jersey (and my daughters hat) today at camp. Also, I was next to the young guy who you took your gloves off for. You made his day. That's what it's all about. #fans4life #gobrowns pic.twitter.com/kW4QVn6Il7 — Tiffany Hesselbart (@thesselbart) August 2, 2018
Rookie life. #TexansCamp A post shared by Houston Texans (@houstontexans) on Aug 2, 2018 at 9:03am PDT
ESPN Staff Writer Bills safety Micah Hyde on officials' presentation Wednesday about new helmet rule: "Who knows, man. It's up and down. It's not clear cut. There was times they showed the play when the whole room was like, ‘Oh, no way, this is getting crazy.'"
Derwin James has been activated from the Non-Football Injury list and will practice today. #ChargersCamp pic.twitter.com/mBsBCubKiq — Los Angeles Chargers (@Chargers) August 2, 2018
ESPN Staff Writer How good has Colts QB Andrew Luck looked so far in his return from missing last season with a shoulder injury? Offensive coordinator Nick Sirianni forgets at times that Luck is still working his way back from the injury. "He’s been fun to be around," Sirianni said. "You can see why he was the player he was at Stanford, the No. 1 pick coming out, the player he’s been in the NFL because it doesn’t look like this everywhere. I know that. There’s not a lot of teams that can come out in practice and be like, ‘Man, we’re just better because he’s on the field.’"
Appreciate Peyton for all the knowledge he shared today! #TrainingCamp 💀💀💀💀 pic.twitter.com/CHfBjnIpNY — Derek Carr (@derekcarrqb) August 2, 2018
ESPN Staff Writer Raiders camp Day 7 Quote of the Day comes from camp visitor Charles Woodson, on Khalil Mack’s holdout: “You guys watched Khalil the last (four) years. You watched him on the field. You watched him grow as a player. You watched him win defensive player of the year. He’s a young guy that’s trying to get paid, and I don’t fault any man for that. Now, every team’s going to have their limits of what they feel they can do and what they won’t do. You have to navigate that. He’s a smart enough guy, he’ll figure it out. Where does he take it from here? I’m sure his agents have talked to the team and the team has responded and they probably put their offers in and counteroffers and the whole nine. We are where we are right now. But for him, he’s got to figure it out.” Woodson held out twice as a Raiders player, in 2004 and 2005.
A tradition unlike any other. Eagles rookies (in this case WR Tim Wilson) pay their dues by carrying water ice into the locker room for the vets. pic.twitter.com/SsGGI3cUvO — Tim McManus (@Tim_McManus) August 2, 2018
Jacksonville Jaguars
Electronic Arts said Thursday that the company did not purposely omit Colin Kaepernick's name from a song it licensed for its latest game.
The video game maker came under fire when it was discovered by a Twitter user that Kaepernick's name was censored from YG's song "Big Bank," which is used in the soundtrack for "Madden NFL 19."
"We made an unfortunate mistake with our Madden NFL soundtrack," EA said in a statement issued Thursday evening. "Members of our team misunderstood the fact that while we don't have rights to include Colin Kaepernick in the game, this doesn't affect soundtracks. We messed up, and the edit should never have happened. We will make it right, with an update to Madden NFL 19 on August 6 that will include the reference again. We meant no disrespect, and we apologize to Colin, to YG and Big Sean, to the NFL, to all of their fans and our players for this mistake."
Big Sean, who makes a guest appearance in the song and performs the verse that references Kaepernick, weighed in on Thursday before EA issued its statement. Kaepernick later thanked Big Sean in a tweet.
Much love brother! Thank you for having my back!✊🏾 https://t.co/yKz3nBMiPb — Colin Kaepernick (@Kaepernick7) August 2, 2018
In the song, Kaepernick's name is referenced about halfway through Big Sean's verse when he says, "Feed me to the wolves, now I lead the pack and s---. You boys all cap, I'm more Colin Kaepernick."
Kaepernick drew attention to social inequality issues during the 2016 season by kneeling during the national anthem as a means of protest. He pursued free agency in 2017 but wasn't given a tryout. He filed a collusion suit against the league's 32 owners last October; the case is ongoing.
Drew Magary prepares for the inevitable shitshow of bad football this fall.
There are two freight trains. They share a track, and they are headed straight toward each other, destined to collide at full speed, with great concussive force, at a single convergence point. Here is the first train: an NFL rulebook that has been redacted and redlined and run through a Babel Fish translator until it looks like little more than a series of construction-paper scribbles drawn by a bored child.
Earlier this week the Philadelphia Eagles met with NFL referees to learn about the league's new rules, particularly the new zero-tolerance rule for helmet lowering. This is all standard operating procedure in the NFL. The league tweaks its rules in the offseason in a futile attempt to appease both viewers and their lawyers, and then refs go on a whistle-stop tour and explain to each team what they can and cannot do, and then the Patriots win thirteen games because they are the only team that manages to stay awake during the PowerPoint presentation. Anyway, the Eagles presentation was notable because, as Tim McManus at ESPN reported, players came out of the meeting still awake but unsure as to what they just sat through:
"We were trying to ask questions to get a better understanding, and yet they couldn't really give us an answer," linebacker Nigel Bradham said. "They couldn't give us what we were looking for." During the presentation, which lasted close to an hour according to Bradham, players were shown clips of what are now considered illegal hits—some of which appeared to them as routine tackles.
The Eagles, who just won the Super Bowl, are far from the only team left scratching their heads at the rule. Falcons coach Dan Quinn asked the league to provide video examples of illegal hits and still came away confused. In fact, the finalized formal language about the new helmet rule in the NFL rulebook was only sent out at the end of June, and the wording was noticeably different from how the NFL initially framed the rule change earlier in the spring. I promise you this won’t be the last time they tinker.
This rule change represents the NFL’s latest token attempt to make an inherently unsafe game safe enough for critics, class-action lawyers, and potentially skittish Pee-Wee moms. It won’t work, but you already knew that. You also know that this kind of semantic torture has invaded nearly every part of the NFL GameDay experience, from illegal hits to video replays to the formerly simple act of catching the ball, and it’s only going to get worse once Week 1 rolls around and players actually try to abide by these mealy-mouthed edicts.
If you’ve ever played football—hell, if you’ve ever played any sport—you know that not knowing what to do is very bad. If you don’t know your assignment, and if you aren’t quite sure as to what’s legal and what’s not, you’re probably going to fuck up. Many times. Take it from someone who never fully grasped the Colby College offensive playbook: It adversely affects your performance. Football is perhaps the sport that suffers the most from this kind of tactical ignorance. Sometimes you can wing it on a basketball court, but football is a hideously violent sport that not only demands that you know what you’re doing, but also demands that you drill that knowledge into your mind and bones until it becomes a simple reflex. But with these constant rule changes, the NFL has left essentially every player, coach, and team in the dark. The new helmet rule is especially tricky, because offensive players and linemen have been allowed to lower their helmets since forever, and it’s nearly impossible to take that protective reflex away from them over the course of a single offseason.
You can probably guess what that’s going to look like when September comes around. It’s gonna look like absolute shit. Not only is this rule (or lack thereof) going to result in low-quality play, it’s not gonna protect ANYONE from getting hurt. You already saw scores of talented QBs get sidelined last season. Save for the Super Bowl, the on-field product was often unwatchable. The measures the NFL put in place prior to 2017 to protect players did pretty much nothing except create an increase in penalty flags commensurate with rising sea levels, flags that no one wants to see gum up a telecast.
Those numbers are poised to skyrocket even higher once they send refs out there with a cobbled-together rulebook and a firm pat on the ass. That means you’re gonna get more stoppages in play, more players running around with their thumbs up their asses, and more players hurt. Given that the franchise values continue to skyrocket, and given that the next round of TV contracts promise to remain lucrative, there’s ample evidence to suggest that the NFL doesn’t give a rat’s ass if these games suck, which I guess is fortunate because they will. Nothing is going to stop these games from being turgid, janky affairs.
Here is the second freight train: the anthem. I know you don’t want to hear about this. I don’t either. I swear to God I am Cris Collinsworth in the booth, ready to heave a gigantic sigh of relief and welcome the return of on-the-field action before presiding over a 6-6 preseason tie. But President Trump has two hobbyhorses that he clings to in this, his dreadful, seemingly endless existence. The first is saying the most racist shit possible about immigrants or about people who, to him, look like immigrants. The other is the national anthem. The man already told Cowboys owner and sun-baked penis lizard Jerry Jones that the anthem was a winning issue for him, and this is a man who has no compunction whatsoever about repeating himself.
Now, the NFL tried to remedy this situation by issuing a new anthem policy during the offseason that pleased no one, in particular the NFLPA, which the NFL didn’t bother to involve in the process. So then they revoked the new policy, went back to the old one, and then Jones said he would make his players stand for the anthem anyway. That was enough to get the president’s flag boner to stir and get him tweeting from the shitter yet again:
It’s painfully clear that the NFL still doesn’t know how to handle all this blowback, because its owners themselves are fiercely divided over whether or not gestures of protest during the anthem are appropriate. Now, they could have gone to the players and offered them something—I dunno, maybe money?—in exchange for getting them onboard with an all-standing policy (something the NBA already has and something few players quibble with), but their greed and their lust for bullying their own players apparently prevented that from happening. As a result, nothing is going to stop these pregame festivities from being a lightning magnet for opportunists, racists, and grandstanding assholes.
So now, here’s what’s gonna happen in September: The games are going to suck and ratings will go down a bit because of it. A few players will demonstrate during the anthem, the Eye of Sauron will fall upon them, and then Trump will hammer the NFL day after day, constructing his own reality in which NFL ratings are down because of the anthem and because he willed them to be, and not because of the game’s much more obvious shortcomings. This will be ALL YOU FUCKING HEAR ABOUT all fall. Whatever brilliant spurts of football happen to occur in between all those flags and all that bloviating will be fleeting…as difficult to recall as your own dreams. The NFL, through its own patriotic machinations, has unwittingly found itself as the main conduit of the culture wars, and it will remain there all season long, with the games themselves serving as an inadequate respite. It’s going to be awful.
And the worst part is that all of this was preventable. The NFL could have a simplified rulebook, and it could have a consistently entertaining on-field product, if it had worked with its players and if it took on SOME liability for the dangers of the sport. And the NFL could have avoided this anthem shit entirely if they had worked with the players to institute an anthem policy everyone could live with (or, better yet, if they ditched the goddamn pageantry altogether).
They have done neither of these things, because the NFL possesses a near-superhuman tone-deafness and because it is terminally incapable of taking away the correct lessons from a PR crisis. And both the players and you, the viewer at home, will bear the brunt of that idiocy. The result is a coming 2018 season that promises to be more divisive and slovenly than any that came before it.
I know that complaining about the NFL has become a national pastime, in the way people enjoyed complaining about Bud Selig back when he was spilling hot coffee from his travel thermos all over the sport of baseball. But, as with virtually every other corrupt sport, baseball managed to survive all of its crises thanks to the timelessness of the game itself. But here, now, with football, we have a sport that is altering its very foundations from year to year. No one knows what a catch is, or what a legal tackle is, or much of anything else. That leaves little opportunity for a corrupt sport to redeem itself on the field. They are willfully disappearing the game, giving endless amounts of oxygen to distractions they claim to abhor, and soon the politicization of the NFL will be all that’s left. And the NFL owners are making too much money to care.
