Did I Miss Anything?

On January 14, IgglesBlog closed its doors. I had put up a post a few days before in which I tried to provide an framework for what the off-season would hold. I didn’t expect anything as dramatic as what we have seen. In the two-plus months since then, Andy Reid has gutted the defensive coaching staff, hired his offensive line coach to be defensive coordinator, and seemingly has put Kevin Kolb up for auction. Meanwhile, the NFL and the NFLPA engaged in a vicious battle of public relations, lodged to a shockingly large extent on Twitter, and now have wound up with a law suit and a lockout, which has (for the time being, at least) killed the off-season.

Maybe now that Iggles Blitz has launched, the insanity will stop.

With this new home, I wanted to define myself more formally than I did previously. Much like before, I am a contributing writer, not a guy in charge. We expect the bulk of the posts to be from Tommy; I will add stuff occasionally.

I tend to think about the game from the perspective of the front office. Broadly speaking, I am particularly interested in roster building, which has several implications. First, I focus on how teams use their resources on their roster. Those resources include using the salary cap to sign free agents and extend existing players, using draft picks to improve the roster, and trading existing players. Second, I focus on the economics of the game, thinking about how teams make money and about the CBA. Finally, I focus on the people who make the decisions about who is on the roster, how those players are developed, and how they are used. That includes front office personnel and coaches.

If I have a goal here, it is to provide a different perspective to the NFL and the Eagles than many fans have. I probably won’t help you understand how the team is performing; that’s Tommy’s beat. But I hope that I can help readers understand why the team was set up the way it was, and how it could realistically be changed to be better.

The current labor situation will probably be my focus from now until its resolution. However, as Tommy said in an earlier post, I don’t intend to comment at all on the legal side of this debate. First, I am not a lawyer. The most helpful writers on this subject have been, and will continue to be, Mike Florio, Andrew Brandt, and Gabe Feldman, who are all lawyers. Second, I find the legal aspects of this case to be impossible to handicap. In the short term, they are all based on the judgment that will be rendered by a single person, and that person’s opinion will be subject to review by appeals courts. But despite all of what we will read about the arguments put forth by the various sides, one never knows how a judge will rule until she has done so. And I, of all people, have no insight into her thought process.

What I do intend to discuss, however, is the negotiation aspect of this matter. Ultimately, this lawsuit is about reaching a CBA and each side strengthening its hand in the negotiation. So to the extent that negotiations take place on reaching a CBA, I will certainly discuss what implications a potential set of terms for the agreement would have.

In the interim, I am hoping to write a couple of posts in the coming weeks that address some broad issues about where we are and why, and some of the broad principles that have been discussed.

If anyone has any questions that they have developed over the past couple of months, let me know, and I will try to address them as best as I can. Again, I’m not a lawyer, so I will stick to issues outside of Brady v. NFL.

Welcome to Iggles Blitz.