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28 May 2012

MMQB: Trade Deadline

In this week's Monday Morning Quarterback, Peter King writes about how the new later trade deadline might have changed the fate of one of the teams that ended up with a very high pick in the 2012 draft. Also covered Bears general manager Phil Emery, the change in the publishing schedule of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, and Jim Brown's thoughts on Adrian Peterson.

Posted by: Tom Gower on 28 May 2012

43 comments, Last at 31 May 2012, 7:45pm by chemical burn

Comments

1
by Drunkmonkey :: Mon, 05/28/2012 - 10:14am

I'm sorry, but why in the world would the Colts trade for Orton even by week 8? Did they really think Peyton would make it back by the end of the season, and that he would be able to suit up? I really think that had the Colts been open to trading by week 8, it would have been to get rid of veterans for future draft picks.

I understand that at that time, they didn't know they'd be going to a 3-4 defense, they would be getting rid of Manning, or that they would be picking number 1, but still, I don't think they Colts should have given up a 3rd round pick to get Orton.

Besides, were the Colts not already ahead of the Chiefs in the waiver order? If they really wanted him, why didn't they just put in a claim?

3
by tuluse :: Mon, 05/28/2012 - 10:53am

I don't buy it either.

I also think Jeff Ireland's quote that he thought the Dolphins were "close to being competitive" at 0-7 to be hogwash too. 1) That means they're not competitive, they're just close, 2) They're 0-7, if a GM thinks his team is fine at 0-7 he's insane.

11
by Jimmy Oz (not verified) :: Mon, 05/28/2012 - 11:49pm

It's not hogwash.

1) The quote correct is "I thought we weren't far away from being competitive" which means that "they're not competitive, they're just close" so i don't understand why you're taking issue with what he's said when you agree with it.

2) He didn't think his team was fine, he thought they were close to being competitive. If they were fine, they'd at least be in play-off contention. They weren't, they were 0-7.

3) The Dolphins' 6th and 7th losses were in OT to the Broncos after giving up 15 points in the last 5 minutes & by 3 to the Giants after being outscored 10-0 in the last quarter. Narrowly beaten by a play-off team and the eventual champions is competitive.

4) The Dolphins had to change to Matt Moore against Chargers in week 4. He had a shocker against the Jets in week 6 after the bye, good numbers against the Broncos, average v Giants. The team was in a position to win in 2 out of the 3 games Moore had started.

13
by Bowl Game Anomaly :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 8:57am

"Narrowly beaten by a play-off team and the eventual champions is competitive."

Narrowly beaten by an 8-8 team and a 9-7 team sounds less impressive, though.

7
by MJK :: Mon, 05/28/2012 - 1:35pm

Yeah, at best this is just Polian making some noise, or PK overblowing it to make a good story. I just don't see the Colts going after Orton in Week 8. At that point, they were 0-8, right? Any hope of playoffs is gone at that point, and even a 0.500 season would take practically a miracle. Unless you think Orton is your QB of the future, you don't go after him. You stick with what you have and get a good draft position next year.

I do feel a little bad for Orton. He and Gradkowski should have a beer together to commiserate (although Orton is probably a bit better than Gradkowski). Both are certainly among the 32 best QB's in the league (Gradkowski is probably in the high twenties, Orton probably in the high teens), and so both deserve a starting job. However, it's obvious that neither will ever be Manning/Brees/Brady, and so both are pretty much relegated to being a career backup at this point, as teams search for "their franchise QB".

8
by Marko :: Mon, 05/28/2012 - 2:13pm

Agreed that there's no way the Colts would have traded for Orton. What PK forgets is that by this point, the push to Suck for Luck was full speed ahead. Even if Polian might have tried to trade for Orton (which I don't buy), there's this other guy involved named Jim Irsay. I can't believe that Irsay would have signed off on a trade for Orton when he was so focused on getting Luck.

I also think at this point it was pretty clear Irsay was ready to move on from Manning (and, with the benefit of hindsight, from Polian, too). What makes PK think that Irsay would have wanted to keep Manning and pay him all of the money due under his contract when he could start over with Luck? Also, even if the Colts somehow had traded for Orton and ended up with the third or fourth pick in the draft, what makes King think that the Colts wouldn't have still released Manning and traded up to the #1 or #2 pick and ended up with Luck or Griffin?

9
by Jimmy :: Mon, 05/28/2012 - 3:13pm

Isn't the GM who might have kept his job with a later trade deadline Jerry Angelo? The deadline would have to have been later than week ten but Orton could have gotten the Bears to the playoffs for Cutler and Forte to return. Does Jerry get the can if the Bears had say, won a playoff game?

37
by LionInAZ :: Wed, 05/30/2012 - 12:45am

I'm having immense difficulty imagining what Mike Martz would have done with Kyle Orton, or even if he would have wanted Orton to begin with.

38
by Marko :: Wed, 05/30/2012 - 2:10pm

That's nothing compared to the difficulty that Bears fans like me had watching Caleb Hanie. The Bears lost multiple eminently winnable games largely due to Hanie's incompetence. All they needed was a marginally competent QB and they would have won at least 3 more games (against Oakland, KC, and Denver) and made the playoffs.

39
by tuluse :: Wed, 05/30/2012 - 2:20pm

The Bears put a wavier request on Orton. So they wanted him to some degree.

16
by Revenge of the NURBS (not verified) :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 9:23am

"Besides, were the Colts not already ahead of the Chiefs in the waiver order? If they really wanted him, why didn't they just put in a claim?"

That's the key point. They were ahead of everybody in the waiver order. If they had wanted Orton, all they had to do was claim him.

Keep in mind that Polian once claimed on his radio show that, as GM of the Panthers, he believed that Marvin Harrison would be an all-time great WR, and he regretted not being able to draft him. It took very little time for a number of fans to point out that, in fact, Polian could have drafted Harrison with the Panthers, but he took Tim Biakabutuka instead. Point being, he's not above a little revisionist history.

2
by Will Allen :: Mon, 05/28/2012 - 10:21am

Peter King is old enough that he oughta' know that the Jim Irsay tweet is a title of a REO Speedwagon album from the '70s. I know this because I always hated REO Speedwagon, especially after the meatheads living in the dormroom next to mine in the '80s played them constantly.

23
by Raiderjoe :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 1:34pm

REO Speedwagon us soft rock mjsic. It is for loverboys, ladies nd nerfs and kids

41
by justanothersteve :: Wed, 05/30/2012 - 2:36pm

REO was a decent 70's rock band. Then the 80's started and they turned into a bad Styx/Journey clone.

4
by big_jgke :: Mon, 05/28/2012 - 11:34am

In a long career of asinine articles and mangled syntax, this may have been the Peter Kingiest of all.

5
by FrontRunningPhinsFan :: Mon, 05/28/2012 - 11:49am

I think its weird he sees the New Orleans paper changing to print only 3 days a week as a tragic thing. Everyone knows it's a dying medium. Online is easier and cheaper for both the producers of the content and the consumers. Why is this a tragic event?

The sports reporter talking about delivering newspapers during Hurricane Katrina as if it were some transcendental, life-affirming experience for the victims? I don't buy it. They were probably excited to have something they could use as toilet paper. I don't mean to cheapen any harm the victims of the storm endured at all...

But really, everyone in the newspaper business has known this has been coming for a long long time. Frankly I'm suprised MOST newspapers even have a print edition at all anymore. Is there anyone out there, other than the reporters who don't want to adjust to the online world, that really cares?

It just seems like he's complaining that the world is trying to leave him behind and he'd rather lament than adjust.

Fire Jeff Ireland.

10
by Joseph :: Mon, 05/28/2012 - 4:42pm

Except that I (as a former New Orleans resident with family still living there) have seen multiple reports at multiple times from at least 2 different sources that more NO adults* read the TP than any other metropolitan city/newspaper. In one, the TP had 58%, and no one else had over 50%. In another, the TP was over 60%, and I believe the only one over 50% was Milwaukee's paper.
Also, not mentioned by PK, but worth repeating, is that the TP sold more than triple their daily papers the Monday after the Saints won the SB, and that people drove as much as SIX hours!! to pay $.50 to get their copy. IIRC, they sold almost as many copies of that Monday paper as their daily paper Tues. & Wed.

The toilet paper allegation is ridiculous. It was the hope that all was not lost in the city, as the newspaper was being printed and handed out. Remember, cell phone contact was almost non-existent, as was the mail, electricity, and other basic services. Think of the idea conveyed in Kevin Costner's "The Postman."

*The aforementioned studies compared the number of adults in a metro area to the # of copies sold, iirc. For example, if a city had 500K adults, and a paper sold 100K copies, they counted it as 20%. They may have counted 1.5 adults per copy, or just one. I don't remember for sure.

18
by Aaron Brooks Go... :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 9:31am

Bear in mind many cities larger than New Orleans have two (or more) papers, who split the city's allegiance.

Detroit, Philly, Chicago, LA, DC, and New York come to mind.

28
by sundown (not verified) :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 2:46pm

I believe one of Detroit's dailies went to 3 days a week a couple years ago. The number of cities with multiple papers is declining rapidly. And joint operating agreements are in place in a number of cities that still have two where they share resources to try and stay afloat.

32
by Aaron Brooks Go... :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 3:55pm

That's Detroit and Philly, although the Free Press remains a daily. Still, though, the existence of a second paper depresses the market share ratio of the more successful paper. It's easier to have a high percentage of the eyes when it's a one-horse town.

20
by Dean :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 9:56am

You mean David Brin's The Postman?

21
by FrontRunningPhinsFan :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 10:14am

I stand corrected. It's much more meaningful to hear it from someone who actually experienced it and doesnt have a financial interest in trying to keep it around.

Again I didn't mean to cheapen the experience of the victims at all. Living in Florida I've been through numerous hurricanes (though none as serious as Katrina obviously; Andrew is the only one that comes close) and newspapers were just never on anyone's mind.

It might also be due to what most people think is sub-par newspaper reporting anyway.

Fire Jeff Ireland.

42
by SandyRiver :: Thu, 05/31/2012 - 10:10am

Nitpick on hurricanes: Andrew was far more intense at landfall than was Katrina, though Katrina was larger in extent. Had Andrew's track been about 30 miles farther north, thus a direct hit on Miami, its property damage probably would've rivaled that from Katrina. Loss of life would still have been far lower than caused by Katrina.

43
by chemical burn :: Thu, 05/31/2012 - 7:45pm

Well, the difference between a landfall in Miami and one in Waveland is that New Orleans was depressingly ill-prepared to handle the shock of the storm because of a mixture of its legendary political corruption, Federal government incompetency and poor areas in neglect to a point of embarrassment. Miami has its problems as a city, New Orleans and Katrina is a pretty unique socio-political debacle. Also, Lousiana has racial tensions between New Orleans and the rest of the state that can't really compare to anywhere else in the country, so relief works and the police where having to navigate those issues while dealing with looting, the aggressive well-armed response to looting, unfounded rumors of violence and some guy on the North Shore shooting at rescue helicopters. (That is, that had to deal with those issues when white police officers weren't, you know, straight up murdering people.) Katrina unfortunately brought out the worst in humanity in a variety of dispiriting ways that are hard to understand if you weren't living there (or in the suburbs) when it hit... So what I'm saying is that the magnitude of the storm isn't the only issue...

35
by Kyle D. (not verified) :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 4:35pm

"Is there anyone out there, other than the reporters who don't want to adjust to the online world, that really cares?"

Yes, they're called advertisers. Print inserts for grocery stores, electronics, department stores, etc. remain a huge revenue source for newspapers and the advertisers haven't yet found a more effective way to get them into shoppers' hands. That's where the idea of not printing every single day comes from--the days that the advertisers don't want to insert are the days that get eliminated.

6
by Cro-Mags (not verified) :: Mon, 05/28/2012 - 12:16pm

About time the Rules Committee gave the Colts some love!

12
by Honest Abe (not verified) :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 4:22am

Excellent, provocative column by Peter King, as always. His humanity shines through.

14
by Bowl Game Anomaly :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 8:58am

Been a while since we had a troll around here.

26
by dryheat :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 2:33pm

Only since last MMQB thread...and the one before that....

What the 300 were to Sparta, Honest Abe is to Peter King.

33
by Aaron Brooks Go... :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 3:58pm

No one should have to defend Peter King's hot gate.

36
by Karl Cuba :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 5:11pm

But it might take 300 armoured men to do it.

15
by Bowl Game Anomaly :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 9:17am

Tweet of the Week IV

"You can tune a piano, but you can't tuna fish."

-- @JimIrsay, the Colts' owner, on Friday morning.

???

19
by Will Allen :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 9:52am

Petey's intellect is such that a tweet which repeats a pun, used as an album title by a bad '70s band, posted by a gasbag owner, whose greatest accomplishment is being fathered by a guy who made enough money to buy an NFL team before doing so was the sole province of billionaires, is the most notable thing in that medium that ol' Kingey read all week.

The only thing this column is missing is Kingey ridiculing the intelligence of some 30k a year prole, whose lot in life is keeping Petey's fat, colonoscoped, ass comfortable, with the use of Time/Warner's expense account.

17
by Dean :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 9:28am

When is Pete going to take his annual vacation and make his column readable for a month?

22
by Raiderjoe :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 1:30pm

Maybe he could get FO reqders to write his cloumn wjen he gors on a vacatiob.

16 of us could each write one paragraoh

24
by Dean :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 2:11pm

That would be fun, but it would be such a disjointed mess that it might resemble his actual column. Better yet would be to let Aaron, Ben, and Mike co-write it. I'll gladly sit back and let them do all the work.

25
by FrontRunningPhinsFan :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 2:32pm

Not to mention the fact that the editors would never let Raiderjoe's Raiders paragraph get to print without ruining it.

Fire Jeff Ireland.

27
by tuluse :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 2:41pm

Have you seen some of the stuff King has written that they've printed? I'm not sure the website has editors.

29
by sundown (not verified) :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 2:52pm

Proofreading and editing have all but disappeared, certainly as far as online is concerned. I think at best somebody may skim PK's stuff to make sure he hasn't obviously defamed anybody just as a CYA move, but that's it.

And it's certainly not limited to his column. I remember one of the last Tuesday Morning Quarterbacks I read where Easterbrook ran through a list of (supposedly) all the movies ever made about Wyatt Earp where he missed the Kevin Costner one actually called "Wyatt Earp." Clearly, nobody was reading that one, either. And then all these places wonder why they're losing reader share.

31
by tuluse :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 3:14pm

At least that was a Page 2 article and not the main attraction of their site.

40
by justanothersteve :: Wed, 05/30/2012 - 2:34pm

All the more reason to have raider joe write PK's column.

34
by Independent George :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 3:59pm

They already did it.

30
by Led :: Tue, 05/29/2012 - 2:58pm

King demonstrates his objection to the media overhyping Tebow by giving one of his two Quotes of the Week to. . . Tebow.

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