NMU PACKER WEEKEND XXVIII (-I): Football Alums Making Titletown Great Again since 1989. FOUR!!
Thursday, February 26, 2015
NMU PACKER WEEKEND 27 (-1):
WHO WILL BE THE OPPONENT?
The Green Bay Packers’ opponents for 2015 are as follows including Editor's Odds for each of the home games being the game for NMU Packer Weekend 27 (-1) (NOTE: The Super Bowl took a one-year break from Roman Numerals and so shall we).
Also included are the iconic Dave Boss NFL Properties posters from the 1960's you may remember from Al's & Sal's Bar in Iron River and/or your Grandpa's Den:
HOME: Chicago Bears (division) , Detroit Lions (division) , Minnesota Vikings (division) , Dallas Cowboys (NFC East) , Kansas City Chiefs (AFC West), St. Louis Rams (NFC West), San Diego Chargers (AFC West), Seattle Seahawks (NFC West)
The NFL expanded to 32 teams in 2002 with the addition of the Houston Texans.
In addition, the NFL realigned for the first time since 1970—into eight divisions of four teams each—and the scheduling formula that was introduced guarantees for the first time that all teams play each other on a regular, rotating basis.
Although the number of teams has increased to 32, the number of playoff teams remains the same at 12.
Under the NFL scheduling formula, every team within a division plays 16 games as follows:
Home and away against its three division opponents = 6 games
The four teams from another division within its conference on a rotating three-year cycle = 4 games.
The four teams from a division in the other conference on a rotating four-year cycle = 4 games
Two intra-conference games based on the prior year’s standings = 2 games.
These games will match a first-place team against the first-place teams in the two same-conference divisions the team is not scheduled to play that season.
The second-place, third-place, and fourth-place teams in a conference will be matched in the same way each year.
The schedule format takes each team through a cycle of games—home and away—against every other team in the league. From 2002-2009, every team played every other team at least twice—once home and once away. After the 2008 season, a decision was made to continue with the same rotation in 2010 and beyond.
In determining how to begin the divisional rotation in 2002, the displacement of teams from their old divisions in the new alignment was taken into account. Preference was given to scheduling games with former division rivals and other regional opponents for clubs realigned from otherwise intact divisions.
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Police car totaled, pedestrian injured in chain-reaction crash at Mackinac Bridge
1 / 4
-5da7d505087a4049.jpg
The Mackinac Bridge is shown during wintertime in this reader-contributed MLive file photo.
NORTHERN MICHIGAN -- A chain-reaction crash that closed the Mackinac Bridge amid white-out conditions Tuesday started with a man exiting a vehicle on the north end to switch places in the car with his wife, who had been driving, authorities say.
That man was struck while outside the vehicle and seriously injured on the bridge's north end exit area. Then at least 11 other vehicles - possibly as many as 14 - were involved in several separate crashes close by, state police Sgt. Michael Powell said.
The injured man's condition was not immediately clear.
Motorists earlier on Feb. 24 were warned of high winds and blowing snow that was already making travel difficult. Speeds were restricted on the bridge. Visibility was especially low at the far north and south ends of the bridge where drivers were lowest to the water, Powell said.
It was in this area on the north end where an older couple found driving difficult, police say. They decided to switch drivers off to the side and the man exited the vehicle to walk around to the driver's seat. He was struck by a vehicle, which started a chain-reaction crash, Powell said.
A state trooper responding amid a white-out found a plow truck "coming right at him," Powell said. The trooper swerved out of the way and was struck by part of the plow, then hit a parked semi truck, Powell said.
The trooper was not injured, but his state patrol vehicle appeared to be totaled. The trooper took the best evasive action he could, Powell said.
The bridge had been cleared before 1 p.m. of the damaged vehicles, but remained closed until about 2:30 p.m. as motorists waited for winds to die down. Numerous vehicles were parked on either end of the bridge and in lots nearby.
Wind chill readings were expected in the negative digits for much of the state Tuesday as higher winds pushed snow already on the ground. Some new snow accumulation also was expected.
Powell advised drivers moving in white-out conditions not to stop in the roadway or try to exit a vehicle, because of low visibility for other motorists.
MORE "SUPER BOWL AT 50":
THE SUPER BOWL &
ROMAN NUMERALS
SUPER BOWL TAKING A BREAK FROM THESE SYMBOLS OF PRETENSION FOR SUPER BOWL "50"
By Gregg Rosenthal
The NFL announced Wednesday that it will be called Super Bowl 50, rather than Super Bowl L. This will be the first Super Bowl in over 40 years to not use Roman numerals. The league revealed that news, in addition to the official logos for the game on Wednesday. The national logo is to the right, and there is another regional logo. This will only be a one-time, one-year change away from using Roman numerals.
The NFL will return to Roman numerals for Super Bowl LI, slated for February 2017 at Reliant Stadium in Houston.
Roman numerals were first employed for Super Bowl V, the Baltimore Colts' victory over the Dallas Cowboys in January 1971.
Why does the Super Bowl use Roman numerals?
The NFL has used Roman numerals since Super Bowl V.
Roman numerals may have gone the way of cursive penmanship for the average American, but once a year, during the Super Bowl, America gets a crash course in counting with letters.
The championship game has been keeping count in Roman numerals since Super Bowl V in 1971, and Roman numerals for the first four Super Bowls were retroactively used. Lamar Hunt, former owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, is credited with the idea of using Roman numerals, according to Chiefs historian Bob Moore.
"It was [Hunt’s] brainchild," said Moore of the numbering system in an interview with Yahoo. "I think people felt from the start that it had something to it, even if they couldn’t quite put their finger on exactly what it was. Before long it was just part of it. Now it wouldn’t be the same without it."
Hunt, who also gave the Super Bowl its name, is one of the founders of the American Football League and was on a committee to organize the first Super Bowl in 1967, when it was still officially called the NFL-AFL Championship.
Instead, NFL and AFL representatives decided to number the games, rather than referring to them by year, to prevent confusion due to the fact that the championship game is played in a different calendar year than the regular season.
The Roman numerals were used to make the game seem more prestigious, back when the Super Bowl was not yet the most watched television event of the year. “It’s much more magisterial,” Moore told the AP.
In the early years, the Roman numerals were simple and recognizable, but they got more complex as the years went on. Many people have complained about the Roman numeral system, saying it is pretentious and outdated.
But the NFL is committed to honoring its roots.
However, for next year's Super Bowl 50, the NFL is taking a one-year break from the traditional Roman numerals and will opt for the Arabic numerals instead. This move was made because of concerns about confusion arising from using only an L, the Roman numeral for 50, in the event's name. The NFL will return to Roman numerals for Super Bowl LI.
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
There's a new, comprehensive NMU Football Alumni & Friends Group on Facebook.
Please join. FOUR!!!
THE SUPER BOWL AT 50, CON'T:
Before it was Super
Inside
Coach Vince Lombardi after his Green Bay Packers beat the Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10, on Jan. 15, 1967, in the inaugural edition of the game that became known as the Super Bowl. About a third of the seats were unfilled.Credit Bettmann/Corbis
Before the first Super Bowl, on Jan. 15, 1967, the two teams — the N.F.L.’s Green Bay Packers and the American Football League’s Kansas City Chiefs — struggled over what kind of ball to use.
The A.F.L.’s football (manufactured by Spalding) was a quarter-inch longer, slightly narrower and more tacky on its surface than the N.F.L.’s ball (made by Wilson). The A.F.L.’s ball was said to be easier to pass, the N.F.L.’s more kickable. As a compromise, each team was authorized to use its own football while on offense.
This didn’t become much of a controversy because, by modern standards, Super Bowl I (as it is now called) was modest and quaint. Compared with the quasi-religious national spectacle that more than a hundred million Americans will watch next Sunday, the 1967 confrontation looked almost like a high school scrimmage. This should not be surprising: The Super Bowl tradition in the United States was begun, relatively speaking, as a last-minute afterthought.
In 1960, the 40-year-old N.F.L. was challenged by a new league, the A.F.L., which it tried to ignore in the way a golden retriever might deal with a yipping terrier. But the two leagues, in time, discarded their unwritten understanding not to raid each other’s teams, which resulted in expensive bidding wars.
To stop the chaos, the A.F.L. and the N.F.L. signed a deal in June 1966 that called for them to join forces by the end of the decade. They made plans to have their champion teams face each other after the 1966 season, but only that December did they choose a date and a location: the next month at the 93,000-seat Los Angeles Coliseum.
“We’re the kids from across the tracks,” Jerry Mays, the Chiefs’ defensive captain, said. “We’re coming over to play the rich kids.”
The showdown was officially called the First A.F.L.-N.F.L. World Championship Game. But after watching his children enjoying Wham-O’s bouncy new Super Ball, the A.F.L.’s founder, Lamar Hunt, son of the maverick Dallas oil tycoon H. L. Hunt, told N.F.L. Commissioner Pete Rozelle that the game should be called something like the Super Bowl, although he was sure that name could be improved. The name was quickly adopted by other owners and much of the news media.
Both leagues had binding television contracts, so the first Super Bowl was televised on both CBS (with the announcers Jack Whitaker, Ray Scott, Frank Gifford and Pat Summerall) and NBC (with Curt Gowdy, Paul Christman and Charlie Jones). No other Super Bowl has been carried by more than one TV network.
NBC and CBS each paid $1 million for the privilege, selling commercials for $70,000 to $85,000 per minute; they hawked 10-cent Muriel cigars and McDonald’s hamburgers (“Over Two Billion Sold”). CBS tried to draw viewers by preceding its Super Bowl coverage with an exhibition by the Harlem Globetrotters.
An estimated 50 million to 60 million Americans watched that first game, (COMPARED WTH 114 M today)foreshadowing the Super Bowl’s commanding place in modern American life, which drove Norman Vincent Peale, the minister and author, to say in 1974,
“If Jesus Christ were alive today, he’d be at the Super Bowl.”
The live broadcast of the 1967 game was blacked out on TV stations within 75 miles of Los Angeles, but this did not significantly help ticket sales (the formal price for the most expensive seat was $12).
Some local football fans were so furious about the blackout that they deliberately stayed away. Despite Rozelle’s prediction that the Super Bowl would sell out, about a third of the Coliseum’s seats were empty.
The first Super Bowl did not exactly show the incandescence of later halftimes that featured Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones. Fans were entertained instead by the trumpeter Al Hirt, the University of Arizona and Grambling College marching bands, 300 pigeons, 10,000 balloons and a flying demonstration by the hydrogen-peroxide-propelled Bell Rocket Air Men.
The focus of the game was the Packers’ renowned Brooklyn-born coach, Vince Lombardi, who conceded to the news media that the Super Bowl would be “a big football game” but contended — not very convincingly — that losing “won’t mean the end of the world.”
Behind the scenes, the usually nerveless Lombardi, who had led the Packers to three championships in five previous seasons, was chafing under the pressure he felt to demonstrate the N.F.L.’s superiority over the A.F.L. upstarts.
Lombardi’s standout quarterback, Bart Starr, said the “main problem” was that his team had never faced the Chiefs; thus there was “no basis for true comparison.” Starr felt that Lombardi “wanted to win this game very, very badly, and treated it like a personal mission.”
According to the Lombardi biographer David Maraniss, the anxious coach knotted his necktie so tautly that morning that he later had to snip it off. Interviewing Lombardi before the game, Gifford was startled to note that he was “shaking like a leaf.”
By the end of the first half, the Packers led, 14-10, but the underdog Chiefs, coached by Hank Stram, had prevailed in total yards, 181-164.
During halftime, in the Packers’ constricted Coliseum locker room, Lombardi told his men they were “too tight.” By Maraniss’s account, linebacker Ray Nitschke asked some of his teammates, under his breath, “Who the hell does he think got us so nervous in the first place?” Lombardi’s order was to “stop grabbing and start tackling.”
After the Packers won, 35-10, William N. Wallace reported in The New York Times that Lombardi was “hiding from well-wishers, as is his habit, because he cannot abide flattery.”
In his relief over the victory, Lombardi told reporters, “In my opinion, the Chiefs don’t rate with the top teams in the N.F.L.” Lombardi added, “They’re a good football team, with fine speed, but I’d have to say N.F.L. football is tougher.”
Asked to design the Packers’ 1967 Super Bowl ring, Lombardi had it emblazoned with the words “Love” and “Character.” Three years later, he died at 57 of cancer, but his name remains entwined with the history of the annual confrontation that his team was the first to win. Next weekend, when the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots meet in Super Bowl XLIX — with a standardized ball, presumably properly inflated — the victors will receive the Vince Lombardi Trophy.
Monday, February 23, 2015
IN MEMORY
Jimmy Whiteside (1961-2015) aka the Orginal Whitey.
A message from his teammate Rich Tegge on the NMU 80s Football FB Group '
Cats:
The passing of Jimmy Whiteside has been very unsettling. Although I had seen very little of Jimmy over the past 30 years since we left Northern I still held to fond memories and shared a few stories with friends of some of his antics during our time together at NMU. Why do I bring it up to you? Because I shared similar stories about many of you. I find most of the best memories I share with my non-Wildcat friends center around those I grew so close to during my tim...e as a Wildcat. Although I share them with others I rarely get the chance to reminisce with those who made those great memories. We have all gotten so busy with careers and family that we find it difficult to make the time to gather and share many of our new memories with those who today we would still call our closest and dearest friends.
My worry is that there may be more Jimmy’s out there that could use us checking in on. I don’t think any of us realized the struggles Jimmy had not because we didn’t care but because we just didn’t know. Had we, I am sure we would have rallied around him as we had rallied around one another during the years we shared as Wildcats. There were many times I was ready to walk away from the team but teammates like Danny Wyers and Dan Leveille wouldn’t let that happen. They took me under their wing and wouldn’t let me quit. They worked with me after practice and made sure I became part of the brotherhood of O-linemen. We all have stories of how one of our brothers on the team helped us through struggles others may not have known about.
Saw Whiteside play against Traverse City in the 78 Class A Semi-Finals.
For me this has been a wakeup call about the importance of my Wildcat family. I hope to reach out to as many as I can over the coming months for no other reason than to check in and catch up. I hope many of you will do the same. We may be in different places in many ways but deep down we are Wildcats and we will always share a bond few understand (my wife included) it is important that we reinforce that bond; you never know who might benefit by the uplifting opportunity to talk with one of their Cat brothers.
I hope all of you are well, I wish everyone the very best through this difficult time. The hearts of many Wildcats ache right now but I am happy for the memories I will continue to share of my times with Whitey and the rest of you I had the privilege to call teammates. Love all of you guys! Teg’s
THE SUPER BOWL AT 50
ARE THE PATS THE BEST SUPER BOWL ERA DYNASTY?
The Most Successful N.F.L. Team of the Last Half-Century
Patriots Dynasty Has a Claim on Being the Best
Left, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady celebrated with Coach Bill Belichick after their win over the Rams in the 2002 Super Bowl, and right, after their Super Bowl win over the Seahawks on Sunday.Credit Left, Jeff Haynes/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; right, Matt Slocum/Associated Press
They have won four championships, which ties Belichick for most by a head coach (with Chuck Noll) and Brady for most by a quarterback (with Terry Bradshaw and Joe Montana).
As a tiebreaker, Brady holds the record for most Super Bowl appearances by a starting quarterback, with six, while Belichick is tied with a coach other than Noll — Don Shula.
Belichick and Brady have also won their titles when N.F.L. rules have made dynasties harder to build. Consider that five franchises won at least three Super Bowls in the 20 seasons before the salary cap took effect for the 1994 season. In the last 20 seasons, only the Patriots have.
Beyond football, the Patriots arguably join the 1990s Yankees as the most impressive team in any major sport in North America over the last 40 years. Multiple championships remain the norm in the N.B.A., where a single great player or two can dominate the game. And multiple championships were common in every sport in the 1950s through the 1970s — be it by the Packers, Yankees, Celtics, Canadiens or others.
But since players have won more freedom to negotiate their contracts and to change teams, sustained excellence has become very rare. The Yankees of Mariano Rivera, Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada and Joe Torre did it. The Patriots have joined them.
A second team worth considering is the 49ers of the 1980s and 1990s. Like the Patriots, San Francisco had a run spanning 14 seasons in which it won several championships, five in the 49ers' case, with no Super Bowl losses. That team also had a regular-season record similar to the one the Patriots have had since 2001, winning about 75 percent of its games. (In fact, the 49ers’ best 14 regular seasons in a row covered a slightly different span, 1984 to 1997, and it’s the only such modern run better than New England’s.)
No player, however, played on all five 49ers championship teams. The run also spanned two head coaches, with Bill Walsh winning the first three titles and George Seifert winning the last two.
The Best Regular-Season Runs
Since the 2001 season, Tom Brady’s first as the Patriots’ quarterback, the team has a .759 winning percentage. The only franchises with better 14-year runs are the Bears (at .767) and the 49ers (.760).
If anything, a better argument against New England is that Belichick and Brady aren’t enough to make the 2001-14 Patriots count as a single team. By this definition, the Steelers of the 1970s (who won four Super Bowls in six years) may be the best candidate. More than 20 players appeared on all four championship teams.
Those Steelers, like the Packers of the 1960s, also deserve credit for their dominance. They often won handily. On the other hand, the Patriots win some style points of their own. Every one of their six Super Bowls has been decided by four points or fewer, and five of the six — the two losses to the Giants, the wins over the Seahawks, Panthers and Rams — have involved nerve-jangling final minutes.
A loss to Seattle on Sunday would have left the Belichick-Brady Patriots with two distinct periods: the early one, when they won three Super Bowls, and the late one, when they kept losing heartbreakers. The win over Seattle changed the story.
2-1 
3-1 
10-1 
12-1 
8-1 
12-1
15-1 
