Off-Topic Forum

Ummmm NOPE!  Those who know me know its Oilers full-time here. Like others I can not fathom NOT collecting Oiler rookies and Ranfords. Have we not seen what 12 years of futility looks like ...... seems last year was the "blip". LOL

Tigers live or die!

I've pretty much given up on all the sports leagues. Football was the last to go, politics seeping in did them in for me. The way I look at sports now is entirely what is in the past. I can count on 1 hand the number of players worth collecting that still play, in all sports.

As an Orioles fan who started collecting during the team’s “dark ages,” not at all.

Doc Floyd,

I have similar feelings about sports and am not convinced that there is not a hand in determining who gets the opportunity to win all of the time.

As for the collecting side, I am with you on that too but it is more for the ridiculous production state of the hobby (it is not realistic to think that one could collect each and every card of any one player).  Therefore I rather complete player collections of the cards produced before 1995 where at least there is a small chance of succeeding. I don't do this for the money so chasing a Trout or Judge RC is not even something I have looked at.  One day, I will buy a large lot of cards and find their cards in amongst the lot.

The on-the-field performance of my TCU Horned Frogs doesn't really affect my support for them. I've sat through terrible years and phenomenal years. But there have been a couple of years that some off-the-field stuff made me step back from support for the teams and my collecting.

Currently, I'm all in on TCU sports both supporting and collecting... except for two football players that I'm actively shunning because they have made some terrible decisions over the last couple of months and I just can't bring myself to support them in any way.

Yes I believe some events are fixed as well. The very last Superbowl I watched is another contributing factor. Whatever one the Panthers made it to last, think it was in 2016, Cam Newton is all I'm going to say.

It WAS the 2016 Super Bowl (#51). Cam sucked in that game. BUT, that's the way the team has always gone since they drafted him! If he's having fun and you see him smiling, he's feeling good and they usually win. When you see him PO'd, they are going to lose. The same thing happened in the rematch to kick off the 2017 season. The Broncos defense kept clobbering him and he was getting pissed. In the end, they lost because he wasn't having fun anymore. When he's mad, he makes mistakes. That's why the team goes back and forth from year to year. It would help a ton if the Panthers didn't lose their Offensive Coordinator nearly every single year. This is the 3rd straight year that the OC was given an opportunity to be a head coach somewhere else and every single one of them took it. I know Bills fans were happy about that last year! Since Cam's rookie season in 2011, he has now had 5 or 6 different OC's in 7 years. The coach has stayed the same, but even the GM has changed 3 times now.

Some sports do seem easy to fix though. In basketball, fouls called at just the right time can destroy the other team and it doesn't even have to be late in the game. Same for football. In NASCAR (or any other racing series), just deciding to put out a caution flag OR NOT put out a caution flag can determine a winner without the drivers even being invovled in the final decision. The mentality of the athletes is easy to mess with by the use of the officials!

I had high hopes for Cam, but can't stand him now. Have no idea what's going on with the Panthers these days, other than they are looking to sell the team because of some accusations against Richardson.

I might start back getting into the NHL, they are the only league that hasn't pissed me off.

The team isn't looking to sell, just Richardson. He still owns 49% of the team, so he's selling his majority stake in the team. He's been a fantastic owner, but apparently the accusations have some merit. He wouldn't have immediately announced that he's selling after the accusations went public if nothing was true. Then again, he's old and has had health issues the past few years. Maybe he just didn't want to deal with any of it. The craziest part to me is that now the bidding for his share of the team has topped what the entire organization is valued at and keeps climbing bit by bit.

As for Cam Newton, I didn't like him in the beginning and didn't want them to draft him. But he slowly gained my support. I generally like him now, but he still isn't the best leader of a team. He gets ticked off too easy and he sometimes gets pouty too. It's funny that people keep saying that the Panthers are interested in Manziel. They don't deal with players with a history like his, even if they drafted them. I see very little chance of him becoming Cam's back-up.

I do like a lot of what they've done in the off-season though. Adding Torrey Smith was a great move, even though they now need to replace Worley at CB. They let Charles Johnson go (for the 2nd year in a row), but this time they didn't re-sign him for a little less money. They went and got a guy they would have drafted in 2012 if Luke Kuechly wasn't still on the board. Now they have both of the guys they really wanted that year. If they improve the O-Line through FA or the Draft, they should be at least as good as last year.