Month: April 2020

Premier Players Who Can Quickly Impact Their NFL Teams

The 2020 NFL Draft has come and gone and it was a strange old beast. Watching the premier players of college football be picked while sitting at home in their basements instead of being in the green room at the draft was a pretty surreal experience that maybe gives an inside peek into our new normal of sports for the foreseeable future.

As the only show in town – and basically the world – this draft was always going to get more attention than normal, something that isn’t easy for what is already a show-piece event on the calendar. A total of 32 premier players were plucked from the college ranks on Thursday night for Round 1, and here are five picks we at Premier Players look forward to seeing on the field:

Pick 1:  Joe Burrow, Quarterback, LSU/Cincinnati Bengals
Sometimes the key to a draft is not to over think it. That is what the Bengals did here as they took the guy who was the best player in the FBS (football bowl subdivision) last season. Burrow threw for an insane 5,671 yards and 60 touchdowns in 2019 and by not trading out of this pick the Bengals have their successor to Andy Dalton for the foreseeable future.

Pick 5:  Tua Tagovailoa, Quarterback, Alabama/Miami Dolphins
The Dolphins had a direct choice between Tagovailoa and Justin Herbert of Oregon who went one pick later. Dan Marino was the last Pro Bowl QB the Dolphins had and they swooped on Tagovailoa who was the prospective No. 1 pick in the draft before the 2019 season unfolded. If Tua can stay healthy he has all the intangible traits of a premier player to go with his football and leadership skills.

Pick 7:  Derrick Brown, Defensive Tackle, Auburn/Carolina Panthers
The Panthers sat at No. 7 and came out of the first round with the best run stopper in the entire draft. Brown is a monster of a player who routinely saw teams in college game plan against him by running all their plays in the opposite direction. His partnership with Pro Bowler – and pass rush DT specialist Kawann Short – is going to be exciting to watch.

Pick 13:  Tristan Wirfs, Offensive Tackle, Iowa/Tampa Bay Buccaneers
The least sexy pick in the first round gives the Bucs a premier player to protect their soon to be 43-year-old QB. Wirfs is a classic Big 10 offensive line prospect, a player with no flash and no question who will knuckle down to work on his first day of minicamp and occupy a spot on the Bucs line for the next decade.

Pick 17:  CeeDee Lamb, Wide Receiver, Oklahoma/Dallas Cowboys
The big question about this draft in five years may revolve around how a wide receiver with the talent of Lamb slid all the way down and into the lap of the Cowboys at No. 17? Lamb had 32 touchdowns in 41 games with the Sooners and while the Cowboys seemed set at wide receiver, the value with Lamb was just too high for Jerry Jones to pass on.

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Three Premier Players To Watch In 2020 NFL Draft

The 2020 NFL Draft will be held in a sports vacuum unlike anything we have ever seen before. The draft – which was moved from a grand Las Vegas event to a bunch of teams drafting from war rooms that we can only assume are in the owners’ basements – does at least give sports fans something to watch and look forward to at a time where there isn’t much of anything going on. This is abundantly clear by the amount of money being wagered on the draft by sports bettors with nothing else to throw their money at.

The premier players that made the 2019 college football season such a delight will find their names called over the next few days. We have already picked out some athletes who will make a difference in the NFL – the likes of Joe Burrow, Tua Tagovailoa, and Chase Young.  However, here are three more premier players to watch out for (in our eyes) over the course of the draft.

Lynn Bowden – WR – Kentucky

Lynn Bowden was a high school quarterback that was about to break out as a wide receiver for Kentucky this season before injuries at QB forced him back to his old position. Bowden is a dynamic Swiss army knife of a premier player that – in the right system – will be a machine. He is a player that will take on any role to help his team win and even at the NFL level he will be one of the more dangerous mismatches on the field wherever he lines up.

Jordan Love – QB – Utah State

Love is a premier player who has polarized draft experts through this whole process. His best fit will be with a team where he can sit for a year and learn – maybe the New Orleans Saints? – before exploding onto the scene in his second year as a pro. Love led the entire Football Bowl Subdivision in interceptions last year, but his upside is huge and there is going to be a team that falls in love with Love and his unique skill set that features elite athleticism for the position.

Kenneth Murray – LB – Oklahoma

Watching an Oklahoma game last year when their defense was on the field was basically like watching The Kenneth Murray Show. Murray is a beast of an athlete – he has those long arms that scouts love and runs a 4.52 40-yard-dash at 6’2″ and 245 pounds – and he would be a scheme fit for any number of defenses looking for a tackling machine with unlimited range. If explosive, play-making linebackers are your thing – and they should be – then watch where Murray goes on draft day as he will be in impact player from this first snap in the league.

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WWE Leads The Way Back For Sports & Entertainment

We have no idea when college and professional sports will return and/or what state the various leagues will be in when their premier players return to action after this pandemic. Most of the noise and quotes coming from governors and health officials are that sports are unlikely to return until the Fall at the earliest, with many saying they don’t expect to see any action resume until 2021. Given the uncertainty around the Coronavirus, this makes sense, but enter Florida.

Last week, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed an executive order adding “professional sports and media production with a national audience” to the list of “essential services” allowed to resume operations during the state’s shelter-in-place order. This order – which had the WWE added to the list of exemptions after it was initially signed – resulted in the wrestling company producing a live show for the first time in weeks from its state of the art performance center in Orlando.

The point of this blog entry isn’t to look at this from a political standpoint. Obviously, we are not yet at the point where sports can open up in Florida – or anywhere else – and we likely won’t be for weeks if not months. The WWE is just a unique example as the performers have been isolated in Florida, or they are flown in with ‘additional safety measures’ in place.

This is, though, an interesting development for premier players in other sports leagues. The UFC being the most obvious sporting venture to consider since company boss Dana White has been desperate to get his shows up and running again.  White points out that a one-on-one bout between fighters that have been tested is about the lowest risk proposition in all of professional sports. He tried to find a spot to fight on an island, then in Las Vegas, but it will be Florida that allows his company to get up and running again.

The next possible beneficiary here would be the premier players of Major League Baseball. A shortened season in the twin spring training sites of Florida and Arizona has already been mooted and now it looks like half of that proposition is a step closer. Maybe the NBA could also find a way to play out a playoff series to determine its champion in the state at some point in the future before the ability to play games all over the country is possible again.

In a world without premier players and without sports, little nuggets like this give us hope for the future of our favorite pastimes.

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NBA Game of Horse Reminder of Classic Commercial

In a world that still needs sports – but that looks increasingly like the wait for the major ones to come back will be longer than we want – it is always interesting to hear a little good news.

The NFL Draft will be going ahead as planned (albeit virtually), the NRL rugby competition in Australia – a county that has not been hit as hard as many others at this point because of its geographical isolation – is looking to get back to something by the beginning of June, and – amazingly – we are about to see some of the premier players in basketball put on a televised HORSE challenge on ESPN.

It is an idea so crazy that it just might work and – if it does – it needs to become a weekly thing until we get the rest of our sports back.

The headliners for the competition are Chris Paul, Trae Young, and Tamika Catchings, a 2020 Hall of Fame inductee. Odds are that everyone reading this has played HORSE at some point in their life, but the basic concept is that if someone makes a shot you have to replicate that shot to avoid picking up a letter. When you have missed enough shots to spell out the world HORSE, you are done.

One catch for this competition is that dunking is not allowed, something that seems fair with Zach LaVine in the field and given his ability to do trick dunks that the rest of the field would find problematic. The hope for ESPN has to be that along with the standard shots, they have a daredevil or two in the field who will be trying their best to recreate the iconic Michael Jordan and Larry Bird McDonald’s commercial on their network.

Speaking of Bird and Jordan, how cool would it be to see this concept expanded to some sort of legends version with those two and a number of other premier players of the game’s history competing. Sports may have stopped, but ingenuity like this is what makes America great and long may this type of innovation continue in the sporting world.

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Premier Player Ionescu Voted AP Player of The Year

You don’t see many players dominate a sport like Oregon senior guard Sabrina Ionescu was able to in the Covid-19 shortened 2019-20 women’s college basketball season. Ionescu was named as the unanimous Associated Press Women’s Basketball Player of the Year, only the second player since the award was first given in 1995 to sweep all 30 votes after Breanna Stewart of UConn in 2016.

Ionescu also became just the eighth player to be named three times as an AP All-American after a career with the Ducks where she shattered records. This premier player became the first player in NCAA history – male or female – to post a career triple-double mark of over 2,000 points, 1,000 rebounds and 1,000 assists.

It is this ability to do anything on the court to help her team win that characterized Ionescu’s tenure with the Ducks. There are many that believe Oregon would have been the favorites for the NCAA Championship this season if the games had been played, with Ionescu averaging 17.5 points, 9.1 assists, and 8.6 rebounds per game after returning to school to chase the NCAA title that had eluded her.

Oregon, with a 31-2 record, was the Pac-12 regular season and tournament champions when the season was cancelled. Head coach Kelly Graves called Sabrina “A transcendent basketball player” and “The ultimate leader.” These are the traits that Ionescu showed this year.

This premier player wasn’t happy with just being good enough at certain aspects of the game, she wanted to be the best in the country. That will to win – to know when to shoot and when to pass in a purely unselfish way – is what set her apart. Add in a drive and a work ethic that the late Kobe Bryant would have been proud of and you can see why Ionescu is the favorite to be taken with the No. 1 pick in the 2020 WNBA Draft this spring.

Ionescu is the prototypical basketball player. After completing her college chapter, she will be one WNBA player that young players can look up to and learn from with her ability to do literally anything she wants on the court.

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