Fantasy Rewind: LaDainian Tomlinson
Even though superstar RB Adrian Peterson enjoyed a breakout rookie season in 2007, the consensus number one pick in most fantasy football drafts in 2008 was Chargers RB LaDainian Tomlinson.
But like most things in life, by the end of the season, people were wishing they hadn't gone with the consensus.
2008 Recap
Tomlinson, as well as the Chargers, came in with very high expectations for the NFL season. LdT (the real LT retired in '93) was looking to rebound from a down year in '07 based on his standards (1,474 rushing yards and 18 total TDs) and an incident in the AFC Championship which damaged his reputation as being a tough player.
Although cleared to play vs. the Patriots after a week of practice, Tomlinson only took two carries before pulling himself out for the rest of the game and sitting on the bench with his hood over his helmet.
But things in '08 didn't turn out as planned. He suffered from a toe injury from the get go and along with rest of the Chargers, came out of the gate sleepwalking.
Another problem for Tomlinson was that for whatever reason, Norv Turner's run blocking schemes have failed to open consistent holes for him to run through and often times LdT was running right into defensive lineman which had beaten the Chargers lineman to position. It's tough to break those longs runs we became accustomed to seeing from No. 21 when the LB or S was now plugging those holes, which were gaping in '06.
Over the final month of the season, he began to raise his productivity level, and not surprisingly, the Chargers also found their rhythm and ran the table to make the playoffs, but in the end, he finished off the season with a modest 1,110 yards and 12 total TDs.
2009 Outlook
While talk of Tomlinson beginning to show his age is real, he's been nicked for the better part of two seasons, there's still enough left in the tank to have a solid season. And talk of making Darren Sproles the featured back in San Diego is laughable; the 5'6" scat back would get destroyed over the course of the season.
What he needs in order to have a productive fantasy season again is help from the guys up front and the scheme in general. Very few backs in NFL history have been able to dominate without a very good line in front of them. And that applies to Tomlinson.
He doesn't have the explosiveness or shiftiness that he had three years ago, but he can still get the job done and our bet is that he'll still get enough carries/attempts to warrant a high draft choice next season, just not No. 1. He will more likely go in the nine-12 range.
Copyright (c) 2009 Bleacher Report, Inc.
Secret to Steelers Coach Tomlin's Success: Take Notes
TAMPA, Fla. -- Sometimes in the off-season, he creeps down to the basement in the middle of the night and pulls an old Franklin Planner from the stacks. Pittsburgh Steelers Coach Mike Tomlin - reluctant intellectual - goes back to school then, flipping through the meticulous notes he has kept since he was a youngster, line after line bringing back the memories of what he did in a practice, of how a coach handled a wayward player, of the goals he hoped to accomplish that season.
For years, Tomlin tried to shield his smarts from view. When the "My Child is an Honor Roll Student" bumper stickers arrived in the mail, Tomlin threw them in the garbage before his mother could put them on the car. It was weird, he thought, when his friends first realized in 11th grade that he had gotten straight A's. Even at William and Mary, an elite college just a few dozen miles from his home in Newport News, Va., he playfully mocked one of his best friends as Poem Boy, only to quote Robert Frost in his news conference after the Steelers won the American Football Conference championship last week.
But those notes in the basement serve as a road map of Tomlin's meteoric career rise and inform his decisions still. The 1996 volume is a particular favorite because Tomlin was a graduate assistant at the University of Memphis, with the ideal fly-on-the-wall vantage point to observe coaches while bearing few responsibilities. Nobody, save perhaps Tomlin himself, could have imagined that a dozen years later - only two years after he met much of the NFL while pushing his baby's stroller through the league's annual meeting - Tomlin would become the youngest Super Bowl head coach in league history.
"Shocked is not a word that I would use," Tomlin, 36, said of landing the Steelers job in the first place. "I've always been extremely competitive. I'm a big dreamer, I guess. I've been known to be pushy."
Tomlin has never lacked for self-assurance. When he told his mother he was forsaking law school to take his first $12,000-a-year coaching job - a decision she thought was insane - he told her coolly that he had a plan. Tomlin's father, Ed, played in the Canadian Football League, but Tomlin had little relationship with him after his parents separated when he was a baby.
The lure of football came, instead, from neighborhood coaches. Athletics were viewed as a way out of a sometimes difficult neighborhood, Tomlin said, so the coaches became the disciplinarians, the guidance counselors. He wanted to be among them, even if he didn't need sports to escape. He was a wisp of a high school wide receiver, but he was also quietly stowing recruiting letters from Ivy League programs.
Tomlin wanted to be known as a jock then, not a smart kid, something he knows sounds silly now. But perhaps that was why he could always command a room, able to make the biology students and the offensive linemen equally comfortable.
"He would walk through the door at 10 o'clock at night and light up the room," said Pete Tsipas, the owner of Paul's Deli, a student hangout at William and Mary where Tomlin worked the door. "Fifteen years later, he still knows everybody's name."
At William and Mary, Tomlin bulked up and became a downfield receiving threat, establishing a team record by averaging 20.2 yards a catch. But football also provided Tomlin an opportunity for the perfect melding of the academic and athletic, and perhaps the underpinnings of his coaching style: he memorized his opponents' biographies, the better to trash-talk them. Tomlin calls himself a flatliner now, projecting only cool dressed in black on the Steelers' sideline. But back then, he was emotional - even a little cocky.
"Confidence was never a problem with Mike," said Minnesota Vikings safety Darren Sharper, a college teammate who was later coached by Tomlin when he was the Vikings' defensive coordinator. "He would talk trash not only to players, but to coaches. It was a comedy every day. He is always ready to go, trying to get guys to compete."
Tomlin and his friend and fellow receiver Terry Hammons were fans of NFL Films, and in one they noticed that the great Cleveland running back Jim Brown behaved oddly near the sidelines before games, to unnerve opponents.
"We had such delusions of our own grandeur, we would do these weird drills, we'd get dressed up to our waist, go out with our shirts off, do some push-ups and then start doing ball drills," said Hammons, who was Poem Boy and is now a lawyer in London.
Hammons calls Tomlin socially intelligent, possessing a knack for knowing what spurs others on. He was the guy singing "It's a Beautiful Morning" in the bitter cold of an off-season workout. And years later, after Steelers running back Willie Parker complained about play-calling, Tomlin noted in a news conference that Parker wasn't complaining last season, when he led the league in rushing for most of the year. The zinger delivered, Tomlin made Parker a game captain a few days later.
In college, Tomlin became a voracious student of the voluminous William and Mary playbook and game film, and he offered his suggestions to Coach Jimmye Laycock. For all his chattiness on the field, Tomlin was a deliberate thinker, given, a sociology professor said, to hanging back in an argument so he could analyze data - the thoughtful approach he takes today when talking to reporters.
From his first coaching job, with the wide receivers at Virginia Military Institute, the notebooks filled up quickly, Tomlin's career buoyed by his amalgamation of smarts and swagger. At the University of Cincinnati - his fifth career stop in five years - the secondary he took over went from being ranked 111th in the nation in pass defense to 61st in his first season. Tony Dungy and Monte Kiffin, then coaching in Tampa Bay, heard about him while they were looking for a defensive backs coach.
After putting Tomlin through a 15-hour interview, Kiffin called the veteran safety John Lynch to tell him about Tomlin's preparedness and poise, about Tomlin’s attention to technique and his plans for motivation. "Monte said, 'I have good news and bad news,' " Lynch recalled. "He said, 'I got a heck of a secondary coach.' I said, 'What's the bad news?' 'You're a year older than him.' "
Tomlin, then 28, was used to the uneasiness his youth created. When the Buccaneers held a brief minicamp early in Tomlin's tenure, he had known the players for two weeks. But he presented Lynch, a perennial All-Pro, a tape of 75 plays he thought he could improve on from the year before.
"At first, I thought, What's up with this guy?" Lynch said. "But then I started reading the detail. He'd show a play, then have a long paragraph about what he thought I could do better. I learned a lot from him right away. That sold me on him."
The Steelers were a veteran team one season removed from a Super Bowl title when Tomlin got the job Jan. 22, 2007, at age 34. The players were watching him closely. Tomlin ran an intentionally savage training camp to make the point that he was in charge and to help him determine the hardest workers.
Now the Steelers credit him for delegating authority to his assistants, rather than interfering with play-calling, and for easing up on some players as he has grown more comfortable with them.
"I like the head-scratching," Tomlin said. "I go out of my way to not put them at ease. There's nothing wrong with being in a permanent state of arousal and not finding a comfort zone."
That wisdom is undoubtedly jotted in one of his notebooks, which will stretch a little longer for this season. There is no hiding how smart Tomlin is now, but that was never the whole book on him.
A few weeks after he became the Steelers' coach, Tomlin invited Hammons, a Pittsburgh native and lifelong Steelers fan, to his first minicamp. Tomlin showed him the five Lombardi Trophies. He introduced him to the team's chairman, Dan Rooney. Hammons was overwhelmed.
"We get out on the practice field, and he'd come over to me and say: 'You know what, Terry? I could blow this whistle and all of the Pittsburgh Steelers would come running over. Do you want me to blow this whistle, Terry?' " Hammons said. "And he just laughs and walks away."
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Futile first: Lions 0-16 after 31-21 loss to Pack
GREEN BAY, Wis. (AP) -- Nobody will remember the Detroit Lions came close to winning their last game. All anyone will know - now and forever - is 0-16. The worst record in NFL history, a dubious distinction that will permanently stain everyone involved.
The Lions lost to the Green Bay Packers 31-21 on Sunday, making them the first team to go winless through a 16-game season. The 1976 expansion Tampa Bay Buccaneers (0-14) were the last NFL team to complete a season without a victory.
"I've got to live with this," center Dominic Raiola said. "I've been here eight years. This is on my resume."
It's also on the resume of Lions coach Rod Marinelli, who faces an uncertain future.
"No competitor wants to go through something like this," Marinelli said. "This is not fun to go through, obviously. But there's people going through a lot worse than this."
Asked what the next step might be if he does keep his job, Marinelli said, "Let me get through step one first."
The Lions' last loss didn't come without a fight. After falling behind 24-14 midway through the fourth quarter, Kevin Smith's 9-yard touchdown run put Detroit back within a field goal.
But Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers responded with a 71-yard touchdown pass to Donald Driver and the Lions' Dan Orlovsky threw an interception on fourth-and-27 with 3 minutes left, dooming Detroit to futility of historic proportion.
"It's just kind of numb," veteran kicker Jason Hanson said. "It's here. It's been coming, though, a train rolling down the tracks for a while. We tried to stop it. We couldn't."
The Lions were building toward this for years and now have lost 23 of their last 24 games. The 0-16 record will be a lasting testimony to the Matt Millen era. With Millen as president of the team from 2001 until he was fired on Sept. 24, Detroit won only 31 games - none this year, of course.
It's so bad that some Lions can't remember the last time they won.
"I don't ever want to be a part of this again," Orlovsky said. "We haven't won since, November of '07, maybe? I don't even know the last time we won a game."
The Lions haven't won since Dec. 23, 2007, actually, when they beat Kansas City. Green Bay is where this woeful streak began at the end of last season. Since then, the Lions have lost 17 straight and have been outscored 551-281.
Marinelli has gone 10-38 in three seasons. His future has not been announced, but team owner William Clay Ford has decided the leaders of the front office, Martin Mayhew and Tom Lewand, will be back in some capacity.
"I am positive that every aspect of what we do as a football team has to be rethought and analyzed," Hanson said.
Orlovsky was 22-of-42 for 225 yards with two touchdowns and two interceptions for the Lions, whose bid to steer clear of the record book came undone in large part because of ill-advised penalties.
Rodgers was 21-of-31 for 308 yards and three touchdowns for the Packers (6-10), and Ryan Grant and DeShawn Wynn rushed for 106 yards each.
After a disappointing season of their own, Rodgers said the Packers wanted a win to build momentum for next season. Left unsaid was that they didn't want to be the only team to lose to the Lions this year.
"We didn't want to lose, no, we didn't," Rodgers said. "But really it's not on your mind once the game starts. I didn't even think about it until the fans started chanting in the fourth quarter. They played hard, they really did."
Packers coach Mike McCarthy didn't want any part of the 0-16 discussion.
"I want to politely try to avoid the question here," McCarthy said. "That's tough. That's a tough deal. But we were focused on winning the game."
With the Lions trailing 14-7 early in the third quarter, safety Kalvin Pearson then put a hard hit on Grant to cause a fumble, and recovered the ball at the Packers 11.
Calvin Johnson caught a pass from Orlovsky and broke three tackling attempts to score a tying 14-yard touchdown with 10:20 left in the third quarter.
But the Packers drove for a 36-yard field goal by Mason Crosby early in the fourth quarter. After a three-and-out by Detroit's offense, Lions linebacker Ernie Sims' penalty for a late hit out of bounds on Grant played a key role on a drive that ended with a 5-yard pass from Rodgers to fullback John Kuhn.
The Lions weren't finished, as Orlovsky used two long completions to John Standeford to set up Smith's touchdown with 8:34 left. After the ensuing kickoff, Rodgers reared back and threw deep to Driver, who blew past Lions cornerback Leigh Bodden and ran in for a touchdown.
Orlovsky led the Lions back into Packers territory, but a taunting penalty on Smith moved the Lions back near midfield and Orlovsky threw an interception to Nick Collins.
"It was a very bad, selfish decision," Smith said. "I let my emotions get the best of me. It was tough, but it is no excuse."
Perhaps more than anything, the penalties got Raiola riled up.
"Stupid," Raiola said. "You know, just uncalled for. You're in a game like that, you can't do that. Just dumb."
And very much like the Lions.
Notes: Green Bay's Donald Driver and Greg Jennings each had 100 yards receiving Sunday. Combined with Grant and Wynn's 100-yard rushing days, it is the first time in league history a team has had a pair of 100-yard rushers and 100-yard receivers in a single game, according to Elias. ... Packers rookie TE Jermichael Finley caught his first career touchdown pass in the first quarter.
Copyright (c) 2008 The Associated Press
