Pixote

Bears Labor Day Update

He was a favorite of many here. I sure hope he latches on with a team and gets a shot.

I think the fact that we have yet to fill the last spot on the practice squad means we will be bringing in at least one OLman. We do not know which one, Miller, Anderson, ????? I keep on going to the various sites for news and the only thing I saw was Metcalf returning to practice, Oakley was signed by the Cardinals, and they were mentioning the missing player yet to be named on the PS. It will be interesting who we pick up. I am sure that it will just be a stop gap type of player, probably an older vet like R Brown was when we picked him up, or Miller. We will still have to address the issue of our OL next year in FA and the draft.

Good luck with the contests this year. If I remember correctly you were doing pretty good until the owners of the site for Bearstalk wiped out the server the contest was loaded onto last year, causing the contest to be aborted. Kinda of sucks the way we were treated by them all because they wanted to force us to move to their preferred "new" site. I can not prove it, but I am sure that is what happened. We will not have that problem this year!

This email was just sent to all posters entered into the TalkBears Pick'em Contests. Be sure to check to see if it arrived safely or if it wound up in your junk/spam folder. If it was diverted by your spam protector be sure to instruct your email program to allow email from the address of the contest email.

Rideau turned down offers from other teams and is now on the Bears Practice Squad.

I should have the new picksheet for week 1 up soon. Normally this would not be until Tuesday but with a game on Thursday and being the first week of the season (no game tonight to hold up the lines from Vegas) I should have it up and going today. A few things to remember: The only contest of the 3 I am running against the spread is the weekly/season selections. The Survivor Pool and the Margin Pool are both with NO POINT SPREAD. In the Margin Pool and the Survivor Pool it is VERY IMPORTANT not to use the same team more than once as your selection in each of the pools. If you choose Chicago as your margin pool selection this week, you can not select them again in the margin pool for the remainder of the year. If you select New England in the Survivor Pool this week, you can not select them again in the Survivor Pool again this year. When you submit your selections you must submit a COMPLETE PICKSHEET! You can change your selections for games that have not started up until 1 hour before the kickoff of the first game played on Sunday of that week. However, every time you submit changes, again, you must submit a COMPLETE PICKSHEET (including Survivor & Margin picks if you are entered in those pools)! When there is a Thursday Game you need to submit a complete picksheet before 1 hour of the 1st Thursday game kickoff . (Same rules for a Saturday Game played). Later in the week, if you choose to do so, you can submit a 2nd picksheet with changes for the remainder of the games to be played. They will need to be submitted prior to 1 hour before kickoff of the first game on Sunday. After this deadline no more picksheet changes will be allowed. If you miss an early deadline for a Thursday game, you will still be able to submit a COMPLETE picksheet in order to select the remaining games, obviously the game already played will not register in the program I use for the contest once the score for that game and results have been entered. Please do not wait until the last minute and miss the deadline! Your selections will not show up immediately on the contest page for 2 reasons. Every time you send in a picksheet I have to manually import that picksheet into a program on my PC at home and then upload the resulting pages to the Internet for them to show up. I will not show the players picks until the final deadline which is usually 1 hour before the start of the first game on Sunday. This is to prevent others from copying your selections. The Rules page is in the drop down on the Home page of the contest site!

Lloyd, you are the tops man, gotta give you the kudos, I do not know of any source that I would trust more than you when it comes to salary cap analysis. I think everyone on this forum from the old Bearstalk site would agree with me on this. I am anxious to see your new breakdown when you get around to publishing it. Great to have you as our in-house expert!

I am pulling for this guy to resign with us. I would still like us to pick up another FA for the OL in addition to signing Miller. Miller, as I said before, played pretty good for us until last year. Last year he played injured and it was not pretty. If now healthy, what better way to provide quality backup to our OL than with a player who could step in from day one, knows the system, knows the players, and would provide continuity? Miller's Decision Could Come Today

I see where P.J. Pope is now on Denver's Practice Squad. With Denvers OL and the way this kid played here, he could be a good player for them if he makes it up to the "53".

The latest blurb I got from Footballguys.com is below, as much as I like Simms (I know, many of you do not) and wanted Simms, unless we traded Rex, no way do we replace Caleb with Simms. I think Hanie is a year or two away from being our starter and possibly the best QB prospect we have had in decades.

Actually I thought the figure Turner mentioned was more like 35 plays a game. Kind of academic, but that would put him more in the line of a starter. Of course, if our offense is as bad as many on the forum has indicated we will be, 35 snaps might be all the offense gets for the entire game, like in a dozen 3 and outs

I like this move, I would not be at all surprised if he makes it back to the 53 man roster. WRs get dinged up every year and sooner or later he will be able to come back up this year and get another chance to stick.

Man I would want the guy who drafts players on teams practice squads in my fantasy league, LOL, I might have a chance to win one!

Bought a HD TV little over a year ago and never got around to subscribing to HD programming and buying proper cables for it. I know, waste of time, but hey, I procratinate all the time. If I had only knew what I was missing I would have been a bit more proactive. The technician just finished the job, got Dish network HD package including NFL Network, ESPN channels, and Big 10 channels (along with many others) all in HD. Watching the replay of the Bears Cleveland game as I type. What a difference. I swear I can see every blade of grass on the field, LOL.

LT2_3, can you help us out, we have had conflicting reports, and some disagreements on the forum, about how much cap space the Bears currently have. One report on the net had us with a little over 9 Million under the cap. another had us at about 1 Million under the cap. What is your expert opinion on this point of discussion?

Deadline for signing up has passed, but if anyone still wants to sign up for the games I will allow you to do so as long as I get your information by tomorrow morning early (say 8 AM CST). Here is a Link to the Rules page Here is a Link to the Home page Click Here to see which members of the forum are signed up to play the Contests All you need to do is send me an email at j.w.sheridan@comcast.net and let me know: Your forum username The email address you want me to send confirmations to A password you would like to use to submit your picksheets with

Gotcha, sorry for the misread. There has been so many on the forum not only thinking the glass as half empty rather than half full, many are thinking it is totally empty. I would at least like to see the first regular season game against a high quality team to make some form of judgement before I decide who I want with the first overall selection in the 2009 NFL Draft, LOL.

Deadline for signing up has passed, but if anyone still wants to sign up for the games I will allow you to do so as long as I get your information by tomorrow morning early (say 8 AM CST). Here is a Link to the Rules page Here is a Link to the Home page Click Here to see which members of the forum are signed up to play the Contests All you need to do is send me an email at j.w.sheridan@comcast.net and let me know: Your forum username The email address you want me to send confirmations to A password you would like to use to submit your picksheets with

I think it was a matter of Angelo feeling he had to draft a player because of need instead of the best player available which is what he usually tries to do. I heard on the Score a discussion about the drafting of Okwo & Bazuin. Going into that draft JA thought he would be losing A Brown & L Briggs. He felt he needed to draft do to "projected needs" at those positions. Now we see what can happen when you draft for need over BPA. You can come up empty a lot as did the Bears.

How much they "suck" will be determined primarily by how "good" Kyle is at QB. Our Wrs in the last few years have been hampered greatly by erratic play of the QB. I know it is a 50/50 situation, the Wr is responsible also for our Passing Offense, but let's face it, rather it be the lack of protection for the QB or the bad play of the QB, out Wrs have not been given much of a chance to shine. Ho productive do you think Moss, Owens, or Wayne would have been in our offense last year? I fear they would not have done very good at all, probably posting half the numbers they did in 2007 with good QBs throwing them the ball.

I strongly expect JA to go after a FA OLman. Like I said in an earlier post, the availability of W Anderson reminds me a lot of when R Brown became available and we signed him. Anderson, if healthy, can give us a stop gap solution which will still need addressing with youth in the near future.

But may now sign for less. This is basically the same scenerio that brought Ruben Brown to the Bears a few years ago and it worked out quite well for us. Now that he is without a paycheck he may very well sign for less and would be a good stop gap measure for us.

After watching the first 2 or 3 weeks of games - games that count, games that have game plans established, games that have all our starters starting, then ask me and I will be more than happy to give you my opinion. Right now, no one knows for sure what this team is capable or not capable of on the basis of meaningless preseason games used to audition rookies and experiment with different plays and formations. No one knows. We are all guessing.