It's July, and nothing, nada, diddly-squat is happening in the NFL. That hasn't stopped me from watching the NFL Network every day. Watching NFLN in July is like watching the Weather Channel on a clear day. It's repetitive, and there's nothing to talk about, but the pretty colors and the cool jazz keep you tuned in.

Here's what I've learned.

In their continuing effort to spin straw into gold, the Saints acquired former Eagles linebacker Dhancin' Dhani Jones to help bolster their run defense. Wow, I wrote that sentence without snickering. To get into the Big Easy spirit, Jones may change his victory celebration from Air Banjo to Air Trombone; he'll toot the imaginary horn after he makes an important tackle (in other words, once every four games). Before signing with the Saints, Jones said he would work for Al Gore as an environmental activist. I feel bad for the Saints defense, but on the flip side, I'm suddenly optimistic about the giant panda.

Jones was on NFLN on Friday reciting poetry. Remember that awkward moment when your girlfriend opened her journal and shared her soul-bearing blank verse with you? ("Here I sit, listening to Morrissey, my heart an empty shell.") Now imagine your girlfriend weighing 230 pounds and wearing a bowtie. That's what NFLN was like on Friday.

In other Saints news, a group of Saintsations cheerleaders has been touring Iraq. The troupe performs at military bases around the Middle East, traveling from gig to gig in Black Hawk helicopters. Talk about Bombshells over Baghdad. The tour has been going smoothly except for one hitch. At a mobile army surgical hospital, a hairy Lebanese corporal donned a miniskirt and pompoms and attempted to sneak off with the girls. He was captured and sentenced to room with Jones in training camp.

The Falcons signed NFL Europa receiver Noriaki Kinoshita, who if he makes the team will be the first player born in Japan to play in the NFL. Bobby Petrino was initially excited by the move, then disappointed to learn that Kinoshita cannot throw a Gyroball. Michael Vick and other Falcons were also disappointed that the long time Amsterdam Admiral didn't smuggle any extra goodies with him from overseas. They hoped Kinoshita could score one of those hard-to-find Nintendo Wii systems. What were you thinking?

For months, NFLN has been running an American Heart Association public service announcement featuring Steve Smith and a bunch of kids running, skating, and swimming. The "Get Up and Move" spots were fast-paced and good-natured efforts to encourage kids to exercise, and Smith looked comfortable in front of the camera. Recently, the PSA was edited: Steve Smith is out, with Matt Leinart in his place. Leinart displays all of the charisma of a department store mannequin and reads his few lines as though he's translating on the fly from Lebanese. This guy is supposed to be "Hollywood"? On camera, he's barely Glendale.

Watching the Smith PSAs made my son want to swim the English Channel and hang glide over the Grand Canyon. But when he saw Leinart, he grabbed a crate a Pop Tarts and a blanket and settled in for a Spongebob marathon. It's time to retire the Leinart ads. The health of our children is at stake.

Don't get me wrong. I like Dhani Jones. He's a Renaissance man. The trouble is, they didn't have football in the Renaissance.

In non-NFLN news, the Sporting News season preview is out, and the otherwise solid publication predicts that the Cowboys will go 13-3 this season. Yes, 13-3. Who is making these predictions ... Jon Kitna? Seriously, for the Lions to win 11 games (as predicted by the Oracle of Kitna) and the Cowboys to win 13, the Vikings will have to lose about 34 games.

Speaking of the sports bible, Donovan McNabb's rehabilitation from an ACL tear is on schedule. The Sporting News reported a few weeks ago that McNabb's regimen includes games of tag to improve agility and stop-start strength in the knee. Tag is no laughing matter: the collective bargaining agreement strictly prohibits Kick the Can, and rumor has it that Eric Mangini keeps his players in shape with a vigorous Red Light, Green Light drill. Donovan was apparently playing traditional tag, not freeze tag or TV tag ("Grey's Anatomy! You can't touch me!") TSN reports that at one point, a cornered McNabb improvised, stood at attention, and declared, "I'm a tree. You can't tag a tree." There's no truth to the rumor, however, that McNabb was hanging out with Kinoshita in Amsterdam.

I just realized that my Spell Checker is happily accepting "Kinoshita" without a little red underline. A quick Google search reveals a stunning model named Ayumi Kinoshita, a film director named Keisuki Kinoshita, a hotel named Casa Kinoshita in San Miguel, Mexico, and an NFL Europa receiver who was just signed by the Falcons. Apparently, Kinoshita is a fairly common name in Japan, and possibly Mexico. I'm told Tanier is pretty common in France, but Spell Checker never accepted it until I added it. Maybe if I could throw a Gyroball, or something.

Rookie tight end Greg Olsen signed a contract with the Bears. Olsen is eager to be in camp on time; he wants to master his timing with Rex Grossman. When he does, he'll be the first.

Okay, I'll cop: I watched a lot of NFLN on Friday because I thought I would be on. Indie filmmaker Tim Carr was hawking his movie "Leaf, an Almost True Story," and I appear in the film as a football humorist/historian. Yep, a stretch. Sadly, I wasn't in the clip Carr used, probably because I have the screen charisma of Matt Leinart.

Mike Nolan and Jack Del Rio have once again gotten league permission to wear cheap-looking suits designed by a sneaker company during games. The NFL should adopt a rule that if a coach wears a sneaker suit, then his players must wear Armani cleats. I don't have a problem with suits per se, and I know Nolan wears one as a tribute to his sick father, but I wish these guys were allowed to line up their own formalwear endorsements like NBA coaches. The typical NBA coach looks like who he is: a high-profile executive for a successful multi-million dollar corporation. The sneaker suits make Nolan and Del Rio look like Salesmen of the Month at the local used Hyundai dealership.

It could be worse, though. Rumor has it that liberal firebrand Michael Moore is working on a new film called "Slobbo," an expose on how Bill Belichick's wardrobe choices have unintended consequences for low-wage garment industry employees. In one of the film's most dramatic scenes, Moore and Belichick visit a dry cleaner for the first time in their lives.

Aaron would be miffed if I didn't mention that Football Prospectus will be out in just two weeks. A quick look at the Amazon sales board on Friday found us ranked 1,505th among books, pretty darn good for two weeks before the drop date. I told Aaron that we should call it Football Prospectus and the Deathly Hallows, but the muggle never listens to me. We're ranked 30th in sports books. Take that, Inner Game of Tennis! Be sure to check us out, even if sobriety prevents us from predicting a 13-3 season for the Cowboys or 11-5 season for the Lions.

Finally, as the father of two small children, I watch nothing but kiddie programming when I am not glued to NFL Network. I also see all of the superhero movies. I saw Spider-Man 3 and was disturbed by the amount of time Peter Parker spent dancing in the movie. I saw Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and shielded my eyes as Reed Richards performed an elaborate dance at a New York club. Superheroes should not dance. Remember the Batutsi? Be glad you don't.

I bring this up because I haven't seen Transformers yet, but I heard a song from the soundtrack by the Goo Goo Dolls. It's a ballad. Worse yet, it is in 3/4 time, making it a waltz. A Giant Robot that Turns into Motorized Vehicle to Fight Evil Waltz. Mark my word, if champagne bubbles start floating and Optimus Prime starts waltzing in that movie, I am taking my kids and marching right out of the theater.

And if old Optimus starts playing Air Banjo or reciting poetry, I'm demanding a refund.

post by Mike Tanier

I apologize that there hasn't been much activity at our blog over the past couple months, but we've finished our latest book, Pro Football Prospectus 2007, and we're ready to take more questions from the FO mailbag. In fact, this question goes way, way back to October, but I always kept it around to answer later because I knew it would make a fun blog post.

Daniel Shack: My question relates to the "Guts and Stomps" article that was in PFP 2006, and previously appeared on FOXSports.com. (You can find a copy of that article here.) I was wondering if you also found trends by analyzing each team's losses instead of its wins. For example, " Good teams wouldnt allow themselves to get blown out" or "good teams wouldn't lose close games" seem to be two of the most popular expressions I hear. Of course, we all remember Buffalo's shutout of New England in 2003.

Aaron Schatz: Good teams, it turns out, wouldn't allow themselves to get blown out, at least by bad teams. If you think of a reverse STOMP as losing by 14+ points to a team under .500, only one of the last 12 Super Bowl champions was STOMPED at any time during the regular season: the team you mentioned in your question, the 2003 Patriots. Nine out of 12 Super Bowl losers went the whole season without being STOMPED either. The exceptions are the 2006 Bears, 2002 Raiders, and 1995 Steelers, and the Bears loss of course took place in the last week of the season with some of the Chicago starters playing limited roles.

Out of 165 teams with winning records since 1995, only five were STOMPED by a losing team more than once: the 2004 Falcons, 2004 Jaguars, 2003 Cowboys, 1998 Jets, and 1996 Cowboys. Teams with more STOMP losses are 5-11-20 in the last dozen years of conference championships and Super Bowls. That "20" indicates that the majority of the time, teams meet with the same number of STOMP losses, either one or zero, because it is so rare for playoff teams to lose in this fashion during the regular season.

On the other hand, it isn't rare for a winning team or even Super Bowl champion to lose at some point during the season by at least two touchdowns. Only four of the last dozen Super Bowl champions did not have such a loss: the 2002 Bucs, 2000 Ravens, 1999 Rams, and 1998
Broncos. However, none of the other eight Super Bowl champions had more than one loss by 14+ points. Six of the 12 Super Bowl losers had two losses by 14+ points.

Teams with more blowout losses during the season won as many conference championship games as teams with fewer blowout losses (6-6-12) although the teams with fewer blowout losses do have an advantage in the Super Bowl (8-3-1).

In all, only 21 percent of winning teams have made it through the whole season without a loss by 14+ points. Plenty of those teams never even made it to the conference championship game. In fact, there were even three teams in the past dozen years with LOSING RECORDS that never lost by more than 14 points: the 2004 Chiefs, 2003 Jets, and 2001 Chargers.

Trying to measure close losses doesn't really work, because teams that make it to the conference championship games usually only have 1-4 losses and those losses are almost all close

Post by Aaron Schatz

It's easy to talk about the NFL's behavior problems. It's much more difficult to quantify them. At Football Outsiders, we like to use statistics to analyze every aspect of football. Unfortunately, there has never been an effective metric to measure arrests, suspensions, barroom brawls, or other acts of naughtiness.

Until now. After 45 minutes of intense boredom, I've developed the latest weapon in Football Outsiders' data arsenal. I call it the Violent, Immature, Criminal, or Knuckleheaded Behavior Statistic, or VICK BS. The VICK BS tells you instantly whether, on any given day, the NFL is a collection of respectable young athletes dedicated to making the world a better place, an ocean-liner-sized hand basket careening straight into hell's deepest septic tank, or something in between.

Like all of our statistics, the VICK BS is easy to compute. You only need two bits of data:

1) The number of stories in the "Headlines" box on the NFL section of FOXSports.com that relate to criminal or antisocial behavior, and

2) The number of days since an NFL player was last arrested. This value can easily be found on ProFootballTalk.com

Each of these values, by itself, is a pretty potent indicator of how prevalent bad behavior is in the NFL on any given day. Put them together, and you have a handy uber-stat. Just square the FOXSports.com headlines, divide by the days since an arrest, and you have VICK BS.

On Sunday, Mat 27th, at 6 p.m. Eastern time, five of the nine football headlines on FOXSports.com dealt with criminal or mischievous incidents. Over at ProFootballTalk.com, the counter stood at six days without an arrest. Five squared is 25, and 25 divided by six is 4.17. I did that without a calculator, folks, because I have a degree in mathematics.

So Sunday's VICK BS was 4.17. What does that mean? In the world of statistics, context is everything. That's why I devised a simple color-coded companion system for VICK BS. If you are too busy or math-phobic to deal with the actual numerical value, you can simply refer to VICK BS by its color code:

VICK BS: Zero to 0.99

CONDITION: Rosy

COMMISSIONER GOODELL'S FACIAL EXPRESSION: A guarded smile.

TYPICAL WATER-COOLER DISCUSSION: "Hey, that new Australian punter sure is giving our veteran punter a run for his money in minicamp. I'll be following that battle right up until the end of August."

VICK BS: 1.00 to 2.99

CONDITION: Orange you glad you weren't partying with the Bengals this weekend?

COMMISSIONER GOODELL'S FACIAL EXPRESSION: An embarrassed grimace.

TYPICAL WATER-COOLER DISCUSSION: "Crushing and snorting Skittles to get high just isn't right. If NFL linebackers think they can get away with it, then junior high kids will be next."

VICK BS: 3.00 to 4.99

CONDITION: Amber, the exotic dancer who works the 3 a.m. shift and tried to make off with 81,000 of your hard-earned dollars. One at a time.

COMMISSIONER GOODELL'S FACIAL EXPRESSION: Roughly the same look your wife gives you when you come home smelling like you were run over by a cement mixer filled with Makers Mark.

TYPICAL WATER-COOLER DISCUSSION: "Did you hear that Terrell Owens faked his own death to avoid paying income taxes? That man has issues."

VICK BS: 5.00 to infinity

CONDITION: Blinding, searing, oops-I-looked-straight-at-the-eclipse white.

COMMISSIONER GOODELL'S FACIAL EXPRESSION: Omega beams are actually shooting from his eyes.

TYPICAL WATER-COOLER DISCUSSION: "Gosh, I had no idea that there was a panda roller derby subculture in the NFL. I am shocked and dismayed."

I think we would all like to live in a world where the VICK BS level was exactly zero. That may be too much to ask. But we can dream.

(Special thanks to Rob Lawrence, who came up with some of the ideas for this piece.)

post by Mike Tanier

The Patriots have traded for Randy Moss, giving Tom Brady by far the best receiver he has ever had and thereby guaranteeing the Patriots another Super Bowl. That will be the conventional wisdom. The only red flag anyone will bring up is Moss' character concerns and whether he can fit into the team-first approach in New England. Maybe that is an issue (it certainly was not for Corey Dillon), but a bigger problem could be that Moss is simply no longer a star player.

Similarity scores are a tool used to compare people to other players who posted similar numbers over a given time period. A quick glance at Moss' three-year similarity profile is very alarming. (Only yards are listed, but similarity scores also compare catches, touchdowns, and average yards per catch.)

Name                         Years             Yards Yr 1-3         Age +1         G+1 Rec +1 Yds+1
Randy Moss             2004-06          767, 1005, 553     30
Drew Pearson         1978-80          714, 1026, 568     30             16     38     614
Sam McCullum         1979-81         739, 874, 567       30             11*   21*    233*
James Jett                 1997-99         804, 882, 552       30             11     20     356
Freddie Solomon     1980-82         658, 969, 574*     30             13     31     662
Ernie Jones             1990-92           724, 957, 559       29             10     5       56
Nat Moore                 1978-80         645, 840, 564        30             13     26     452
Andre Rison             1996-98         593, 1092, 542      32             15     21     218
Webster Slaughter 1990-92          847, 906, 486        29             14     77     904
Antonio Freeman     2000-02         912, 818, 600       31             15     14     141
Ernest Givins            1992-94          787, 887, 521       31              9      29    280
Earnest Gray             1982-84          757*, 1139, 529  28              5        3     22

(*Strike-adjusted) 

The names on the left are acceptable if not overly impressive. More than half had over 7,000 receiving yards in their careers. The numbers on the right represent the next season after the similar three-year stretch. Only one receiver had more than 700 yards. Some of these guys had another good season or two in them, but nobody hit 1,000 yards again.

Moss is a different animal because his peak was higher even than that of Rison or Pearson. The other assumption is that Oakland was too dysfunctional and/or Moss just did not care when he was there. Of course, both Doug Gabriel and Ronald Curry had success there the past two seasons. Gabriel, of course, came to the Patriots a season ago and struggled to get consistent playing time. Curry was actually the leading receiver on the Raiders last season.

Tom Brady is a better quarterback than Aaron Brooks, Andrew Walter, and Kerry Collins put together, but this is not Randy Moss circa 2002. Moss averaged a whopping 3.3 catches per game last season, and the once-dominant red zone threat scored just three touchdowns. He caught only 43% of the passes intended for him.

The truth is that Moss is 30 years old, and he always relied heavily on his speed to get open. He is not the physical receiver that Terrell Owens is or the master route-runner that Marvin Harrison is. As such, he is not likely to age gracefully. Moss always played better on the fast track of the Metrodome, so it is good news that the Patriots have gotten rid of their grass field.

Is Randy Moss an upgrade for the Patriots? Certainly, considering Jabar Gaffney and Reche Caldwell were their second and third receivers. But, I think it is a little wishful thinking to see Moss as a better player than Deion Branch at this point in his career. Branch also would have been a better fit opposite Donte Stallworth than the supposed deep threat in Moss. Only once in the last six years has Moss caught 60% of the passes intended for him, a total Branch hit three times in four years with the Patriots.

Still, the Patriots have to be commended for playing this one right. They unloaded Branch at the height of his value for a first-round pick and now steal Moss away for a fourth-round pick. His reputation alone should help open up the running game and get Stallworth one-on-one opportunities. Moss could easily get his 900 yards, 65 catches, and eight touchdowns, and the Patriots will be a better team. Just don't expect Moss to team with Brady to form some sort of Montana-Rice unstoppable duo.

Post by Ned Macey

As the stock of Michigan DT Alan Branch seems to drop further and further in the upcoming NFL draft (having two broken legs generally doesn't help), he's being pushed below fast-rising Amobi Okoye on most draft boards. Indeed, NFLDraftScout.com's defensive tackle rankings list Okoye above Branch. Listed below them is Tennessee's Justin Harrell, who's seen as a notch below the other two first round-graded tackles.

Allow me to hazard a prediction, right now, that Harrell will end up being the best of the three.

Why? Because, simply put, highly-regarded SEC defensive tackles are as much of a lock as any other position and conference in the draft.

Since 1995, 11 defensive tackles from the SEC have been selected in the top two rounds of the draft. They include:

- James Manley

- Booger McFarland

- Reggie McGrew

- Cornelius Griffin

- Gerard Warren

- Richard Seymour

- Marcus Stroud

- John Henderson

- Albert Haynesworth

- DeWayne Robertson

- Johnathan Sullivan

Of the 11, only three were busts: Manley (who never played an NFL down), McGrew, and Sullivan, who ate his way out of the league. The other eight are all starters and considered top-tier NFL defensive tackles.

In addition, many SEC defensive tackles that were drafted in the later rounds made it to the NFL, including Shane Burton, Jason Ferguson, Michael Myers, Darwin Walker, Kendrick Clancy, Ian Scott, Kenny King, and Chad Lavalais

The Big 10, on the other hand, enjoys no such regard. Since Dan Wilkinson went first overall in 1994, they have struggled to put out quality defensive tackles. Second-rounder Nathan Davis played two games with the Falcons before they cut him. Wendell Bryant was drafted 12th overall in 2002 by the Cardinals and is now out of football.

Even the success stories aren't that successful. Jimmy Kennedy has matured into a NFL starter, albeit not a very good one; Anthony Adams still has a job but hasn't broken through, and was let go by the 49ers after three seasons, and Jonathan Babineaux is still behind Rod Coleman and Grady Jackson in Atlanta. The only Big 10 tackle to be a real success since Wilkinson is Chargers DT Luis Castillo, who made it to the Pro Bowl in his second season.

The highest-drafted defensive tackle in Conference USA (Okoye's home conference for the majority of his college career) history is former UAB DT Eddie Freeman, who was out of the league after 20 games.

Does this mean that making a move for Okoye or Branch is an obvious mistake? Not really. Okoye has that massive upside, and Branch is the only legit nose tackle that's Day 1-caliber. Picking Harrell, though, sure would look like a nice move for a team looking for defensive line depth. Don't be surprised if one of the "smarter" organizations in the league grab him at the end of the first round.

written by Bill Barnwell