STACKHOUSE’S 10 THOUGHTS

1 – SUPER BOWL PICK – At the moment, it’s too close to call for me.  Usually when in doubt, I pick the best quarterback and the best coach but I think Kyle Shanahan may be the same amount of better over Andy Reid than what Patrick Mahomes is over Jimmy Garoppolo, so I just don’t know.  The Chiefs may be the only team capable of stopping the 49ers run attack, as they did a very nice job on Derrick Henry last week. The 49ers may be the only team capable of slowing down Mahomes’ passing game. Give me a week to think on it.

2 – OJ SIMPSON – Say what you want about him, but there is clear charisma there.  I follow him on Twitter and ‘Yours Truly’ as he calls himself is never short on NFL opinions and he’s often correct when you watch him in hindsight.  The one observation he made over a month ago was how the 49ers use a fullback while many other teams have abandoned the position. He points out all of the greatest running backs benefitted from having great fullbacks. 

3 – MORE OJ – OJ is a serious fantasy football participant and he won his league this year.  My query would be who else was in this league based on the ridiculous cache of talent he had?  And, if OJ wanted to pick a certain player, who is going to argue with him knowing the potential penalty for upsetting him?  There is also a very subtle amount of trolling in his videos that while appalling on one hand, is brilliant on the other. For me, the amateur comedians who comment on his tweets are sensational.  One tweeter inquired, “OJ, my wife is beating me in my fantasy football league this year. Do you have any suggestions as to how I should deal with this?”

4 – FRANCHISE QUARTERBACKS – If you were to have any quarterback in the world for the next five years, who would your top five options be?  After the first two, it’s a challenge and up for debate. I went with: Mahomes, Russell Wilson, Lamar Jackson, Deshaun Watson, and (I know I will get a ton of flack for this) Dak Prescott.  Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady, and Drew Brees are just too old. Based on my list, I think we can drop the conspiracy theory of black quarterbacks not being promoted.

5 – JETS FADE AGAIN – For the second year in a row, the Winnipeg Jets are headed for a crash landing in the second half of the season.  They just have too many injuries on the blueline to keep up. Having said that, there are some things that cause me concern. In the first half of the year when they were playing well, General Manager Kevin Cheveldayoff didn’t strike a trade to help bolster the defense.  Instead, he just waited for the glass slipper to come off and now he can shrug his shoulders and say there’s no point in adding to a team with minimal upside. Head Coach Paul Maurice has been extremely stubborn when it comes to mixing lines. It took him years to learn Blake Wheeler was his second line centre and the Jets really didn’t need to trade for Paul Stastny and Kevin Hayes.  There are some hungry speedsters with interesting long range potential in the form of Mason Appleton and Jansen Harkins, but neither seems to get appreciable ice time. Instead, we watch Nik Ehlers diving all over the ice, Jack Roslovic proving on a nightly basis he has no finish, and now Andrew Copp is miscast as a second line winger when he should be alongside Adam Lowry. In addition, the powerplay look hasn’t changed since the day Patrick Laine put on a sweater.  How hard is that for opposing teams to defend? Jets need a change.

6 – GALLANT OUT – Las Vegas Golden Knights GM Kelly McCrimmon raised some eyebrows around hockey last week when he announced he was relieving Gerard Gallant from his coaching duties.  Gallant led Vegas to the league final in 2018 and was scheduled to be one of the coaches in this weekend’s all-star festivities. People change over the course of time, but I used to know McCrimmon a little bit from my Brandon media days and I would say for people to try and get inside his head to understand what he’s thinking is a fruitless exercise.  I know him to be very loyal (you will notice Ryan Craig was not let go and Craig played for 5 years in Brandon and I suspect being groomed for even bigger things under McCrimmon someday), but also very shrewd when it comes to business. Remember, Gallant was not really McCrimmon’s hire. He was George McPhee’s. My guess is McCrimmon wants ‘his’ guy as the head coach and wanted to make a change before his team fell out of a very close race in the Pacific Division.  But, again. Don’t try and figure out what McCrimmon is thinking. You will almost always be wrong.

7 – CLEAN HOUSE IN HOUSTON – If Houston Astros owner Jerry Crane was really serious about cleaning up the culture of his franchise, his first order of business for whoever the new General Manager would be to trade and/or release as many of these bad apples as possible.  Surely, some other team out there wants to win bad enough that you can send Alex Bregman and his smug attitude elsewhere without much difficulty. Ditto for the suddenly unlikeable Jose Altuve.

8 – WHICH TEAM TO MANAGE – I saw a poll on Twitter asking fans which team do they think is the best situation for a new manager coming in:  New York Mets, Boston Red Sox, or Houston Astros. Well, it’s the Mets and it’s not even a close race. The atmosphere in Houston is toxic and I don’t think those inmates can be controlled.  Boston’s ownership is not being shy about the fact they are going cheap and sewering the team, so you can bet whenever they are ready to win again, it will be with a different manager than whoever they hire for this year.  That leaves the Mets. And, they aren’t exactly the poster child for MLB franchises, so what does that really tell you about those other two?

9 – AARON HERNANDEZ – If you get a chance to watch the Aaron Hernandez documentary on Netflix, do yourself a favor and set aside an hour a night for three nights and take it in.  Most of the information that was revealed I already knew because I had taken quite an interest in this case at the time it happened, but it’s still a scary tale of what can happen to someone who feels invincible because he’s a sports superstar.  Many will have sympathy for Hernandez when you are done watching, but I wasn’t one of them. He was a bad apple for whatever reason I don’t know. Sometimes there is no reason.

10 – UNIFOR – I see Jerry Dias and some of his cronies were arrested Monday afternoon.  I suspect this is all just a publicity stunt and the most that will happen here is a fine and you know how a union would pay a fine right?  I mean what’s their main source of income? I hope the workers are happy out there freezing their you-know-whats while Dias stages some theatre and doesn’t miss a single pay cheque, a pay cheque that is massive in comparison to those well-paid Coop workers.  Here’s an idea: disband the union and throw the union dues into a pension plan contributed by both employer and employee. I suspect by the time most workers are ready to pack it in, this would be a much more productive way of spending a few hundred dollars a month.

(Mike Stackhouse is a freelance writer/broadcaster. Follow him on Twitter at @Stack1975)