2023 NFL offseason thread

Two of those moves were by the fired GM. The newest one is an attempt to clean up the mess. Although keeping Tannehill around for a couple more years wasn't a bad idea.

 

Smith-Mahomes was an exception. Do some research.

 

And he stripped it's best players and took them to Colorado, leaving them dead in the water.

 

IRRC, the only player Kurt Waner named in his HOF speech was Trent Green for all he did to help him succeed when he stepped in back in '99.

Guys like Smith and Green are very much the exception. No one wants to train their replacement.

 

I'm not slamming him or his family because I know nothing of the circumstances and it's a tragedy any way you cut it, but the carelessness of parents blows my mind sometimes. When I was a small child we lived in Tampa and had a pool in the back yard. My parents had a chain link fence around it and kept it padlocked. We were taught in no uncertain terms that it was off limits unless we had one of our parents with us. I taught swimming and lifeguarded at the YMCA when I was young. You can teach an infant less than a year old to swim and how to breathe in the water without choking. You can teach a two or three year old how to swim well enough to stay alive in the water for several minutes at least, and to swim to the side. None of that prevents a child drowning, but what it does is provide some time for someone to notice what's happening and pull them out instead of finding them on the bottom of the pool.

Florida is chock full of lakes, canals, pools, and other places that a child could drown. They should be taught to swim as early as possible.

 

Somewhat related to the carelessness of parents...we've been renting one floor in a two-family for far longer than I'd like to remember (all that rent money, down a big giant endless hole). When we moved in, the downstairs tenants were a couple with two preteen kids. One of the parents casually told the landlord that he or she was planning to buy one of those seasonal pools (fully chlorinated and big enough to actually swim in but chucked at the end of every summer) and put it in the backyard. The landlord said the second you do that, you're all evicted because I'm not getting sued if one of your kids' friends drowns, or if some dopey kid scales the fence, jumps in the pool and drowns.

Flip side: Before my daughter's best friend moved to North Carolina, her Dad did the exact same thing in the house they rented and the landlord didn't care b/c the Dad did all the maintenance around the house. For all the hundreds of hours of free fun my daughter got in that pool, I still think my landlord had it right.

 

Years ago my cousin who had two small children bought a house with a dilapidated in-ground pool. (The house may or may not have been Anne Hathaway's childhood home, but it did have a niche in the living room for the Stanley Cup when a NJ Devil lived there, but I digress...) They filled in the pool, for safety. The next good rainstorm, the entire basement flooded because the contractor did not account for the change in the water table. Had to sue the insurance company to fix the house and install drainpipes in the backyard. I still believe this catastrophe hastened their eventual divorce.

 

I wouldn’t own a pool without one of those surface alarms on them.

 

When it was time to send our then 1-year-old to daycare, we signed up with a highly recommended in-home provider. Went to her house to visit before we started with her and she had a small in-ground pool. We immediately canceled. Fast-forward eight years. We now have a 9-year-old who wins races from time to time for his swim club, yet we won't allow him to swim at any of the various neighbors' pools unless one of us can be there. I'm amazed at how cavalier a lot of parents are about this. My kid is a very strong swimmer. Other kids in the neighborhood, um ... aren't. Yet there they all are, diving into any pool they can, with no adults in sight -- or, if they are in sight, they're shitfaced and not paying attention anyway.

 

That's very similar to my other, similar, pet peeve on parents. Trampolines. I worked doing lab and x-ray in a family practice that included two pediatricians for fifteen years. I saw lots of kids with the usual childhood traumas, broken arms from falling off the monkey bars, all sorts of stuff. Trampolines are accidents waiting to happen for a family who has one in their backyard. If you look at any gymnastics meet, the bars around the edge of a tramp are padded. The floor area around the perimeter is padded. There are spotters stationed along the edges to try to keep someone from coming off the edge accidentally.

Most home trampolines have none of that. "Oh, we bought the net that goes around it so they can't fly off." Great. They hit the net and that drops them down onto the bars around the edge, where they hit their head, or a leg goes through the space among the springs while the rest of the does not. Two or three kids get on at the same time, and try to time their bounces to make the other kid fall, or they hit their heads together. I've seen so many injuries from them. And yes, other kids in the neighborhood are very likely to be on it whether you allow it or not. The only good thing about them is they're unlikely to kill anyone.

Sure, they're fun. Take them to the Y or somewhere that has appropriate safety gear. And hope nothing happens. Little kids have no judgement.

 

In high school, I was a lifeguard at a hotel’s indoor pool, and it was ridiculous how often a young kid would come down unaccompanied or, there would be, perhaps, a 10-year old bringing down a five-year olds and a toddler.

I’d ask the kid where their parents were, and they’d either shrug their shoulders or tell me, “at the bar.” I told them to go find them.

Then the kids would return with parents with annoyed looks on their faces. I told them the kids couldn’t come in the pool unless their parents were there as well. Which, at least twice, led to this conversation:

Parent (pointing): What does that say on your shirt?”

Me: “Lifeguard.”

Parent: “Then why do I have to be here?”

Me: “Because my shirt doesn’t say ‘Babysitter’.”

 

I am semi-ashamed to admit I've never really worried about tramampolines #HomerVoice. My daughter's had at least three friends who have had one in the backyard and she's never had an issue so far *finds some wood on which to knock* The only broken bones so far? When she slipped in the backyard at her super protective uncle's house and landed just right on the wrist and broke a couple tiny bones. The most random of random shit.