NFL Playoff Thread: Championship round

I don't want the Pats anywhere near the SB but it sure would be funny to see Brady/Kraft on the stage after all the offseason BS.

 

Truly disturbing stuff, which most football fans and SJ.com members will forget within a week.

 

Anyone who has spent any time in NFL locker rooms has seen what the game does to these guys. This is one reason I hate Thursday games and even the suggestion that an 18-game regular season is a good thing.

 

Randle El also says -- despite his love for football -- that he wishes he would have played baseball instead. The CTE bomb is a slow-motion train wreck.

It seems the only safe positions to play football are kicker and punter.

 

Disagrees:

 

Don't know if this belongs here or the journalism thread, but by noon every news outlet had the story about Patriots linebacker Darius Fleming. Last Thursday Fleming pulled some woman out of a car he thought was on fire (it was smoke from the airbags). He kicked the window in, got her out, and when another bystander came along to help, left to get treatment at the stadium, got stitches, played two days later. Didn't tell anyone. Teammates found out about it, Devin McCourty told reporters and it became the day's story.
Sometime in the afternoon, TMZ reported none of the local PDs had a police report of the accident. The Globe's Ben Volin said he contacted area PDs and got nothing, but shortly after a reporter said the accident was on the Walpole Police Log and they put out a statement confirming the accident.
Everyone in New England was crying about journalistic integrity of TMZ and Volin to report that there was no police report, but they weren't wrong, per se. It sounds like both TMZ and Volin called asking for accident reports involving Fleming but since he left before the cops showed up, he wasn't named.
I'm shocked Volin screwed up so bad. It's clear his reporting chops are limited to pressers and friendly sources, because if you don't know how to track down a police report you shouldn't have a job covering anything.
So the question is - aren't all the reporters who ran with the story just as guilty as Volin for incorrectly reporting? It's a one-source, take-my-word-for-it story that wcould have easily been confirmed. If you were an editor, would you run the story or tell your reporter to make sure it happened?
It bugs me because it seems, at least around here, pro sports reporters are the first ones to scream about ethics and "we don't root for any team" when someone questions their journalistic integrity, but when time comes to actually practice journalism they do a piss poor job of it other than getting quotes and using unnamed sources.

 

@Rhody31 I can see how it wouldn't have appeared, though, if Fleming wasn't a responsible party in the accident.

 

Shit, most of the stuff I see called "news" online doesn't even have one good source.

 

I can too, but there wasn't one reporter that tried to confirm there even was an accident except TMZ. Everyone just got their quotes, wrote their story, published it online and watched the clicks add up. Then everyone chastised TMZ for questioning the report.
Couple years ago some Sox prospect said he accidentally shot himself in the foot in the offseason. No one bothered to look for a police report, they just took him at his word. It was befuddling.

 

I admit I don't have much experience shooting myself, but . . . why would there be a police report?

Did he press charges against himself?

 

He went to the hospital for a gunshot wound. Aren't hospitals required to report gunshot wounds?

 

I guess they are in most jurisdictions. But some slip through the cracks (Plaxico Burress, for one).