Also feels good because I fucking hate Brady, Belichick and Kraft. Immense tools.

Hey, he built Gillette Stadium with his own $$.

Tom Brady's team are said to be furious after Gisele Bundchen poured salt on their wounds following the New England Patriots' defeat at the Super Bowl yesterday.

Just moments after Brady's team lost to the New York Giants 21-17, the supermodel was overheard slamming her husband's side in response to taunts from a fans.

While waiting for the elevator to leave the VIP suites at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Giselle let rip in a F-word rant which saw her slam his teammates efforts on the field.

In video footage capture by theinsider.com, she was heard saying: 'My husband can not f****ing throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time. I can't believe they dropped the ball so many times.'

Her swipe at the Patriot receivers are said to have left Brady's fellow players feeling 'disappointed', with claims she violated 'the 'code of brotherhood.'

A source told TMZ: 'It's like knocking someone when they are down.'

Later the Brazilian model met with her husband behind the scenes at the event where she consoled him with hugs.

Wearing a leather jacket, with a black dress over her black trousers and a black and white scarf, Gisele headed behind the scenes at the stadium to try and brighten her husband's evening.

According to reports, he was so dejected after the match had finished that he spent almost 20 minutes sat down in the Patriots locker room staring at the floor.

She kept a big smile on her face and a tight grip on Brady's hand as the quarterback appeared sullen-faced.

The couple made their way out of the stadium and boarded the team's bus at the end of the game.

Brady had started the game hoping to equal Joe Montana's record of four Super Bowl wins, but early mistakes put the New York Giants in a strong position.

Though the Patriots regained their composure and managed to claw their way back - victory was eventually taken by the Giants in the closing minutes.

Speaking to Boston.com media members, Tom somberly said: 'You know, we fought to the end. You know, we're very proud of that. Just came up a little bit short.'

Asked if he thought he could lead his team to a winning touchdown after getting the ball back with one minute left, the 34-year-old replied: 'Yeah, we tried, you know.

'We just, we got to the fifty and kind of ran out of time and threw a hail mary at the end. I don't know how close we were to getting it.'

The quarterback also added: 'As a competitor, we all hate to lose. We fight as hard as we can and sometimes you get beat. I'm proud of our team for the way that we hung in there all season.

'We just kept fighting until the end and it came down to one play at the end of the game. I give (the Giants) a lot of credit for the plays they made. They deserved to win and hopefully we'll be back at some point.'

After making their way onto the team bus Tom sat down and was seen resting his head against the back of the seat in front of him, staring at the floor like he did in the dressing room earlier that evening.

Never got any of the Brady hate. Sure, he doesn't have a personality as likable of Rodgers or Brees, but he's not an unpleasant guy. He's confident of his abilities, but not in an arrogant way. He knows he has to work hard to be the best.

I think Brady may have had too much success too quickly, and gave the impression he didn't pay his dues. Also suffers from the stink that comes off Belichick.

The thing you have to remember with Brady is that he was a sixth round pick. His early 'success' was largely off the back of Bledisloe.

Well...we'll probably only have to endure another five or so seasons of him.

Dave Duerson's family sues NFL

CHICAGO -- The family of former Chicago Bears player Dave Duerson filed a wrongful death suit against the NFL on Thursday, claiming the league didn't do enough to prevent or treat the concussions that severely damaged his brain before he killed himself last year.

The suit was filed in Chicago on behalf of Duerson's son, Tregg, and three other children. Duerson died on Feb. 17, 2011, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest at his home in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla.

Duerson's family wants to know more about the NFL's handling of concussions during his career, according to his son.

"If they knowingly failed to inform and implement proper safety concussion procedures, then their indifference was the epitome of injustice," Tregg Duerson said at a news conference announcing the lawsuit. "The inactions of the past inevitably led to the demise and death of my father.

The lawsuit accuses the NFL of negligently causing the brain damage that led Duerson to take his own life at the age of 50 by not warning him of the negative effects of concussions. Attorney Thomas Demetrio, who is representing Duerson's family, said the NFL should have been a leader in educating current and former players about head injuries.

"They not only dropped the ball, they maintained until current times that there was no connection between playing football, receiving concussions and brain damage," Demetrio said. "That's wrong."

The NFL said in a statement that it had not yet seen the lawsuit.

"Dave Duerson was an outstanding football player and citizen who made so many positive contributions but unfortunately encountered serious personal challenges later in his life," the NFL said. "We sympathize with the Duerson family and continue to be saddened by this tragedy."

The suit also names helmet maker Riddell Inc., alleging that the helmets didn't adequately protect players from concussions. The company declined comment.

A native of Muncie, Ind., Duerson was a third-round draft pick by the Bears in 1983 out of Notre Dame and played 11 seasons in the NFL before retiring in 1993. He won Super Bowls with the 1985 Bears and 1990 Giants, and played in four Pro Bowls.

The lawsuit was filed less than a week after nearly a dozen former NFL players living in Louisiana sued the NFL over their own concussions.

Several former New Orleans Saints players are among the 11 ex-players named as plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit filed Friday in federal court in New Orleans. The lawsuit says each of them has developed mental or physical problems from concussions or concussion-like symptoms. Several suits blaming the NFL for concussion-related dementia and brain disease already have been consolidated in Philadelphia.

Duerson had at least 10 concussions in his NFL career, according to his family, and lost consciousness during some. He left notes for his family asking that his brain be donated to science, and researchers at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University's School of Medicine concluded he had "moderately advanced" brain damage and CTE related to blows to the head. The damage started to manifest itself about 10 years before his death, his son said, though the changes were gradual.

"It was slow deterioration, day after day," Tregg Duerson said. "You can see his mannerisms change toward the end of his life."

The lawsuit says brain damage affected his judgment, inhibition and impulse control.

"My dad donating his brain as his last plea, we feel as though we're taking that to the next level," Tregg Duerson said. "We believe that he would've wanted us to pursue this, and because of that belief, we feel obligated to do so."


Copyright 2012 by The Associated Press

So this is how NFL dies...

The NFL is done for the year, but it is not pure fantasy to suggest that it may be done for good in the not-too-distant future. How might such a doomsday scenario play out and what would be the economic and social consequences?

By now we're all familiar with the growing phenomenon of head injuries and cognitive problems among football players, even at the high school level. In 2009, Malcolm Gladwell asked whether football might someday come to an end, a concern seconded recently by Jonah Lehrer.

Before you say that football is far too big to ever disappear, consider the history: If you look at the stocks in the Fortune 500 from 1983, for example, 40 percent of those companies no longer exist. The original version of Napster no longer exists, largely because of lawsuits. No matter how well a business matches economic conditions at one point in time, it's not a lock to be a leader in the future, and that is true for the NFL too. Sports are not immune to these pressures. In the first half of the 20th century, the three big sports were baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and today only one of those is still a marquee attraction.

The most plausible route to the death of football starts with liability suits.1 Precollegiate football is already sustaining 90,000 or more concussions each year. If ex-players start winning judgments, insurance companies might cease to insure colleges and high schools against football-related lawsuits. Coaches, team physicians, and referees would become increasingly nervous about their financial exposure in our litigious society. If you are coaching a high school football team, or refereeing a game as a volunteer, it is sobering to think that you could be hit with a $2 million lawsuit at any point in time. A lot of people will see it as easier to just stay away. More and more modern parents will keep their kids out of playing football, and there tends to be a "contagion effect" with such decisions; once some parents have second thoughts, many others follow suit. We have seen such domino effects with the risks of smoking or driving without seatbelts, two unsafe practices that were common in the 1960s but are much rarer today. The end result is that the NFL's feeder system would dry up and advertisers and networks would shy away from associating with the league, owing to adverse publicity and some chance of being named as co-defendants in future lawsuits.

It may not matter that the losses from these lawsuits are much smaller than the total revenue from the sport as a whole. As our broader health care sector indicates (try buying private insurance when you have a history of cancer treatment), insurers don't like to go where they know they will take a beating. That means just about everyone could be exposed to fear of legal action.

This slow death march could easily take 10 to 15 years. Imagine the timeline. A couple more college players — or worse, high schoolers — commit suicide with autopsies showing CTE. A jury makes a huge award of $20 million to a family. A class-action suit shapes up with real legs, the NFL keeps changing its rules, but it turns out that less than concussion levels of constant head contact still produce CTE. Technological solutions (new helmets, pads) are tried and they fail to solve the problem. Soon high schools decide it isn't worth it. The Ivy League quits football, then California shuts down its participation, busting up the Pac-12. Then the Big Ten calls it quits, followed by the East Coast schools. Now it's mainly a regional sport in the southeast and Texas/Oklahoma. The socioeconomic picture of a football player becomes more homogeneous: poor, weak home life, poorly educated. Ford and Chevy pull their advertising, as does IBM and eventually the beer companies.

There's a lot less money in the sport, and at first it's "the next hockey" and then it's "the next rugby," and finally the franchises start to shutter.

Along the way, you would have an NFL with much lower talent levels, less training, and probably greater player representation from poorer countries, where the demand for money is higher and the demand for safety is lower. Finally, the NFL is marginalized as less-dangerous sports gobble up its market share. People — American people — might actually start calling "soccer" by the moniker of "football."

Despite its undeniable popularity — and the sense that the game is everywhere — the aggregate economic effect of losing the NFL would not actually be that large. League revenues are around $10 billion per year while U.S. GDP is around $15,300 billion. But that doesn't mean everyone would be fine.

Big stadiums will lose a lot of their value and that will drag down neighboring bars and restaurants, causing a lot of them to shut their doors. Cable TV will be less profitable, and this will hasten the movement of TV-watching, if we can still call it that, to the web. Super Bowl Sunday will no longer be the best time to go shopping for a new car at the dealership.

Take Green Bay as a case study: A 2009 study of the economic impact of the Packers' stadium estimated "$282 million in output, 2,560 jobs and $124.3 million in earnings, and $15.2 million in tax revenues." That's small potatoes for the national economy as a whole, but for a small and somewhat remote city of 104,000, it is a big deal indeed.2

Any location where football is the only game in town will suffer. If the Jets and Giants go, New York still has numerous other pro sports teams, Broadway, high-end shopping, skyscrapers, fine dining, and many other cultural activities. If college football dies, Norman, Oklahoma (current home to one of us), has … noodling? And what about Clemson, in South Carolina, which relies on the periodic weekend football surge into town for its restaurant and retail sales? Imagine a small place of 12,000 people that periodically receives a sudden influx of 100,000 visitors or more, most of them eager to spend money on what is one of their major leisure outings. It's like a port in the Caribbean losing its cruise ship traffic. (Overall, the loss of football could actually increase migration from rural to urban areas over time. Football-dependent areas are especially prominent in rural America, and some of them will lose a lot of money and jobs.)

Outside of sports, American human capital and productivity probably rise. No football Saturdays on college campuses means less binge drinking, more studying, better grades, smarter future adults. Losing thousands of college players and hundreds of pro players might produce a few more doctors or engineers. Plus, talented coaches and general managers would gravitate toward management positions in American industry. Heck, just getting rid of fantasy football probably saves American companies hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Other losers include anything that depends heavily on football to be financially viable, including the highly subsidized non-revenue collegiate sports. No more air travel for the field hockey teams or golf squads. Furthermore, many prominent universities would lose their main claim to fame. Alabama and LSU produce a large amount of revenue and notoriety from football without much in the way of first-rate academics to back it up. Schools would have to compete more on academics to be nationally prominent, which would again boost American education.

One of the biggest winners would be basketball. To the extent that fans replace football with another sport (instead of meth or oxy), high-octane basketball is the natural substitute. On the pro level, the season can stretch out leisurely, ticket prices rise, ratings rise, maybe the league expands (more great athletes in the pool now), and some of the centers and power forwards will have more bulk. At the college level, March Madness becomes the only game in town.

Another winner would be track and field. Future Rob Gronkowskis in the decathlon? Future Jerome Simpsons in the high jump? World records would fall at a rapid pace.

This outcome may sound ridiculous, but the collapse of football is more likely than you might think. If recent history has shown anything, it is that observers cannot easily imagine the big changes in advance. Very few people were predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, or the rise of China as an economic power. Once you start thinking through how the status quo might unravel, a sports universe without the NFL at its center no longer seems absurd.

So … Tennis, anyone?

In the first half of the 20th century, the three big sports were baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and today only one of those is still a marquee attraction.

I saw this article when it was posted on ESPN a few weeks back. I labeled it complete horse shit. The NFL continues to grow at fantastic speeds to be one of the largest and most financially powerful organisations on earth.

And this point is absurd because Basketball and American Football didn't exist for much of the first half of the 20th century.

I'm just concerned about the precedent that this will set for the NFL if the judge finds in favour of the Duerson family.

As for making it that a player must be tackled to the ground, you'd see a sharp increase in career ending knee-injuries and pro-bowl type scoreboards.

NFL Reveals Saints’ “Bounty” System In Play Under Gregg Williams
After a lengthy investigation that began in 2010 the NFL has revealed that previous New Orleans Defensive Coordinator Gregg Williams and numerous players during the 2009, 2010 and 2011 seasons maintained what is now being called a “bounty” system where defensive players were rewarded in cash for deliberately attempting to hurt an opposition player during the game. Violating the NFL’s “Bounty Rule”.

The rewards were scaled up in relation to how severe the hit was and whether or not the opposition player had to be taken off the field.

A memo with the findings have since been distributed to the NFL teams and the NFL itself has not yet determined how the New Orleans Saints or Gregg Williams (now the Defensive Coordinator for the Saint Louis Rams) will be punished.

Roger Goodell in the memo made the nature of the allegations clear, saying “The payments here are particularly troubling because they involved not just payments for ‘performance,’ but also for injuring opposing players.”

Gregg Williams has since released a statement, via his new team, apologizing for his role in the system.

It has also been revealed by former Washington Redskins Defensive End Phillip Daniels that during Williams’ time in Washington (2004-7) he ran a similar scheme.

Whether or not the Redskins shall share punishment with the Saints remains to be seen.

The NFLPA is reviewing the findings and is yet to issue a statement, regardless of how exactly the union treats the findings this revelation flies in the face of their previous insistence on player safety as a primary motivator during last year’s collective bargaining agreements.

How seriously should the NFL and owners take their views on player safety when their own members attempt to injure one another for a cash reward outside the rules of the game?

Washington for me. Harbaugh has indicated he'll be sticking with Alex Smith. Improved last year, and he was immense vs the Saints in the playoffs. Wll be interesting to see if he can improve further.