A flashy 40-yard dash time tends to get all the headlines around NFL Combine time, and in some cases, improved draft stock for the players with record times.
And while there is a pretty strong argument to be made that 40 times are rarely indicative of long-term successful NFL performance, we thought it would be interesting to see what a team would look like based on the fastest 40-yard dash times in each position.
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Below you will find the top penalized player by each position for both offense and defense over the 2017-18 NFL season. Of course two CBs top the list, a position where essentially two or three big pass interference calls can juice the numbers. But then there are guys like Germain Ifedi of the infamous Seattle Seahawks offensive line, who put up 120 yards of penalties with almost entirely just false starts and holds (not that we’re bitter or anything).
We recently polled 1,355 self-described NFL fans from around the United States for their opinions on current players using marijuana. Below you will find the results from this survey, which asked the following questions:
| Do you think the NFL should allow current players to use marijuana? | |
| Yes | 66% |
| No | 25% |
| Not sure | 9% |
Below you will find our annual SportFacts Optimism Score for the 2018 MLB season. Each year, we give teams a preseason optimism score based on how excited people are about their team’s prospects. You can review the 2017 MLB preseason scores here for a fun look back at last year.
It has been one of the most common complaints among NFL viewers for the past several seasons: There are too many commercial breaks.
But despite analysis showing that over the past few years, the number of commercials per game has stayed fairly flat, the perception has become that the number of ads has gone up. Our hunch leads us to believe that the way people are consuming content has changed drastically over the past five years, turning this into more of a perception issue. When it’s possible to watch our favorite shows on Netflix ad-free, to tune into an NFL game on a normal television broadcast makes it seem like it’s nothing but commercials these days.
It has been an interesting year for the NFL. The sports league has seen one of the strongest bull markets of the past decade, with television ratings, attendance, and thus advertising revenue all skyrocketing in that time.
In Seattle, we’re pretty biased, Century Link Field, aka “The Clink,” is pretty spectacular, especially for evening games, with the sun going down over the Puget Sound, the lights of the stadium radiating south of downtown, with skyscrapers a stone’s throw away.
The SportFacts office is located in Seattle, so we know firsthand the pain and turmoil of losing a team, a few of us here still struggle watching NBA games, and a large percentage of us were all for Durant leaving if it meant turmoil for the Thunder. Is it way past time to be getting over it? Probably. But we’re not.
With that in mind, we’re sympathetic with San Diego, who, due to one of the least popular owners in the NFL doing terrible owner things, had their team ripped away and plopped in a seemingly uninterested city. But we found a statistic this weekend that might make those in San Diego laugh just a bit.
We did in fact see a notable decrease during week one, anywhere between five and 15 minutes fewer commercials in most games
Touchdown – commercial – extra point – commercial – kickoff – commercial.
Last year, we ran the numbers and on average, each NFL game had around 55-65 minutes of commercials. This wasn’t an increase from previous years, but the perception was that there were far more ads, a problem for the NFL. We reported that the reasons for this perception are likely twofold:
“You don’t owwwwwn me” took the top spot on the podium last year, voted by fans as by far the most annoying commercial played throughout the NFL season. Congratulations Toyota!
We wanted to get a feel for what fans thought of the opening weekend advertisements thus far. And while it will probably take a few weeks to really let the hate soak in, there are some pretty clear front runners after the opening weekend’s games were played.