Tag: Green Bay Packers

Katrina Shankland knows more about the NFL’s player salary structure than Scott Walker does

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The author of the blog post is a New England Patriots fan who lives in Illinois, and Wisconsin State Rep. Katrina Shankland (D-Stevens Point) is, like the vast majority of Wisconsinites, a Green Bay Packers fan. Anyways, the Chicago Bears are a bunch of losers.

At a recent private, invite-only “listening session”, Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, while claiming that the NFL’s free agency system should be a model for paying public school teachers, demonstrated that he has no knowledge of how the NFL’s player salary structure works. Here’s what Walker said:

If the Green Bay Packers pay people to perform and if they perform well on their team, (the Packers) pay them to do that…They don’t pay them for how many years they’ve been on the football team. They pay them whether or not they help (the Packers) win football games.

Wisconsin State Rep. Katrina Shankland (D-Stevens Point), the Assistant Minority Leader of the Wisconsin State Assembly, issued this brilliant response to Walker’s absurd claims about the NFL player salary structure and absurd comparison between NFL player salaries and Wisconsin public school teacher salaries. I encourage everyone who is reading this blog post to read Shankland’s statement in full, but I’ll summarize three points that Shankland made in her statement:

NFL teams often have a total player payroll that is well under the league’s salary cap, whereas public school districts in Wisconsin are barely able to make payroll thanks to Walker’s funding cuts to public K-12 schools in Wisconsin
NFL players have a strong labor union representing them, whereas Walker and his Republican allies severely weakened Wisconsin public school teachers’ unions by restricting collective bargaining rights.
For the third point, I’ll directly quote Shankland: “…the NFL does pay their athletes regardless of whether or not they win games. Ask the Chicago Bears about this.”

For those of you who are wondering, the Chicago Bears compiled a record of 6 wins and 10 losses, and failed to make the playoffs, in the 2015 NFL season. Oh, and NFL players do not lose a penny of their base salary if their team loses a game.

The salary and unionization structure of NFL players and that of public school teachers in Wisconsin are not identical by any rational person’s imagination. I applaud Katrina Shankland for having a far better knowledge of the NFL player salary structure than Scott Walker does.

Lambeau Field: The NFL stadium that is literally in its own time zone

In just a few hours, the Green Bay Packers will host the Minnesota Vikings in the final regular-season game of the 2015 NFL season. The winner of the game will win the NFC North division title and host a playoff game in the Wild Card round of the NFL playoffs next week. The loser of the game will take a wild card spot in the playoffs and play a road game in the Wild Card round of the playoffs.

The Green Bay Packers play their home games at Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin. One interesting thing about Lambeau Field is that it’s literally in its own time zone.

While the Packers website lists game start times in Central Time, which every part of Wisconsin that has a permanent population officially observes, Lambeau Field itself, which has no permanent population but seats 81,435 people during Packers games, is actually on Lombardi Time, set 15 minutes ahead of Central Time. This is because an outdoor clock on the north outer wall of the stadium is deliberately set 15 minutes fast, compared to Central Time. As a result, Lambeau Field is in what I like to call the Lombardi Time Zone, which has an offset of UTC-5:45 during standard time and UTC-4:45 during daylight savings time (the Universal Time Code offsets for Central Time are UTC-6 for standard time and UTC-5 for daylight savings time). No other part of the world is located in this time zone. The Lombardi Time Zone is an unofficial time zone, in that, to my knowledge, neither international law, the U.S. federal government, nor the State of Wisconsin officially recognize Lombardi Time as an official time zone.

Lombardi Time gets its name from Vince Lombardi, the legendary Packers head coach who led the Packers to wins in the iconic “Ice Bowl” game on New Year’s Eve in 1967 and the first two Super Bowls ever held. When Lombardi coached the Packers from 1959-1967, he was known for expecting Packers players and staff to be 15 minutes early to practices and team meetings.

The actual blown call in the Packers Hail Mary victory over the Lions

There’s been a considerable amount of talk of a blown call on the last play before time ran out in the 4th quarter of last night’s NFL Thursday Night Football game between the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions (won by the Packers by a score of 27-23). That play involved a questionable facemask penalty against Lions defensive end Devin Taylor (#98):

However, since Taylor did move the face mask of Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers (#12) to one side, although only by his thumb, that was a correct call by the officials. Even though time ran out in regulation, since the penalty was committed by the defensive team (the Lions), the Packers were given one untimed down.

The actual blown call was on the untimed play, which was the Hail Mary pass itself. At a little past 40 seconds into the video below, you will see Packers wide receiver Davante Adams (#17), who was not the player who caught the winning pass, commit an offensive pass interference penalty against Lions linebacker Josh Byrnes (#57) by grabbing the shoulderpad of Byrnes as Byrnes was attempting to intercept a forward pass by Aaron Rodgers:

Had offensive pass interference been called against Adams, that would have ended the game, the Packers touchdown from Aaron Rodgers to tight end Richard Rodgers (#82) would have not counted, and the Lions would have won. Instead, the officials missed the offensive pass interference and allowed the touchdown to stand.