FOOTBALL

Thursday night marked the day everyone has been waiting for:  The Opening Day of the NFL Season between the Baltimore Ravens and the Denver Broncos.  The defending Super Bowl champs were forced to play on the road because of a scheduling conflict with the Baltimore Orioles, and the Broncos definitely intended to take advantage.  It was actually a very close first half, but in the second, Denver QB, Peyton Manning turned into Superman.  The Ravens defense were winded and gassed, and Manning wound up tying an NFL record 7 touchdowns thrown.  He was just hitting his receivers at will, including new addition Wes Welker, and the Ravens couldn’t do anything to stop him.  The Broncos look absolutely excellent, and they’re still without their best defensive player, Von Miller.  This team is going to be very hard to beat.  Denver 49, Baltimore 27.
Funny enough, even though the Ravens got pummeled, they hopefully won’t have any regrets about the other thing they did yesterday:  Renew Super Bowl winning head coach John Harbaugh.  Instead of just two years on his contract, the Ravens extended it to four years, worth nearly $7million per season.  Harbaugh has been to the playoffs in every one of his 5 years as head coach, obviously culminating in a Super Bowl win last year.  The players love playing for Harbaugh, and it’s very difficult to get a coach that has the respect of his players and know how to win.  The best franchises keep the management consistent so they can improve on what they’re doing, instead of starting fresh every year.  This is a very smart move for the Ravens.

BASKETBALL

Finally, in the NBA, the league is installing new state-of-the art cameras in every arena that will revolutionize the sport.  These aren’t just TV cameras — these are motion capture cameras that will be able to track essentially everything that happens on the court — from where a player stands to where they run to, and it will all be documented statistically.  This will bring a level of statistical analysis to the game never seen before.  Imagine if a team knew ahead of time that LeBron is typically going to drive to his left at the top of the key 70% of the time.  They could plan for this ahead of time.  This will also probably include new stat categories in the box score (that have remained the same pretty much since the inception of the NBA).  Things are about to get very fun in the NBA.