+ Workouts During Lockout Drawing Criticism. With players conducting player-only workouts during the owner's lockout, there's questions being asked about how much these workouts actually help. Besides lifting weights and studying the new playbook together, there's limited position drills that fellows like the offensive linemen can run. Some believe that it's really about camaraderie, considering most professional football players have remained in shape on their own. One general manager?
"Quite honestly, I'm waiting for the first ACL tear that happens and then we'll see if anyone talks about how great this whole workout program is for these young guys,'' the GM said. "Every club in a way wishes they were like the old Redskins and had all 80 guys out there working together, but as soon as a prominent player pops an ACL in some high school gym or at some college, what's going to be the reaction? If someone breaks a leg, who's there to help? As a GM, the thing that makes me nervous is the what-ifs that could happen without supervision, specifically from a training standpoint.
+ One Owner Worries About The Fans. And no, we're not talking about Bengals president Mike Brown here. New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft is worried that the league's labor issues could hurt themselves with fans.
"One of my concerns is that we not aggravate our fan base, and we have to be very careful. I think we're coming to that point now where we start to hurt ourselves collectively in the eyes of our fans," Kraft said. "In the end, the fans just want football. They don't want to hear about all this meaningless squabbling."
The truth is, fans are just tired of hearing about it. If every update and commentary weren't available to the fans, limiting the exposure to the current issues about the lockout, fans could be on their merry way for a time. Generally speaking, nothing happens in May, or even June, save for a few workouts that have little meaning to the general fan population. So fans are doing what we've always done. Bidding our time for Training Camp. When there's no training camp and the regular season games are in danger of being lost, then that's a completely different story.
Quote of the Weekend comes from Bengals.com's Geoff Hobson, who wrote after Chad Ochocinco fell off the bull after 1.5 seconds: Now Ocho is 1-4 against the Broncos.