It’s a shame that NFL teams can’t loan players out to other teams.
In soccer, clubs loan players to other clubs all the time, usually because those players are young prospects on the end of the bench that need some experience. So big club A and small club B have a chat, and small club B gets to put said prospect in their starting lineup for a set period of time. Villarreal loaned Jozy Altidore out to Hull City for this season. (Of course, why Phil Brown isn’t playing the young man remains a mystery to me.)
We need this policy in the NFL, and the first deal should be for the Pittsburgh Steelers to loan Limas Sweed to the New York Jets.
Why? Because apparently, the New York Jets actually teach their receivers how to catch the ball.
Seriously, you saw Braylon Edwards out there in Miami last night, right? It took him all of one game to go from being Ol’ Iron Hands in Cleveland to making one clutch catch after another in a Jets uniform. That performance must have had every Browns player thinking to himself, “Damn, who can I punch to get the hell out of this town?”
So how did Braylon Edwards suddenly become clutch? Was he suddenly free of staph? Does Mark Sanchez put some special mojo on the ball that Brady Quinn and Derek Anderson don’t? I doubt it. Clearly, Edwards got coached up in a few days in New York, and that might have been better coaching than he had gotten in several years in Cleveland.
What a shame that the Steelers can’t loan Limas Sweed out to the Jets to figure this out. Clearly, Ben Roethlisberger throws a decent ball. He’s neck-in-neck with Peyton Manning for the league lead in completion percentage. There must be some reason why can’t Sweed catch his passes. He wouldn’t have been a 2nd-round draft pick if he couldn’t catch, right?
Maybe this will be the purpose of the UFL in the long run. Maybe the Steelers will be able to loan Sweed out to the California Redwoods one day and let Dennis Green coach him up. Until then, though, we have to settle for watching the Jets work miracles, while we hope Hines Ward and Santonio Holmes don’t pick up an injuries — because, y’know, they can catch a football. That’s why the Steelers pay them.
2 responses so far ↓
1 JW // Oct 15, 2009 at 5:05 pm
I love the idea, but after seeing the Dennis Green experience in Minnesota, I wouldn’t let him train my dog let alone a young prospect.
2 a different Dave // Oct 16, 2009 at 4:08 am
I’m sure you’ve thought of the reasons why already: NFL isn’t structured the same way as European football leagues. NFL has relative parity and no promotion/relegation. It isn’t in the interests of individual NFL clubs to help their rival clubs get better.
Whereas without parity in Europe, the top 2-4 clubs dominate their league, sign up lots of very talented players who will sit on the bench and get little actual playing experience if they aren’t loaned out. Even if loaned to a club in the same league, the club taking the player on loan is unlikely to get good enough to threaten the top club (and the loan player won’t be allowed to play against the club that owns his contract in any case) so the arrangement actually benefits the club making the loan because it develops their players better with actual playing experience that the player would not get otherwise; if the player is any good he can be brought back to the 1st team of the top club later, or his contract can be sold for a tidy profit. So it’s win-win for the player and for both clubs.
So player loans within NFL are not very likely to happen. Player loans to leagues outside the NFL are also unlikely, since the drop off in talent is too great (and leagues like the UFL are very unlikely to survive in any case). I doubt there is any coach or trainer in UFL or CFL or whatever that could provide better training than what the players received in the NCAA.