Jerry Jones, Jeff Lurie should star at Flat Earth symposium

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Jerry Jones is an American classic – in the same way that climate change deniers are classics.

Jones’ climate change is the link between football and neurodegenerative diseases like CTE. He says he sees no “firmly established link” between the two, despite the fact that the league’s health and safety vice president said there most certainly was.

“We want to continue to be safer and want to continue to support any type of research that would let us know what [the] consequences really are,” Jones said at the annual league meeting’s Flat Earth symposium. “In no way should we be basically making assumptions with no more data than we’ve got about the consequences of a head injury.

“The thing that I don’t want to get caught up in is semantics, the semantics of it,” Jones said, knowing the semantics are exactly what we are talking about here. “We as a league, we have not in any way changed our desire to do everything we can to make it safe, make it safe as to head injury. We hope and will support any data that would give us more insight into any short- and long-term consequences. We would support that.”

But . . .

“We don’t have that knowledge and background and scientifically, so there’s no way in the world to say you have a relationship relative to anything here. There’s no research. There’s no data . . . there’s no data that in any way creates a knowledge. There’s no way that you could have made a comment that there is an association and some type of assertion. In most things, you have to back it up by studies. And in this particular case, we all know how medicine is. Medicine is evolving. I grew up being told that aspirin was not good. I’m told that one a day is good for you.”

Yes, it clears up that pesky head trauma in a jiffy. Of course, Jer’ played football, and . . . nahhh, that’s cheap, even by my subterranean standards.

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In other nutty owner news (like that separates today from any other day), Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeff Lurie spoke of his decision to give, and then take, all the decision-making power as regards his team to Chip Kelly. His answer was, well, not the kind that an aspirin can treat.

According to the elegant yet dignified Dave Zangaro of CSNPhilly.com, Lurie said he thought that removing former and current general manager Howie Roseman from a position of power so that Kelly could be in charge was required so that Lurie could make a proper decision on his coach.

In other words, Kelly was promoted to see how quickly he could become an abject failure. Yay Jeffy!

“I think it was a necessary way to go to find out if Chip was the right guy,” Lurie said. “Let him be responsible for all the decisions that he wanted to inject and make. No question I have that it was the right way to dissect if Chip was going to be the right guy going forward or not. We dissected it and decided with all of the great things he brought, he wasn’t the right person going forward. And it was helpful for him to be accountable for those decisions so we could move on in a great way.”

Jeff, meet Jerry, and both of you, if you could please follow the orderly to that room at the end of the hall. Take an aspirin on your way.


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Cal booster Erik Bruvold has decided to get more actively involved in the future of Cal basketball coach Cuonzo Martin by initiating a petition on Change.com to press chancellor Nicholas Dirks and athletic director Mike Williams to publicly affirm their support for Martin, who is under campus review for whether he reported sexual-harassment allegations against his former assistant coach, Yann Hufnagel.

Maybe someone is getting a petition up to ask why his contract status (which is he doesn’t have a signed one) hasn’t been clarified after nearly two years.

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And finally, I weary of a world in which we have to be Boston Strong, and Paris Strong, and Charleston Strong, and Ankara Strong, and now Brussels Strong. Our various capital cities, and every other city, town, village, hamlet and place where people congregate around the world, in all countries everywhere, deserve better than this.

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