NFL's $765 Million For Concussion Victims; NFL 2013 Season, Week One// MLB Standings; Colorado Rockies // Brief Notes.

For more analysis, go to Mile High Sports Radio AM1510 or FM93.7, and to Denver’s best sports blogging team, milehighsports.com. SPORTS NOTEBOOK posts its columns Tuesday and Friday of each week. Ed. & Publ., Marvin Leibstone; Copy & Mng. Ed., Gail Kleiner). . . //-- NFL---YES, the NFL providing $765 million dollars to around 4,500 former athletes suffering from brain damage due to concussions taken afield “it’s a lot of money.” The breakout per capita is around $170,000, with no more than $5.0 million allotted for any player suffering from the more debilitating game-driven brain damage issue, for instance, advanced Alzheimer’s. No-one should have a problem with the total expenditure or the $5.0 million cap, except that the total expenditure is about the past, very little about “the future.” Only $10 million of the $765 million is for research into ways to reduce all likelihood of NFL players experiencing serious concussion injuries, and undetermined still is how much of that $10 million will be for R&D toward advanced gear technologies, for new ways of doctors treating injuries, and for new ways that the game can be played without such injuries occurring, this without the game losing it’s cleverness, intensity and viewer-attraction. Given what it has taken for development of a single major medical prevention product for national consumption, e.g., the MRI, the $10 million for R&D isn’t going to buy enough to keep another 4,500 players from the terror of brain damage. There are 32 NFL teams with rosters of 40-45 each for active participation afield, which is around 1,340 players for one16-game NFL regular season, four year’s of which is a number hardly much greater than the number of athletes who are already concussion victims. That’s a huge hurricane of hurt. A point being made here is that efforts to “terminate” that which could cause another round of 4,500 brain damaged professional football players ought to be in play, and probably needed for that is an amount equal to the $765 million allocated for existing victims. It may not seem that the NFL can afford that, but it can . . . /// . . . NFL SEASON, 2013: IF we’re talking spread of national interest, TV audience growth and more completely filled stadiums, then professional football in the U.S. “rules.” It has been equal with and then ahead of professional baseball for several seasons now, winning the label, “National Pastime,” catching up to soccer and Formula One motor racing as a global sport drawing in the larger number of spectators and the most money annually. NFL 2013 is likely to continue the trend, and it kicks in this week, 16 weeks of 32 teams each wanting one thing above all else, a shot at next February’s Super Bowl, though more than half of the 32 know that this goal is more dream than reality. By game 12, nearly half of the 32 will be settling for an 8/8 finish, and around half of those will see that .500 finish as more dream than reality. Thus, it’s all there: joy, heartbreak, reason to hope and “dig in,” reason to find where honor and dignity still reside within the less than .500 finish. So, what’s to know now so that this Thursday and the weekend are less than a blur, colorful though such may be. Some background: What is today’s NFL with effective record keeping goes back 93 years, to 1920, then mostly an east coast game, the better teams from the larger industrial towns, e.g., Akron, Ohio, the Super Bowl coming into existence several decades years later, 1967, first to claim it Green Bay after defeating Kansas City. Last year, the Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl and they will be challenged on Thursday by the Denver Broncos. The Broncos may have been the 2012 season’s Super Bowl winner had the Ravens not beaten the Broncos in double overtime with a spontaneous last minute throw more out of desperation and some wildness than a QB offering up something strategic and cool. It wasn’t a play, instead a response to a play gone wrong. Thursday night competes Denver quarterback, Peyton Manning, against Ravens QB, Joe Flacco. Manning is of a mindset that ignores desire for vengeance; he’s more determined to push point-leveraging to where even the best of his team’s defense tactics won’t be needed to help sustain a long lead accrued. Reading and then neutralizing an opposing defense squad is what Manning will be about on Thursday. Whether that defense is called the Ravens, Raiders or Rams will be of less consequence to him than driving an offense for successive first downs and then the low risk rush or throw for the TD or field goal. Ravens QB Flacco could be thinking differently, however; he wouldn’t want to believe, or have anyone else believe, that his role in last year’s Ravens win over the Broncos was a fluke. Meanwhile, other than Thursday night’s Broncos/Ravens match, Week One NFL games including teams that comprised last year’s playoffs will seem like upstairs/downstairs battles, the most against the least, e.g., on Sunday the New England Patriots against the Buffalo Bills, the Atlanta Falcons versus the New Orleans Saints, the Seattle Seahawks vs. the Carolina Panthers, the Indianapolis Colts vs. the Oakland Raiders. Make no mistake, Week One’s more intense drama and tight competition will be that of Thursday’s game. . . /// . . . MLB--- IN the National League, of the three division leading clubs only the NL Central’s Pittsburgh Pirates have to worry about a fast shove back to second place, being one game ahead of the 79-58 St. Louis Cardinals. Impressive within the NL is that the three division leading clubs have amassed more than 80 wins to date, the NL East’s Atlanta Braves ahead with 84 wins, which is more than accrued by any American League club. The NL West’s L.A. Dodgers are second within the NL to the Braves, with 82 wins, 12 wins ahead of second place team, the Arizona Diamondbacks. The Braves have the best lead above second place, 15 wins ahead of the Washington Nationals. The NL Central’s Cincinnati Reds are the only third place team in the NL that could obtain a playoff slot without pairs of September miracles, being only three games behind first place team, the Pirates. . . Within the AL, the Oakland Athletics and the Texas Rangers are tied at first place today, both 15 games ahead of second place club, the L.A. Angels. Both the Athletics and the Rangers have 79 wins, while the AL Central’s first place club, the Detroit Tigers, have 81 wins, five above second place team, the Cleveland Indians. The AL East is still led by the 82-57 Boston Red Sox, five wins ahead of the Tampa Bay Rays. The best third place performance within the AL belongs to the AL East’s Baltimore Orioles, seven wins behind the Red Sox. . . If the above-cited data holds up, if the growth-rate of wins maintains, then as the regular 2012 season comes to a close we’ll see the Atlanta Braves atop the NL and the Red Sox leading the AL. BUT, and as always, playoff competition will change the order of things and deliver some surprising outcomes . . . /// . . . COLORADO ROCKIES---SERIOUS baseball fans want to see good baseball, and serious players want to provide good baseball. Sure, fans and players are more than curious about team standings and individual player stats, it’s great if one’s favorite baseball team can double-down, lead a division, win a pennant race, go to the World Series, win the WS, and we like to marvel at individual feats, at double-digit home runs, at most hits for a season, at low ERA’s. That so many fans of art, theater, literature, science, politics and other endeavors deride sports fans/game analysts/sportswriters/athletes for appreciating the amazing that happens on baseball fields and at football and soccer arenas, at track meets and at basketball courts seems ridiculous, in that appreciation of sports is no different than, say, liking a Picasso painting, a Broadway musical or a movie based on a Jane Austen novel. It’s about power of appreciation, one of the major plusses separating us humans from snakes and scorpions. Okay, that pet-peeve digression put aside, many “appreciating” baseball fans, and lots of MLB players, want above all else to be inside that one day at the stadium, that one game, to see multiple extra-base hits, RBI’s, home runs, stolen positions, catches not even an Olympic gymnast could leap or stretch to make, and it’s been that way ironically at games involving the now National League West third place club, the 65-74/.468 Colorado Rockies. We can be disappointed, even top-of-the-mark angry, that the Rockies haven’t the numbers for easy playoff candidacy, yet that disappointment, the anger, can dissolve quickly when after appearing to be asleep during a few games the Rockies suddenly bounce, e.g., against the Los Angeles Dodgers on Monday night, Josh Rutledge reaching first base safely, followed by D.J. LeMahieu offering a double, sending Rutledge to third, then Wilin Rosario gets on base and Rutledge and LeMahieu get to go home before the inning is over, Rockies ahead of the Dodgers, 3-1. Or, last Friday against the Cincinnati Reds, Todd Helton proving that at 40 years of age he’s still the face of the franchise---two home runs, six RBI’s, reaching 2,500 hits and still going. If the body slows a bit at 40, the eyes can be the same. I asked Todd Helton a few years ago what he believed was the best attribute for successful at-bats; he answered, “The eyes, seeing the ball,” and he still sees it large, maybe inside that five feet of distance before reaching the plate when a ball travelling over 85 mph is considered any hitter’s blind spot. Or, just when one thinks that Wiln Rosario and Michael Cuddyer won’t be seeing multiple hits in a single game or extend a hitting streak as they had earlier in the season, the two see bat/ball connectivity again and put numbers on the board. There’s Rockies heat still for a decent season finish, a .500 or higher closeout, which means the Rockies need to blast away against the L.A. Dodgers in five more September games and cause trouble for the Arizona Diamondbacks in six September outings. Then there‘s putting up a solid showing this month versus the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals. Our take here is that the Rockies mirror the Dodgers, in that they can be a come from behind club time and again. The Dodgers finished poorly in 2012, and they started off poorly this year. They weren’t hot and winning more than losing until after the 2013 All Star game. Now of 82 wins and 55 losses, the Dodgers were 47/47 just before the All Star break. The Rockies have 23 more games to play before the 2013 regular season ends. If they can continue to win four of seven games played, or adopt the Dodger post-All Star game win/loss percentages, the Rockies can claim .500+ status, MLB’s version of a box for the better also-ran clubs. . . . /// . . . BRIEF NOTES---At the U.S. Open, Roger Federer is gone, Venus Williams is gone, sister Serena is still up . . . RUSH, it’s the title of a new film directed by Ron Howard and to appear at theaters soon. It’s about FORMULA ONE motor racing, with F1 footage that compares with that in classic films Grand Prix and Le Mans. The FORMULA ONE-USA event will be this November, at Austin Texas, touted as top sirloin steak compared with NASCAR, the hamburger . . . A terrific and current HBO documentary is titled GLICKMAN, about Marty Glickman, among the best radio/TV sports announcers in U.S. sports history, who was also a college football star and an Olympic runner on the same team as Jesse Owens at the 1936 Munich-held Olympics that humiliated Hitler and Hitler’s notion of there being a super race (There’s great footage of that race and of classic football and basketball games that Marty Glickman covered.). END/ml.