Q: I don't think he was specific as to where the roster expansion would occur, but as a coach, where would it benefit you the most – the 46-man, the 53-man, or the 90-man roster.
BB: Those questions, and look, they’re good questions, they come up every year, and I know that the league meetings, those get talked about in one version or another. We’ll start with the game day roster. The issues with the game day roster is if you allow all the players to play, let’s say you allow all 53 players to play, then you get into some competitive situations due to injuries, where I have 53 players but you only have 48 because you have guys that are hurt and that type of thing. So there is a competitive aspect to that versus the argument of, “Well they’re all on the team, they’re all being paid, so why can’t we use them”? It kind of goes back and forth on that one I think one of the issues with the extra players if you will, like going from 46 to some higher number on game day, it gets into the over-specialization. Do you have a long field goal kicker, a short field goal kicker, extra specialty-type players that therefore just require other extra specialty-type players? So if you carry four tight ends or you carry a lot of receivers or a lot of backs and use formations and personnel groups… So you have a Wildcat quarterback, you’ve got a regular quarterback, you’ve got a backup quarterback, you’ve got some other type of quarterback, that just forces a similar specialization on defense to match up with that. I don’t know if that’s really where we want the game to go. There was a time in the National Football League, not that long ago, when the same 11 players played on offense on every play and the same 11 defensive players played on defense on every play. The fans knew all the players. Now it’s hard for me, and I’m full time at this, to keep up with all the players, even on the teams that we play, like the Giants, or I’m sure the Giants are looking at us. There is a lot of roster movement and guys on and off and injuries and practice squad guys and all that, so when you add the practice squad players on the roster potentially because they could be added all the way up to the day before the game, that’s other depth that you have on your roster that you can get up to your 46 if you need to. So, you’re talking about training camp numbers – I’m not sure in the overall big picture of the league how many of the players of those extra 320 players, the guys from 80-90, from 81-90, that let’s say five years ago wouldn’t have been on a roster in training camp, although you had the Europe exemption guys and all that, I’d say the 85-90 number, somewhere in there, was what the training camp numbers have been for a while. You get into that whole how much higher do you need to go than 90 for training camp and what impact do those players really have on the overall quality of the league, although I think without doing a total study on it, certainly my impression is that the injuries in the early part of the season – training camp to the early part of the season – is definitely on the incline, so maybe that’s something that would warrant further study. And again, I’m sure that the league will take a look at that every year. But in the end, it comes down to the players that are playing, and I think as you get into the second half of the season, what you usually see at this point is players going on injured reserve that are going to be out for the season because the season is shorter, they have less time to recover, players going on injured reserve, teams bringing in emergency players, whether they bring in from outside the organization or they bring them up from the practice squad, and in a lot of cases, those players that get added to the team or even to the 46-man roster don’t play a tremendous amount I’d say overall as a group, although there are some notable exceptions. But overall you don’t see those guys getting a lot of playing time. So when you lose a player and replace him with an emergency player or a practice squad player on your roster, I’d say probably the general tendency of most teams and most coaches would be to take their other better players who are already on the team and use them more rather than take another body that hasn’t been with the team and give those snaps to the player that is now out of the lineup. I think usually you try to find a way to take what you have and just do more with it rather than take somebody that is a lot further away and isn’t as familiar with what you’re doing and what your system is and think you’re going to get them up to the same speed that the guy that you just got hurt was at. Another long answer to a short question, but there are a lot of different aspects to it and obviously there are a lot of other factors involved, like the CBA and the Player’s Association and salary cap implications and benefits and a thousand other things, most of which I’m not even familiar with. But it does impact the competitiveness of the game.
Q: Thanks, Bill
BB: Yeah, sorry to take so long on that.
