He was introduced to it by a good buddy of his, one he went to Seaside High and Cal with, who lives on Cape Cod.
Rivera also had a single slice of bread and ordered the Atlantic cod as his entrée, with mashed potatoes and green beans on the side.
“I couldn’t eat it all, and I love the seafood,” Rivera said, about an hour later on a couch at the team hotel.
And this is where Rivera pauses, and recounts the story of the trigger that led to his getting checked out last summer and ultimately being diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma.
He was the bellwether for a steady Washington team in his first year as coach there, with news-cycle-driving controversies involving the owner and the team’s nickname surrounding his group, and that group won the franchise its first division title in eight years nonetheless.
Rivera’s a football coach and, while he’s always been one of the more personable ones in the NFL, he’s like a lot of his peers in that there’d long been guardrails on where he’d go publicly.
The result is Rivera has found his voice in a way he hadn’t used it before.
Like the medical issue—to me, it’s the craziest thing that we’re the richest country in the world and we don’t have affordable health care for everybody, that we have a health-care system that’s broken, that I got denied proton therapy initially.
Then to find out more, I had someone reach out to me and say, Hey coach, heard you want to be an advocate for things, would you mind if you told me your story, and I could put it in this book I’m writing to advocate for proton therapy? Which I did.
She went to appeal the decision, but her doctor told her she didn’t have the time to ride out a lengthy court battle, so she had the photon therapy instead.
“She lost the opportunity to have children, because she was denied the opportunity to get proton therapy,” Rivera said.
It’s no secret that Rivera’s been advocating for his players to get vaccinated against COVID-19, and his style has been more forceful than perhaps any of the other 31 head coaches.
That’s because high schools and colleges now require the HPV vaccine, meaning that, because they’ve gotten, yes, a vaccine, the players he’s begged to get vaccinated for COVID-19 aren’t as at-risk as he was to get the cancer he did.
His group of the immunodeficient was second in line for it nationally, behind only health-care workers and the elderly, so the Washington coach got his first shot in January and his second in February.
“We’ve had a couple situations with players already testing positive for COVID, and that scares the hell out of me, because I interact with these guys.
“There’s enough positive science out there, if they’re going to tell me that over 600,000 people have died and 99.9% are people that were not vaccinated, well, what about the .1%? Well, that .1% are people that had underlying conditions—old age, something else.
“I had a player come to me when we first got back and we’re getting ready to go to camp,” Rivera said.
The player said no, and raised his phone to say, “I get all my information from here.” Which, right there in the moment, Rivera recognized as the problem.
“And you got some, quite frankly, f—— a——-, that are putting a bunch of misinformation out there, leading people to die.
Rivera has his football reasons to want players to get vaccinated too, of course—he raised to me that he had two unvaccinated players knocked out on contact tracing in camp, and that if that happened the morning of the opener, those guys would miss two games .
On one hand, Rivera feels compelled to speak up, because going through what he has will give a man perspective on life outside of football.
It was there in case he needed to get off his feet for a second, and that’d happen about once a week—usually on Wednesday, because that was the last of three straight days of cancer treatments every week.
“Every time I had to sit down, it would just … I’d put my leg up and be like, f—, this is tough,” he said.
There was an episode where he was getting proton treatments, his throat got dry and he couldn’t get himself to sit still—which is a must to the point where they strap patients in with an immobilizing mask—and needed to be told by his oncologist, Dr.
“As soon as that first click went in, I said, Alright motherf—–, we’re getting through this, this is for your own f—— health, you need this and you can’t f—— back down now.
You guys gotta help me.” So she pulled the car around to the back of the building, where head athletic trainer Ryan Vermillion helped Stephanie carry him out of the car into the facility.
She wound up getting Washington’s team doctor, Anthony Casolaro, on the phone, and, in Rivera’s words, Casolaro “basically read me the riot act.” Stephanie got some bone broth that ex-Panthers RB Jonathan Stewart had sent his former coach out of the fridge, made chicken noodle soup, and Rivera, down 40 pounds at that point, forced himself to eat it.
“It was the first time I’d eaten that much; it was the first time I’d slept that much,” Rivera said.
The following day, he arrived at Gillette Stadium ahead of the team so he could get an hour nap there—because he’s still afraid to oversleep if he takes his nap at the team hotel.
I still have the tingling in the hands and the feet, I still have the acid reflux stuff, I still have tightness in my neck, I can’t turn it quite yet.
But as he sees it, there’s benefit to all this too, and he genuinely believes his team felt that benefit in 2020.
So when the season ended with a loss to the Buccaneers, while Rivera wished for a better ending, he was also able to appreciate crossing the finish line.
“I’ve coached better teams, but I don’t think I’ve coached a team with this kind of resilience, and I can’t help but wonder if all the things that we’ve gone through was reflected in the way that we managed last year.
And for his daughter Courtney, especially, who works in social media with the team and would routine call her dad out if he told the doctors he was fine when he really wasn’t—so he could get the rest he needed.
“The other thing that we found out was that when a male is diagnosed with cancer, and he has a caregiver, he will do well,” Rivera said, smiling as he made his point.
He likes where his roster is and thinks this year will be a good test of its maturity—keeping a team relevant, he knows, is often harder than making it relevant in the first place.
When we went through that stuff, Rivera didn’t much raise his own situation, and that, for him, was a healthy thing.
Asking him why he’s doing this after all he’s been through was another reminder of that, and how what he’s been through, and is still going through, is woven into every piece of his life.
“It’s interesting because it took me back to why I took this job, I just feel like I’m supposed to have this job.
I do want to win a Super Bowl, not necessarily for me, but for the people around this, the people that are part of this.
But, s—, it’s how I feel, it’s how my wife feels.
CINCINNATI — I was here before things seemed to go the wrong way for Joe Burrow, so a lot of my discussions at Bengals camp on the second-year quarterback centered on the steps he’s been able to take despite coming off December ACL surgery.
But given all the noise around Burrow, it made sense to dig around a little more on the bumpy stretch of practices he had a few weeks ago that drew headlines and resulted in skepticism on how ready he’ll be for the team’s opener against the Vikings on Sept.
See, from February, when he returned to Ohio from California, through the first week of training camp, Burrow steadily kept adding to his workload in different ways and kept progressing as he and the team moved forward.
Then, the Bengals put the pads on, went 11-on-11, Burrow had guys buzzing by him and, even with the quarterback no-contact jersey on, he felt a real rush for the first time since one led to his knee’s being shredded in Washington.
“Seven-on-seven and routes on air was fine.
After a couple of days of that, the coaches noticed Burrow’s frustration was simmering—a quarterback who’d always thrived on his own confidence was suddenly lacking it.
“It was just getting reps, getting people around me again,” Burrow continued.
But once he was forced to confront it, he recognized it was something he’d been warned about, and something even guys like Carson Palmer and Tom Brady weren’t immune to.
When he went down, there was 11:41 left in the third quarter, and he’d already thrown for 203 yards and a touchdown while 22-of-34 throws against the fearsome WFT front and staking the Bengals to a 9–7 lead.
“He had taken ownership, was really comfortable with what we were doing on offense, and we found our rhythm in how we wanted to play last year,” Bengals coach Zac Taylor told me.
“And we went to Pittsburgh, and it was tough, great learning experience for him, on the road, divisional game, 4:30, it was our first late-afternoon game, all that went into that.
And he was starting to see things that guys see typically maybe three, four, five years into their career, because he’s got such an unbelievable ability to process what he sees.
He was on a mission to get back.” And while that might be a slight exaggeration , his work was pretty constant regardless of where he was, and that’s shown most in places other than the practice field.
“He tells them what he expects and how he wants it, and that’s ideally in this league how you want it.
When he was a young Broncos assistant, he remembers the coaches sitting in the back row of the meeting room while Peyton Manning commanded the clicker, only chiming in as needed.
Burrow doesn’t have the clicker yet.
“We’ll be in the unit meeting, and it’s generally with the skill positions, the line’s usually doing their own thing, and we’ll turn play on, and, Alright, Joe, go ahead,” said Callahan.
“That’s always what great offenses do, that’s what great teams do.
That’s why his main goal has been to pick up where he left off in November, and in a roundabout way, it’s why he feels like going through what he did a week and a half ago will help him get there.
… The biggest thing was me understanding the offense enough to get us out of bad plays and into good plays, and to see what the defense was trying to do, and check to a play to counter that.
“I was excited about where I was going, I was getting better each week.
COSTA MESA, Calif.
It’s what’s called, in sports-performance parlance, an activation period, designed to get the players’ bodies warm and ready to practice.
And so when I got together with Staley after practice, it was the first thing I thought to ask about as we dove into what’s a different practice schedule in general—the Chargers were only out there for about 90 minutes total.
And then I want them to know how we bring it all together in the kicking game, and I think there’s a lot of benefit to that.
This is the reason why we’re going to meet the way we do the night before at the hotel, this is the way we’re going to travel on the plane.
Then, Staley interlocked fingers, explaining that rather than being a top-down operation, he wanted the different facets of the organization to fit together like puzzle pieces.
Tom Arth got the head coaching job at John Carroll in early 2013 and landed his first choice for defensive coordinator: Case Western assistant Jerry Schuplinski.
“We’d just finished spring ball, and first thing we did, we watched all the games, the practices, to get to know the players we were coaching.
And the result was reflected in how Arth, now the coach at the Univ.
The overarching idea, of course, is that, like Staley said, every minute is thought out and explained clearly.
“You want to go through the plan with the team, where they feel like, O.K., everything they’re talking about, the situations they put us in, they’re doing it because it’s gonna help us perform better,” Arth said.
The 11 periods of the session wrapped at 10:30, with the defense’s going in to lift, and the offense’s taking part in a mandatory post-practice stretch.
To be clear, while the overarching every-minute-counts approach did come from Arth and John Carroll, Staley’s taking things from working with John Fox, Matt Nagy, Vic Fangio and Sean McVay in the NFL, too.
From McVay, Staley took the idea of loading up the players with work in walkthroughs, so they could get the time on task they needed mentally without putting miles on their bodies.
So that when we’re out here, like today, it’s like, Hey guys, we can go today, you can give it everything, you don’t need to pace yourself, we can go.
The result, both Staley and Arth emphasized to me, is players’ seeing a program that’s invested in getting each guy in the best position to be his best—and moreover, the leaders of that program explaining why it’s the way it is.
They’re doing three days on, one day off, recovery day, and then building it, slow it down, giving us a lot of time to stretch, warm up, do things so when we go to practice, we’re able to go.
And we are not going to think like that, we’re not going to act like that, there is no such thing as that.
He rolled to his left on the play and, with the rush bearing down, whipped his body around to hit DeSean Jackson, racing to the pylon down the opposite side of the field.
It was obvious, to me at least, in how Stafford’s carrying himself, and also how he carried on in explaining why the Rams were an attractive destination to him even before he was traded here.
1 defense in the league last year, bunch of young talented players on that side of the ball, two all-time greats on that side of the ball and then some really talented dudes on offense, some guys that have made plays for quite a few years in the league.
Sean as an offensive coach, no doubt, what he’s done has always been very innovative, always forward-thinking and trying to put his players in the best position to succeed.
Like he said, it’s the up-tempo, upbeat nature of the group, to begin with, and that Stafford is around not just Aaron Donald and Jalen Ramsey, but peers with skins on the wall like Andrew Whitworth, Robert Woods and Cooper Kupp.
That part is less about obvious things, like his capability of throws like the aforementioned one to Jackson, and more about where Stafford’s experience and mind can take the offense in partnership with McVay.
“I’ve had exposure to a lot of different offenses, a lot of different ideas, a lot of different ways to do it on the offensive side of the ball, this one being a brand new one to me,” Stafford said.
Sean’s obviously built this thing and had a ton of success, and has an idea of how he wants it to look and how he wants it to feel.
From what I can tell, the result will be what can best be described as a new version of the Shanahan-styled offense McVay brought with him to Los Angeles five years ago, one built to bring out the best in Stafford specifically, and the scheme as well.
Trey Lance is playing for a team that was in the Super Bowl 18 months ago, Mac Jones is on one that won it 30 months ago and just completed the most successful 20-year stretch in league history, and the franchise Justin Fields went to has been in the playoffs two of the last three years and is top 10 in the league in wins over that stretch.
And I think that’s the best thing you can say for the Patriots’ first-round pick—the operation looked clean, he ran the no-huddle confidently at the start of the second half, the ball was out on time and there really wasn’t anything that looked too fast or big for him .
Fields, like Jones, wasn’t fazed by the stage.
But practicing game speed, going at it with my teammates every day, of course, we have a great defense, me going against them every day, it definitely slowed the game up a little bit for me.
I was as calm as could be, just trying to take it play-by-play, and trying to win every play.
So really, the overriding thing the coaches learned in getting to see Fields in live game action for the first time was how calm and collected he was playing, and that showed up in how he kept his eyes downfield and didn’t panic when he escaped the pocket.
This class has long been expected to be a strong one—with Trevor Lawrence, Fields and Trey Lance’s having been known commodities as NFL prospects for well over a year—and that promise was on display this weekend.
But watching on Saturday night, I’d say there’s reason to worry about his protection and how much he’ll get hit, especially when you consider he still could stand to put on some weight .
And later, on a third-and-14, with the rush bearing down, he didn’t try to be a hero, instead checking the ball down to tight end Tyler Kroft, who actually almost got to the sticks on his own.
But he also took four sacks and nearly threw a couple picks, which, again, underscores part of the deal we mentioned earlier.
The numbers look good: Love finished 12-of-17 for 122 yards and a touchdown, notching a 110.4 passer rating and leading Green Bay to its only touchdown of the night in a half of action.
But it’s pretty clear, too, why the Packers needed Aaron Rodgers to be the quarterback this year, beyond just wanting to have the reigning MVP on your roster.
Really, whether or not Watson gets moved is going to boil down to whether someone is willing to pay what the sticker price would’ve been in January in a trade, and it’s certainly understandable why, regardless of what or who anyone believes on the 22 lawsuits he’s had filed against him, other teams would be reticent about making such a move.
The important thing here, to me, is that Pittsburgh has an idea on what it’s going to get, and Schobert should give Pittsburgh a shot to be elite on defense again.
But the Colts really need Fisher to be close to the guy he was in Kansas City coming back off his torn Achilles , it’d be a shame for the team to be caught at the most important position up front following Anthony Castonzo’s retirement, especially given Carson Wentz’s injury history.
Good story from Kevin Clark over at The Ringer on Mahomes this week, and in it was this quote from the Chiefs quarterback: “Sometimes, when I get hit early, I don’t trust staying in the pocket and going through my reads.
Second, his teammates are going to see that, and know he has their back, and maybe even more so take it as a challenge for everyone to look in the mirror when something goes wrong.
Maybe it’s going to what the league has explored, which is programming like what Showtime did with its 24/7 series in college football—where the network would chronicle teams in-season a week at a time.
But then, I know there’s probably no chance that an NFL team is going to walk away from one of 10 home dates it gets annually for a novelty game.
3) And over the last couple of weeks, being face-to-face with the people I cover has been great too.
4) That the Big 10, Pac-12 and ACC are meeting about forming an alliance, ostensibly to combat the SEC’s landing Texas and Oklahoma, only further bolsters the idea that college football’s going to wind up with about 50 to 60 schools in relevant conferences towering over everyone else.
But I don’t think it means anything deeper about people who were born in the late ’70s and early ’80s, people who, truth be told, mostly grew up in a peaceful, prosperous time.
6) I’d really like for people to stop making the pandemic political.
And trade talks, as a result of that, will probably start to heat up a little with the final cutdown two weeks away.