Sporting Madness

In the next instalment in my extended interview series for this piece on innovation in the NFL for The Good Point , I present Steve Sheiner of the Miami Dolphins site Blog With A Porpoise . Steve is also a senior editor at Fanball.com , the network I run Canuck Puck for. He had a lot of interesting comments on the Dolphins, the Wildcat offence, former B.C. Lion Cameron Wake and innovation in the NFL in general. Read on for the full interview! Andrew Bucholtz: The Dolphins obviously made a huge turnaround last year, going from the league's worst record to AFC East champions. How much of that success do you attribute to their implementation of the Wildcat offence? Steve Sheiner: I certainly think that played a role in their success as they caught a lot of teams off-guard that were ill-prepared to defend against such an unfamiliar attack. But more realistically, the Dolphins had one of the cushiest schedules in 2008 and the loss of Tom Brady in the division certainly didn’t hur...

Photo: The cover of Bob Ackles' memoirs . It came as quite a shock last week to hear the news [Neate Sager, Out of Left Field ] of Bob Ackles' death at 69 [Ian Austin and Marc Weber, The Vancouver Province ]. Ackles was such an integral part of the B.C. Lions, the CFL and Canadian football as a whole that it seems weird to consider a future landscape of the game he loved so much without him in his prominent role. It's been a bad year for CFL icons: remember, we lost J.I. Albrecht [Stephen Brunt, The Globe and Mail ] back [Neate Sager, Out of Left Field ] in March [my piece], so Ackles' death takes away yet another of the characters who made this league great. Today, as an appropriate intro to the Lions-Blue Bombers game, TSN spent a half-hour of their pre-game show relating the tributes [a collection of them from TSN.ca ] to Ackles, a man who thoroughly deserved all of them. The collection of tributes they were able to put together on short notice was very impres...