Listening To Marc Ross

The Super Bowl will be played Sunday in Los Angeles between the Cincinnati Bengals and Los Angeles Rams. 

This is not news. Nor is the fact that for the second straight time, a team is playing in the Super Bowl in its home stadium after it never happened in the first LIV years of the event. This bodes well for the Arizona Cardinals, who host the game next year, though the team probably needs to figure out why its franchise quarterback unfollowed all of their social media accounts first.

If you asked TigerBlog who his favorite player in the game Sunday will be, he'd oddly enough have to say that it's Cincinnati rookie placekicker Evan McPherson, the fifth-round pick out of Florida. McPherson's clutch kicking is as big a reason for why the Bengals are in the game at all.

Of course, it's hard to root against either quarterback. Cincinnati's Joe Burrow said this when asked what advice he'd give young athletes:

“Focus on getting better,” said Burrow. “Don’t have a workout and go post it on Instagram the next day and go sit on your butt for four days and everyone thinks you’re working hard but you really aren’t. Work in silence, don’t show everybody what you’re doing. Let your game on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights show all the hard work you put in.”

He comes across, at least, as a very grounded, very likeable young man. As for the Rams' QB, that would be Matthew Stafford, who deserves all of this after having been the quarterback of the Detroit Lions for 12 seasons, where he never exactly had a great team around him. He was still the fastest NFL quarterback to reach 40,000 career yards, and he ranks third all-time in passing yards per game.

This is actually a rare Super Bowl for TigerBlog in that he finds both teams easy to root for. He just hopes it's a good game.

This Super Bowl is only half the story for the NFL right now. The other half is the lawsuit that has been filed by former Miami Dolphins' coach Brian Flores, who is accusing the NFL and the teams of racially discriminating in their hiring practices.

For each Thursday during Black History Month, TigerBlog will be writing a feature story for goprincetontigers.com on an alum (or as was the case last week, three alums). For today's piece, he wanted to speak to Marc Ross, from the Class of 1995.

Ross was a football player at Princeton and a really good one. He holds school records to this day, and for all the great wide receivers Princeton has had, Ross is the only one who has ever averaged better than 20 yards per reception for a season (20.2 as a junior in 1993).

TB and Ross go way, way back, all the way to when Ross was a player and a student-worker whose main task was to answer the phones at Jadwin Gym during basketball games. This was before there was an internet on which to check in-game scores. 

Through the years, TB has remained a big fan of what Ross has done. In all his time at Princeton, TB hasn't met too many more impressive people than Marc Ross.

He went on to a long career working in scouting in the NFL, helping to build the Philadelphia Eagles into a team that reached four straight NFC championship games and one Super Bowl and, after a stop in Buffalo, won two Super Bowl rings with the Giants as the No. 2 person on the personnel side.

Each year, TB would see Ross mentioned in stories about GM openings, and TB assumed it was just a matter of time until Ross got his chance. And yet it never came. 

Eventually, his time with the Giants ended, and he landed with a great job as an analyst on the NFL Network. These days, he's also trying to help the Rock build a refurbished XFL, which will begin playing a year from now (in a less-gimicky way).  

There is a question that TB can't really answer, though, and it's actually a question that begs several other questions. Why is it that Ross didn't get a GM job?

It's not because of the resume. It's not because of the intelligence. It's not because he can't communicate well. So why?

It certainly raises some flags, especially in the context of the Flores lawsuit. It's something that Ross talks about in the story, and what he says is quite eye-opening, and thought-provoking. He also talks about his time at Princeton, his love for the University and his admiration for John Mack and Bob Surace.

You can read the story HERE.

Enjoy the Super Bowl, but also give some serious consideration to the issues that he and TB discussed.