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DAVIE Ben Powers Jersey , Fla. (AP)Miami Dolphins defensive coordinator Matt Burke plans to go diving in Bora Bora on summer vacation, and when he returns he’ll really start trying to figure out who should play where this season.Burke and the rest of the defensive staff have been experimenting and evaluating during spring non-contact drills. But when asked Wednesday how much he can tell before players don pads, he responded with a slight smile.”Nothing,” Burke said.Minicamp does offer a chance to assess agility and how well players are absorbing the system, he said. But it will be August before Burke and the Dolphins have a true sense regarding what kind of defense they’ll be in 2018.”Everything has an asterisk on it until we put pads on,” Burke said.Miami hopes and need to be much better on defense than last season, Burke’s first as a coordinator under coach Adam Gase. The Dolphins ranked 29th in points allowed at 24.6 per game, and then parted with their best defensive player, five-time Pro Bowl tackle Ndamukong Suh.On the plus side, they added veteran Robert Quinn at defensive end and first-round draft pick Minkah Fitzpatrick at safety. Raekwon McMillan, a 2017 second-round pick, returns to start at middle linebacker after missing his entire rookie season because of a knee injury. And depth appears improved at end, linebacker and safety.”We don’t have any positions set in stone right now,” Burke said. ”We’re rolling a lot of guys at a lot of positions.”Fitzpatrick, for example, is splitting his time among the free safety, strong safety and nickel back positions.”He’s probably about as advertised,” Burke said. ”He’s really sharp. He’s thirsty for knowledge. We’re trying to overload him, and he keeps taking it. We are moving him around at some different spots and trying to get a feel for what his best fit is. He has responded well.”At defensive end, the rotation will include Quinn, Cameron Wake, Andre Branch, William Hayes and 2017 first-round pick Charles Harris.”Our plan would be to rotate different groups,” Burke said. ”We feel we’ll be better off having fresh guys, whether it’s for two, three or four snaps at a time, and then send the next group in. Building depth there was important to us. We want guys going full speed.”The Dolphins have four more practices scheduled next week and then break until training camp, allowing the 42-year-old Burke to embark on his latest exotic vacation in Bora Bora, a small island in the South Pacific. He has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, done charity work in Uganda, and taken a safari in three other African countries.Burke joked in the past about Gase calling him during vacation with football questions, and had a quick response when asked if the boss will be able to reach him this time.”Whether I have cellphone service or not http://www.ravensfootballauthentics.com/iman-marshall-jersey-authentic ,” Burke said, ”the answer is no.”Decisions about who’s playing where will have to wait.— BOSTON (AP) — Atlanta Falcons linebacker Tommy Nobis seemed to transition easily into his post-playing career, landing a job as the manager of the team’s training camp hotel and rising through the franchise’s front office to vice president.For three more decades, the man who came to be known as “Mr. Falcon” never left football.And football never left him.“Growing up, I remember my mom having to call his secretary when he was going out to training camp to let them know what kind of mood he was in. And then vice versa,” his daughter, Devon Jackoniski, said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.“We were pretty uneasy growing up,” she said. “Although my dad had just some beautiful moments of being a wonderful man, emotionally he was so unstable it was just hard to get close to him.”Researchers have confirmed what Nobis’ family long suspected: He had the most severe form of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease linked to repetitive blows to the head that can cause the kind of violent moods they had grown accustomed to.And now, as the NFL world descends upon Atlanta for Sunday’s Super Bowl, it serves as a somber reminder of the impact that football can have on its players and those who love them.“That truly was my dad’s first love,” Jackoniski said. “He wasn’t born with a lot of money. They were from a blue-collar area. It gave my dad a lot of opportunities, so it’s kind of a bittersweet thing.“He told me before he became very ill he would never turn his back on football or do anything different. But he would educate kids a little different in the game,” Jackoniski said. “There’s something very wrong with slamming your head against a brick wall over and over and over again.”A two-way star at Texas whose No. 60 was retired by both the Falcons and the Longhorns, Nobis won the Maxwell Award as the best all-around player in college football and finished seventh in the 1965 Heisman Trophy voting, just ahead of Bob Griese and Steve Spurrier. In the Orange Bowl against Joe Namath and top-ranked Alabama, Nobis led a goal-line stand to preserve the Longhorns’ victory .He was the No. 1 overall pick in the 1966 NFL draft — the first ever selection by the brand-new Atlanta Falcons . The rookie of the year. Five Pro Bowl selections. But he never made the playoffs, with the upstart franchise posting only two winning records in his 11 seasons.And when the Falcons reached the Super Bowl two years ago, he was too far gone to understand what it meant.Dr. Ann McKee, the director of Boston University’s CTE center, said Monday that Nobis had the most severe form of the disease, showing a “severe loss of neurons and large CTE lesions throughout the cerebral cortex.”His family was not surprised.“We knew there was going to be something wrong on his pathology report,” said Jackoniski, who is a physician assistant. “But it was shocking how a human being could still be alive with that little functioning brain.”Jackoniski was 2 when her father retired from the NFL, but football was never far from their life.Nobis spent 30 years in the team’s front office, working in scouting, marketing, player development and corporate development. (He also ran a charity that provided job training for people with disabilities.)At home, there was more football.“It doesn’t matter the time of year, my dad could always find a football game on Trace McSorley Jersey ,” Jackoniski said. “That was basically our lives. When he retired, his only career was with the Falcons. We would go to all the Falcons games, whether we wanted to or not. That was who we were.”She remembered her father, who died in 2017 at the age of 74, as a humble man who was not very social, and yet was a great public speaker. A prankster. Big Red. Huckleberry Finn with Muscles.He was beloved in Atlanta; Jackoniski said he would approach children with disabilities at restaurants, just to make them laugh.“That can be awkward for a lot of people, but it wasn’t to him. He could relate to a kid but not an adult,” she said. “When we were growing up, people would always come up to us and say, ‘Your dad is a saint.’ We would just sit there smiling, knowing that when we got home, the tide was going to turn.”With his family, Jackoniski said, Nobis was a disciplinarian. Aggressive. Intense. “We always said we had to walk around eggshells with my dad,” Jackoniski said.When her older brother, Tommy, decided he didn’t want to play football anymore, her father snapped. The incident drove a wedge between them and kept Nobis from seeing any of his grandchildren for many of his later years.“He just became unhinged,” Jackoniski said. “We just thought that’s who my dad was.”Nine years ago, Nobis was supposed to give the eulogy at his father-in-law’s funeral. “My dad, who was the public speaker,” Jackoniski said. “It was totally garbled.”Afterward, in front of the extended family, Nobis snapped at her 2-year-old son. His rage was so frightening they thought about calling the police.“He was this caged animal that was just unleashed,” she said. “At that point we knew there was something wrong. Once he took it out to the public, we knew there was something horribly wrong with him.”The family tried to avoid triggers like noise or chaos, but Nobis would become increasingly rattled in public. There were restaurants he couldn’t return to because of his outbursts; he got out of a car at a bank drive-thru to yell at the teller for taking too long with the customer in front of him.“It became embarrassing,” Jackoniski said. “But it was scary, too. Toward the end my brother removed all the guns from his house, thankfully. I don’t know if he ever threatened to use a gun, but my brother had enough insight to do that.”CTE Kyler Murray Jersey , which can be diagnosed only after death, has been found in more than 100 former NFL players, and in dozens more athletes and members of the military who have been exposed to repetitive head trauma. The disease can lead to memory loss, depression and even suicide.“When you see some of these guys going in for these tackles, I wish they would allow these guys to come into these houses where these CTE victims are living and see them living their lives, day to day,” Jackoniski said.“Do they really want their lives to be that way? Not only is it going to affect their lives, but it rips families apart, and it rips friends apart, and it is so destructive.”Although her children don’t play football, Jackoniski said they remain Falcons and Longhorns fans and are proud of the man who they were once kept away from for their own safety. And though connecting his behavior to CTE has helped the family understand Nobis’ struggle, it also made Jackoniski realize that she never knew what her father was actually like.“I don’t know that I ever saw my dad without showing signs of CTE, my entire life,” she said. “In hindsight, I think that was the saddest part of the news. His children never even knew who he was. My mom even may have not known.”Jackoniski said she doesn’t watch a lot of football any more, but she will watch the Super Bowl “just because I know it will be on in our house.” In an email follow-up to the telephone interview, she said she struggled to comprehend what the sport has meant to her family.“Football was my father’s life, the air he breathed and therefore the air we breathed,” she wrote. “It brought discipline and recklessness, self-worth and depression, strength and weakness, determination and fear, teamwork and destruction of relationships, competition and dissension, friendships and loneliness, strategy and brutal honesty, entertainment and subsistence.“In the end,” she said, “it brought humility in every sense of the word.”