Tag: sports

One of the hard things about veterans’ sports is that it’s only a matter of time before the old guy retires. It’s strange, because it’s not like anything changes all that much, but somehow, it’s never quite the same once a player stops showing up for practice. Sometimes it’s a job, sometimes it’s family circumstances, but usually it’s an injury of some sort that is the cause. Sometimes it’s serious and there is no choice. More often, it’s a nagging minor injury that the player simply can’t manage to shake, and which reminds him of his mortality.

Soccer is a young man’s game. Veteran status over here begins at 32. I was already quite old for a player when I joined my current team 10 years ago, but somehow I’ve managed to hold my own despite slowing down a little and being moved from striker to the wing. I even scored a few goals in the most recent season, including one game-winner. But I was never the oldest on the team, in fact, I’ve never been the oldest player on any team dating back to when I first started playing at the age of 7 for the North Suburban Soccer Association.

I am 11 months younger than my teammate S, a tough defender who deceptively looks about 10 years younger than his 53 years – he also looks exactly like the Bond actor Christopher Walz – although unfortunately, he is now my former teammate, having announced his retirement from the club to the team tonight. So, as of now, I am officially “the old guy”.

I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep playing. When I was 45, an opposing player of the same age and I agreed that we would try to play until 50. Five years later, we both had a good game against each other, and declared that we could easily make it to 55. But tonight, after S’s announcement, the end of the road suddenly feels as if it is looming just a little bit closer than before.

I’ve been very, very lucky. I’ve been fortunate to play at a higher level than I ever imagined, to play against better competition than I ever expected, and to have been a part of five championship teams since I moved to Europe. There are still few things I enjoy more than the intoxicating thrill of finding the open space, kicking the ball and seeing it flash past the keeper into the back of the net. I don’t want to stop. I have no intention of stopping. But I know that Father Time always wins in the end.

Nevertheless, I’ll play as long and as hard as I can, until it comes time for me to take off my jersey for the last time and pass the burden of being the old guy onto the next player in line.

 Are now hitting the NFL hard:

Even though the NFL managed to play all 256 regular-season games and all 13 postseason games, the league lost a large chunk of money due to the pandemic. According to Ben Fischer of Sports Business Journal, the league saw its revenue fall from $16 billion in 2019 to $12 billion in 2020. The league had expected to generate $16.5 billion last year, before the pandemic changed everything.

That’s a 27 percent decline in revenue, in just one year. Sound familiar?

From Corporate Cancer:

It’s one thing to simply claim that something is bad, it is another to demonstrate exactly how bad it is. Once a corporation contracts Stage Five convergence, it can go downhill very fast.

How fast? On average, as a rough estimate, up to 20 percent in just one year. This decline can take place in terms of either revenue or units….

While the NFL continues to publicly dismiss its declining ratings as a temporary problem, the fact is that they caused the league to fall short of its predicted 2017 revenue of $14 billion and knocked the league considerably off the track of its revenue target of $25 billion by 2027. A four-percent reduction in annual revenue may not sound like much, but it represents a 10.7 percent decline in expected revenues which is not insignificant to any business, no matter how big it is. Indeed, there are even some who believe that this unnecessary, convergence-caused debacle may represent Peak NFL.

Keep in mind that the TV money is actually increasing while the viewership is declining. This is a fragile situation; it’s more likely that the future will see an NFL with annual revenues of $8 billion than $25 billion in real 2020 dollars. 

And it’s not the pandemic. The pandemic should have boosted TV ratings. The NFL’s real fear should be that it did….

The NBA All-Star game is down 76.1 percent from its peak viewership.

Like all sports everywhere, the NBA has been suffering in the television ratings game, dating back to last season and the restart in the Disney bubble. That included an all-time ratings low for the NBA Finals between the Los Angeles Lakers and Miami Heat.

Well, it appears things aren’t much better today, as it was revealed that Sunday’s All-Star Game also hit an all-time ratings low.

Per Anthony Crupi of Sportico, Turner Sports’ coverage of the NBA’s midseason event averaged just 5.94 million viewers and just a 2.4 rating in the all-important 18-49 demographic. That was a drop of nearly 24 percent from the year-over-year average.

And consider this — the record high for the All-Star Game, which came in 1993, averaged 22.9 million viewers and boasted a 14.3 rating.

Professional sports are suffering from a triple whammy. First, demographics. All the outreach efforts to Hispanics, Asians, and other not-Americans can’t disguise the fact that not-white people don’t care about sports invented by white people as much as white people do. Ockham’s Razor suggests that they never will, for the obvious reason that they never have, and relocation to the USA isn’t going to cause a sufficient percentage of them to do so.

Second, the convergence of the leagues. The changes in ownership from a class that cares first about the sport to a class that cares about financial performance and influence over the masses is significantly reducing the quality of the product while serially turning off segments of people who increasingly become ex-fans.

Third, the behavior of the players. This is, in many ways, an extension of the convergence, because the behavior would not have been permitted by the old school owners. But it is nevertheless distinct, as the players are not so much biting as relentlessly gnawing at the hands of the people whose interest keeps them fed.

I am a lifelong NFL fan who was active in two fantasy leagues for more than 15 years. I subscribed to NFL Gamepass from the time it was initially offered. Two years ago, I stopped subscribing. Last year, I only watched part of the Super Bowl. Most damningly, I know a die-hard Packers fan and shareholder who didn’t watch one single moment of the NFL, not even when the Pack played in the NFC championship game at Lambeau.

Pro sports are not going to bounce back from their convergence. In fact, the pandemic is disguising the full extent of the catastrophic declines.

 After destroying both the ebook and audiobook markets, Amazon has set it sights on further reducing NFL viewership:

After steamrolling the bookstore industry, monopolizing online retail, taking a stab at dominating the pharmacy business and not that far from muscling out the competition and becoming the dominant player in cloud, Amazon is set to dominate yet another market: NFL viewership.

The WSJ reports that the National Football League is on the verge of signing new rights deals with media partners that could see Amazon.com carry many games exclusively and TV networks pay as much as double their current rate, plunging NFL viewership notwithstanding.

According to the new agreements, which could be in place as early as next week, TV deals for the league’s Sunday and Monday franchises with Fox, CBS, NBC and ESPN are likely to run for as long as 11 years, they said. ESPN’s deal would go into effect after the 2021-22 season while the Fox, CBS and NBC agreements would kick in after the 2022-23 season.

But it is the NFL’s deal with Amazon that is of most interest: it would result in a significant number of Thursday night games being available exclusively on its Prime Video platform and “represent the league’s deepest foray into streaming”, WSJ sources said. And in order to lock even more Prime Video viewers, those games wouldn’t be available on traditional television outside of the local markets of the two teams playing.

While it hasn’t been confirmed yet that the replacement of the Washington Redskins’ cheerleading squad with a nameless gay men’s Chippendale dance troupe was dictated by Amazon, it appears likely that the Minnesota Vikings and the Kansas City Chiefs will be terminated from the league for racism, while the New England Patriots have already received an email from Amazon informing them that their games will not be televised due to their extremist identitarianism.

It is, of course, merely another permutation of the Sino-Jewish War:

No American pro sports league has profited more from its business relationship with China than the NBA, and the NBA has been known to take some serious social justice and political stands in the United States.

So it will be interesting to see if the league will take a stand against its biggest business partner, now that a Chinese court has ruled in favor of a widely circulated Chinese textbook that describes homosexuality as “a psychological disorder.”

Remember, the NBA is the same organization that once pulled its All-Star Game out of Charlotte after a North Carolina law banned transgender people from using bathrooms in accordance with their gender identities.

Now, will the league speak out about the Chinese court ruling that states referring to homosexuality as a mental disorder is a-OK? Will it pull preseason games out of China, stop accepting money from Chinese merchandise sales, vehemently speak out about the communist nation’s decision to promote materials that are clearly anti-LGBT?

The point is not the hypocrisy. The point is that the Chinese response demonstrates it was never necessary to surrender to the neoclowns and SJWs. Unfortunately, the prosperity-weakened Christians of the West lacked the spine and the intelligence to defend their ideals, their nations, or their faith, and succumbed to lies about free speech, equality, posterity, and civic nationalism.

Which is why the 21st Century is much more likely to belong to the East than to the West.

Why do I doubt that Hollywood will be falling all over themselves to make a movie about this athlete’s heroic refusal to compromise his principles?

Jamaican sprinter Yohan Blake has said that he would rather miss the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics than receive the Covid-19 vaccine. Blake – a two-time Olympic gold medallist and former 100m world champion – made the comments in Jamaican newspaper The Gleaner.

Earlier this month, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced that receiving a vaccine would not be compulsory for athletes and officials to attend this summer’s delayed Games, though they still encouraged competitors to be vaccinated if possible before arriving in Japan “to contribute to the safe environment of the Games.”

“Also out of respect for the Japanese people, who should be confident that everything is being done to protect not only the participants, but also the Japanese people themselves,” the IOC said.

Speaking over the weekend, Blake was quoted as saying: “My mind still stays strong, I don’t want any vaccine, I’d rather miss the Olympics than take the vaccine, I am not taking it.”

Now there is a man who understands risk-reward. There are some people whose personal situations justify the risks of the not-vaccine. Frankly, most of their genes could probably use modification. But an elite young athlete is definitely on the wrong side of the risk-reward ratio. 

It’s all about the talent, right? The talent and experience, right? The talent, the experience, and the intelligence, right? It can’t possibly be about ethnipotism, right?

Fans are going to watch NFL games, the NCAA Tournament, the NBA playoffs, etc., no matter who is calling the action. This is true for the NFL draft as well. So with ESPN needing a host for this year’s draft after parting ways with Trey Wingo, the network reportedly has turned to Mike Greenberg.

You’d think the network would want to use someone who has a connection to the NFL or college football, but that isn’t nearly as important as the opportunity for cross-promotion Greenberg provides…. ESPN broke up a successful morning radio show (Mike & Mike) so it could give Greenberg his own morning show (Get Up) and then ended up giving Greenberg his own radio show (Greeny) too.

So it’s not a shock ESPN would go out of its way to give the public even more Mike Greenberg. Now this is the part where I’m supposed to get snarky and say ESPN is giving us more Mike Greenberg even though no one has ever asked for more Mike Greenberg. 

Here is a prediction. The NFL is going to start falling harder and faster in terms of ratings and fan interest, just like the NBA. And no one in the media is going to be able to explain why, because explaining requires undersanding, understanding requires noticing, and noticing is very much discouraged these days.

I guarantee there are a few talented, intelligent individuals with NFL and college football connections who are noticing, though. I suspect the author may be, at the very least, suspicious, given the hilarious dagger at the end.

Personally, I’d prefer someone who is somewhat entertaining….

Kevin Garnett explains why you never, ever, talk trash to an individual who finds motivation through competition:

Every NBA fan knows former Timberwolves star Kevin Garnett was a legendary trash-talker. However, there was a time when that trash talk came back to burn him. Appearing on Wednesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! Garnett revealed that when he was 19 years old, his teammate J.R. Rider got off to a hot start during a game against the Bulls and that got Garnett chirping at Michael Jordan. Garnett says he’s paid for it ever since.

“I was playing great, probably the best I ever played in my life at this point, and it’s against the Bulls and J.R. Rider is having an unbelievable game, too, and I’m feeling 19,” Garnett explained to Kimmel. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, keep going, you’re killing him. Woo!’ In the short form of it, I woke up a sleeping dog. … It just turned bad, Jimmy, it turned really bad. And it turned bad quick.”

Even Rider knew it wasn’t smart to push Jordan’s buttons.

“J.R. told me to calm down,” said Garnett. “He was like, ‘Yeah, we’re having a good game, but chill. He can hear you.’ I was like, ‘Who cares? Keep going!’”

Not only did Jordan then torch the Timberwolves, he continues to let Garnett know about it.

“Whenever I see Jordan he does the same thing every time,” said Garnett. “He palms my head and he says, ‘Remember the game I gave you 40 in three quarters?’ And then he has this sidekick … around him and he’s like, ‘Pull that up.’ And then a guy goes and pulls it up!

I’m like, ‘What is this?’ This is really Jordan Brand. Who walks around with content? Like, tee it up. It was an experience in which I quit talking trash to Michael.”

Michael Jordan is such a psychotic competitor. It’s truly inspiring. He takes the art of dead horse beating to previously unimagined heights.

They’re paying nearly 2x for content that is rapidly losing viewership. That math can’t hold up for long:

THE NEW NFL TV DEALS. 

You may have noticed that the glam Super Bowl matchup of Brady vs. Mahomes didn’t deliver the TV rating the NFL would have liked. The ratings were down 9 percent from last year. That may be because ratings are the average number of people watching throughout the game, and surely people switched off the 31-9 contest when it was a snoozer midway through the second half. But the NFL isn’t too concerned. Ratings for the NBA Finals were down more than 50 percent in 2020 from 2019, even with LeBron James playing; prime-time programming across all networks is down more than 18 percent from last season. And the NFL’s streaming numbers—5.7 million Americans streamed the game eight days ago—were up more than 60 percent from last year.

Why am I telling you all this? Because the NFL is close—“within a month,” one source told me at the Super Bowl—to inking new 10-year contracts with its network partners that could result in an aggregate increase of 70 to 100 percent in rights fees from the last contract.

This is the problem with smoking your own supply. Not a single mainstream source has even begun to accept that it is their convergence that is costing the sports leagues their audiences. The Super Bowl ratings weren’t down because it was a bad game; in fact, it was a very intriguing game with an all-time matchup of great quarterbacks. The ratings were down because so many NFL fans aren’t watching pro football anymore.

And next year, the ratings will be even worse. Which is all to the good.

If you think you’re going to survive the roving SJW terminators by keeping your head down and doing a good job, you’re absolutely wrong:

One day after announcing Chris Doyle as their new director of sports performance, the Jaguars have announced Doyle’s resignation.

“Chris Doyle came to us this evening to submit his resignation and we have accepted,” Jaguars coach Urban Meyer said in a statement. “Chris did not want to be a distraction to what we are building in Jacksonville. We are responsible for all aspects of our program and, in retrospect, should have given greater consideration to how his appointment may have affected all involved. We wish him the best as he moves forward in his career.”

Well, yes, the Jaguars should have considered the repercussions of Doyle’s hiring before he was hired.

It created an instant firestorm, with Meyer facing tough questions from the team’s beat reporters Thursday. It served as Meyer’s “welcome to the NFL” moment.

Doyle departed Iowa last summer with a $1.1 million separation agreement after he was accused of making racist comments and belittling players. He denied any “unethical behavior or bias” based on race. Meyer defended the hiring and said he was unconcerned about what Doyle’s presence could do to the team’s ability to add free agents.

News of Doyle’s resignation came only a few hours after Fritz Pollard Alliance executive director Rod Graves took issue with Doyle’s hiring.

Just being “accused of racist comments” isn’t just enough to cost you your job, now it will prevent you from finding another job somewhere else. It won’t be long before the only white people employed in large corporations are introverts who refuse to talk to anyone.

But don’t worry. I’m sure the media won’t abuse its newfound veto power. Much. Right?