Tag: sports

Discuss amongst yourselves if you are so inclined. Big win for the Colts over the Texans. And if Philadelphia beats Chicago, watch out!

The Bengals finally part ways with Marvin Lewis:

The Bengals officially announced that Marvin Lewis is out as their head coach on Monday morning and the statement from the team called it a mutual decision to part ways.

Cue the drums beating for Eric Bienemy, whether he is ready to make the leap to head coach or not. Affirmative action destroys a lot more people than it helps.

Gase is out at Miami too. I suspect seeing the rapid success of Doug Pederson, Frank Reich, Sean McVey, and Matt Nagy is influencing a lot of owners these days.

Affirmative action cannot work in a meritocracy:

The proof is hiding in plain sight; currently, minority coaches and executives are dwindling, not thriving, in the NFL. Only one African-American coach or G.M. has control over a football operation, and Ravens G.M. Ozzie Newsome will be retiring at season’s end. That will leave no coach, no General Manager, no V.P. of player personnel, no one who has practical or contractual final say over the construction of an NFL roster.

If Chris Grier remains in Miami (his status is unclear), he’ll be the only minority G.M. when the dust settles on 2018. For coaches, it could become nearly as bad. With Hue Jackson already out in Cleveland, and Vance Joseph, Todd Bowles, and Steve Wilks expected to be fired in Denver, New York, and Arizona, respectively, the NFL will have only four minority coaches: Steelers coach Mike Tomlin (whom many locals want to see fired), Bengals coach Marvin Lewis (who could be out), Chargers coach Anthony Lynn, and Panthers coach Ron Rivera (who’s currently expected to be safe).

That’s not what the league or the Fritz Pollard Alliance envisioned more than 15 years ago, when the standard named for the late Dan Rooney first emerged as a device for rectifying decades of unfairly biased hiring practices by NFL teams, as demonstrated by the raw numbers.

The problem is a straightforward one of distributed intelligence among the various population demographics. The complexity of modern NFL offenses and defenses strongly favors intelligence. It’s no longer enough to be a confident leader of men with charisma and personal discipline. And it’s not an accident that Bill Belichick, despite his personality and character flaws, has become the most successful coach in NFL history, as he is one of the most intelligent and studious men to ever coach a team, and he surrounds himself with highly intelligent assistants and players.

All that forcing more black coaches and executives on the NFL is likely to do is to reveal their intellectual shortcomings in comparison with their smarter white colleagues. What did giving Hue Jackson an additional year to fail at a historic level accomplish? Affirmative action is nothing but enshrining the Peter Principle in law; it guarantees systematic failure. And while it might unearth the occasional pearl, it is much more likely to expose the overmatched and the fraudulent in an embarrassing manner.

The black coach challenge is the exact opposite of the black quarterback issue of the 1980s. As playcalling moved to the sidelines and coaches were allowed to communicate directly with their quarterbacks, the cognitive challenge of playing quarterback was temporarily reduced, making the position more viable for less intelligent players. But even that trend has now been reversed, as the increasing importance of pre-snap reading of the defensive formations and quickly going through the route progressions has caused it to rise again.

The only way to salvage the purpose of the Rooney Rule is to systematically reduce the requirements for cognitive capacity among NFL coaches and executives. I leave the likelihood of that ever happening to the reader.

So, at the behest of a trainer at the gym who used to play professional soccer, I tried a new high-intensity circuit class today. While I don’t think he was actually trying to do me in, I can’t rule the possibility out entirely. I seriously thought I was going to vomit after the first circuit of 15 stations, but after a dire 30 seconds or so during the first break, I held it together and managed to get through the second circuit without incident. I was a little distressed to discover that we were doing a third circuit, but it only consisted of 12 stations since three of the other 14 participants had dropped out by then.

My satisfaction in completing all three circuits was mildly tempered by the fact that there were several girls in their teens and twenties who did as well, and who, Spacebunny cheerfully informed me later, didn’t require several minutes lying flat on their back to recover afterwards. I had no idea, of course, because I was lying flat on my back with my eyes closed.

Anyhow, it turns out that high-intensity training is a great exercise for the offseason, since running, walking, biking, and lifting simply don’t serve as adequate substitutes for the explosive burst-and-coast endurance that one requires for soccer. The trainer even complimented my form, and I was sufficiently high on flattery and post-exercise endorphins that I agreed to show up for the next class. Apparently there are two… fabulous.

The Green Bay Packers have certainly disappointed this year, but this is a surprisingly ruthless firing. At the very least, one would have expected Green Bay to let a Super Bowl-winning coach finish the season.

The Green Bay Packers have parted ways with Head Coach Mike McCarthy & named Joe Philbin interim head coach.
— Green Bay Packers (@packers) December 3, 2018

The best guess is that everyone wants the next Sean McVay and the supply is limited. By pulling the trigger so quickly, Green Bay will have first crack at whoever the next offensive genius is supposed to be.

You might think that a comment or two would not be sufficient to counterbalance an entire life lived, much less a long one lived by a self-made billionaire, sports team owner, and family man. But then, you don’t think like an SJW:

Texans owner Bob McNair spent two decades working his way into the exclusive club of NFL ownership, and then into that club’s inner circle of influence. By the start of this decade, he’d arrived, serving on the six-man committee that officiated the NFL’s return to Los Angeles, holding a seat on the commissioner’s compensation committee and chairing the finance committee.

On one hand, that’s who he was—a statesman within ownership ranks who was known for his pragmatism and level-headedness. On another, his legacy will be forever marked by events of October 2017, when a comment he made at an NFL social-justice summit became public, and went viral.

This is why it matters who writes the histories. 

While I enjoyed Peter King, Dr. Z was always my favorite of Sports Illustrated’s Big Three football writers. His acerbic, opinionated style might not well have gone down with television viewers – he was fired by ESPN – but he was the inspiration for all the detailed analysis now provided by the likes of Football Outsiders and ProFootball Focus.

His articles are a wealth of football history, dating back to the all-time great Notre Dame teams of 1946 and 1947 and the unheralded stars of the AAFC. He truly lived a life in football, and he was one of the sport’s greatest historians. His insight was deep, as indicated by this offhand observation in an article on the New York Giants defeat of the Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl XXV:

“I want size on my entire defense,” says Parcells, “not only on my front seven, but in my secondary. [Five of his nine defensive backs weigh 200 pounds or more, and no defender weighs less than 190.] The defensive backs have to be physical on the receivers, jam them. Sure, they’ll get their share of catches, but they’re going to pay for them.”

That was the heart of the defensive scheme New York threw at Buffalo. Parcells was in charge of the overall concept, but the implementation was left to Bill Belichick, the brilliant, 38-year-old defensive coordinator who has head coach written all over him.

We can hardly hold it against him that he did not predict Belichick would subsequently become the greatest NFL coach of all time, as he clearly perceived Belichick’s unusual potential. His attention to detail bordered on the obsessive; he made a habit of timing the performance of the national athems. My favorite feature was his post-season ratings of the NFL announcing teams, where he spoke for the viewers with the assurance of a subject-matter expert.

The worst is the search for the eternal “story line,” a favorite device of production people but something I’ve always felt is a deadly trap. “Here’s the story line,” we hear at the top of the show, or “among the many story lines,” etc. No, the story line is what develops from the game itself, and as an old handicapper, I can tell you that most of the time it differs from preconceived notions. So why bother with it at all? Why get locked into such a static device, instead of merely letting the game take its course?

He was an old school man in a new school world, but he never compromised or concealed his opinions. He was also a wine aficionado and wasn’t afraid to demonstrate that he loved his wife as much as the sport to which he dedicated his life. He was, in short, a genuine man, and the world is fortunate that he left us such a treasure trove of his work.

Perhaps the best compliment one can pay him is to observe that if an alien were to come across the ruins of the planet Earth centuries in the future, the archive of Dr. Z’s writings would not merely suffice to allow that alien to understand the game of football, it would make that alien a fan of the defunct sport.

Realty-based sports competitors are going to have to build their own platforms too, now that men are allowed to declare themselves women and clean up in most sporting competitions:

‘For those of you who think I have ‘folded’ I have not. There’s a group of us working on getting the rules changed but we are going to fight it offline, not in the name-calling angry world of social media. I’m choosing to move on in a positive way,’ she wrote.

Dr McKinnon retweeted her commented and told her thousands of followers: ‘This is why the apology is not accepted: she still thinks what she said. She merely apologizes for being caught saying it publicly. She wants to ban trans women from competing. They will fail: the IOC openly allowed us in 2003 and revised their policies in 2015. #MoveOn.’

Adding that the women fighting her inclusion in the sport should face punishment for breaking the rules of USA Cycling, she shared that they had carried out the exact behaviour the rulebook states is not allowed.

‘I’ve been humiliated, they make me feel unwelcome at races, and saying that it’s unfair (when I follow all the rules) is degrading and disparaging,’ McKinnon tweeted.

Cycling isn’t the only sport McKinnon loves; she was a junior provincial badminton champion, regional junior golf champion and club champion, won sport climbing competitions and was a professional poker player for six years.

She started competing at a professional level when she was 10 years old.

Writing ‘Trans women are women. We must compete as women. We have rights, too,’ McKinnon later compared her struggle to civil rights racial struggles.

‘White people thought it was UNFAIR for black people to compete in sport. The very same tactics are being used against trans women athletes,’ she posted.

The Union Cycliste International responded Friday in a statement that shared how the rules consider hormone therapy over gender reassignment and that the guidelines will be clarified later on.

‘Although there are no queries concerning Women-Men (W-M) transgender athletes, whose situation – at UCI level as for all International Federations (IF) – is controlled by therapeutic use exemptions (TUE), the current situation concerns M-W transgenders,’ they wrote.

‘After some 18 months of substantial work, and after consultation with the IFs, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) should shortly announce guidelines covering the participation of M-W transgender athletes. This document should enable us to take into consideration, in line with the evolution of our society, the desire of these people to compete while at the same time guarantee as far as possible an equal chance for all participants in women’s competitions.

‘The UCI will adapt its regulations according to the guidelines of the IOC.’

“Trans women” are not women, they are parodies of women and there is literally nothing female about them. Anyone who says otherwise is a confirmed science denier. However, the convergence of the sporting associations means that the only way to stop this nonsense is not through changing the rules, or defining the guidelines more realistically, but by simply refusing to compete with any athletes competing in the wrong sex class.

I won’t be surprised to see mediocre heavyweights declaring themselves lightweights someday, as we’ve already seen men in their twenties playing in veteran’s leagues as well as individuals with IQs in the normal range pretending to be retarded and winning gold medals in the Paralympics.

Understand that forcing you to publicly declare that there are five lights is the entire point here. That’s why trans sports are one of the many false narratives presently being pushed by the Empire of Untruth.

The NFL is down 17 percent in two years:

Consider the curious case of the National Football League: It’s the largest single entertainment property in the U.S., a $14 billion per year attention-sucking machine with a steady hold on the lives of tens of millions. And its future is now in widespread doubt.

Ratings for regular-season games fell 17 percent over the past two years, according to Nielsen, and after one week of play in the new season, viewership has been flat. February marked the third-straight year of audience decline for the Super Bowl and the smallest audience since 2009. Youth participation in tackle football, meanwhile, has declined by nearly 22 percent since 2012 in the face of an emerging scientific consensus that the game destroys the brains of its players. Once a straightforward Sunday diversion, the NFL has become a daily exercise in cognitive dissonance for fans and a hotly contested front in a culture war that no longer leaves space for non-combatants.

To many outside observers, this looks like the end of an era. “The NFL probably peaked two years ago,” says Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College who specializes in the business of sports. “It’s basically treading water.”

I really need to finish writing Corporate Cancer. The NFL is on exactly the same track as NASCAR and Marvel. This indicates it will likely be down 50 percent within a decade of the 2016 viewership peak.