Tag: sports

We win again!

Overheard:

VD: Did we win?
Vineyard shop employee #1: Win what?
VD: Did we buy the most bottles today?
VSE #1: What?
VD: Did we buy the most bottles of anyone who took the tour today?
VSE #1: Um… actually, yes.
VD & SB: (high-five)
E: So, what do we win?
VSE #1: What?
E: Don’t we get a prize?
VSE #2: Hold on. (goes and retrieves a bottle, puts it in a gift bag.) Here you go!
Everyone: Hurray! (poses for a picture with both employees.)

All right, so there may have been an amount of wine-tasting involved. A considerable amount, as it happens. Actually, the best part was the five-star lunch at the restaurant owned by the vineyard, where we were the only diners today. Jose, our waiter, put on a truly professional show, complete with a freaking easel and cardboard posters, as well as an unforgettable explanation of how all of the animals who went into the meal were lovingly raised on the premises before being slaughtered. It was more than a meal, it was an education.

Jose: And the core of this next dish is the little lamb from our farm here, whom I raised myself and permitted to sleep in my own bed every night, until this very morning, when I strangled him in the most loving and humane manner you can imagine. We should all be so fortunate as to perish in a manner as quick and painless as little Pepe. (sniffs, brushes away a tear) He is served in a sauce of butternuts and rancid red wine, with potatoes, leeks, and chunks of jamon.

SB: So how did you kill the cuttlefish in the last dish?

Jose: What?

E: Who cuddles fish?

To quote F, you know it’s going to be a great meal when a) there is literally no one else in the restaurant, and b) there are three wine glasses per setting on the table. As it turned out, they ended up bringing a fourth glass per person, thereby raising the level from epic to legendary. Four people, three bottles. And that was before the wine-tasting started.

Needless to say, they got straight 5s on the customer satisfaction ratings. Except for F’s, who simply scrawled BEST TOUR EVER across his form.

Say what you will about Spacebunny and me, but we always win the wine tour. And if you’re a Foundation-level Voxiversity backer, you can rest assured, your European experience is going to be epic. We’ve spent 20 years researching this sort of thing.

Because they haven’t lost enough fans

ProFootballTalk, which should change its name to FlagFootballTalk, has an exceptionally bad idea:

The hit that broke Aaron Rodgers‘ collarbone on Sunday wasn’t illegal. Maybe it should be.

Vikings outside linebacker Anthony Barr hit Rodgers just after Rodgers released a pass, and the two of them tumbled to the turf with Barr on top of Rodgers. That rather ordinary hit broke Rodgers’ collarbone and dramatically affected the entire NFL season, possibly knocking Rodgers out until 2018 and in the process ending realistic Super Bowl hopes for the Packers.

I think it may be time for a radical rule change, one that makes hits like Barr’s illegal. It may be time for the NFL to consider dramatically expand the roughing the passer rules, and treat quarterbacks like kickers and punters: Basically, you can’t hit them at all once they’ve thrown a pass.

I know, I know, you’re going to tell me I’m soft and weak and ruining the game of football, and that we might as well just play flag football if we’re going to do that. And I’m here to tell you I’ve heard it all before.

I heard the same thing when the NFL changed the roughing the passer rules to prohibit low hits on quarterbacks after Tom Brady suffered a season-ending knee injury in 2008: “How can defensive players possibly be expected to avoid those hits?” But defensive players adjusted, and it’s now unremarkable that those hits are penalized.

And I heard the same thing when the NFL implemented the horse-collar tackle rule: “How can any defensive player ever catch a runner from behind?” But defensive players adjusted, and now the horse-collar tackle rule has been adopted at every level of football and is completely noncontroversial.

I believe the same thing would happen if the NFL dramatically changed the roughing the passer rule. Yes, at first it would seem wrong to see defensive players penalized for putting a shoulder in a quarterback’s chest after he throws a pass. But defensive players would get used to it, coaches would get used to it, and fans would get used to it.

And it would make the game safer for the quarterbacks, the most important players on the field. Is it really a good thing for the NFL that Aaron Rodgers might miss the entire season? Are hits like Barr’s really so fundamental to football that we can’t outlaw them for the health of quarterbacks and the good of the sport? I don’t think so.

The NFL already protects quarterbacks far more than it did when I was growing up as a football fan in the 1980s. But the league can do more. Roughing the passer needs to be expanded.

If they’re going to further protect the quarterback, then they need to make it easier for the defensive players to sack them. Either go to two-hands-touch and he’s down or give the quarterback two flags and tearing off one of them means he’s down. As silly as those options sound, they are much better than pretending that it is still legal to tackle the quarterback, but banning most of the ways to actually tackle him.

But I have two better ideas that will fix nearly everything that is wrong with the NFL on the field.

  1. Weight limits determined by position. No more 280-pound steroid monsters running a 4.6 forty. Get too big, you won’t play.
  2. Require quarterbacks to call all the plays with no more interference from the coaches and sidelines.
Of course, neither of these rules changes will fix the problem of convergence of the league’s owners and office, but they would fix the main problem of the on-field product being increasingly boring.

Kaepernick sues NFL for collusion

Colin Kaepernick confirms league-wide suspicions that he’s more of a pain than he’s worth:

Colin Kaepernick has been waiting patiently for his next NFL opportunity. His patience has now expired. PFT has confirmed that Kaepernick has filed a grievance against the NFL under the Collective Bargaining Agreement. The grievance alleges that the NFL’s teams colluded in not signing him to a contract, presumably due to his decision to kneel during the national anthem in 2016.

Kaepernick has retained outside counsel to handle the claim. The NFL Players Association will remain in touch with Kaepernick as the grievance proceeds; however, Kaepernick’s private counsel will be spearheading the effort.

The filing of the grievance was first reported by Mike Freeman of BleacherReport.com.

Kaepernick became a free agent in March after opting out of the final year of his contract with the 49ers. (San Francisco G.M. John Lynch has said that the team would have cut Kaepernick if he hadn’t opted out.) The Seahawks brought Kaepernick in for a visit, but did not sign him. The Ravens were considering adding Kaepernick during training camp. Owner Steve Bisciotti publicly acknowledged that fans had expressed opposition to the possibility.

The last straw may have been the failure of the Titans to give Kaepernick a tryout after quarterback Marcus Mariota suffered an injured hamstring. The Titans instead brought in Brandon Weeden, Matt McGloin, Matt Barkley, and T.J. Yates, before signing Weeden.

The clever part is that if Kaepernick wins, the Collective Bargaining Agreement will be voided, so even players who don’t support Kaepernick will have an incentive to hope he wins. The not-so-clever part is that it appears highly unlikely that he will win. The fact that nobody wants him on their roster is not indicative of collusion, it is merely a sign that no team wants to anger its season-ticket holders.

Jerry knows business

ESPN provides an inside look at the fecklessness of both the NFL league office and the owners:

Going forward, however, some owners preferred a league-wide directive. Dan Snyder, the Washington Redskins’ owner and who declined to comment through a spokesman, argued that the protests needed to end because of the danger that the issue posed to the league’s bottom line. A “$40 million” NFL sponsor was considering pulling out, he told his fellow owners. Snyder kept repeating “$40 million” to add emphasis, amusing a clique of owners who did the math and realized that, after the players’ cut of the shared revenue, it amounted to considerably less than $1 million per club — hardly a game-changing sum for a league that last year had an average per-team profit of $101 million.

In the meeting, many owners wanted to speak, but the discussion soon was “hijacked,” in the words of one owner, by Jones, a $1 million contributor to Trump’s inaugural committee fund and who declined comment through a spokesman. The blunt Hall of Famer mentioned that he had spoken by phone, more than once over the past 24 hours, with Trump. Jones said the president, who only a few years ago tried to buy the Buffalo Bills, had no intention of backing down from his criticism of the NFL and its players. Jones — who a day earlier for Monday Night Football in Arizona had orchestrated a team-wide kneeling before the anthem ahead of rising to stand when it started to play — repeated his refrain that the protests weren’t good for the NFL in the long run. Most agreed, but some felt that even if the league did lose a small percentage of fans due to the protests, it also could gain a new audience. There was a general, if fanciful, consensus that even a short-term financial hit could benefit the league in the long term, especially if the league and the union could join in solidarity behind a single plan. That’s how the league’s marketing department was planning to proceed, even if some of the rough ideas fell flat. One idea had all players wearing a patch on their jerseys that would read, “Team America.” An owner briefed on the proposal simply shook his head: “We need to do better than that.”

By the time Jones concluded his remarks — and by the time the meeting ended in the early evening — nobody had pitched a concrete plan about how to move forward.

Apparently Jerry has had enough of everyone pussyfooting around the players.

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said Sunday any player who disrespects the flag will not play.

Jones’ comments, the strongest made on the anthem controversy, came after he was asked about Vice President Mike Pence leaving the game in Indianapolis early after several San Francisco 49ers players took a knee during the national anthem.

“I know this, we cannot … in the NFL in any way give the implication that we tolerate disrespecting the flag,” he said following the Cowboys’ 35-31 loss to the Green Bay Packers. “We know that there is a serious debate in this country about those issues, but there is no question in my mind that the National Football League and the Dallas Cowboys are going to stand up for the flag. So we’re clear.”

Translation: I told you Trump wouldn’t back down and the fans obviously hate it. So knock it off, because it’s bad for bidness.

NFL Week 5

Open thread for those still following. TNF down 12 percent, biggest decline to date the late double-header on CBS, which featured the Raiders vs Denver and was down 31 percent from last year.

Over just one month of player, coach, and owner protests of the flag and National Anthem, the National Football League has gone from America’s sport to the least liked of top professional and college sports, according to a new poll. From the end of August to the end of September, the favorable ratings for the NFL have dropped from 57 percent to 44 percent, and it has the highest unfavorable rating – 40 percent – of any big sport.

It does not appear to be going away. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ve just been using the additional time to work on Castalia House books.

Losing is good for you

Ed Latimore explains why losing can be beneficial, even losing in a public and humiliating manner:

Despite my obnoxious posting about my fight on Showtime this last weekend, I hope you had something better to do than watch. If you didn’t, then I’ll fill you in. I got stopped in the 1st round.

It’s heavyweight boxing. When you have two men over 200 lbs throwing hard shots, someone is bound to go down. My opponent (quite the affable fellow outside the ring), landed a great short right over my jab and the fight was short lived after that.

It’s a terrible way to lose. Worse, it was live for the whole world to see. It’s awful but it’s part of life. I move on and become better from it.

In many ways, I learned more from this 3 minutes (technically speaking, the referee called a stop to the contest sometime after the 2-minute mark) than I did from the rest of my 9-year career in boxing. Life is funny this way.

If you can look at things the right way, you learn more from failure than success. Jay-Z once said, “I will not lose for even in defeat, there’s a valuable lesson learned so that evens it up for me”.

Here are 8 valuable lessons I learned from losing on national television.

Embarrassment is the worst emotion to feel 

It’s miserable because there’s no real way to confront or conquer it. You can face your fears. You can cheer yourself up if your sad. Embarrassment is just a burden you bear until it heals. The one fortunate thing about embarrassment is that like all other negative emotions, it is extremely susceptible to the power of gratitude.

These are the lessons that gammas never learn, because their fear of failure and the humiliation they wrongly believe it necessarily entails precludes them from putting themselves at risk of failure. They don’t understand that the lessons one learns from losing not only makes success more likely in the future, but that there is no shame whatsoever in a defeat in which one genuinely did one’s best and was simply overcome by a superior opponent.

The most ferociously competitive team with which I was ever associated was the kid’s soccer team I coached about ten years ago. Their first year, they lost every game, and usually badly. As a result, they developed a total immunity to any fear of losing, and, much to the confusion of the other teams, would celebrate every rare goal as if they had won the game. Two years later, they upset the provincial champions who were affiliated with the main professional club in the region by beating them in the championship games of both of the major tournaments. The next year, they went undefeated, won both tournaments again, and this time, only allowed a handful of goals the entire season.

They weren’t particularly big or particularly skilled, but the combination of their intensity and their total lack of fear was intimidating, even to the parents watching them. “They are wolves with a taste for blood,” one opposing coach memorably said, shaking his head, after a game in which I put our leading scorer into goal to prevent him from running up the score, started talking to one player’s father, then looked up to see the kid bringing the ball up past midfield to send a perfect cross to a teammate for another goal. The kid was so goal-hungry that I practically had to tie the kid to the bench to keep him from putting the ball in the net.

And it was their season of “humiliating failure”, all those 13-1 and 10-0 losses, that forged them into an extraordinarily successful team.

Read the rest there.

The players crumble

The NFL players are beginning to grasp that it is futile to fight the God-Emperor on rhetorical grounds:

Only 11 NFL players did not stand during the national anthem during the first set of games Sunday. That is a stark contrast from the 180 who kneeled last week, according to ESPN’s Darren Rovell.

This is why it is always a good idea to stop and think before reacting. Especially when you’re dealing with an opponent who is very, very good at anticipating the other side’s probable reaction.

It will be amusing to see how the owners who supported the protests will now try to climb back after leaping to take the side of the players.

NFL Week 4

Prognosis: Red.

Week 3

-14{c6770088f688fedd109195fb76ded7bc5c58269bd213a4319575b4bd99e8e8ff} NBC OAK-WSH
-17{c6770088f688fedd109195fb76ded7bc5c58269bd213a4319575b4bd99e8e8ff} FOX NYG-PHI
-03{c6770088f688fedd109195fb76ded7bc5c58269bd213a4319575b4bd99e8e8ff} CBS CIN-GB

Week 4

-06{c6770088f688fedd109195fb76ded7bc5c58269bd213a4319575b4bd99e8e8ff} CBS CHI-GB

A reader with connections at Anheiser Busch reports that the phone calls and emails there are “at least 3 to 1 against NFL, and against Goodell in particular.”

NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” is off 7 percent this year, ESPN’s Monday night down 5 percent, Fox down 11 percent, CBS 19 percent.

Starve the SJW beast. But to be honest, I can’t watch any football today anyhow. I’ve simply got too much to do.

The NBA stands

ProFootballTalk is desperately hoping for the spread of the #TakeAKnee protest:

As the NFL is embroiled in controversy over players kneeling during the anthem, the league has steadfastly insisted that players have the right not to stand and will not be disciplined if they choose to exercise that right.

The NBA, meanwhile, has reiterated that players must stand for the anthem. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said the league’s longstanding rule requiring players to stand for the anthem isn’t going anywhere.

“On the anthem specifically, we have a rule that requires our players to stand for the anthem. It’s been a rule as long as I’ve been involved with the league, and my expectation is that our players will continue to stand for the anthem,” Silver said.

What’s unclear is what the NBA would do if a player chooses to violate that rule. In 1996 the NBA suspended Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf for refusing to stand for the anthem. Abdul-Rauf quickly relented and stood for the anthem while saying a silent prayer. After President Trump’s comments kicked off the latest anthem controversy last week, however, two of the NBA’s biggest stars, Steph Curry and LeBron James, offered comments critical of Trump. If those two stars were to kneel in protest, it’s highly unlikely that Silver would suspend them.

So far, the NBA has managed to avoid controversy. All it takes is one player to defy Silver’s orders, and the controversy will spread to basketball.

Silver is smarter than Goodell. He’s a student of David Stern, and he’s not about to let the players take over his league.