Tag: sports

This is an open thread to discuss the first week of the NFL 2016 season. Skol Vikings!

This is an excellent trade for the Vikings, in light of what the options were after Teddy Bridgewater went down. Bradford compares pretty favorably with Bridgewater; he’s not quite as mobile but he has a slightly stronger arm. Like Bridgewater, he doesn’t throw many interceptions, but Bradford had as many 40+ yard passes last year as Bridgewater did in two years. And while he’s not elite – he wouldn’t have been available if he was – he’s pretty solid. He’s accurate, and Pro Football Focus even had him ranked as the 12th best QB in the NFL last year.

Compare:

65.0%, 3,725 yards, 19 TD, 14 INT, 86.4 rating
65.3%, 3,231 yards, 14 TD, 9 IND, 88.7 rating

That’s not bad, considering that the Vikings had the better team. Obviously, Vikings fans would prefer that Touchdown Teddy was behind center come opening day, but I see no reason not to be confident in Bradford’s ability to take advantage of the opportunities that Adrian Peterson will create for him. Given the talent around him, it would not be even remotely surprising if Bradford had an unexpected career year in 2016, since he no longer needs to feel the pressure to

From Steve Sailer’s site:

The New Yorker recently inquired “How Fast Would Usain Bolt Run the Mile?“, only to find out according to his agent that “Usain has never run a mile.”

As my old coach used to say, sprinters are born, not made. When I ran track for Bucknell, the rest of the team used to openly mock what they called “the sprinter’s jog”, which is considerably slower than a normal walking pace. Of course, if you were facing another sub-25-second 200-meter repetition as soon as you finished jogging 100 meters, you’d jog pretty damn slow too.

Two of my roommates used to run the occasional 5k, and some girls once asked why I never ran one with them. After they stopped laughing, one of them pointed to a nearby lamp post and said:

“See that lamp post?”

“Yeah.”

“He can get there faster than you would believe. Now see that one?” He pointed to one a little way up the hill.

“Yeah?”

“You can beat him to that one. Also, he won’t make it that far.”

In fairness, I did run a 5k once a few years after that. I barely finished in front of a woman who had just given birth three days before. I don’t recall the time, but I do remember vomiting afterwards.

UPDATE: Very disappointed to see Alison Felix robbed of the 400m gold. She clearly won that race; diving at the finish line should not be permitted in sprints or dashes as it is much too dangerous. She’s been my favorite sprinter for years, as her style is very pretty and graceful. She’d have won gold in the 200m too if she hadn’t been injured at the qualifiers.

I mentioned previously that I was invited to play in a friendly with the first team for the club to which Ender is now on loan. There was just one little detail that escaped me: while the second team plays in the fifth league, the first team plays in the fourth league. Ruh-roh.

This makes a pretty big difference, you see, as promotion and relegation means that the higher up you go, the better and more athletic the players are. Our first team was third league last year, and despite having some really good players, ended up getting relegated, so the challenge suddenly looked considerably more difficult. Having played against our own first team, then with them, in two scrimmages last fall, I knew exactly how in over our heads we were likely to be in a fourth-league game. While I was a member of a fourth-league team that won promotion to the third league, then spent a year playing in the third league, that was 15 years ago.

Ender and I were both substitutes, of course, but he went in at wing with about 15 minutes left in the first half and the team down 2-1. For the first 5 minutes, he looked like a little kid in the scuola calcio who’d joined three years late and had never played in a real game before; he was so obviously bad that I thought the manager might take him out immediately. He was out of position, reactive, late to the ball, and on the rare occasions he did manage to get to it, he didn’t kick it to anyone, he just blindly kicked it forward.

But he wasn’t the worst player on the field, as that honor went to the goalie, the young man to whom Ender had lost the starting position for the club’s junior team two years ago. I noticed, while taking warm-up shots with the kid, that he actually appeared to have regressed, and once the game started my suspicions were confirmed. While the first goal might have been saved and the second one was a really nice shot about which nothing could have been done, the third goal, on a free kick, was totally inexcusable. It was a high bouncer, one that could have been easily saved by either stepping forward or stepping back, but the goalie froze, and the ball bounced over his head and into the goal untouched. 3-1, and right before halftime too.

Needless to say, the halftime talk was not even remotely complimentary. The second-team goalie was substituted in, and, I suspect, has since been promoted to first-team starter.

In the second half, Ender was able to adjust to the speed of the game and the aggression of the players, got some positional guidance from the assistance coach working the sideline, and his play significantly improved. First the striker scored to make it 3-2 with him effectively serving as a decoy distracting the goalie, then he had a phantom assist on a nice cross that would have leveled the game if the goal hadn’t been called off, rather questionably, for some innocuous shoving in the box. About ten minutes later, he got an assist that counted on a slick 15-meter through ball threaded precisely past three defenders to the striker, who promptly put the ball in the net. 3-3.

He came off not long after that, thoroughly exhausted, but he’d put in a solid 35 minutes and the team was quite happy with his performance. He got applause from the team when he came off the field, and one defender shouted, in heavily accented English, “I love dees Americain!” while thumping him on the back.  After the other team scored to make it 4-3, the coach put me in at striker for the last 15 minutes, and I would have had the equalizer in an empty net if the right wing had simply crossed the ball square to me, but instead he pulled it back to the midfielder arriving at the top of the box, who hit the crossbar. Sfortunato, ma c’e calcio cosi.

I didn’t have any trouble running with the younger guys, mostly because I was fresh and they’re not in full game shape yet, but I wasn’t in sync with them either and was ineffective for the most part. Our midfield lost its shape as they increasingly pushed forward for the equalizer, leading to an easy goal on the counterattack for the other team to close out the game, 5-3. After the game, I was one of those criticized for not leaving the ball to a teammate in front of me who’d called for it – I didn’t bother pointing out that I heard the guy and ignored him because there was a defender right on my back who would have had the ball if I’d let it go.

I was actually rather glad to hear the criticism, misplaced or not, because, as I later explained to Ender, no one ever yells at the old guy who is only being humored because he can’t play. We were both invited to come back and practice with the first team next week, but I shook the manager’s hand and politely declined. It was a lot of fun, and it was a game I won’t ever forget, but the veterans’ season starts soon, and apart from a possible friendly or two with the second team, I’ll do better to stick with the guys my own age. More, or as is almost entirely the case, less.

Reason covers the many reasons, most of which are nonsense:

1. The end of the mostly-fake-but-still-compelling fiction that participants were “amateurs” who competed out of mere love of the game.
2. A fuller understanding of just how much cheating went on among the athletes. First, it was the massive revelations about juicing by Iron Curtain teams but post-Cold War, it became clear that many Western athletes (Ben Johnson! FloJo! Marion Jones!) who won our hearts were faking it too (except for Carl Lewis, the greatest track and field Olympian yet one who was never fully embraced by the crowds, either).
3. The mainstreaming of sports TV and the ability of less-popular sports to gain an audience independent of the Olympics.
4. The disturbing spectacle of the Games being hosted by tyrannical and/or bankrupt countries and cities that wasted huge amounts of money on conspicuous consumption (Beijing, Moscow and Sochi, and Athens obviously, but let’s never forget Montreal too!).
5. An endless stream of scandals implicating national-level Olympic Committees but also the IOC itself in just terrible, terrible behavior.
6. The growth in cosmopolitanism around the globe, meaning that we are no longer as mesmerized by “exotic” athletes from foreign countries.
7. Oscar Pistorius.
8. Bob Costas.
9. Rick Wakeman’s 1976 soundtrack to the Innsbruck Winter Games, White Rock.
10. Brazil’s political instability, Zika problems, and inability to control sewage.
11. The long, acrid hangover from the 1972 Summer Games in Munich, during which the Palestinian terrorist group Black September killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches. In the wake of the murders, the head of the IOC, American Avery Brundage, famously declared that “the Games must go on,” despite “two savage attacks.” For Brundage, a lifelong racist and personal friend of Adolf Hitler (as head of the USOC during the ’36 Games in Berlin, Brundage watch track and field competitions from der Fuhrer’s box and pressured the American track coach to sideline Jewish runners), the second “attack” during the ’72 Games was a threatened boycott of the Olympics by African nations if apartheid Rhodesia was allowed to compete. Beyond all that, endless boycotts for this or that reason, usually tied to politics, not athletics.
12. The Olympics, designed as a means by which France might avenge its loss in the Franco-Prussian War, is explicitly nationalistic in a world that is moving toward greater individualism.
13. “The Olympics matter less because we live in a better world, one filled with innumerable options for leisure and one mostly—though by no means completely—free from the most onerous aspects of geopolitical strife. We live in a world where nations matter less than individuals, a reality that is mirrored by the increasing number of ‘nation-hopping’ Olympians.” And the rise of an actual “refugee team.”
14. The IOC’s insane attempt to control and regiment all aspects of the Games on the Internet, including a prohibition on GIFS, Vines, and other home-brewed content. Apart from all the scandals, the IOC is the athletic equivalent of Metallica, busting the balls of its most-fervent fans in the hope of squeezing a few more nickels out of a dying franchise.

Talk about the Ewing Theory in effect! Who would have thought that Ronaldo going out due to injury after 15 minutes would lead to a Portuguese victory?

I was DEEPLY unimpressed by the French. They played very much like the Germans did in the semifinal, standing back and passing the ball around the perimeter, showing absolutely no urgency or seriously attempting to score. It was another strike against EU-style multiculturalism as the much-ballyhooed Noir-Blanc-Marron failed at home.

One lesson of this tournament is that solid team play and determination beats superior talent. The lesser teams aren’t quite as lesser as they used to be. Between Iceland, Wales, and Portugal, it was an unusually entertaining Euro.

And it’s always fun to see one of the minor powers steal a championship from the usual suspects. What a fantastic goal by Eder in extra time to win it.