Tag: sports

This is my shocked face

ESPN finally gets around to shutting down Grantland:

Effective immediately we are suspending the publication of Grantland.  After careful consideration, we have decided to direct our time and energy going forward to projects that we believe will have a broader and more significant impact across our enterprise.

Grantland distinguished itself with quality writing, smart ideas, original thinking and fun.  We are grateful to those who made it so.  Bill Simmons was passionately committed to the site and proved to be an outstanding editor with a real eye for talent.  Thanks to all the other writers, editors and staff who worked very hard to create content with an identifiable sensibility and consistent intelligence and quality. We also extend our thanks to Chris Connelly who stepped in to help us maintain the site these past five months as he returns to his prior role.

There was no way the site was ever going to make money. It made sense as a means of keeping Bill Simmons happy, but there was no reason to continue it once they fired him.

I liked the idea, but it was too full of SJWs pushing the usual nonsense to bother sifting through it for the interesting articles. I quit reading it regularly long before the Sports Guy was ejected.

NFL open thread

Well, starting the Bills defense against Jacksonville looked a lot better on paper than it has in London. This is your weekly NFL open thread.

NFL open thread

This would be it. And if you wanted to discuss the incredible end to the Michigan-Michigan State game, that would be understandable. While I have no doubt Harbaugh will somehow be blamed for not winning the game, I very much doubt the punter was instructed to do anything other than fall on the ball in case of a bad snap.

Football is not the only activity where trying to fix a problem that doesn’t need to be fixed is the best way to ensure complete disaster.

Who bitch this is?

Now we know exactly what role the NFL’s in-house SJW, aka “Vice-President of Social Responsibility” is expected to fulfill. Unsurprisingly, it is to play speech police and nag the players for saying anything that a hypersensitive woman looking to be offended might find offensive:

After Cowboys defensive end Greg Hardy commemorated the lifting of his suspension with awkward remarks about Tom Brady’s wife and the unfortunate use of the phrase “guns blazin’,” different people had different reactions.

Cowboys fans and some of the media covering the team proclaimed that it was no big deal. Owner Jerry Jones downplayed the remarks in classic Jerry Jones style, reminding the world that Hardy won’t actually be taking guns onto the field, equating Brady’s value as a human with the attractiveness of his wife, and making an always-timely Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton reference.

Others weren’t happy with the comments. Once coach Jason Garrett made it clear that he’s in the group that finds the statements unfortunate, the issue seemed to be settled.

Through it all, the NFL said nothing. As of Sunday morning, the NFL has broken its silence, via comments from a league executive to the league-owned website.

“I couldn’t disagree more with Greg Hardy’s comments, and they do not reflect the values of the league,” NFL V.P. of social responsibility Anna Isaacson said. “We are working hard to bring attention to the positive role models many other players represent and also to continue our education with all members of the NFL family. . . .

“We spend a lot of time at the NFL educating our players on domestic violence and sexual assault. That’s what we control here, we control education. We control training, we control all the league does from a public perspective and public service, working with non-profit organizations. We can control that. So that everyone in the NFL family has the services and resources that they need if they need help.”

There is really only one appropriate response to Ms Isaacson’s comments, that being to quote the immortal Shinblade: “Who bitch this is?”

“League executive”? What a joke. The NFL should understand that it exists to entertain men and women who want to watch athletically gifted men play the game of football and that no one except SJWs gives an airborne rodent’s posterior about what opinions any of the players happen to hold about retired Victoria’s Secret models, dead actors, dead actresses, or firearms.

The NFL’s policy on player speech should be summed up in a single sentence: “Insofar as a player’s speech does not concern violations of the rules of the game, we have no position, pro or con, on anything that he might say.”

Week Three

This is your weekly NFL open thread. I have to confess that I’m a little disappointed that Philip Rivers broke Dan Fouts’s San Diego record last week; I know the game has changed, but when I think Chargers, I still think first of Air Coryell and Fouts.

I may have to reconsider women’s sports

Sure, they don’t grasp either sportsmanship or emotional continence, but that doesn’t mean they don’t offer considerable entertainment in their own right:

By the side of the green, Hull could clearly be seen walking towards the next tee in a gesture that golfers the world over will recognize as the tacit concession of a tiny putt. Lee duly scooped her ball up, only to be met by Pettersen’s fiery insistence that no such concession had been made. ‘Europe one up,’ declared the referee, who had no choice but to apply the dictum: rules are rules.

Cue pandemonium. Down the 18th hole the European coterie of captains and assistant captains debated what had happened. Surely one of them could see it drove a coach and horses through the idea that the spirit of the game is a vital part of the integrity of these matches?

Under the rules they had the opportunity to offer a concession of the final hole and make things right. It cried out for strong leadership – or just common sporting decency, for that matter – but sadly none was forthcoming from the captain, Carin Koch.

It says everything about the grotesqueness of it all that Hull had taken her record to four wins out of four – and yet still ended the match in floods of tears.

Awesome. Frankly, I think women’s sports would be a lot more popular if they stopped trying to imitate the men and just embraced the full extent of cattiness and head games that women are capable of bringing to intra-sexual relations.

This will serve as your NFL open thread.

The NFL opener

This is your weekly open NFL thread. I’m disappointed the Vikes aren’t playing until tomorrow night, but it will be good to see some football again anyhow, Roger Goodell notwithstanding.

Less politics, more football. How hard is that?

And if you don’t like football, that’s nice. No one asked for your opinion. Go talk about how much you don’t like it somewhere else. We don’t care.

21-2

I have to say, I haven’t seen my team this confident since we were the two-time league champions. Our second game was against the other new team in the league, and although they’d lost 4-2 to our arch-rivals, last year’s second-place team, the word was that it was only because they’d played all 19 players and the weaker substitutes let them down in the second half.

Somewhat to my surprise, I started at attacker, although I came out after 20 minutes with us up 1-0. At halftime, we were up 3-0 and in control of the game, so much so that after losing two of their players to injury, they asked if they could borrow a player. Since I’d already played, our captain offered me, and they put me in at left midfield, where I promptly intercepted a pass and very nearly scored against my own team.

To illustrate the gap in talent between the two teams, I am the worst starter on my team, but I was the second-best player on their team. Their only attack was me combining with their center mid, and if I hadn’t been defending on the left side, we would have had at least three more goals. I have no idea what happened to their left defender, but at several points I found myself defending our right defender, our right mid, and a striker by myself. We won 7-1, but it could have easily been 14-1.

The third game was against our neighbors, who are always overmatched but nevertheless play us surprisingly tough. They even beat us at their place 2-1 last year thanks to some poor substitutions on our part combined with a pair of late corner kicks. They are old, fat, and slow, but highly skilled, and their slow pace has tended to disrupt our game the last two years. We had all three of the younger strikers present and our captain elected to start at striker, so I figured I’d play in the second half, but instead I found myself starting at right mid.

(This is why it is important to show that you can play different positions, as you’ll always get plenty of playing time if you are willing and able to play wherever the team needs you. The only four positions I can’t play at this level are the two center mids and the two central defenders; I can play goalie and once even stopped a penalty shot in a game.)

The first 15 minutes were much the same as in previous years. We controlled the ball but couldn’t do anything with it. The right defender was the guy who is usually the substitute and he put us in danger once by charging forward at the wrong time without telling me; a quick reversal would have given their left midfielder a very good chance if the cross hadn’t been too long. But not long after that our captain got a through ball, and for once I remembered to chase after him, knowing that he’s lately shown a tendency to drill the ball directly at the keeper. He did, and the ball rebounded right where I anticipated, but too high to volley. It was also too low to head, so I hit it with my knee just inside the box and somehow managed to put it in the upper right corner. 1-0 and the dam was broken.

I took myself out about five minutes later, as we had plenty of substitutes and I was winded from controlling the left side. By the time I went back in at striker around the middle of the second half, it was already 5-1. We blew about 10 more opportunities, two of them my fault, as my shots beat the goalie twice but curved wide left of the post. Even so, we ended up winning 7-1, giving us nine points to start the season and a three-game goal difference of 19. We haven’t faced any real tests yet, but our confidence is sky-high and I’m quite looking forward to our game against last year’s champions. We beat them and tied them in our two games last year, so I’ll be very disappointed if we can’t beat them twice this year.

The secret of our success this year appears to be a combination of our strikers being able to capitalize on their chances and our midfielders’ ability to control the wings. I don’t think there has been a single chance created from either the left side or the right so far this season; the biggest change is that we now have four outside midfielders who are capable of attacking, then getting back on defense.