The Premier League game between Bournemouth and Luton was abandoned after Luton captain Tom Lockyer collapsed during the second half. The players were taken off the pitch by referee Simon Hooper and after a lengthy delay, the Bournemouth staff doctor confirmed that Lockyer was ‘alert and responsive.’
Lockyer, who collapsed in the play-off final earlier this year, dropped to the floor in an off the ball incident in the 62nd minute of the game between Bournemouth and Luton. Luton manager Rob Edwards immediately ran onto the pitch as the players surrounded Lockyer before the paramedics stretchered him off after treating him on the pitch for over ten minutes.
Half an hour after the incident, the game was officially called off.
Luton captain Tom Lockyer ‘alert and responsive’ after collapsing against Bournemouth, 16 December 2023
To put this in an American context, it’s comparable to the Bills-Bengals MNF game that was cancelled, if Josh Allen had collapsed instead of Damar Hamlin.
I’d love to be able to say that the Purple People Eaters are back, but in truth, the game was the epitome of a battle between two overmatched third-string quarterbacks. It wasn’t so much a defensive struggle as a display of complete offensive ineptitude, as well as the lowest-scoring game since the infamous Snowplow Game of December 12, 1982 without the excuse of being played in a driving blizzard.
I don’t think I’d ever seen multiple 2-and-17 situations in a game before. And all three quarterbacks combined for an average rating of 64.5. That’s not QBR either, that’s the old school rating that tops out at 158.3, and in which Brock Purdy currently leads the league at 116.1.
In other NFL news, a once-burning question has been resurrected. It has to be asked in light of the man’s 3 TD, 311-yard performance in a victory over Jacksonville with playoff implications.
Is Joe Flacco elite?
UPDATE: This is how elite he is. Per ProFootballTalk:
The situation is unprecedented. Coach Kevin Stefanski named Flacco the starter for the rest of the season. Even though Flacco isn’t really on the team.
There is absolutely no chance that Sports Illustrated is the only mainstream media publication using AI-generated articles attributed to nonexistent individuals whose headshots are also AI-generated:
There was nothing in Drew Ortiz’s author biography at Sports Illustrated to suggest that he was anything other than human.
“Drew has spent much of his life outdoors, and is excited to guide you through his never-ending list of the best products to keep you from falling to the perils of nature,” it read. “Nowadays, there is rarely a weekend that goes by where Drew isn’t out camping, hiking, or just back on his parents’ farm.”
The only problem? Outside of Sports Illustrated, Drew Ortiz doesn’t seem to exist. He has no social media presence and no publishing history. And even more strangely, his profile photo on Sports Illustrated is for sale on a website that sells AI-generated headshots, where he’s described as “neutral white young-adult male with short brown hair and blue eyes.”
Ortiz isn’t the only AI-generated author published by Sports Illustrated, according to a person involved with the creation of the content who asked to be kept anonymous to protect them from professional repercussions.
“There’s a lot,” they told us of the fake authors. “I was like, what are they? This is ridiculous. This person does not exist.”
“At the bottom [of the page] there would be a photo of a person and some fake description of them like, ‘oh, John lives in Houston, Texas. He loves yard games and hanging out with his dog, Sam.’ Stuff like that,” they continued. “It’s just crazy.”
The AI authors’ writing often sounds like it was written by an alien; one Ortiz article, for instance, warns that volleyball “can be a little tricky to get into, especially without an actual ball to practice with.”
According to a second person involved in the creation of the Sports Illustrated content who also asked to be kept anonymous, that’s because it’s not just the authors’ headshots that are AI-generated. At least some of the articles themselves, they said, were churned out using AI as well.
“The content is absolutely AI-generated,” the second source said, “no matter how much they say that it’s not.”
After we reached out with questions to the magazine’s publisher, The Arena Group, all the AI-generated authors disappeared from Sports Illustrated’s site without explanation…
The Arena Group is also hardly alone, either. As powerful generative AI tools have debuted over the past few years, many publishers have quickly attempted to use the tech to churn out monetizable content. In almost every case, though, these efforts to cut out human journalists have backfired embarrassingly.
We caught CNET and Bankrate, both owned by Red Ventures, publishing barely-disclosed AI content that was filled with factual mistakes and even plagiarism; in the ensuing storm of criticism, CNET issued corrections to more than half its AI-generated articles. G/O Media also published AI-generated material on its portfolio of sites, resulting in embarrassing bungles at Gizmodo and The A.V. Club. We caught BuzzFeed publishing slapdash AI-generated travel guides. And USA Today and other Gannett newspapers were busted publishing hilariously garbled AI-generated sports roundups that one of the company’s own sports journalists described as “embarrassing,” saying they “shouldn’t ever” have been published.
Sports Illustrated Published Articles by Fake, AI-Generated Writers, FUTURISM, 27 November 2023
This is yet another reason why your standard assumption should be that every bit of news that is reported by the mainstream media is, at best, misleading, and and worst, outright fiction concocted by artificial intelligence that is attributed to people who don’t even exist.
It’s going to be very interesting to see how Peter King, the former Sports Illustrated NFL reporter, will react to this, especially given his recent two-week jihad against fabulist sideline reporter Charissa Thompson due to the way that he felt her fake halftime interviews called the legitimacy of the sports media into question.
The lesson, as always, is this: everything in Clown World is fake.
Peter King is an excellent football reporter. While I could do without his occasional editorial sallies into politics, which reliably offer typically retarded left-wing takes, he follows in the well-respected tradition of Paul Zimmerman. If he reports on something football-related, you can guarantee that it is honest, legitimate, and well-sourced, and it is probably true.
But he clearly has no idea how flagrantly dishonest most of the mainstream media is on a regular basis, or he wouldn’t be calling for sideline fabulist Charissa Thompson’s pretty little head:
We live in a time when the media is more distrusted than I ever remember. Thompson is a high-profile person who hosts the Thursday night pregame show on Amazon Prime, who hosts a Sunday pre-game on Fox, who co-hosts a podcast with Erin Andrews. She says on the Pardon My Take podcast that in her former role as a sideline reporter at Fox she would “make up the report sometimes.” It’s outrageous. It’s fireable. Thompson’s not covering the White House, but I don’t care if she’s covering the Chula Vista Little League. Her job is to report the truth, and she admitted she made up things. When Thompson says that, it’s fodder for media-haters to say, “See? They all lie.” Now, in these high-profile roles at Amazon and Fox, how do you trust she’s not inventing some of the things she’s saying? And where are the programming people, the bosses, particularly at Fox, where Thompson said these sideline reports occurred? The silence says one of two things: Sideline reports don’t really matter. Or the truth doesn’t really matter. Or both.
Thompson’s statement after the firestorm didn’t solve anything. Thompson didn’t say on Pardon My Take that she’d almost make it up, or use some qualifying words. She said she “would make it up.” And she repeated it: “No coach is gonna get mad if I say, ‘Hey, we need to stop hurting ourselves, we need to be better on third down, we need to stop turning the ball over and do a better job of getting off the field.’ They’re not gonna correct me on that. So I’m like, it’s fine, I’ll just make up the report.” In her Instagram statement the next day, Thompson said: “I understand how important words are and I chose the wrong words to describe the situation. I’m sorry. I have never lied about anything or been unethical during my time as a sports broadcaster.” Twice Thompson said she’d made up reporting. A day later she said she never lied or was unethical. So, what’s true? What she said on the podcast? What she said in a clear CYA statement that made things worse?
So she lied a few times. And then she lied about having lied. So what? The vast majority of reporters lie, or at the very least report things they don’t actually know to be true, on a daily basis. It’s not as if Congress is sending tens of billions of dollars to the Carolina Panthers because she gave them cause to believe they might possibly be able to win a few games.
The UK police are apparently much less inclined to excuse the outrageous killing of a hockey player by another player than the global media is:
ITEM 1: NHL player Adam Johnson died on live TV after Matt Petgrave slashed his throat with his skate. Petgrave has a history of bad behavior in the EIHL, including racking up the most penalty minutes and getting booted out of games. The media quickly has declared it a total accident, but many viewers and expert hockey players are not convinced.
ITEM 2: A man has been arrested for the manslaughter of Nottingham Panthers player Adam Johnson after his tragic death last month. The 29-year-old American ice hockey star was reportedly killed after a skate slashed his throat in a collision during a match against Sheffield Steelers on October 28, causing a fatal neck injury.
Like pretty much every other man who grew up in Minnesota in the 1960s-1980s, I played ice hockey from a very young age. I played for eight years, and if it hadn’t been for a) early morning ice times, b) pretty girls on the ski slopes, and c) indoor winter tennis, I almost certainly would have played varsity in high school. I still consider the Minnesota State High School Hockey Tournament to be the third-best televised sporting event after a) NFL Redzone and b) March Madness, although I haven’t been a particular fan of any team since the Minnesota Fighting Saints shut down after the 1977 season and the Minnesota North Stars moved to Dallas in 1993.
And as a former hockey player, I have absolutely no problem saying that the kick that killed Adam Johnson was 100 percent intentional. I never, ever, saw anything that even came close to resembling what Petgrave did in all my years of playing and watching hockey. I don’t believe the African player was trying to kill Johnson, but he was clearly attempting to harm the other player when he struck him with his skate, so if that’s not manslaughter, then nothing is. There is no way the incident was merely “an accident”.
Knight was an almost Shakespearean character: brilliant, thoughtful and tragically flawed. In the late 1980s, he happened to show up on a rare evening when high school recruit Calbert Cheaney had a bad night. He upbraided his assistants for dragging him to see a player clearly not good enough for Indiana. They explained he had caught Cheaney on a bad night and should see him play again. Knight told them he wouldn’t waste any more time, nor should they.
Cheaney committed to Evansville — coached by Jim Crews, who had played on Indiana’s 1976 team and coached under Knight for eight years. Knight was at a summer camp game a few months later and saw Cheaney again. This time, the real Calbert Cheaney showed up.
“Why aren’t we recruiting that kid?” Knight asked his assistants.
The assistants told him he had ordered them not to recruit Cheaney. “Why don’t you just give him a call and see if he might have any interest in Indiana?” Knight said.
Cheaney, quite naturally, was thrilled. He chose Indiana, was the star of Knight’s last Final Four team in 1992 and is still the Big Ten’s all-time leading scorer. Crews was stunned that his old coach had recruited a player who had committed to him.
“If some other coach did that to me, you’d call him every name in the book,” Crews said to Knight. “I know coaches do this sort of thing, but how could you do this to me?”
Knight responded by telling Crews he would be nothing in basketball if not for him. Crews finally said, “You know something, Coach: The saddest part of your life is that you treat your enemies better than you treat your friends.”
The truth in that statement is very sad.
Peter King, in his NFL Football column, makes an accurate observation about how younger sports fans will wonder why anyone cares about the death of a coach of a minor university in a lesser sport: “It’s understandable that many will note the death of Knight and wonder how possibly could the basketball coach at Indiana be one of the five most dominant people in sports for 15, 20 years. He just was.” But if Bobby Knight had been a military general instead of a basketball coach, he would have been as famous as George Patton was, and probably more successful. He was a rare individual whose obvious talent was only exceeded by the force of his will.
But Knight’s career is a cautionary tale in how one should not treat others, no matter how talented, driven, or successful one is. For some reason, all too many people insist on treating their enemies better than they treat their friends. This is wrong, in every application, and ultimately leads to failure in everything from marriage to business marketing.
In your personal life, you should, you must, treat your partner, your family, and your friends better than you treat anyone else, most especially strangers. The idea that the closer you are to someone, the more you can “truly be yourself” and “be unconditionally accepted” despite your worst behavior is a pernicious one that is all too common today.
And in your professional life, you should, you must, treat your core market and your loyal customers better than anyone else. The idea that you should focus your efforts on the periphery and on potential new customers in different markets is much in vogue, but it has reliably led to complete failure in everything from beer and NASCAR to Hollywood and video games.
He always insisted he didn’t care what anyone cared about him when, in fact, he cared desperately and went so far out of his way to prove it that he hurt himself figuratively — and literally. Worse than that, he always had to have the last word — whether it was with referees, other coaches, players, the media and even his family.
This is another important lesson. Two, in fact. First, nearly everyone cares what most people think about them. The only people who genuinely don’t are either a) neuroatypical, b) 3SD+ more intelligent than the norm,(1) c) psychologically scarred from childhood,(2) or some combination therein. So, attempting to erect an uncaring facade is both futile and transparent. And worse, most of the efforts required to protect that facade tend to harm the person behind it.
As for needing to have the last word, this is just retarded and unnecessary. There is absolutely no point in repeating the same point over and over and over again, as most people do, much less resorting to insults and attacks because your feelings have been hurt when someone doesn’t agree with you. Did you somehow forget that you claimed you didn’t care what others thought? Then why are your feelings hurt, and why do you assume that they care what you think?
So, RIP Bobby Knight. The remarkable thing about the General is that even in death, he is still capable of teaching important life lessons.
(1) Contemplate the extent to which you care about a child or a literal retard thinks. Then consider the fact that in terms of IQ, they are closer to you than you are to Chris Langan.
(2) It’s virtually impossible to replicate, or even simulate, those psychologies shaped by childhood experience, particularly prior to puberty. For good or for ill.
Even those whose politics are more or less in line with those of the mainstream media often find the organizations and individuals to be contemptible. Brett McMurphy, a former ex-ESPN reporter, calls out the Disney-owned sports network for its overt hypocrisy:
It’s ironic @ESPN is hammering Michigan & Jim Harbaugh for sign-stealing when ESPN continually steals & fails to credit reporters & news organizations for news ESPN didn’t break
The media never hesitates to hold everyone else to rules that it rejects for itself. And it’s always fascinating to see how the media immediately abandons all of its sacred journalistic principles the moment it, or one of its employees or executives, becomes the center of attention for one reason or another.
Although Clay Travis of Outkick suspects that in this case, there might be something more than the usual hypocrisy at work here.
Conspiracy theory: Is ESPN going hard after Michigan because they are mad they lost all the Big Ten games and want to devalue the Big Ten conference?
Either way, it would be hard to name a more hypocritical institution than the mainstream media. I’d place my trust in a crack-addicted street whore before I’d trust any mainstream journalist, much less an editor.
It’s not quite right to say the NFL is fixed. But it is most definitely tweaked, adjusted, and massaged in order to favor certain teams on certain specific Sundays. I think it’s a stupid policy and shows an unnecessary lack of confidence in what would arguably be an even more entertaining entertainment product if left unmanaged.
And I think I speak for every lifelong NFL fan when I say that using fake celebrity relationships with NFL stars to spark female interest in the game is vastly preferable to the previous over-the-top activism on breast cancer and BLM. It’s been encouraging to see the complete absence of Ukraine-Russia and Hamas-Israel on the field and in the broadcast booths.
Even the anti-conspiracists are beginning to recognize the way in which the referees are being used to put the league’s thumb on the scale.
Amari Cooper drew a flag for getting his thigh pad touched, which negated a forced fumble. Donovan Peoples-Jones drew another one on a ball launched out of the back of the end zone. This pair of calls almost assuredly would have been rejected by a neutral observer in the booth with the ability to view what all of us were watching, that this crew was single-handedly clubbing at the knee a Colts team that was punching way above its weight class. After the game, Colts coach Shane Steichen called the whole experience a character builder. I suppose that’s the only way to look at it without becoming a full-blown conspiracy theorist.
The Chiefs pulled off a primetime win over the Jets that ended up being far closer than fans had anticipated. Kansas City escaped with a 23-20 win to improve to 3-1 on the year, but their victory wasn’t without controversy. In addition to a questionable defensive holding call against Sauce Gardner, which wiped away an interception, Jets defensive lineman Jermaine Johnson was inexplicably held for a stunning length of time on a play that resulted in a 25-yard run for Patrick Mahomes. Somehow, the officials seemed to not notice Johnson being held for multiple seconds by Donovan Smith. The missed hold would likely explain why Mahomes had so much time in the pocket, which he eventually used to slither free for a first down run.
I thought there were a lot of key calls yesterday that were made correctly, and a few that were missed were correct on replay. The refs are clearly capable of doing a good job, albeit only when the league permits them to do so. It’s not an accident that so many of the egregious calls and non-calls happened late in the fourth quarter of close games, or that they all went in favor of the league-preferred team.
The fact that it’s perfectly legal to script an entertainment product doesn’t mean that it’s actually more entertaining. Using the refs to protect the quarterbacks is one thing; last year’s NFC championship game clearly demonstrated that no amount of protection can be too much given the inability of even a very good team with a sixth-round rookie quarterback to remain competitive without a healthy QB in the modern game.
But bad calls in the fourth quarter on key plays that hand the game to the league-favored team are a turnoff even to the most uninterested parties. Is making sure the Chiefs are 6-1 instead of 5-2 in a division they’re leading by four games really worth sacrificing the perceived integrity of the game?
Question: Take a guess what media outlet this quote is taken from:
People attending a Thursday performance from Dave Chappelle reportedly were very upset with comments the comedian made about Israel.
The Israelis are currently engaged in a massive war against Hamas following the horrific slaughter of more than 1,400 men, women and children in Israel. So far, the war has been mostly an air campaign, but all signs indicate a ground invasion could come in the near future.
The topic has dominated the news, and for good reason. Hamas terrorists murdered innocent people, and Israel is now responding. That’s called war and retaliation.
Dave Chappelle thinks going to war with Hamas in Gaza is a war crime committed by Israel.
DAVE CHAPPELLE REPORTEDLY ACCUSES ISRAEL OF WAR CRIMES DURING SHOW, COMPLETELY MISSES THE MARK, 22 October 2023
Answer: It’s from Outkick the Coverage. Now how, pray tell, is this sports-related news of any kind?
Clay Travis really needs to tell his writers to stay in their freaking lanes.
And I know when I want an opinion on geopolitics and war, the first person I turn to is a comedian.
Less than five years after founder Aaron Schatz sold the popular Football Outsiders site, it’s dead, done, and dusted.
Football Outsiders was founded in 2003 by Aaron Schatz. What began as his passion project grew into a fully fledged website for advanced football analytics and statistics such as DVOA (Defense-adjusted Value Over Average). Football Outsiders went on to strike partnerships with ESPN and became a popular source for hardcore football nerds and casual fans alike. In 2018, Schatz sold Football Outsiders to a company called EdjSports. He stayed on as editor-in-chief, and, according to longtime Football Outsiders writer Mike Tanier, the site continued to operate as normal.
Then, in September 2021, Champion Gaming, co-founded by Simmonds and Hershman, entered the picture. It acquired EdjSports, and Football Outsiders along with it, in late 2021 as part of a “reverse takeover,” a way for private companies to go public quickly without having to go through an Initial Public Offering. As part of the deal, Champion Gaming merged with a shell company called Prime City One Capital. According to a news report from the time, “the group closed a funding round of $3.65 million (CAD $4.62 million), giving it a roughly $12.3 million post-money valuation, and it is on track to begin trading in a few weeks.”
Champion Gaming had ambitions to expand beyond NFL coverage. It struck a licensing deal with Inpredictable, an NBA analytics website run by Mike Beuoy, and partnered with SharpRank, a sports betting resource. The terms and status of these partnerships are unclear; Beuoy and SharpRank did not respond to queries. Champion Gaming also brought on Chris Spagnuolo to oversee content (for a particular microgeneration of sports media consumers, Spagnuolo is best known as the guy who left Barstool Sports after writing a blog calling Rihanna fat), and hired ESPN’s Katie George to be a brand ambassador and create video content. Spagnuolo declined to comment. Defector was not able to reach George for comment.
By the summer after the takeover, changes at the top of the company were underway. In June 2022, Simmonds took over from Hershman as CEO; Wickham took over as CFO; and the company’s president, Chief Innovation Officer, and director all resigned. The company framed the changes as an exciting new chapter. Of Simmonds’s ascent to CEO, Hershman said in a press release, “Given his previous experience as a public markets CEO and his extensive background in online gambling, the board of directors and I determined that his leadership of the Company would be both ideal and appropriate to steer us going forward as we build a leading sports content and data intelligence business.”
But by the fall there were signs that the company was floundering. According to financial documents filed in November 2022, which are publicly available through Sedar, Canada’s securities filing system, the company had little cash flow and was carrying significant debt, especially relative to its revenues. In the first nine months of 2022, Champion Gaming reported $969,789 in revenue and $5,619,803 in losses. (All monetary figures cited in the filings are in CAD.) As of Sept. 30, 2022, the entire company had only $55,776 in cash, with even less coming in. As of the same date, the accounts receivable, meaning revenue the company accrued, but which they still needed to be paid, was only $13,911. On page six of the same filing, the company wrote: “These material uncertainties cast significant doubt as to the Company’s ability to continue as a going concern.”
The company’s main form of cash flow came from issuing equity and borrowing money.
Now, if your sole focus is money, it may make sense to literally sell out. Schatz probably made a nice bit from the initial sale, although he didn’t make the big score that would have resulted from the money guys going public or selling it to a big public corporation would have.
An operation like FO, despite its popularity, never makes all that much money. A million dollars sounds like a lot, but FO probably didn’t do much more than provide a reasonable living to its owners due to the need to pay for all the contract-based content produced. And as usual, the people who practically invented the NFL analytics game are about the only ones not profiting much from it.
“It’s just really disheartening to see this niche, special interest, really passionate sports blog that blossomed into a pretty influential sports analytics company, just get sucked dry so quickly,”
It is always disheartening to see how quickly, and how comprehensively, the financial parasites manage to destroy great little companies. So if you’re doing what you love, if it’s truly a passion, why sell out and run the very high risk of seeing your creation destroyed? For every sell-out that scores big, there are probably ten or more that end up dessicated, defunct, and forgotten. It’s amazing how many organizations that could have continued doing what they were doing almost indefnitely have disappeared as a result of cashing in and cashing out.
That’s one reason why Castalia subscribers need not worry about their source of world-class leather books going away, as long as enough people continue to subscribe to it. I am fully aware of the realities of the merger and acquisition market, which is why I won’t even agree to have “a conversation” with the financial pirates when they “reach out” to see if we’re interested in “exploring mutual opportunities”.
