Tag: sports

Sir, This is a Wendy’s

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.

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Why You Don’t Sell

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”.

And speaking of Castalia, I would be remiss if I did not point out that CARAVAN OF THE DAMNED, Chuck Dixon’s Conan #2, is back in stock on Amazon.

Anyhow, at the end of the day, a man needs to ask himself: what is my purpose? And also, is money a necessary evil or is it the prime objective?

UPDATE: Caravan has also reached the fulfilment house for those who bought direct. The cover colors look brilliant.

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RIP Dick Butkus

One of the long-time NFL greats has died. Not even the legendary Dick Butkus was too tough for Father Time.

“How could he die!” Fran Tarkenton said on the day Dick Butkus did, indeed, die. “He was indestructible! Bigger than life, tougher than nails! Mick Tingelhoff died recently, and he was my center, and we were close. Bud Grant died recently, and he was my coach. Great man. And today Dick goes, and I’ve been crying ever since I heard. Dick Butkus was football!”

When I was very young, I loved the NFL more than anything. I wore purple Vikings corduroys with a matching yellow Vikings shirt to my first day of school in first grade. I collected the game programs. I met Matt Blair after winning a reading contest. For my 11th birthday, we went to the preaseason training camp in Mankato and I got Ted Brown’s autograph at the nearby pizza place. On Monday nights, I went to bed at halftime of Monday Night Football and my mother would write the final score on a piece of paper she’d tape to my bedroom door. Eventually, I owned a pair of Vikings season tickets on the 20-yard-line of the Metrodome. I went out with Vikings cheerleaders. I had a drink with Todd Scott in the VIP lounge at Glam Slam.

And always, I read the lore dating back to the earliest days.

Some of my favorite childhood books were those written by Bill Gutman and published by Tempo Books. They were short paperbacks, less than 200 pages, and always featured four players. I somehow still have two of them, Football’s Fantastic Four and Great Linebackers #1.

Haden-Dorsett-Payton-Jones. Butkus-Lanier-Curtis-Buoniconti. Needless to say, Butkus went first.

I never met him. I don’t even remember ever seeing him play. He retired when I was five. But his ferocious determination to succeed, combined with the tragedy of a great player being stuck for his entire career on a sub-par team, resonated with me, and I never forgot his dignity, the universal respect he commanded, and the way he continued to excel even though his superhuman efforts were invariably futile. He was named to eight consecutive Pro Bowls, but he never played in a playoff game.

It’s an irony of sports history that the greatest NFL defense of all-time, the 1985 Chicago Bears, did not include Chicago’s greatest linebacker.

Dick Butkus is gone. But his legend remains.

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Forza Milan!

Giroud is such a legend! Watch the whole thing. It’s not what you’re expecting.

On the subject of calcio, the winning goal in our most recent game was pretty funny. The right wing who’d come on as a substitute for me was pretty gassed with about five minutes left, so he was hanging back instead of running with the attack on the other side. He was just standing there about 30 meters out on the right, nonchalantly watching the action on the other side, as our striker went one-on-one with the keeper on the left side of the box, and took a hard shot that was blocked as the keeper came out aggressively at him.

Fortunately, the ball flew across the field directly to where the right wing as standing. He controlled the ball and then calmly put it in the empty net before the keeper could get back into position – it can be harder than it looks to keep a shot on target from that distance in those circumstances – then turned to the bench and folded his arms Mbappe-style before the ball even went in the net.

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone work less for a goal.

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I Was Wrong

After considerable review of statistics and video highlights in the aftermath of Argentina winning the World Cup, I have been forced to conclude that my previous opinion was in error. There simply isn’t any question about it.

Lionel Messi is the greatest soccer player of all time.

I’ve always considered Pele to be number one, with Maradona a close number two. But the fact is that Messi’s creative abilities, vision, and generosity make him a more complete, more effective player on the field than either Pele or Maradona. As for modern players, Cristiano Ronaldo is an incredible scorer and an inspirational leader for Portugal, and his speed, size, and aerial abilities are certainly superior to Messi’s, but the fact is that Messi is arguably more valuable as a goal-maker than he is as a goal-scorer.

This is unprecedented at the highest level of scoring even when one removes penalty goals from the equation. In his five-year peak at Barcelona, Messi averaged 1.03 non-penalty goals per game and 0.46 assists per game for a combined average of 1.5 goals per game.

Consider that the consummate midfielder, Zinedine Zidane, universally regarded as one of the ten-greatest to ever play the game, averaged 0.26 assists per game across his entire career. In Zidane’s best-ever season, at Juventus, he averaged 0.46 assists per game. Messi did that for five straight years. And he did that in addition to scoring a goal in every game himself.

His closest rival, Cristiano Ronaldo, scored fewer non-penalty goals and had 25 percent fewer assists during his own five-year peak at Real Madrid. CR7’s combined average of 1.3 goals per game is still historically excellent to the point of being very nearly unprecedented, but across the 170 games played, that 0.2 delta is a difference of 34 goals in five seasons!

Statistically speaking, at their mutual peaks, Messi was worth one more goal every five games than Cristiano Ronaldo. That’s the statistical equivalent of having one additional mediocre striker or one above-average midfielder on the field every single game. And this peak-to-peak comparison is actually favorable to CR7. The career delta between Messi and Ronaldo is 0.32 despite the latter’s Saudi league-inflated numbers. To put that into perspective, 0.32 happens to be the career average of Andrés Iniesta, an excellent Spanish international who was named to the FIFA Pro World XI no less than nine times.

So the cold hard tangibles are perfectly clear. What about the intangibles? All you need to do is to forget about the goals and watch one highlight reel of Messi dribbling, followed by another one of him making assists. Only Maradona can compare to his dribbling and I’ve never seen anyone who creates opportunities for others as well as Messi does. Any lingering doubts about his ability to win the biggest competitions were settled once and for all when Argentina beat Brazil in the 2021 Copa America, then followed that up by winning the 2022 World Cup.

Dennis Bergkamp will always be my favorite player, and I’ll always harbor the utmost respect for Pele, Maradona, and CR7. But the unquestionable fact, the undeniable fact, is that Lionel Messi is the greatest footballer to ever play the game.

And Americans are very fortunate to be able to watch him doing what he does at Inter Miami. Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar took the Saudi money, but what Messi is doing with David Beckham in Miami is more important, as they are building stronger foundations for the beautiful game.

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Spain 1, Lesbianesses 0

Spain won the Women’s World Cup despite its Football Association needing to crush a player revolt by 15 of its top female players by ejecting 12 of them from the national team.

Spain won their first Women’s World Cup final vs. England on Sunday 1-0 but did it without a handful of top players because of an ongoing protest against the Royal Spanish Football Federation.

In September 2022, 15 players sent the federation separate but identical emails asking not to be called up to the national team, citing a lack of professionalism that each player wrote had an “important effect on my emotional state and by extension my health.” They demanded “a clear commitment to a professional project with attention paid to all the aspects needed to get the best performance of this group of players” in the email.

The 15 players were Aitana Bonmati, Mariona Caldentey, Ona Batlle, Patri Guijarro, Mapi Leon, Sandra Panos, Claudia Pina, Lola Gallardo, Ainhoa Moraza, Nerea Eizagirre, Amaiur Sarriegi, Lucia Garcia, Leila Ouahabi, Laia Aleixandri and Andrea Pereira. Three additional players who did not send emails voiced their support for the others: Alexia Putellas, Jennifer Hermoso, and captain Irene Paredes.

According to The Athletic, among the players’ complaints was insufficient preparation for matches, from arriving to host cities too late and traveling by bus when planes would be considered the practical choice. The players also reportedly had issues with several coaches, alleging they were asked them to keep their hotel room doors open until midnight and inspected their bags after they went on excursions during camps. The players never explicitly asked for head coach Jorge Vilda or his coaching staff to be fired, but it was clear the relationship between them was fractured.

Instead of taking the players’ complaints seriously, though, the federation instantly backed Vilda and criticized those who protested. Ana Alvarez, head of women’s soccer at the federation, said that players would need to apologize before they were welcomed back onto the team, and added that “the federation comes first.”

It’s interesting to see how the players revolt – so celebrated in the early stages of the tournament when the team lost 4-0 to Japan in the last round of qualifiers – is being minimized here now that Spain, under the much-vilified Vilda, has won the tournament. Leaving 12 internationals out of the national team in a sport that starts 11 is hardly “a handful”. The media made a lot out of the current players turning their backs on their coach and refusing to celebrate a quarterfinal victory with him, but the observable fact is that there is no way the Spanish team, which had never even reached the quarterfinals before, would have won the World Cup without him.

Female teams are particularly fragile and are much given to self-destructive drama. I doubt it is an accident that Vilda didn’t select 12 of the 15 who initially declared themselves unavailable, as they were troublemakers and drama queens. And it was impressive that he didn’t hesitate to sit down the #1 goalkeeper when she wasn’t playing well, and that he left his star player, arguably the best in the world, on the bench for most of the tournament because she wasn’t 100-percent recovered from injury. Whether they like him or not, his players went on to dominate an English team full of the very sort of troublemakers and drama queens that he ejected from the squad.

A lot of NFL players don’t like Bill Belichick either. But there is no denying he gets the most out of them. Or that he wins championships.

It’s a bit amusing to see some of the bigger names who were left out whining about how they didn’t get the chance to win a World Cup. “What saddens me the most is that I really have to miss out on something when I could have earned it and contributed. It’s a shame.” But it’s not a shame, you didn’t earn it, you didn’t have to miss out, and your contributions were obviously unnecessary.

The lesson of the unexpected Spanish triumph at the Woman’s World Cup is this: the players are never bigger than the team.

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How to Fail

Johnny Manziel was given a team iPad where coaches could secretly track the amount of time he spent watching film. But the problem was that Manziel didn’t watch any film. Literally not a minute.

It would probably surprise most of you how few people are capable of performing even the most basic and rudimentary aspects of their jobs. And it’s not as if the solution is necessarily more pay.

Johnny Manziel signed a 4 year, $8,248,596 contract with the Cleveland Browns, including a $4,318,980 signing bonus, $7,998,596 guaranteed, and an average annual salary of $2,062,149.

Note that not even two million dollars per year was enough to get the guy to watch five minutes of game film.

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He Even Lost His Name

Jack Nicklaus’s bid to reclaim his own name from (((a former business partner))) was rejected by (((a Florida judge))).

In a recent federal court decision, Jack Nicklaus suffered a setback in his attempt to regain control of his name and likeness owned by former partner Howard Milstein. On Aug. 1, Judge Robin Rosenberg of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Florida ruled that due to a prior decision against Nicklaus by the New York County Supreme Court on the exact same property in question in Nicklaus Companies, LLC v. GBI Investors Inc., he lacked the ability to grant Nicklaus any control of the property in question.

I neither know nor care much about the travails of a rich golfer who lost control of his own name in pursuit of even more riches. But it’s a reminder that if something looks too good to be true, it probably is, and that if there is wording in the contract permitting the other party to a) take full control or b) not pay, the other party will usually find a way to make that happen.

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Adios, Bitches

The end of Megan Rapinhoe’s international soccer career was truly glorious. The most annoying athlete in all of sports finished by blowing a golden opportunity to finish off Sweden on penalties in the World Cup by putting the ball five feet over the crossbar; an inept penalty attempt worse than the average high school girl’s. It’s up there with Roberto Baggio’s 1994 catastrophe, only worse, since a) Italy reached the finals, b) Baggio was just trying to keep Italy even, not win the game, and c) four years later, Baggio took and made a penalty in the 1998 World Cup to become the first Italian player to score in three World Cups.

And just to make the moment even sweeter, the outspoken anti-American lesbian-infested SJW squad, which prior to the tournament had been favored to win it, ended up losing the round-of-16 knockout match 5-4 on penalties after future star Sophia Smith put her penalty wide and over, followed by some other player whose name I don’t know hitting the right post.

I used to support the US Women’s National Team back when Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain were playing for it, and while I like Alex Morgan and Sophia Smith as players, the current team as a whole is an obnoxious, overpoliticized, and overrated embarrassment to the country. It’s good to see them lose in such an ignominious manner, especially to a team mostly comprised of pretty European blondes.

As for the winning penalty, it was a close call, but the VAR was conclusive. The US goalie did a nice job of deflecting the ball and quickly recovering to knock the ball out of the goal, and I initially thought she’d saved it, but a different angle and the VAR review showed the ball did fully cross the line.

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A Failure of Leadership

The Pacific-12 conference, first founded in 1915 as the Pacific Coast Conference, is pining for the fjords.

“The Big 12 Board of Directors has voted unanimously to admit Arizona State University, University of Arizona and University of Utah to the Big 12 Conference,” commissioner Brett Yormark said in a statement.

The Pac-12 Conference really has no one to blame but themselves.

Former commissioner Larry Scott once had an opportunity to add the Texas Longhorns and Oklahoma Sooners, but declined. He also had an opportunity to partner with ESPN with the failing Pac-12 Network, but declined.

The windows of opportunity don’t ever remain open for long. Good leadership understands that. Mediocre leadership never does anything because it fears making a mistake, which ironically, often turns out to be a mistake.

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