Rest In Peace, JR Richard…

Former Astros’ ace, JR Richard, passed away Wednesday night.  Richard was one of the dominant pitchers in MLB in the late 70s.  At one point, he and Nolan Ryan were part of the team’s starting rotation making a series against the Astros not a lot of fun for opponents.  His career was brief; it ended when he was 30 years old after he suffered a major stroke during warmups for a game.

Rest in peace, JR Richard.

The Steelers and the Cowboys played a meaningless exhibition game last night as an adjunct to the Pro Football Hall of Fame induction ceremonies.  Meanwhile in Winnipeg, the CFL kicked off its regular season last night after a fully dark year in 2020 thanks to COVID-19.  The game last night matched the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers; those two teams were the opponents in the last Grey Cup game in December 2019.  The Tiger-Cats won the Grey Cup game; the Blue Bombers won last night’s game by a score of 19-6.

Tomorrow night, the rebranded Edmonton Elks will make their debut hosting the Toronto Redblacks.  I hope this season goes well for the CFL because I have to believe that the league and the teams are financially stressed after the 2020 non-season.  Back before the COVID crisis, there were plans for a CFL expansion team in the Maritime Provinces that would have taken the field this year.  Looking at the schedule, it seems that existence of this new team has been postponed for now.

Reports say that there is opposition in Halifax – the proposed home base for the Atlantic Schooners expansion team – to building a stadium for the team.  I am certainly not an expert in Canadian geography, but I have traveled to the Maritime provinces twice and Halifax is certainly the largest city I recall in either Nova Scotia or New Brunswick.  That raises a question in my mind:

• Could the CFL put an expansion team in Quebec City, or would that cause an injury to the Montreal Alouettes?

For the 2021 season the CFL has a no-nonsense policy when it comes to game cancellations and COVID outbreaks.  Forget the rhetorical flourishes around the edges of the policy and the announcement of the policy, here is the meat:

• If a game must be canceled due to a COVID-19 outbreak, only players on teams where 85% or more of the players and staff are vaccinated will get paid.  Moreover, this applies without regard to which team caused the cancellation.

Having mentioned the Dallas Cowboys in passing above, a friend sent me a copy of an article in the New York Times dated January 1, 1984.  The Dallas Cowboys were “up for sale” and this article had the following quotation:

“I feel sorry for the poor guy who is going to buy the Dallas Cowboys.  It’s a no-win situation for him, because if he wins, well so what, they’ve won through the years and if he loses, which seems likely, because they’re having troubles, he’ll be known to the world as a loser.”

Later that year, a consortium led by “Bum” Bright bought the Cowboys from Clint Murchison for $85M and then sold the team in 1989 to Jerry Jones for $140M.  The “Bright Consortium” turned a tidy 65% profit in 5 years; today the Cowboys franchise – according to Forbes – is worth $6.5B.

In case you are wondering who was quoted by the NY Times back in 1984, it was Donald J. Trump.

Bob Molinaro had this to say in the Hampton Roads Virginian-Pilot this week:

“TV timeout: NBC’s Olympic viewership is way, way down from the audience size for the 2016 Rio Games. The fragmented nature of broadcasts from the other side of the world — and confusion over where and when to find the programming — is being blamed. So is Simone Biles, poor thing. Then there’s debate over how many are watching on streaming services, but when this subject comes up I begin to lose consciousness.”

I am part of the “lost audience” for these Games.  A big part of my absence is the unavoidable fact that Tokyo is 12 time zones away from Northern Virginia meaning that most of the live coverage of events is very inconvenient for me.  For teams that I have followed closely, I can watch a replay of a game where I know the outcome because I watch it differently and watch for things I would not have watched for had the game been live.  Such is not the case for Olympic events; for me, they lose a lot if I know the outcome.

Oh, and one other thing about the coverage.  I understand the TV adage that “Sex sells,” but there has been a huge overdose of beach volleyball coverage in these games.  The women participants are attractive and less-than-fully clothed; I get that.  What the network execs seem not to realize is that an audience expecting to see Olympic events is not going to be mesmerized for a long time by scantily clad women.  Those execs should have an example of this to learn from:

• If “Sex sells,” applies to women’s sports on TV, then the late but not lamented “Lingerie League” of women’s pro football would have been a smash hit.
• It wasn’t!

Finally, here is one more item from Bob Molinaro:

“Shenanigans: The Buffalo Bills apparently are threatening to threaten that they’ll shuffle off to Austin, Texas, if the city doesn’t use taxpayer money to cover the entire cost of a new stadium. That’s a bad bluff. Austin already has a pro football team — the Texas Longhorns.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………