Daily Rants | The Sports Curmudgeon

The Race Card …

Last week, the Washington Post had a report that Charles Barkley will host a new TV show – to make its debut next year on TNT – where he will examine “race, class and cultural differences” in our society. The working title for the show is “The Race Card”. This program has the potential to be very important and constructive for a wide audience and this program has the potential for self-immolation. Clearly, I would prefer the former outcome but even though I would root for that, I have to acknowledge that “crash and burn” is a real possibility.

Charles Barkley is not shy about sharing his opinions and feelings and his opinions are never ones that are universally held throughout society. Here is an overview of what he will try to do:

“… bring [race and cultural tensions] to the forefront, and create a dialogue, and he’s going to bring a Who’s Who [of people] with him to both dramatize it, to opine on it, to participate. And he hopes it’s sort of a lightning rod, and a really constructive dialogue.”

I can assure you that I will be watching for this program and hoping that it succeeds. And, simply because Charles Barkley has been himself “sort of a lightning rod” in the past, there will be some who tune in because they think this will be equivalent to inviting Howard Stern to a church social.

There was another report that caught my eye recently regarding the Monday Night Football game this year that will be played in Mexico City (Raiders/Texans on 21 November). The game will take place in Azteca Stadium there and the venue seats 98,500 people. The NFL reported that after tickets for the game went on sale, the game was a sellout “within minutes”. This is scheduled as a home game for the Raiders; clearly, this will be the largest home attendance that the team will see this year.

The reason that report caught my eye is because it points to the potential for the NFL to expand revenues in international settings. Roger Goodell – like Charles Barkley – has been a lightning rod for the last several years with regard to his role as the league disciplinarian. [Aside: Back in September 2014, I wrote here that Goodell ought not be the league disciplinarian because it interferes with his main job – growing the revenue for the NFL.] This show of support for the NFL product in an international venue seemed to be an indicator that Goodell’s “vision” for annual revenue of $25B for the NFL by 2027 might just be realistic.

Consider that in 2010, the NFL revenue was $8.5B and in 2015 the NFL revenue was $13.1B. In case your calculator is not handy, that is an increase of 54% in 5 years. If you extrapolate that sort of increasing revenue over the next decade you will see that NFL revenue in 2025 would be in excess of $30B. Since it becomes much more difficult to sustain that level of growth as the base for calculating the growth expands, even the NFL has to accept the reality that growth will slow – – and yet an annual revenue of $25B in 2027 might be achievable.

This is what Roger Goodell is hired by the owners to accomplish; that is why he enjoys support among the owners. By the way, the players ought to appreciate what he is doing – and what he is seeking to accomplish – because roughly half of all the league revenue shows up in players’ contracts. If the league revenue were to grow by $12B in the next decade, then player salaries will grow by $6B. Even if the players may feel that they deserve a slightly higher percentage of the gross revenue than they are currently receiving, it is not as if they are the recipients of chump change.

The way I see it, the single largest obstacle in the way of the NFL growing to the levels that Roger Goodell has envisioned is continued labor peace. The current CBA extends through 2020; that is the timeframe where this growth engine could hit a speed bump – – or it could find a bridge over troubled waters and come to suitable compromise(s). Therein lies the great unknown in all of this.

How will the league grow revenues between now and 2025 – – assuming labor peace beyond 2020?

2. More TV games: Notice, I did not say more games here; while I would enjoy seeing an 18-game NFL regular season schedule, I recognize that player safety issues stand in the way of having that happen in the near future. However, the NFL has gone from “Sunday-only” to “Sunday and Monday” to “Sunday and Sunday Night and Monday” to “Sunday and Sunday Night and Monday and Thursday” in its scheduling. What that does is put more games on the air in a national audience setting. That attracts more viewers; that means ratings go up; that means more ad dollars; that means higher TV rights fees and that increases revenues.

Therefore, Tuesday and Wednesday are still in play. Do not discount those possibilities…

Finally, since I talked about Charles Barkley above, here is an item from Gregg Drinnan in his Keeping Score blog:

“A piece of advice from the always relevant Charles Barkley: ‘Don’t get in a fight with somebody who’s ugly. They got nothing to lose.’”

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

I Don’t Like Moneyball …

I have never been a fan of Moneyball. I thought the book was shallow and self-evident if you believed the implied premise that this approach to building a baseball team was transferable to each and every other situation in MLB. I tried to watch the movie and did not make it past the first 15 or 20 minutes. Billy Beane continues to receive the sort of accolades one usually associates with a true visionary. My problem is that true visionaries have successes at least once in a while.

The A’s last won a World Series in 1989; that happened before Beane was the GM in Oakland; if fact, that was before Beane was even hired as a scout in Oakland. The idea behind Moneyball is to find value in players such that the team can win without having an outrageously expensive payroll. As I said above, the premise is sort of self-evident. However, what Moneyball seems not to be able to address is this:

Once you find a valuable player – or two or three – and the on field performance demonstrates that they are worthy of more than some sort of minimal salary, how does the team keep some of them as the foundation for building a team with other new “value discoveries” that the genius GM will uncover?

I assert that the A’s have not yet figured out how to do that simply because of the top-shelf players that they have had on their roster “on the cheap” and whom they traded away to other teams for lesser performance. I am not going to pretend here to have done hours upon hours of research to come up with these examples because I did not. I suspect that there are more examples – and better examples – of the point I want to make here but I have not had the time or inclination to do the work to uncover them. Nevertheless:

Josh Donaldson

The A’s had Ben Zobrist playing second base for them. They traded him away for a young pitcher who has a 4.68 ERA this year and another pitcher they traded away before he ever saw the parent club.

The A’s had Nelson Cruz in their minor league system for about 5 years and never found a way to see that he might be a major league hitter. They traded him to the Brewers in 2004; the Brewers traded him to the Rangers in 2006 and Cruz is still playing productively as a DH in 2016. Back in 2004, the A’s received an infielder who appeared in 51 games for them and batted .161.

The A’s had outfielder Yoenis Cespedes on their roster. Despite his All-Star level performance, they traded him to the Red Sox for John Lester – whom they failed to keep, he appeared in a total of 11 games for the A’s – and Jonny Gomes.

I am not trying to make the case that the A’s had tons of Hall of Fame quality players that they gave away for nothing; that is not the point. What they did have were solid MLB players or better and they got rid of them to save money and did not get any “Moneyball-value-players” in return. As of this morning, the A’s are 47-60 and are sitting comfortably in last place in the AL West. They have a run differential of minus-85 which is by far the worst in the AL. for the last 10 years (since 2006), the A’s cumulative record is 867-859. That is a winning percentage of .502.

That winning percentage over a decade says “mediocrity” to me and not “visionary genius”.

Enough negativity for the day … There are two positive things that happened last week which I want to mention today. The Web.com Tour is sort of like the AAA affiliate of the PGA Tour; players on the Web.com Tour have not yet made it to the main tour and almost all of them aspire to do so. This “developmental tour” if you will, was originally known as the Ben Hogan Tour and most recently as the Nationwide Tour. Stephan Jaeger is one of the players on the Web.com Tour and last week all he did was to shoot a round of 58.

To put that in perspective, this is only the third time in the history of pro golf that a player has carded a 58.

Moreover, this was not a mere flash-in-the-pan round where everything was dropping for him. In the other 3 rounds of the tournament, Jaeger shot 65,64,63 meaning that his total for the four rounds of the tournament was 250.

The previous US record for low score in a 72-hole professional tournament was 254. Jaeger broke that record by 4 strokes.

The other positive happening from last week was an announcement by the NBPA saying that retired NBA players who had accumulated 3-years of tenure in the league will get health insurance provided by the NBPA. Open enrollment will begin in October 2016 and coverage will commence on Jan 1 2017. The vote to make this happen was passed unanimously by the players.

Kudos to the NBA players and the NBPA for this classy move.

Finally, Brad Dickson had this comment in the Omaha World-Herald recently. It brings together the current political debates in the US with the world of sports.

“Democrats say they want to put an end to the rich getting richer on the backs of the middle and lower classes.

“In that case, they can start by investigating how the Golden State Warriors got Kevin Durant.”

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

What’s The Point …?

Late last week, there were reports that the NFL could and would fine the Dallas Cowboys $250K because the Cowboys had 3 players suspended for 4 or more games at the start of the 2016 season. That was the first time I had heard of that provision of the NFL rules and I wondered if this was something that had always been in place – and never hit the public spotlight – or if this was a new provision of the rules as more scrutiny on player anti-social behaviors has increased. In any case, I did not try to go and od that research because I was immediately confronted with another aspect of this report:

What a feckless and meaningless punishment this is!

Annually, Forbes evaluates sporting franchises and puts a value on them. The latest estimate I can find for the Cowboys is $3.2B. Forbes also does an annual listing of the net worth of the country’s richest folks. The latest estimate I can find for Jerry Jones is $5B.

Now the NFL is going to fine someone – maybe the Cowboys and maybe Jerry Jones himself that was not clear – $250K for this violation of the rules. Nominally, one of the reasons for fines or punishments in general is to provide some measure of deterrent. The rule should be in place for a good and sufficient reason and in this case I guess you could say that it is in the NFL’s best interest to present a sociable face to the public rather than an anti-social face to the public. So, on the assumption that this issue is worthy of making a rule over, one has to consider what might or might not be a deterrent to teams or owners when it comes to breaking that rule.

Now, go back and look at those numbers. The fine of $250K is meaningless to either the Cowboys or to Jerry Jones. Consider:

Oh, they probably get more cars driven to each game and you can be sure the average car pays more than $25 to park there…

Now if the fine is personally going to Jerry Jones instead of the Cowboys, please consider his approximate net worth of $5B and what a $250K fine might mean to him. Reducing this to numbers we may all be able to relate to, imagine that you had a bank account with 5 thousand dollars in it and you were issued a fine of 25 cents. Would that fine make you sit up and take notice and say to yourself that you better shape up, bucko, because this sort of assault on the exchequer cannot be sustained?

The fine is meaningless. Given that the fine is meaningless, there is no deterrent to the Cowboys or to Jerry Jones to do anything differently tomorrow than they did yesterday. That has to mean that this is not all that important to the NFL and that raises the question why this rule is there in the first place.

Take yourself back in time a couple of years when the Miami Dolphins were the center of attention in the football world because of the bullying allegations made by Jonathan Martin with regard to his offensive line teammates. One of the outcomes from all of that was that the Dolphins fired their OL coach, Jim Turner and one of the revelations of the investigations done in that matter revealed that Turner had purchased inflatable sex-dolls for the players as Christmas presents. Coach Turner has not been involved with football for the last couple of years; I have no idea if that was a self-imposed exile or if no team or coaching staff would get within a country mile of him. It really makes no difference.

This year, Jim Turner got a job as the OL coach at Texas A&M. Assuming that he is good at what he does as an OL coach – I have no idea if that is the case or not and really do not care – restarting his career progression at a major SEC school makes good sense. What does not make good sense is getting back in the news rather quickly and in a not-so-positive light.

Turner – and another assistant coach for the Aggies – are now suspended without pay and have been directed by the university to perform community service hours for “inappropriate comments they made at an event for female fans.”

According to reports, the comments included juvenile changes in the school fight song to “fire-up” the female fans and the lessons provided to the female fans about the game of football were laced with double-entendre and sexual innuendo to include descriptions such as:

Never bend over

You don’t want to end up on your back

Let me be clear; this is not sexual predation in any way. Let me be equally clear; this is the sort of stuff that would get junior high school boys gigging on a playground somewhere. This attempt at comedy – and I am giving them the benefit of the doubt that all they were trying to do was to be funny – is hopelessly lame and has no place in a university setting. In the realm of “Thank God for small favors”, perhaps we can be glad he did not bring any of his inflatable dolls to the event put on especially for female fans.

Memo to Coach Turner – and the other suspended assistant coach:

Finally, here is a comment from Greg Cote in the Miami Herald:

“Hockey Hall of Fame finally inducted Eric Lindros, out of the NHL since 2007, after passing him over six times. Must have had a hell of a retirement year!”

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

The College Football Playoff – – Reimagined

Last year, the folks who stage the College Football Playoff (CFP) had an idea. You could call it a “bold idea” or you could call it a “dumb idea” depending on the level of charity in your soul. They decided to play the semi-final games of the CFP on New Year’s Eve and said at the outset that they were hoping to create a new tradition in America with regard to how people would celebrate New Year’s Eve. Let me be charitable here and say that did not work very well.

I like college football as much as anyone and probably more than most. I had other plans for New Year’s Eve last year and so I set my VCR up to record the games and I watched them when I got home. Lots of other people went to New Year’s Eve parties and could only watch the game out of the corner of their eye and with the sound on mute. Still others were hammered beyond measure and would not have known they were watching a football game as opposed to driving a milk wagon. The result was that TV ratings were horrible – and TV ratings are critical to the CFP concept.

Any serious drop in ratings has to be taken very seriously by the CFP mavens because continued low ratings will mean smaller TV dollars from advertisers and therefore smaller TV dollars from the networks to the schools.

The “bold idea” of changing the American tradition with regard to the celebration of New Year’s Eve is looking like a “dumb idea” for the moment. But give the CFP folks credit; they recognize that they have dealt a losing hand and they are looking to try to fix it. Here is the new idea:

[Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain selling you games on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday nights…]

That sounds like an easy solution until you recognize that Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve are exactly one week apart and that means the games could take place on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day – and the CFP folks realize that is a non-starter.

In 2016, New Year’s Eve is a Saturday; playing the games on the Saturday before New Year’s Eve would put the games on Christmas Eve. That will not happen but the games will start an hour earlier than they did last year (3:00 PM and 7:00 PM EST) with the idea that this will fit better into the party schedule of many people. It is a move in the right direction – – but it probably ought to be moved back even earlier in the day since it is not a workday.

In 2017, New Year’s Eve is a Sunday and the CFP does not want to compete in a 3-way goat-rodeo with the NFL and New Year’s Eve parties. Next year, the game will be played on Saturday 30 December. And so it goes…

The CFP idea is a good idea. It may someday need to be expanded to 6-teams or 8-teams; if that time comes, we can deal with it then. What the CFP has to avoid is to damage itself with self-inflicted wounds. The New Years’ Eve scheduling idea was potentially a self-inflicted wound and the mavens in charge chose to move off their initial idea quickly. Take that as a good sign.

Moving up the ladder a step, the NY Jets and Ryan Fitzpatrick finally reached a deal. It would seem from the outside that both sides got much of what they wanted after about 5 months or wrangling.

The Jets had offered 3-years and $24M with either $10M or $12M guaranteed depending on which reports you read. Other than starting QBs working on their rookie contracts, $8M per year as a starting QB in the NFL has become akin to chump change. Fitzpatrick did not want to be painted into that corner for what could be the rest of his career. So, he gets about 50% more this year and then can be a free agent and go through all of this again next off-season depending on how well he plays in 2016.

Truth be told, neither side had much leverage here. No other NFL teams were burning up the phone lines calling to offer Fitzpatrick a long-term deal at any sort of annual number he might like. On the other side, the Jets faced the possibility of heading into the season – coming off a very productive 2015 – with a QB depth chart that read:

Speaking completely about 2016, that depth chart is a losing proposition; the Jets have playoff aspirations in 2016 and if those are the 3 QBs who will divvy up the 16 games on the schedule, those aspirations will turn to desperations. The Jets needed Fitzpatrick and no one else made him any viable offers. Finally, the two sides managed to sit down and make all of this work.

Finally, here is a comment from Greg Cote in the Miami Herald from about a month ago:

“Shaquille O’Neal spent four days in Cuba this week as a U.S. State Department ‘sports envoy.’ There is a phrase for that: ‘Waste of tax dollars.’”

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

Changing the NBA Regular Season

In late April, Jason Whitlock posted an interesting article on his blog J.School.com. I do not always agree with Jason Whitlock but his work is always well-reasoned and well-written; that makes his work interesting and thought-provoking. After Steph Curry’s knee injury, Whitlock wrote that this was the demise of the 82-game NBA regular season. His point was that more and more teams would move to follow the Spurs’ model of playing star players in fewer games rendering the regular season games even thinner gruel than many of them are. I do not know if other teams will react that way; but if I were an NBA coach, I would give my top guys a few days off in the middle of the season.

However, what Whitlock did next was not to lament the soon-to-be-dilapidated state of the NBA regular season. Instead he had a bold idea for how to make it all work. You can – and should – read it in its entirety here but I will summarize it anyhow:

2. Top team in the East and Top Team in the West after 40 games play a single game at a neutral site.

3. Create a mid-season classic tournament among 4 teams and offer $20M to the winning team to split up however the team chooses.

4. Play the remaining 30 game schedule in a 15-week period. Pay “win-bonuses” for those final 30 games to keep stars involved and to keep teams from tanking.

While I do not subscribe to all of the details here, I do think this is a creative way to look at the problem of boring regular season NBA games and to try to minimize the boredom going forward. Since I read that piece about 3 months ago, I have been trying to come up with some ideas of my own related to this subject. Here is what I came up with:

2. Start in mid-October as Jason suggests and have the 58 games over and done with by Feb 10.

3. Start the playoffs proximal to Valentine’s Day and make the playoffs double elimination with five and seven game series between teams to determine who moves on and who is eliminated.

I am sure that my idea is imperfect but it is another way of looking at making the regular season a tad more meaningful and increasing the number of playoff games – the ones that are far more interesting to start with – for TV consumption.

Switching gears here, last year there was a short Internet buzz about a high school kid in California who was playing high school football and was 7-feet tall and weighed 450 pounds. People said he was the biggest football player in the world. The buzz died down as the Internet moved on to become fascinated with pictures of kittens and the dating status of various celebrities. Well that young man’s name was John Krahn and he is back in the news.

Krahn graduated from high school last year and received a couple of “walk-on invitations” from Division I football schools and “some Division II offers”. Obviously, I never saw him play; I would suspect from his size that speed would not be one of his great assets. So, instead of giving up football or taking one of the Division II offers, Krahn has enrolled in Georgia Prep Sports Academy in Decatur, GA where he can work on 2 things simultaneously:

2. He will work with a trainer to get his weight down to about 350 lbs and he will work on his blocking technique(s).

According to reports, he is already down to about 400 lbs and he works out daily with a former NFL defensive end. His routine is to do strength and conditioning work on weekdays and then to take part in a 2-hour “technique training” session every Saturday. If successful, Krahn might land himself a Division I scholarship and still have 4 years of eligibility left instead of going to a school, walking on and using up part of his eligibility getting into football shape and learning the techniques of his craft.

That sounds rather mature and dedicated to me and it does not have a whiff of “entitlement” in it. As I said, I have no idea what this kid’s God-given talents may or may not be. However, if he works at this to the point where he gets a Division I scholarship to play football, I will be rooting for him.

Finally, Dwight Perry had this comment in the Seattle Times recently:

“Jose Altuve, the Astros’ mighty-mite second baseman, is getting his own bobblehead night on Aug. 27.

“Just wondering: Has a guy ever been able to see eye-to-eye with his bobblehead before?”

Question for Dwight Perry … Ever heard of Eddie Gaedel?

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

More Rio Olympics Nonsense …

The Rio Olympics will begin in just over a week. I am sure you read that the Australian team refused to take their place in the Olympic Village a couple of days ago because when they saw their quarters they noticed some wetness on the walls and it turned out to be a “sewage leak”. The mayor of Rio tossed off their protest by saying he would get them a kangaroo as a pet for their stay in the Olympic Village. I do not know about you, but I think the mayor of Rio has fundamentally missed the point here.

If that were some sort of isolated event, you could ignore it and assume it will all be fixed and in working order by the end of next week. However, reports in the Washington Post point to a bigger problem. As of this morning, only 12 of the 31 buildings – they are 17-story structures – in the Olympic Village have passed safety inspections. Think about that for a moment. You would think that the Australians would have been directed to quarters that had passed safety inspections and look what they found.

The Post also cites an official of the Australian Olympic Committee saying that when they performed a stress test of their own by turning on all the faucets and flushing toilets simultaneously, here is what they experienced:

“Water came down walls, there was a strong smell of gas in some apartments and there was shorting in the electrical wiring.”

I guess the only thing to say in that situation is:

Enjoy your stay.

The Australian team is not alone in experiencing problems in the Olympic Village. The team from Belarus refused to move its athletes into the quarters assigned to them due to a “lack of hot water and a failing sewage system”.

Enjoy your stay.

In other Olympics news, the IOC did not take a stand on doping. When the anti-doping agencies recommended that the Russian team be barred from the Games because there was evidence that the doping was “state-suggested” if not “state-sponsored”. The IOC could have taken a stand here and actually seized the moral high ground on this issue – a perch they rarely if ever enjoy. However, taking that position would put them squarely in opposition to the Russian IOC and the Russian state system that clearly greased more than a couple of palms to secure the put on the Sochi Winter Games. Not surprisingly, the IOC chose not to take the high road here and deferred judgment to the international federations that oversee the various sports to determine the eligibility of each Russian athlete.

Compounding this travesty of justice, the one individual who is personally banned from the Olympics is the Russian 800-meter runner who blew the whistle on the whole “state-encouraged” doping system that caused all of this. She is banned; she cannot compete under a non-national flag as can athletes from countries that are war-torn and cannot send athletes to the Games. Her name is Yula Stepanova; she was not likely to medal in these Games; now she will not be able even to show up and try.

I rarely have anything good to say about the IOC. It is tempting to blame them for the failure of Brazil to live up to the promises it made to the IOC to secure these Games. However, I will give them a pass on that; the blame there belongs to the Brazilians. However, given the way this “state-encouraged” doping situation has unfolded and has concluded, it is absolutely fair to ask a simple question:

If Russian athletes who were part of the “state-encouraged” doping system are allowed to participate and the individual who brought it all to light is not allowed to participate, what is the anti-doping program of the IOC all about?

This is the time of year when NFL teams come together to prepare for the upcoming season and when news nuggets emerge from the individual teams:

Browns:

Cowboys: Randy Gregory was already suspended for the first 4 games of the 2016 season for multiple substance-abuse violations. The report now is that he has failed yet another test and may not play at all in 2016.

Falcons: The team released Devin Hester who holds the NFL record for returns for a touchdown. Hester missed much of last season with a foot injury and had off-season surgery; his release indicates to me that his recovery has not been complete. In reading the report, I learned that Hester is 33 years old; if you had asked me how old I thought he was, I probably would have guessed 28 or 29.

Niners: Anthony Davis – the offensive tackle that retired in June 2015 – now says he has sought reinstatement from the league by rescinding his retirement letter. That is good news for the Niners in that they need OL help and Davis was a quality player when he chose to retire to promote his “mental health”. Davis and Niners’ GM. Trent Baalke have had their issues in the past; it will be interesting to see what level of détente can be achieved there.

Finally, here is a comment from late-night comedian Jimmy Fallon:

“Happy Birthday to legendary boxer Sugar Ray Leonard, who turned 60. You can tell he’s getting older by his new name — Splenda Ray Leonard.”

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

Some Of This And Some Of That …

A while back, there were rumors circulating that Chris Berman was going to leave ESPN at the end of his contract at the end of this NFL season. Those rumors were denied and things quieted down quickly. Well, now there are also rumors that Tom Jackson will be leaving ESPN at the end of this NFL season. My only response to all of this is:

Holy Housecleaning, Batman!

The Sunday night ESPN program, NFL Primetime, was a pioneer in its field and it remained a top-shelf program from the time it started sometime in the late 80s until it morphed into The Blitz about 10 years ago. If I recall correctly, Berman, Jackson and the late Pete Axthelm were the hosts when NFL Primetime made its debut. If these rumors turn out to be true, all of them will be gone at the end of the 2015/16 NFL season. I would not want to be the studio host(s) who got the assignment to step in and make that program continue on its high level of acceptance; those are indeed big shoes to fill.

I guess I sort of knew this but had never focused on it directly until I had a recent conversation with a Cleveland native who is a long-term fan of the Browns. We were talking about the Browns inability to find a solid QB ever since returning to the league in 1999 and he said that in 3 different drafts, the Browns had or acquired the #22 pick in the first round and used all 3 of those picks to take bad QBs. I went back and checked and it appears that is the case.

Let me put as polite a face on those picks as possible and say that none of them worked out nearly as well as the Browns might have hoped for. In fact, Joe Btfsplk had better luck than the Browns had with the overall #22 pick and good ol’ Joe did not have enough luck to have any vowels in his name. [Google is your friend…]

Of the three, Brandon Weeden has the most starts as a QB with 25. His teams’ record in those 25 starts is 6-19. Quinn has started 20 games and his teams’ record in those starts is 4-16. If Manziel does not sober up and never plays another NFL game, his record will show 8 starts and a 2-6 record.

As the dust begins to settle on NBA free-agency, there are three teams whose moves bear scrutiny for next year:

2. Can those three players co-exist?

The Atlanta Hawks welcomed back native son, Dwight Howard after Al Horford took his talents to Boston. Dwight Howard has not been a happy camper for a long time now. He wanted out of Orlando; he wanted out of LA after clashing with Kobe; he wanted out of Houston saying that Harden would give him the ball enough. The question here is simple enough; how long will Dwight Howard stay happy with his teammates in Atlanta and how long will the home crowd be welcoming to the return of their native son?

The Miami Heat hoped to sign Kevin Durant; they did not get that done. They expected to resign Dwayne Wade; that did not happen either. Perhaps Chris Bosh can still play in Miami, but given his medical condition, he runs the risk of collapsing on the court at almost any moment. I do not think that the Heat have a lot going for them for the 2016/17 season except this:

They should get a nice high draft pick and they will have a ton of cap room available to them to sign some free agents next summer.

Ryan Fitzpatrick remains unsigned by any NFL team. After posting the best year of his career with the Jets last year, he and the team have not been able to close a deal. Supposedly, the Jets’ offer on the table is for 3 years and $24M with $10M of that guaranteed. That seems a tad on the low side to me not because I think Ryan Fitzpatrick is going to be a late bloomer and start to chase Tom Brady for QB honors in the AFC. Rather I think it a tad on the low side because of what the Jets have at QB other than Ryan Fitzpatrick:

Finally, here is a comment from Dwight Perry in the Seattle Times:

“RB Karlos Williams showed up overweight for the Bills’ offseason workouts, saying he packed on some sympathy pounds due to his wife’s pregnancy.

“But Karlos, to his credit, vows to be in game shape by the season’s first trimester.”

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

Fixing Baseball ?

Sometime last week, MLB Commish, Rob Manfred, went on WFAN radio in NYC and said that he would consider limiting the number of pitching changes that can be made in a game. Notice, he did not say he would implement it by fiat or even make it a central piece in the upcoming CBA negotiations; he said he would consider it. Loads of people went teaspoons as soon as they heard/read that comment. Here is exactly what he said:

“Relief pitchers have really changed the game. The use of relief pitchers — obviously every time you have a pitching change, it goes contrary to our pace-of-game efforts. And the other thing it does — and hats off to them — our relievers now are so good that they actually make the back end of the game — seven, eight and nine — with less action in it. And when you think about keeping people engaged, you’ve got to ask yourself, ‘Is this a good thing for the game?'”

The “issues” he cites are observably true; if you are going to give this idea serious consideration, you have to begin by acknowledging what is true and then decide for yourself if any of the possible “solutions” to these “issues” are worth the trouble. With regard to the “pace-of-the-game” issue, I suggested several months ago a change that would assist in that dimension.

Oh, and to protect the integrity of the game from seeing how often a pitcher would come into a game and suffer an injury that forces his replacement, any relief pitcher in that circumstance would immediately be put on the 15-day DL.

With regard to “lack of action” in the back end of games due to the excellence of relief pitchers these days, I have a problem with trying to “fix” that problem. First of all, there is plenty of action in the final innings of games as pitchers and batters face each other – each with clearly opposite intentions. Secondly, I do not think it is a good idea to punish one class of players because they seem to excel at their craft. Back in the “Steroid Era” when home runs were flying out of ballparks at record rates, I do not recall anyone suggesting that certain hitters use balsa wood bats or that the fences be moved back another 30 feet.

The other news events that put Rob Manfred in the spotlight are the nascent negotiations with the MLBPA on a new CBA. The players have expressed an interest in having a few more off-days built into the schedule particularly around games involving major time zone changes. Those are not unreasonable requests but the most obvious way to provide such a thing is to cut the season back to 154 games as it was for many years until the 1960s. The problem with that is that cutting the season cuts the number of TV events meaning revenue would be cut. Eight games represent 5% of the MLB season; I suspect that the players would not be willing to take all of their contracts and shave 5% off the gross just to get a few days off.

However, there is another way to look at this. Suppose each team built 5 home double headers into their schedule on designated dates. To minimize the revenue hit for teams – not eliminate it but minimize it – teams could charge 50% more than usual for tix to those doubleheaders. And with people in the park that much longer, think of the increase in concession sales… Each team would play 5 home doubleheaders and 5 away double headers; it will balance the schedule and create 10 “off days” for the players. It may not be a perfect solution, but it should be considered…

Green Bay, Wisconsin is a small market; there really is not any way to pretend otherwise. Nonetheless, the folks there – and throughout Wisconsin – do love their Packers and come out to support them. Last year, 67,000 fans showed up at Lambeau Field on a summer day to watch a Packers’ practice. This year, the team sold out the stadium at $10 per ticket – 76,000 tix – for a practice. Basically, this event is a day in training camp with 76,000 onlookers.

Now, if you are a Packers’ fan and you did not get a couple of those tickets, you need not worry. The practice will be televised all over Wisconsin and to parts of the Upper Peninsula in Michigan.

Oh, did I mention, this is just a practice – the kind where the QBs are wearing bright red jerseys. I do not want you to be disappointed should you tune in…

One other note about Lambeau Field comes from the Milwaukee Business Journal. Patrick Cudahy brand bacon is the official bacon of Lambeau Field – and the Green Bay Packers too. One of the important things to come of this arrangement is that Patrick Cudahy brand bacon will provide a “bacon-themed concession stand” in Lambeau Field. The full menu for this bacon-themed concession stand is not fixed yet, but two items were described:

A second item has not been named yet but it will be deep-fried bacon-crusted cheese curds. That sounds very good – and it also sounds like an embolism waiting to happen.

Finally, Greg Cote of the Miami Herald channeled Johnny Carson and Carnac the Magnificent with this item over the weekend:

Answer: A new sport called “footvolley” — soccer meets beach volleyball; no hands allowed — will debut as a demonstration sport at Summer Olympics.

Question: What do you mean there are too many ridiculous, made-up sports?

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

College Football In July …

Earlier this week, I wrote about college basketball in July; today I want to lead off with news about college football. Anyone who has read these rants for any period of time knows that one of the things I do not like about college football is the “cupcake scheduling” that many of the power schools set up. I do not care how rabid a fan of Humongous State anyone might be; it cannot be “exciting” or even “entertaining” to watch a game that is 52-0 at half time and 69-7 at the end of 3 quarters. The fewer of those sorts of games that there are on the college football landscape the better.

A few of the big schools are starting to move in that direction and I think that is a good idea. Auburn and Penn State have agreed to a home-and-home pair of games for the 2021 and 2022 seasons. Kudos to both of the athletic directors at Auburn and Penn State for making that happen. This meeting between solid teams in two major conferences should be the model for out-of-conference scheduling for all the schools in the major conferences. I am certain that someone somewhere will complain about this saying that this will deprive two smaller schools the opportunity to go and “get a payday” from Penn State and/or Auburn so that the smaller school can lose a game by 50+ points. I can imagine that some folks will suggest that this is a way for the “big guys” to make sure that the “little guys” are squeezed to a point where they will not rise up to challenge any of the “big guys”. To that argument, let me use one of H.L. Mencken’s favorite words:

Buncombe!

There are also reports that Notre Dame and Michigan will renew their rivalry with two games scheduled on a home-and-home basis for 2018 and 2019. This too is a positive step for college football and those two athletic directors should be applauded for making that happen.

There are also reports that the Big 12 is looking to expand by 2 and perhaps by 4 teams. The Big 12 coaches seem to be onboard with the idea of expansion and Bill Snyder at K-State said that he hoped that the conference would not “get spread out all over the country” and that he hoped the footprint of the expanded Big 12 would be similar to the footprint of the old Big 8 conference. That is probably a good idea. Obviously, speculation on which teams would be under consideration for an invitation to the Big 12 began as soon as the announcement of the intent hit the streets. Here are the usual suspects – with my off-the-cuff commentary on what I think about each one:

Boise State:

BYU: The second most logical choice on the list

Cincy: Interesting market

Colorado St: Good location but program would need a major upgrade

Houston: The most logical choice on the list

Memphis: Meh

Tulane: Kansas would no longer be the conference cupcake

UCF: Remote location and no ties to any existing schools

UConn: Seriously…?

USF: See comment for UCF above.

According to a report in the Birmingham Business Journal, anyone attending a home football game at Alabama this year will need to get some new tote bags. Starting this year, anyone planning to enter Bryant-Denny Stadium will have to be carrying their stuff in a clear plastic bag with the size limited to 12” X12” X 6”. As usual, when a team makes an announcement about a change of this type, the PR folks get to weigh in. Here is part of what Alabama said about this new policy:

“This is about both safety and improving the overall fan experience…”

So, somehow my overall fan experience is enhanced based on the size of tote bags brought into the stadium and based on the transparency of the walls of that tote bag. This is a security and safety issue primarily and if the school wants to say that a secure environment in the stadium adds to the fan experience, that would be fine. This is also likely a way to make it more difficult for folks to “smuggle” contraband food and drink into the stadium thereby increasing the take at the concession stands; somehow, I doubt that sentiment would find its way into a roll-out announcement.

I have never been in Las Vegas while the Olympics were ongoing so I did not realize that the sportsbooks there did not take action on the Olympics. That must have been the case because reports say that for the Rio Games in 2016, there will be betting action on the Olympics for the first time. Proposition bets are already up; here are samples:

Total gold medals won by USA:

I suspect that Baron Pierre de Coubertin did not have this in mind when he “resurrected” the Olympics at the end of the 19th century…

Finally, here is a comment about Nebraska football from Brad Dickson in the Omaha World-Herald:

“June is being called an ‘important month’ for Husker football. In a nutshell, this has been the problem with Nebraska football recently. Too many important Junes, not enough important Novembers.”

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

A Step Forward For ESPN…?

With the exodus of Skip Bayless from ESPN’s program, First Take, the network needed someone to “debate” Stephen A. Smith on the program. Even though the “debates” are staged – it cannot be that Stephen A. and his partner disagree on EVERY situation – there need to be two people there to present two points of view. While I was away, ESPN resolved that problem by assigning Max Kellerman to the role of Stephen A. Smith’s “adversary”. I like Max Kellerman certainly more than I like Skip Bayless who normally could get me to change the channel in about 90 seconds of his monologues. Kellerman is bright and articulate; I think he will make First Take easier to take.

[Aside: The woman who “hosts/sets up” the “debates” on First Take is Molly Qerim. The fact that she has been able for all of the time she has been in that role to sit there and not grab a baseball bat and do damage to either or both of the “debaters” speaks to her equanimity.]

The WNBA season began in mid-May and the final regular season game will be on September 18. In terms of the calendar, their season is half-over. Already, two teams in the Western Conference – the LA Sparks and the Minnesota Lynx – have clinched playoff berths. On a calendar basis that is equivalent to a team in MLB clinching a playoff spot right around now. League advocates might point to these two teams as examples of excellence in the WNBA; league detractors might say that the talent imbalance in the league is a joke. Take your pick – if you care enough to do so.

The LA Sparks’ record after 21 games was 20-1; they have hit a rough patch and have lost their last two games so they sit atop the West with a 20-3 record. During last year’s NBA season the Golden State Warriors started the year with a 24-0 record. By the time the Warriors were 15-0, they were a big enough story that they got lots of attention in the midst of the NFL season. The Sparks started their season similarly; so I ask you to stay away from Google and do the following:

OK, name any 3 players on the Sparks’ roster.

Name the Sparks’ coach.

Last December when the Warriors were on their season-opening win streak, almost anyone could have aced that quiz. The WNBA has been around for 20 seasons now and it simply has gained no traction in the US sports assembly. In fact, for the regular season in 2015, the WNBA had its lowest average attendance in league history. In 2015, average attendance for a WNBA game was 7,318. Back in 2009, average attendance was just over 10,000 per game so the league has seen attendance drop about 27% in the last 6 years. Somehow, I do not think that the hugely unbalanced results to date this year are going to help those attendance numbers and reverse the downward trend.

A couple of days ago, I mentioned that UFC fighter and WWE ‘rassler, Brock Lesnar, had failed a drug test proximal to his last UFC fight. A report yesterday said that his “B Sample” also came back positive so it would appear that there is not a “laboratory error” there. Dwight Perry of the Seattle Times viewed these circumstances through his customarily unique lens:

“USADA says rassler and MMA fighter Brock Lesnar might have violated the UFC’s anti-doping policy.

“Translation: They found a foreign object in his urine sample.”

In the 2013 NBA Draft, the Cleveland Cavaliers took Anthony Bennett (UNLV) with the first overall pick. He lasted one year in Cleveland, went to Minnesota for a year and then on to Toronto for his third season. He was a free agent again this summer and the team he signed with was the Brooklyn Nets. That signing screams “Desperation” on both sides of the transaction.

Here are Bennett’s stats over the past 3 seasons:

Any time a team has the overall #1 pick in a draft, it runs the risk of taking a player who does not live up to the potential ascribed to him. On rare occasions, the overall #1 pick contributes to the team the way a cadaver might. I am not going to spend the time and effort to look over the history of NBA drafts to look at all of the overall #1 picks but two really bad ones come quickly to mind:

At age 23, Anthony Bennett still has a chance to elevate himself off this ignominious list. However, the Brooklyn Nets may be his last serious chance to become a regular in a substitution rotation that will get him the time on the floor to do something with his game.

Finally, here is an item from Bob Molinaro in the Hampton Roads Virginian-Pilot that points out something I did not know – and would not have guessed:

“Numbers Crunching: Much was made this week over World Series results favoring teams with home field advantage – won again at the All-Star Game by the American League. But in the age of wildcards, isn’t the more dramatic trend that the team with the best regular-season record has won the Series only five times in the past 30 years?”

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