Category: Daily Rants

A few days ago, I noted that the LA Rams had won two games this year without scoring a TD in either game.  I suggested that this sort of thing may have happened for frequently “in the 30s and 40s” but that I could not recall it happening recently.  Even though I should have, I did not expect an e-mail response from the reader in Houston who is the repository for sports history and stats.  Here is what he provided;

“In the 1920’s, there were 77 games in which a team won without scoring a TD. There were also a load of 0-0 and 3-3 ties and some 6-6 games that no TD was scored during that period. Please note that in the 20s, the average number of games per year was less than 80.

“In the 1930’s, there were 37 such games won without scoring a TD and there were still ties, but not as many as the previous decades. Please note that in the 30s, the average number of games per year was less than 55.

“In the 1940’s, there were only 4 such games and that includes both the NFL and the four years of the AAFC.

“More recently, there were no NFL games from 2013 to 2015 in which the winning team scored fewer than 10 points, but there have been two this season: the two mentioned above. LA is the first team since the 1997 Bills to win two games in one season in which it scored fewer than 10 points. Buffalo did that in Marv Levy’s final season as its head coach, with victories against Indy and Miami, each by a 9-6 score on all field goals.”

A tip of the hat in the compass direction aimed at Houston, TX for that information…

There was a minor tempest in a teacup a few weeks ago when Dallas Mavericks’ owner, Mark Cuban, pulled the press credentials from two ESPN reporters because ESPN made a decision he did not like.  Evidently, ESPN decided that one of the two reporters would not cover the Mavs exclusively this year but would also cover the NBA “in general”.  Cuban took exception and refused to give the reporters press credentials which kept them away from the team and the locker rooms.

Since Cuban owns the team, he has every right to hand out press credentials however he sees fit.  Some people immediately screamed that this was a “First Amendment issue” which it most certainly is not.  Later as it became advantageous for both Cuban and ESPN to modify their positions without appearing to give in to the other side, the basis for Cuban’s actions somehow became associated with “robot reporting” of sports stories as a new trend in that field.  Both sides here could agree that “robo-reporting” was “bad”; ESPN could wave the banner of “quality in journalism” while Cuban could stake out a position as a “defender of jobs for journalists”.  In any event, everyone kissed and made up…

However, when I look at the NBA standings this morning, I note that the Dallas Mavericks’ record is 3-13 and that record is the worst in the NBA at the moment.  Indeed, the Mavs are trailing both the Sixers and the Nets in the standings – albeit not by much – as of this morning.  Perhaps, the Mavericks would be treated more kindly by a “robo-reporter” than a “quality journalist” given the product on the floor.  Just a thought…

Last week, the NCAA announced that Notre Dame would have to vacate its football victories from 2012 and 2013 because a student-trainer did academic work for some of the players on those teams which is a violation of NCAA rules and thereby made those players ineligible.  Ergo …

That sounds pretty cut and dried but when you look just a bit closer, you begin to see frayed edges on the fabric of this decision.  Consider:

1. Notre Dame discovered this on its own and suspended multiple players for academic violations on its own. The NCAA super-sleuths and the NCAA Committee on Infractions had no idea this was going on until Notre Dame informed them of the problem.
2. The “punishment” is feckless to the Nth degree. In 2012, Notre Dame played Alabama in the BCS Championship Game.  Vacating all the wins prior to that game does not take them out of that game and put a different team in there to play Alabama.  Is anyone to believe that the 12 teams that lost to Notre Dame prior to the BCS Championship game actually won those games?
3. More on the feckless punishment … From this point forward, Notre Dame will suffer exactly nothing for something that the Committee on Infractions thought was sufficiently heinous that it had to issue a punishment 4 years after the fact.  There is no loss of scholarships – nor should there be; there is no ban from post-season play – nor should there be.  The football program will proceed apace from here on save for the silliness of “vacated wins” in the past.
4. Hold on, here comes “the hammer” from the NCAA mavens … In addition to vacating those wins, Notre Dame must pay a fine of $5K and the school had to take the public reprimand from the NCAA.  To which I say:

Whoop-di-damned-doo!!

Finally, in the aftermath of Thanksgiving week, here is a comment from Brad Dickson of the Omaha World-Herald regarding something we may not have realized we should be thankful for:

“Thanksgiving is a day to give thanks that none of the three NFL games featured the Cleveland Browns.”

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

 

For about the last 6 or 8 weeks, one of the “go-to topics” for sports radio and/or studio analyst discussion on TV was this:

• Should Dak Prescott keep the Cowboys’ QB job once Tony Romo is healthy?

The two sides of that “debate” never really varied from some tried and true lines of “reasoning”:

1. A player should not lose his job due to an injury.
2. A winner on the field should stay on the field – the Tom Brady/Drew Bledsoe outcome.

All that was at least marginally interesting for the first half-dozen times I had to listen to it but it did start to wear thin quickly and then it became rather annoying for the next 500 times I heard it.  Now that the “fundamental question” has been resolved by the Cowboys, I believe there is a very real “existential” question that should be considered – and was not considered in any of the “debates” I heard previously:

• Given that the Cowboys will owe Tony Romo $14M as a base salary in 2017 and that his salary cap hit will be approximately $24-25M, can the Cowboys afford to pay that kind of money for a backup QB?

At first blush, the answer seems obvious; how can any team spend about 15% of its salary cap money on a backup player at any position?  Well, the Cowboys have enough young players that they were able to fit everyone in under this year’s cap with Tony Romo sucking down a similar percentage and what he has given the team so far is exactly what a backup QB would be expected to give to the team.  Rather than speculating on whether or how the capologists in Dallas will juggle the numbers, I prefer to ask a different question because it deals with football and not with bookkeeping:

 

If – I said IF – the Cowboys were to decide to release Tony Romo and suffer the consequences of the “dead money” that his release would engender, whither Tony Romo?

 

Obviously, he could choose to retire from the NFL.  I am not authoritative when it comes to unraveling the intricacies of NFL contracts and bonuses and cap hits and the like but my calculations say that Tony Romo will have earned somewhere in the neighborhood of $115M over the course of his career with the Cowboys at the end of the 2016 season.  Absent a terminal case of financial blockheadedness, that ought to mean that Tony Romo and his family should be financially secure for life; he should not be worrying a lot about how much his Social Security check will be about 30 years hence.

But suppose he wants to continue to play QB in the NFL and he is a free agent who can go wherever he wants.  I am now going to engage in mind-reading and as I have certified many times in the past, I have exactly no skills in that area.  In actuality, this is nothing more than a pro football version of omphaloskepsis.  I would not imagine that Tony Romo at age 36 would be interested in going to a team on the skids right now to be part of a 5-year program to rebuild a franchise.  Translation:  I do not see him in a Cleveland Browns’ uniform or a SF Niners’ uniform.  I also think you can strike a line through any team that has either a Pro Bowl QB as a starter now or a team that has committed to a young QB already.  Translation: I do not see him in a Detroit Lions’ uniform or an Atlanta Falcons’ uniform AND I do not see him in a Philadelphia Eagles’ uniform or an Oakland Raiders’ uniform.

I can imagine him playing for a team where as a starter he might represent an upgrade at QB for a team that has lots of strengths in areas of the game.  Who might those teams be?

 

Arizona Cardinals – I think Carson Palmer is going downhill rapidly.

Denver Broncos – Siemian is not the long-term answer.  Paxton Lynch is a question mark.

Houston Texans – might they have a giant case of buyer’s remorse already?

KC Chiefs – the longest shot of the teams on the board here

LA Rams – good defense, good running back, mediocre quarterbacks on the roster.

Minnesota Vikings – Bradford is signed only thru 2017

NY Jets – do not think I need explain any further here.

 

My point here is that if the Cowboys and Tony Romo decide to “go in different directions” come next Spring and if the Cowboys wish Tony Romo the “best of luck in his future endeavors”, there is about 20% of the NFL out there where he might fit in as a starting QB who could have a significantly positive impact on team fortunes.

Tony Romo lost his starting job in Dallas.  What might be next if he loses his clipboard holding job in Dallas?

Finally, here is a word from Dwight Perry of the Seattle Times:

“English golfer Ian Poulter, in fit of pique, took a club and whacked his bag a few times — shattering not only his cellphone, but his caddie’s, too.

“That was certainly uncalled for.”

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

In last week’s NCAA Mythical Picks, I said that if Texas lost to Kansas, I would not be surprised if Charlie Strong was fired on the spot and had to rent a car to make his way home to Texas.  Well, Texas indeed lost to Kansas in one of the more embarrassing performances of the 2016 season – – but Charlie Strong was not banned from the team transportation home.  However, if you believe the reports showing up via many of the very reputable sports media, Charlie Strong is not long for the job in Texas.

ESPN.com says that prominent boosters (note the use of the plural noun there) are putting “extreme pressure” on the administrators in charge of UT-Austin to fire Charlie Strong.  Make no mistake, Texas was one of the college football bluebloods from bygone days. However it could only hold onto the fantasy that it is still one of the elite college football programs in the US if it avoided losing to a team like Kansas who brought the following recent résumé to last Saturday’s game:

 

When Kansas beat Division 1-AA Rhode Island early this year at home, the student body stormed the field.  Rest assured, no college football program that pretends to be “upper echelon” would have students who thought that was a good idea.

It had been two full years since Kansas had beaten a Division 1-A opponent.  For most of the years of its existence, the Texas football program feasted on opponents like that.

Texas did not avoid that odious loss…

 

Also, according to the ESPN report, those same “prominent boosters” want Texas to hire Houston coach, Tom Herman and have him move about 150 miles to the northwest to put Texas back in the football spotlight that boosters remember from happier times in the past.  Look, there is no doubt that Tom Herman has done a wonderful job at Houston turning an ordinary team in the American Athletic Conference into a team that has earned national attention.  I am perfectly willing to stipulate that Tom Herman is a superb college football coach.  I also wish to put on the record that Charlie Strong did an outstanding job at Louisville before the Texas boosters who want him fired now pressured the school to go out and hire Charlie Strong.

The problem with the pressure that the boosters are putatively applying to the Texas administration is that the pressure is born of unrealistic expectations.  Many of the boosters recall the times when Darrell Royal ran the wishbone offense better than anyone could stop the wishbone offense and dominated college football year after year.  Those days are gone and many of the boosters who view those days as some sort of a birthright need to stop bleeding orange and recognize that Texas is no longer the dominant football force that it once was.  Big time boosters of collegiate athletic programs are not very good at looking at the world through “reality spectacles” and much prefer to don the “rose colored glasses”

Imagine if I were to make these two assumptions:

On top of those two assumptions fraught with optimism for a rapid resurrection of the Texas football fortunes, the fact remains that at Texas the head coach has to compete with the likes of Oklahoma and Oklahoma St. and TCU and Baylor and Kansas St. every year and those programs are better programs than what coaches in the American Athletic Conference  face annually:

1. Cincy
2. Carolina
3. Memphis
4. Navy
5. SMU
6. Temple
7. Tulane
8. Tulsa
9. UCF
10. UConn
11. USF

Texas can become bowl-eligible if they win this week against TCU.  If Texas is hell-bent to fire him and hire Tom Herman who will be a hot property in the coaching carousel this winter, it would not surprise me to see someone else coach the Longhorns in whatever bowl game they might participate.  I fully anticipate that the separation of Charlie Strong from the Texas football program will be a public and messy affair…

In the NFL, the Cowboys lost in Week 1 and the Niners won in Week  Since those balmy days of September, these two teams have headed in opposite directions.  This morning the Cowboys are 9-1 riding a 9-game win streak.  This morning the Niners are 1-9 bearing up under the strain of a 9-game losing streak.  However, the Niners’ plight is even worse than that:

• The Niners’ loss to the Pats this weekend was the 7^th time this year that they lost by double digits.  They are not losing “squeakers”; they are on the short end of significant losses.
• In 8 of their 9 straight losses, the Niners’ defense has allowed an opposing running back to go north of 100 yards in the game.  Just to be clear, that is not good…
• Fan support is rapidly eroding.  I only saw the game on replay but by the middle of the third quarter, if you added the number of people wearing Pats’ gear to the number of empty seats, I think you would have had at least 60% of the stadium capacity – and maybe 70%.

Finally, here is a comment from Brad Dickson of the Omaha World-Herald reacting to LeBron James’ signing of a 3-year contract extension with the Cavaliers worth $100M:

“That will take him through the next six Cavaliers head coaches.”

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

At the beginning of the football season when Colin Kaepernick began his national anthem protest, I said that I defended his right to protest even though I would have chosen some other way to do so.  Even when other players in various sports chose to join him in those protests, I said that there needed to be some products of these protests over and above the act of taking a knee during the national anthem; symbolism and “awareness” are fine but they do not effect change by themselves.

Well, yesterday there was a report at espn.com saying that things have moved to the next level.  It seems that Lions’ WR, Anquan Boldin, has worked quietly behind the scenes to arrange for 5 NFL players (including Boldin of course) to go to Washington DC for meetings with members of Congress – possibly to include Speaker Paul Ryan – and perhaps members of the White House Staff.  All of this happened yesterday while news focus was elsewhere but ESPN reported that the topics of discussion were police/community relations and the level of mistrust that exists between the African-American community and the police in those communities.

I want to say congratulations to Anquan Boldin and to the folks mentioned in that report who helped arrange these meetings/discussions.  This is a logical next step in the protest landscape for this issue; there is more potential for constructive action to come from that sort of activity than there is for taking knee during the anthem.  Lawmakers at the national level are not going to resolve these issues; these are far more local problems than national ones.  Nevertheless, these national lawmakers have the stature and the ties to various local authorities and to various local community leaders to arrange for focused actions to ease tensions and anxieties on both sides.  What Anquan Boldin and these other 4 players accomplished was to take the protest and the issues beneath the protest from the sidelines of a football game and to put the issues before a set of folks who might – if they choose to act on the issues – begin to make things better.

Let me suggest here – and I admit this is easy for a commentator to do so long as the commentator does not have to do the dirty work – that another important step in the potential resolution of these issues will be to have people with community recognition and leadership to take these issues to the police departments in cities where there are significant tensions.  Ultimately, that is the venue for resolution of these tensions and anxieties but it is the existence of those tensions and anxieties that demands a diplomat/mediator to act to bring the parties together and to get a process of resolution started.  What happened yesterday is an important step even though it is not the final step.  Perhaps, yesterday was the time when people moved from “raising awareness” to “getting people with the power to do something to do something”.

Recently, there was a report in the Triangle Business Journal that said that the Hula Bowl will be relocating to Raleigh, NC starting in 2018.  I don’t know about you, but when I think of Raleigh, it takes me a while to fire enough synapses to get the image of “hula” in my brain.  Nevertheless…

The Hula Bowl is one of those college All-Star games that used to populate the calendar in December and January in the days when there were not about 2 dozen abjectly meaningless bowl games on the schedule.  The Hula Bowl has been dormant since 2008; it was nominally a casualty of the “Great Recession”; in actuality, the game had seen declining interest and attendance for several years prior to 2008.  To be sure, the financial woes in that year kicked the snowball over the cliff, but that snowball had been on the perch for a while by then.

The report linked above paints the picture of a rosy future for the Hula Bowl in Raleigh.  Time will tell if there is room enough for yet one more concocted college football game in the sports landscape.  Let me just say that I will not be considering investing my IRA funds in this venture…

I made a note that it was on 7 November 2015 when CBSSports.com published its first column on “Bracketology” for the 2015/16 college basketball season.  Prior to the playing of even a minute of actual intercollegiate basketball for the season, this sort of exposition represents a projection of how the men’s basketball tournament brackets will set up in the second week of March 2017.  Were the Bard of Baltimore – H. L. Mencken – still alive today, I am sure he would label that sort of speculation as:

“Buncombe !!”

I am a staunch supporter of the First Amendment; nevertheless, I would support any law or any action that would ban that sort of nonsense from the Internet or the airwaves prior to March 1 of the college basketball season.  [Aside:  I would similarly support a law or action that would ban Mock Drafts from the Internet or the airwaves until 2 weeks before the NFL Draft is scheduled.]  Bracketology articles – and Mock Drafts too – are space fillers and nothing more.  If I were to venture out into the orbit of political commentary and I were to produce for you my list of the candidates in the Presidential primaries for the election in 2028, you would be in a position to – quite properly – tell me to remove my head from my ass and to do something productive with my time and effort.  Each time you see an article headlined as Bracketology, just substitute “Presidential primaries 12 years hence” and then decide how eager you are to read on.

Finally, after the Eagles cut WR. Josh Huff after Huff’s arrest on a variety of charges, Scott Ostler had some advice for Huff in the SF Chronicle:

“The Eagles cut wide receiver Josh Huff after he was stopped by New Jersey police, who say Huff was speeding, drunk, carrying marijuana, driving with illegally tinted windows and packing a handgun with no permit, loaded with illegal hollow-point bullets.

“But his tires were properly inflated.

“Huff faces a marketing challenge. He says, ‘I have to do what’s best to rebrand my image.’ Like, work on being a model prisoner?”

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

Reports yesterday said that Butch Davis will take over as head football coach at Florida International.  Previously, Davis had been the head coach at Miami for 6 years in the 90s where he was successful to the tune of a 51-20 overall record.  After that success, he took the job coaching the Cleveland Browns for 4 years and – let me just be polite here – he did not replicate the same level of success in Cleveland that he did in Miami. He did get the Browns in the playoffs one year with a 9-7 record, but overall his teams went 24-35.

After sitting out a couple of seasons, Davis became the head coach at UNC in 2007.  At the time of his arrival, the UNC program was in a bad way; the team had a winning record only once in the previous six seasons.  Davis turned that around; in his second season in Chapel Hill, UNC went to a bowl game.  Then came NCAA investigations.

In 2010, the NCAA began investigating the possibility that some UNC players had had improper contact with a sports agent in Miami and soon after that began, UNC started an internal investigation about some possible “academic fraud” issues involving one of the tutors in the team’s academic support mechanism.  Rather quickly, several players were suspended and a couple were permanently removed from the football program and one assistant coach resigned amid allegations that he was involved with things like improper benefits and contact with agents.  For a moment, it seemed as if the program had taken a hit but had righted itself and was ready to move on.

Channeling Lee Corso here for a moment:

“Not so fast, my friend …”

The NCAA conducted an investigation of its own and found that there were some improprieties but that the school had found them out on its own and had taken sufficient disciplinary action and sufficient action to avoid such problems in the future.  Just when things began to look as if everything was hunky-dory, the news broke about the phony courses and the guaranteed high grades in courses offered by the African American Studies Department.  The head of the department was implicated and had to step down from his position and the academic scandal spread like a pandemic.  The school actually hired a former governor of North Carolina to head up an investigation into that stink and what he found was not pretty.

All of this put Butch Davis on a hot seat and he was fired in 2011.  The entirety of the matter is still not resolved; the NCAA and UNC are at odds over several matters that came to light in the various investigations here.  Presumably, that will all sort itself out some day.

Getting back to yesterday’s reports, Florida International is several steps lower on the NCAA football ladder than either Miami or UNC.  FIU football history goes all the way back to 2002 when it was a Divison 1-AA program; it only became a Division 1-A program in 2005.  The school had early success going to bowl games in 2010 and 2011 but the team has regressed since then.  The team has not had a .500 season since 2011.

Coaching success in college begins with recruiting.  Butch Davis has shown that he can recruit good players – and coach them up competently – in the past.  The difference between his previous gigs and this one at FIU is stature.  Miami had a history as a football powerhouse in the 90’s; UNC is an easily recognized athletic program within the NCAA hierarchy; FIU is a johnny-come-lately football program that participates in C-USA which is a backwater of Division 1-A football.  I follow college football “overall” but I promise you that I could not name the teams that make up C-USA. All I do know off the top of my head is that this conference provides candidates for my fantastical SHOE Tournament every year; the presence of those teams on that list from year to year has taught me that Rice and UTEP and North Texas and – yes – FIU are members of C-USA.

This is an interesting hiring decision for the school.  Davis is 65 years old; so, actuarily, he is not someone that you think of when you are looking at a ten-year growth program that will lead FIU out of C-USA and into an expanded ACC or something like that.  At the same time, it is hard to argue that Davis’ record of success brings a lot of focus to the football program there.  Truth be told, I cannot name another head coach in C-USA at the schools I know are in that conference – and I doubt that if I went to the C-USA website to see all the other teams in the conference that I would be able to name more than one other head football coach.

I think this will be an interesting situation to watch…

The Canadian Football League is in the middle of its playoff structure.  This is a 9-team league where 6 of the teams make the playoffs; because it has an odd number of teams divided into an Eastern and Western Division, one of the Divisions is larger than the other.  In order to keep the season “competitive” and interesting as long as possible, the playoff structure for the league allows for a “crossover”.

If, for example the team that finished 4^th in the 5-team West Division has a better record than the 3^rd place team in the 4-team East Division, then that 4^th place West team crosses over and participates in the tournament as if it were the 3rd place team in the East.  That happened this year due to a fundamental imbalance between the East Division and the West Division.

In the West, four teams finished above .500 for the season; the 4^th place Edmonton Eskimos were 10-8-0.  In the East, things were not nearly so pretty; the East Division Champions were the Ottawa Redblacks who posted a season record of 8-9-1.  The fact that the East Division was won by a team with a sub-.500 record made it rather obvious that Edmonton would be the “crossover team” for the Grey Cup Playoffs this year.

This weekend will be the semi-finals for those playoffs.  Edmonton survived its first-round game and will play Ottawa this Sunday; in the West Division bracket, the BC Lions will visit the Calgary Stampeders.  The winners of those two games will play for the Grey Cup the Sunday after Thanksgiving.  Oddsmakers in Las Vegas favor Edmonton by 2.5 points and Calgary by 7.5 points in these games.

Finally, Brad Dickson of the Omaha World-Herald captured the essence of fans’ frustrations with game delays in this comment:

“The Cubs needed 108 years, seven games, a rain delay and extra innings to win a World Series. This whole thing felt like a replay review in football.”

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

 

I got an email over the weekend with a great offer.  If I wanted to buy “genuine” NBA gear at 50% off – or more – all I had to do was to click on a link and go to some website that I will not reproduce here for reasons that will become obvious in a moment.  One of the jerseys pictured in the email was #24 from the LA Lakers.  The email sender identified it as the jersey of “Colby Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakes”.  At that point, I figured there were two explanations:

I chose #2 and deleted the email.  When you get one in your inbox, I suggest you do the same…

In addition to the country electing a President last week, the good folks of San Diego spoke clearly with regard to public financing for a new stadium for the Chargers.  I do not pretend to understand what provision of law in either California or San Diego – or both – required a ballot initiative prior to the city fathers striking a deal with the team owner.  Nevertheless, I think that is a great provision of law and that other jurisdictions would do well to replicate it in other jurisdictions.  The deal was supposedly going to be financed by a rise in the hotel tax allowing proponents to say that out-of-towners would be paying for the stadium.  The people did not buy that.

The new stadium financing proposal only got 43% of the vote.  In electoral politics, a vote of 52% – 48% is considered a “landslide win”; I do not know if there is a word that makes “landslide win” seem like a trivial matter; if there is such a word, I think it might apply to the stadium funding initiative in San Diego.

So, where does this leave the Chargers and the NFL?  Here are some possible pathways to the future:

1. Stasis. The Chargers stay in San Diego and continue to play in Qualcomm Stadium even though ownership – and others – say it is outdated and sub-standard.  [Full disclosure:  I have never been to that stadium to see a game.  I have driven by it and seen it from the road.  That is the full extent of my personal expertise here.]  In such a circumstance, the Chargers would continue to make money year after year after year – albeit not as much as they might make in a new playpen.  For an NFL team actually to lose money these days, it would have to be operated by a lobotomized garden slug.
2. The Chargers have an option – I believe it expires next February – to move to LA and be a “junior partner” in the new stadium complex that Stan Kroenke and others are building there. I have to imagine that Kroenke would prefer not to have such a “partner” and will drive a hard bargain in whatever partnership agreement would be forthcoming.  However, as I understand it, his approval to move the Rams to LA last year by the NFL had that contingency in the approval.  I think the Chargers would be destined to exist as “junior partners” in this arrangement for eternity – – with particular emphasis on the word “junior”.
3. The Chargers might cast a loving glance in the direction of Las Vegas NV where the State money for a new stadium ($700M) has already been approved by the legislature and signed by the governor. [Aside:  Interestingly, Nevada will pay for the stadium bonds with an increased hotel tax levied in the city/county of Las Vegas.  No referendum was required.]  A team moving to Las Vegas will have to deal with Sheldon Adelson who is also putting up a reported $650M for the project; perhaps, the Chargers can get a better deal from Messr. Adelson than they can get from Messr. Kroenke?
4. Recall that the Chargers and the Raiders had a “partnership proposal” in front of the NFL owners last year where they would build a stadium in Carson, CA and both teams would move there. Is there another deal to be made between those two clubs?  I doubt that the NFL would approve of 2 teams moving to Las Vegas…
5. The NFL continues to say that they want a team in London…

I do not do a lot of commentary here on NHL happenings for the simple reason that I do not follow the NHL nearly as closely as I follow other sports – particularly in the regular season.  A friend who tracks the NHL much more closely told me to go and look at the following data and to think about an explanation.

• The Montreal Canadiens have played 16 games so far this year and have won 13 of them.
• At one point, they had an 8-game win streak going for them as they went to Columbus, OH to play the Columbus Blue Jackets.  As of this morning the Blue Jackets have won 7 of their 13 outings.
• In that game in Columbus, the Canadiens lost by a score of 10-0.  In their 16 games so far this season, the Canadiens have only allowed 34 goals.  Other than this debacle of a game, the team gives up an average of 1.6 goals per game; in that game, they gave up 10 goals.

I have thought about this; I have no explanation…

Finally, Brad Dickson of the Omaha World-Herald demonstrated great insight with this comment on college football:

“In Thailand, a tortoise raced a hare. This is the Thai version of Michigan playing Rutgers in college football.”

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

At the conclusion of the 2002 season, the Oakland Raiders lost the Super Bowl to the Tampa Bay Bucs.  For the next 13 seasons – through 2015 – the Raiders have enjoyed little success.

• There have been no winning seasons since 2002.
• Only twice (2010 and 2011) did they have a .500 record.
• In 10 of those 13 seasons, they have had double-digit losses.

The 2016 Raiders are 7-2 and they lead the AFC West Division by half a game over the Chiefs and by a full game over the Broncos.  We are only in early November and the Raiders are guaranteed to have a winning record on the road for the season; they are currently undefeated on the road with a 5-0 record.  And so, the first conclusion one might draw is that things are looking up for the fans in Oakland – particularly the ones who inhabit the Black Hole on Sundays.

Maybe so – and maybe not…

If you are a Raiders’ fan with nothing but nostalgic ties to the city of Oakland, you are thrilled with the on-field results to date.  If, however, you are a Raiders’ fan who lives in Oakland or who has some fundamental feelings about the OAKLAND Raiders, you may be feeling apprehensive about the team leaving town.  A move to Las Vegas has been going through the traditional kabuki theater that precedes such franchise moves:

• Protracted negotiations with Oakland indicate no new stadium there.
• A plan to move to LA thwarted by other NFL owners.
• Negotiations with the city-fathers of Las Vegas.
• State money approved by the Nevada legislature and signed by the Governor.

And then, recently, the caravan leading the Raiders to Las Vegas hit a speed bump…  Part of the financing for the new stadium in Las Vegas would come via $650M thrown into the pot by Sheldon Adelson – CEO of Las Vegas Sands, a hotel/casino company.  According to financial estimates by people who purport to know about such things, Mr. Adelson’s net worth is close by the neighborhood of $29B.  This $650M commitment is a little more than 2% of his net worth.

Nevertheless, one would have to believe in the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy – and maybe in some sort of interspecies liaison between those two fantastical creatures – to expect that Mr. Adelson’s $650M is a gratis contribution to the movement of the team.  Obviously, he wants a part of the Raiders for himself in exchange for his backing and his cash.  And in recent reports, it would seem that Mr. Adelson is not satisfied with whatever Mark Davis is offering him.  In one report, Adelson supposedly responded to a Davis proposal with a take-it-or-leave-it offer of his own.

I am skeptical about that report because that is hardly a way to get to a negotiated settlement but the fact that such a report is out there means that Adelson is not fully on board yet.  For Oakland fans who tie the team to Oakland, that could be a good thing because without Adelson’s ante into the pot, there is not enough money to build the sort of stadium that has been touted all through this process.  Moreover, I suspect that Mr. Adelson is shrewd enough to recognize that his inexorable ties to gambling casinos will get in the way of NFL owners’ approval of a move until the owners have time to acclimate themselves to having any ties to casino owners at all.

I would not be surprised at all to learn that Mr. Adelson really wants to own the Las Vegas Raiders at some point nor would I be surprised to learn that Mark Davis does not want that to happen.  What this deal needs is “a broker” or a “diplomatic interlocutor” to keep the parties from painting themselves into separate corners.  Moreover, that “broker” needs to be someone who can “chat up” a bunch of the NFL owners to make them positively disposed to the deal.  That person is:

 

Jerry Jones

 

The Cowboys’ owner has expressed his support for this move and for the benefit that the Raiders would bring to the NFL in this new facility.  He is a mover and shaker in the NFL owners’ community and he has the credibility and the capability to be the guy that both Adelson and Davis can turn to for advice and counsel here.  It has not happened yet, but I would not be shocked at all to hear that it is ongoing sometime very soon.

There is another NFL owners’ component to all of this and that involves the relocation fee that the league will assess to the Raiders just for the privilege of pulling up stakes and heading somewhere else.  When the Rams moved to LA last year, the fee was $550M; Rams’ owner Stan Kroenke could comfortably write a check for that.  According to reports, Mark Davis does not have that kind of liquidity meaning he would need to pay the fee out over time.  In addition, there might be an owner or two who could view this vote as a way to settle some sort of old score with Mark Davis’ father, Al Davis.  Obviously, I have no inside information here, but it is not a huge stretch of my imagination to think that some NFL owners might be venal and petty individuals.

Meanwhile, a private group in Oakland is trying to pull together enough money to buy the Oakland Coliseum so as to build a new stadium on that site and keep the Raiders in Oakland.  That group does not have a Sheldon Adelson on board so let’s just say that they have a rather significant Kickstarter campaign on their hands.

There are lots of moving pieces here; the momentum is clearly in the direction of a move to Las Vegas but there is not yet a document spelling out the terms of the deal to which anyone can affix one’s signature.  However, Mark Davis says he will begin the formal NFL process to relocate in January 2017.  That means there are about 8-12 weeks for folks to tie up all these loose ends into a pretty package.

Happy Holidays, everyone…

Finally, Brad Dickson of the Omaha-World Herald had this slant on the Las Vegas Raiders:

“There may soon be an NFL team called the Las Vegas Raiders. This is sort of like when Sodom annexed Gomorrah.”

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

I want to begin today with my quadrennial exhortation to go out and vote today.  Voting is a responsibility of citizenship.  When a significant fraction of the electorate does not vote, it is impossible to know if the outcome of an election truly represents the will of the majority.

I will not tell you for whom I am voting; that is none of your business.  I will not suggest to you for whom you should vote; that is none of my business.  But I do urge you to go and vote even if you – like many others according to polls – do not really like any of the available candidates.

Here is an item that Bob Molinaro had in his column in the Hampton Roads Virginian-Pilot all the way back on 4 March of this year regarding the Presidential campaigns as they all existed then.  It was prescient:

“In passing: My polling place is at the Norfolk Zoo. Considering this election year atmosphere, that seems fitting to me.”

And now, back to your regularly schedule rant …

There is word not to be found in a dictionary that expresses the condition where a highly ranked team inexplicably – and inexcusably – loses a game to an inferior opponent for no discernible reason.  That word is “Clemsoning” and its derivation is rather obvious.  There is a team that has tended to do that frequently enough that some have come to anticipate it at least once every other year.  As you may imagine, Clemson coach, Dabo Swinney, does not like to hear the word “Clemsoning” even a little bit.  He has “gone off” on folks who have asked him about it.

I have no reason to poke Dabo Swinney with a stick; I do not know the man; I have no ties with nor animus toward Clemson.  However, I do think there is linguistic gold to be mined from the concept underlying the word “Clemsoning”.  If we were to expand the concept to other folks or other teams or other entities, we would have a wonderful set of opportunities for linguistic shorthand that would accurately describe behaviors or situations.  Consider:

 

“Harbaughing”:  In honor of Jim Harbaugh and his sideline “demeanor”, this word could come to mean behaving in such a way as to send one’s blood pressure to 215/190.

“Goodelling”:  In honor of Roger Goodell, this word could come to mean botching a disciplinary decision or process.

“FIFAing”:  In honor of FIFA, this word could come to mean shamelessly taking bribery money.

“IOCing”:  In honor of the IOC, this word would be synonymous with “FIFAing”.

“Lochteing”:  In honor of Ryan Lochte, this word could come to mean just making up sh*t.

“Soloing”:  In honor of Hope Solo, this word could come to mean running off at the mouth in a most insulting manner.

“Clippersing”:  In honor of the LA Clippers, this word could come to mean finding new ways to disappoint the few fans they still have.

“Kaepernicking”:  In honor of Colin Kaepernick, this word could come to mean drawing attention to oneself when one’s performance is insufficient to do so.

“NCAAing”:  In honor of the NCAA, this word could come to mean behaving in such a way as to make hypocrites everywhere blush.

“Peytoning”:  In honor of Peyton Manning this word could come to mean cashing in on EVERY endorsement opportunity in the Western World.  Cha-ching!!

 

See how much fun this is?  See the potential for expanding the vocabulary and bringing a richness of expression to the English language?  We could start a movement here.  Come to think of it, “Ex-Laxing” could come to mean starting a movement – and it might have particular symbolic meaning whenever a politician says that he or she is involved in one.

Last week, as the Cubs were moving toward winning the World Series for the first time in 108 years, an ESPN writer for ESPN who is obviously a massive Cubs’ fan postponed his open-heart surgery because he did not want to miss any of potentially historic series.  He had an aortic aneurysm; had it burst, he would have died.  He chose to postpone the surgery until 7 November.  Interestingly, he got the diagnosis of his aortic aneurysm from a cardiologist in a Cleveland hospital.  Here is a link to a report about this.

The latest story about Tiger Woods’ return to competitive golf is that he will play in something called the Hero World Challenge in December.  There have been so many “Tiger Rumors” recently, that there are now proposition bets on him and his golf game.

 

Will Woods withdraw from the Hero World Challenge before it starts?

Yes:  +275       No: minus-350

Will Woods win the Hero World Challenge?

Yes:  +250       No:  minus-300

Will Tiger Woods win another tournament before the end of his career?

Yes:  minus-120          No:  Even money

Will Tiger Woods win all four majors in 2017?

Yes:  +50,000              No:  minus-75,000

 

Finally, if Tiger Woods were to withdraw from the Hero World Challenge – as he did from the last tournament he said he would play in – how close would that bring him to “Kaepernicking”?  Just wondering…

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

Yes, I know. Today is supposed to be NFL Mythical Picks Day. I’ll get right on that… This will be brief.

Last night, the Cubs won the World Series in a fantastic Game 7. I said yesterday that anyone who represented himself/herself as a baseball fan had to watch that game. Well, it certainly did not disappoint. Even the losing manager, Terry Francona, said that it was a great game and that it was a privilege for him to have participated in it. There were few if any “missing elements”.

We can now put aside all notions and mentions of billy goats and Steve Bartman. It is time to turn the page because – as the FOX announcing team told us more than a few times during the Series – the Cubs are built to be a really good baseball team for now and for the next several years. [Aside: Do not think that the Indians are going to dry up and blow away; they too have a solid corps of young talent.]

Focusing specifically on the winning Cubs for a moment:

Kyle Schwarber: I think you could wake him up at 4:00AM after he had spent a night on the town, put a bat in his hand and a pitcher on a mound and he would hit line drives all over the place. If anyone were to suggest that Spring Training might be shortened, he would be the poster child for not needing a lot of time to “get his stroke”. He is 23 years old.

Javier Baez: He is a magician in the field. When/if he learns to hit the ball where it is pitched and to lay off pitches that are at eye level, he will be the best second baseman in baseball. He is 23 years old.

Addison Russell: He is already an excellent defensive shortstop and is developing as a hitter; he has a long future ahead of him. The Cubs got him from the A’s in a trade for Jeff Samardzjk. He is a youngster; he is only 22 years old.

Wilson Contreras: He is the Cubs’ catcher-of-the-future and a pretty fine player in the present. He is 24 years old.

Anthony Rizzo: He is solid in the field and at the plate. He is an elder statesman at age 27.

I left Kris Bryant off that list purposely because I think he belongs in a category of his own. There are a bunch of young players in MLB who have shown the makings of stardom in their brief time in the big leagues. If I focus on the guys who are 25 and below, the following names come to mind – without scanning every MLB roster to make sure I get everyone. There are the four Cubs’ youngsters noted above and then, in alphabetical order:

Nolan Arenado
Mookie Betts
Xander Bogaerts
Kris Bryant
Bryce Harper
Francisco Lindor
Manny Machado
Corey Seager
Giancarlo Stanton
Mike Trout

Those are 10 outstanding young players and there are the four Cubs listed above. Every team in MLB would be happy to have any/all of them on the roster. Having said that, I believe that two of this list of excellent players stand out from the crowd:

Mike Trout and Kris Bryant

I think they are both destined to more than stardom; they are destined for greatness.

Congratulations to the Cubs and to the Indians. Thank you to both teams for great runs in the playoffs, for a great 7-game series and for a 7th game that was as good as the famous one in the 60s when Bill Mazeroski hit the walk-off grand slam to end it all.

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

The MLB season began about 7 months ago – not counting Spring Training. Counting the playoffs, there have been close to 2500 games in the season leading to a sense that no single game until the final week or so of the season is of particular importance. Until tonight that is… The great thing about many sports is that their championship event is a one-and-done situation – – the Super Bowl, the NCAA basketball tournament, the Breeders’ Cup Classic, the FIFA World Cup Tournament. Baseball only achieves that “finality” in a year when the World Series goes to a 7th game as it will tonight. Every baseball fan will be looking in to see how the game unfolds and the only excuses for missing it would involve phrases like “emergency room” or “granddaughter’s birth” or “neighborhood power outage” etc.

In case you want to know how the oddsmakers in Las Vegas see the game – or more accurately how the bettors in the sportsbooks there see the game – the Cubs are favored at minus-115 with the Indians at +105. The Total Line for runs by both teams in the game is 6.5. I like the OVER among these choices.

Since I mentioned the betting lines on tonight’s game, let me use that as a way to talk about sports gambling more generically. About a week ago, there was a story on espn.com that said a Congressional committee is examining the extant Federal gambling laws with the intention of introducing legislation to change at least some of those restrictive laws. Three specific Federal statutes are under examination and could be the targets for modification; they are the Federal Wire Act (1961), the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) of 1992 and the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) of 2006.

It would seem that the rise of Daily Fantasy Sports and questions about its legality and its status as a game of chance – – i.e. gambling – – or as a game of skill – – i.e. not gambling – – is a major driver for this Congressional committee along with the desire of some States to implement single game sports wagering as a way to generate revenue for the State coffers. PASPA specifically restricts States from doing so if they did not have statues on the books making such activities legal prior to a certain date. Under that restriction, Nevada is the only state in the Union where individual game betting is legal.

Another interesting item in that espn.com report is that the State of Pennsylvania passed a resolution earlier this year telling congress to “lift the ban on sports betting and to allow states that authorize, license and regulate casino gaming including the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to legalize sports betting through its licensed facilities.”

My positions on the issues here are clear and simple:

1. I think the legality or illegality of sports wagering should be the province of the individual States. If there needs to be Federal legislation to regulate some aspect of those enterprises, those regulations should exist only in the context of the individual State decisions as to whether or not sports wagering is permitted within State borders.

2. Regarding Daily Fantasy Sports and their status as gambling/non-gambling. I happen to believe they are gambling enterprises. However, if legislators believe differently, I would urge them to include tournament poker in any legislation that defines Daily Fantasy as a “game of skill” and put tournament poker on the same level.

Here is a link to the espn.com report.

Amid the controversy about the “Bathroom Law” in North Carolina, you may recall that the Atlantic Coast Conference opted to move its championship football game from Charlotte, NC. Notwithstanding the fact that I sometimes succumb to the use of “potty humor” in these rants, I will refrain from discussing anything related to the “Bathroom Law” here; that is a topic for an entirely different website. What I recently learned – even though it seems to have been announced several weeks ago – is that the game will be played in Orlando, FL at Camping World Stadium. If you are wondering what that venue is and who plays there, it used to be called the Florida Citrus Bowl and the Tangerine Bowl prior to that.

This stadium has undergone renovation recently and the ACC Championship Game will be the first football game of such a magnitude played here subsequent to those renovations. The stadium is the site of two minor bowl games each year and it was the site of the Florida State/Ole Miss game earlier this year. More than likely, the ACC Championship Game will eclipse those sorts of events in terms of importance.

Evidently, the ACC execs recognized that individual fans who had purchased tickets for the game expecting it to be in Charlotte would be disadvantaged in any new allocation of tickets in the new venue. So, they gave those folks a head start for buying tickets in Orlando if that is what they wanted to do. I read one report that said the “head start” was a 3-day lead and another report that said it was a 48-hour head start. In either case, it is good to recognize that the ACC execs saw the disruption for some of its fans and took steps to ameliorate the inconvenience/disappointment some of them could have felt.

Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte seats 75,419 folks for a football game. Camping World Stadium in Orlando seats 65,000 folks for a football game. I would assume that the ACC Championship Game would be a good draw so the “loss” of about 10,500 seats made me wonder why the ACC chose to go to Orlando. The Georgia Dome in Atlanta seats 71,228 for a football game. The Georgia Dome is in ACC country and it is a neutral field; Georgia Tech plays its home games at Bobby Dodd Stadium – also in Atlanta. It would be interesting to know the decision process that sent the game to Orlando.

Finally, here are comments from Brad Dickson of the Omaha World-Herald regarding the Nebraska/Purdue game from two weeks ago:

“On Saturday, the Husker football team defeated Purdue 27-14. If the goal was to win and simultaneously make Wisconsin and Ohio State overconfident, I think Nebraska was two for two. Purdue was led by interim head coach Gerad Parker, at 35 the second-youngest FBS coach. When he shook hands with Mike Riley, it looked like Take Your Son To Work Day.”

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