Category: Daily Rants

 

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The Chargers stay in San Diego and continue to play in Qualcomm Stadium even though ownership – and others – say it is outdated and sub-standard.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………

There is a report on CBSSports.com this morning saying that a Philadelphia Eagles’ fan tweeted to Terrell Owens and to Chad Johnson about their interest in coming to the Eagles to augment what is a sub-standard corps of wide receivers on the team. Owens said he is “available”. Pigs will not only fly before the Eagles sign Owens again; pigs will have their own space program before the Eagles sign Owens again. This is not a mystery novel; the “criminal” is not required to “return to the scene of the crime”.

The NFL trade deadline is today. There have been plenty of trade rumors going around for the past couple of days – including ones involving the Eagles chasing WRs from teams going nowhere this year – but one rumor that was not out there became reality yesterday. The Pats traded LB, Jamie Collins, to the Browns for a 3rd round pick in the 2017 Draft. The first reaction many folks had to this announcement was shock and amazement. As the day wore on, I heard various “NFL insiders” saying that Collins had been offered a contract extension in the $11M per year range and had turned it down and that he would be a free agent come March 2017. Additionally, one said that Collins was looking at getting “Von Miller Money” which was 6 years and $114M. If that report is correct, the Patriots made a great deal because Jamie Collins is a very good linebacker but he is not nearly in Von Miller’s class as a defensive player.

Paying Jamie Collins anything near $19M per year on a long-term deal makes about as much sense as the Eagles bringing Terrell Owens back into their locker room.

In the last week or so, two veteran NFL players announced that they will retire in mid season. Andre Johnson is calling it quits during his 14th season in the NFL. Johnson had five seasons with more than 100 receptions; three times he led the league in receiving yards per game; twice he led the league in receiving yards; twice he was named as a first team All-Pro. Andre Johnson will be in the Hall of Fame one of these days but Father Time simply caught up with him in 2016.

Last week, Arian Foster announced that he was retiring at age 30; he has had groin and hamstring injuries this year and has had injury issues in recent seasons including a ruptured Achilles tendon that sidelined him for most of one season. I always liked the “Adrian Foster Story”. He was an undrafted free agent who led the NFL in rushing in his second year in the NFL with more than 1600 yards in that season. What I liked about Foster was his intelligence and his willingness to tell the truth.

He admitted to taking “illegal benefits” while he was in college at Tennessee. Per his recounting, he and other players had no money nor any food and when they asked the coach for something to eat, he bought them tacos. That is an NCAA “illegal benefit”.

I also liked the fact that Foster was his own person. His parents are Muslim and he grew up in that environment but Foster is a professed atheist. There are more than 1500 NFL players on rosters this year; Arian Foster’s religious beliefs – or more properly his non-beliefs – are clearly unusual among his peers. Moreover, he is willing to speak about his non-beliefs when asked. Foster was a philosophy major in college – – again not a typical major for your typical NFL player – – and he has written and continues to write poetry. Arian Foster was a very good player who was interesting to watch; Arian Foster is an interesting person who just might have a career in broadcasting somewhere down the line.

The furor over Giants’ kicker Josh Brown and his domestic violence issues seems to have abated once the Giants released Brown and he is no longer in the league. Now that things have calmed a bit, I want to comment on one small part of that story that seems to have been glossed over.

Brown was in therapy/rehab trying to resolve whatever issues led him to become a spousal abuser. That act does not justify in any way what he did; spousal abuse – or violence against women in non-domestic settings – is fundamentally abhorrent. Seeking professional help to remove oneself from whatever drives one to do such things is a positive response to that abhorrent behavior; it indicates that, de minimis, the perpetrator has some interest in behaving in more constructive ways.

As part of that therapy/rehab, Josh Brown kept a diary recounting his actions and his feelings as he was in treatment. That diary became public during this investigation/exposé. In an age where privacy concerns have led to laws that require my dentist to protect my dental history of cavities and fillings from prying eyes, that diary kept by Josh Brown as part of his mental health therapy was made public.

In no way, do I condone what Josh Brown did with regard to his personal life and his relationship with his former wife. Likewise, I do not condone whatever happened to made Josh Brown’s “therapeutic diary” a matter of public record.

According to a report on profootballtalk.com, one of the issues that may be under negotiation for the next NFL Collective Bargaining Agreement is the 18-game regular season schedule. The current CBA has 4 more years to go; I surely hope we do not have to debate that issue for the next 4 years. Here is what I do hope happens over the next 4 years:

1. Someone ascertains the key elements of the TV ratings decline afflicting the NFL at the moment. The reason this is important is that one reason MIGHT be that people are saturated with NFL football on TV and simply do not want more of it. IF that is the case, then an 18-game regular season makes as much sense as reinventing the flat tire.

2. The NFL Exhibition Season is reduced from 4 games to 2 games – with or without any agreement to go from a 16-game regular season to an 18-game regular season. The most wildly anticipated NFL exhibition game does not come close to the interest fans have in a Browns/Jags regular season “showdown”.

Finally, with the World Series drawing to a conclusion and with the NFL season in full swing, consider these comments from Brad Dickson in the Omaha World-Herald:

“The Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians are playing each other in the World Series. I always thought this would take place on the recently colonized Jupiter.

“What a year for Cleveland sports. The Cavaliers won an NBA title, the Indians are in the World Series and the Browns almost made a first down.”

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

A little over a month ago, Bob Molinaro had this to say in his column in the Hampton Roads Virginian-Pilot:

“Time will tell: Even people who love the sport have to admit that something needs to be done about the length of college football games.

“The replays are excruciating. After just one week, I’ve had enough of college booth officials searching for ‘indisputable evidence’ after halting games for a ‘further review’ that almost always confirms the on-field call. Are the games really better for all this?”

The answer to that final question here is that the games – in the plural – are certainly not better for any of that sort of stuff but one individual game might be better if a critical call was muffed by the on-field officials and then made right by the “replay guys”. The difficulty in the calculation here lies in Professor Molinaro’s correct observation that the replay review almost always confirms the call on the field. Therefore, fans pay frequently but receive anything of value only once in a great while. It is frustrating; there is no getting around that.

Perhaps the solution to this problem in college football – – and a couple of other sports where replay is now part of the action/inaction – – is found in this snarky remark by Brad Dickson in the Omaha World-Herald:

“The NBA D-League is experimenting with a 75-second time limit on instant replay reviews. There’s something similar in college football, where reviews are now limited to 2½ days.”

I am less frustrated by the number of reviews than I am by the length of time taken by the folks doing the reviewing. I think 75 seconds is plenty of time to resolve 99% of the issues that call for review. It will be interesting to see how that D-League experiment works out.

By the way, having gone to several minor-league baseball games this summer, having a 20-second “pitch-clock” does not ruin the game of baseball. It is amazing how pitchers at that level are actually able to get themselves in a rhythm to deliver a pitch in that amount of time. In fact, the vast majority of pitches are made well within that time limit.

There is another problem with college football replays that goes beyond the annoyance of interrupting the flow of games and making the games seem eternal. As some of the major conferences have moved to a system where replays are monitored in a central location and then communicated to the officials on the field, these conferences have set themselves up for criticism and charges of “self-interest”. When a call goes in favor of a team that needs to win in order to stay in contention for a CFP slot and that call is made in a “dark room” several hundred miles from the game venue by a bunch of people who represent the conference that would benefit from that team getting into the CFP … You can easily see how the conspiracy theorists can spin that one into orbit.

The use of a centralized command center to do the reviews ought to speed up the review process since officials need not spend time “under the hood”. However, there are paranoid fans out there spring-loaded to proclaim that any important call that goes against their team is part of a master plan somewhere that requires their team to take a kick in the goolies.

During the NBA Exhibition Season, I read a report somewhere that some folks were “live-Tweeting” one or several of the NBA exhibition games. This behavior is mystifying to me on just about every level:

1. It is an exhibition game, for Heaven’s sake. By definition, such a game is meaningless and cannot have meaning bestowed upon it via Twitter or any other social media platform.

2. Since the game is meaningless and will continue to be meaningless, why would anyone waste the energy to “Tweet” about it? Unless, of course, the real reason to “Tweet” about it has nothing to do with the game but has everything to do with some narcissistic need to tell the world, “Hey! Look at me!”

3. Whether the game is a meaningless one – or a championship game – why would anyone bother to read someone else’s Tweets about the game? If I care about a game, I will watch it and draw my own conclusions/derive my own enjoyment from it. If I do not care enough to watch, then why would I care what anyone else had to say about it?

I am a strong supporter of free expression. Having said that, I would not object to a limitation on “Freedom of Tweeting” if in fact Tweeting Exhibition Games is a real phenomenon that takes root in our society. Just as you cannot yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater, I think one should not be allowed to pollute the Internet with Exhibition Game Tweets. The penalty for a violation of that standard should be six months with your smartphone housed in a Faraday Cage – – where there are no signals going into the cage to the phone or out of the cage from the phone. That ought to give the perpetrator time to reflect on how man existed as a species before some twit invented Twitter.

Finally, here is an item from Brad Rock’s column “Rock On” in the Deseret News from last week:

“Washington State coach Mike Leach says he doesn’t really see the point of team captains.

“On Monday he told the media, ‘All the guy really does is the coin toss.’

“Leach continued, ‘And then I decided one of the most screwed up things about this country is in order to do anything, to cross the street, we have a committee. So, I figured … we really only need one guy. And he’s gotta be smart enough to either call heads or tails. That’s it.’

“Why is this man not the President?”

Memo to Brad Rock: Maybe he is not the President because he is smart enough to see through the nonsense of things and anyone that smart would not subject himself/herself to the muck and mire of a political campaign. Just a thought as we come to the conclusion of the 2016 Presidential campaign…

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

Unless you are a Cubs’ fan, Game 1 of the World Series was a good game to watch. Jon Lester pitched well; the combination of Corey Kluber and Andrew Miller pitched excellently. It was good, sound, fundamental baseball on both sides all night long.

Joe Buck said during the game last night that Francisco Lindor and Javier Baez played against each other in high school. Wow! That must have been a top-shelf high school league/conference. It is a treat to watch either or both of those guys play the game.

With the NBA season underway, let me get a few NBA comments on the record here:

1. The regular season in the NBA is always full of boring and meaningless games. This year will be even worse. The two best teams – the Cavs in the East and the Warriors in the West – are so much better than anyone else in their conferences that the season boils down to this:
They will play 1230 regular season games to figure out which other teams will be in the playoffs in order to set up a Cavs/Warriors final series. Yes, I know the Warriors got beaten badly in their opener last night; that does not make the other 1229 regular season games any the more relevant.

2. Out in Las Vegas last week, the odds on winning the NBA Championship were:

Warriors minus-150
Field +130.

You could get plus odds” on the other 29 teams to win it all next June. Wake me when we get there…

3. Out in Las Vegas last week, the odds that the Warriors would win the Pacific Division were 1-to-50. Seriously, I have witnesses who saw it on the board …

4. The guys I feel sorry for are the beat writers and the columnists in NBA cities who will have to find ways to present some pretty obvious and tired storylines to local fans from now until sometime in April or June depending on how far in the playoffs the local side goes. In a sense, that means the writers in places like Philly or Brooklyn or Miami have it better than writers in some other cities. Their extended nightmare will be shorter.

The NBA allowed teams to sell promotion patches for the front of their uniforms this year. The Sacramento Kings will be sporting a 6.25 square inch logo for Blue Diamond Almonds. The terms of the deal were not announced, but I read one report that said it was a 3-year deal worth $5M per year to the Kings. I like Blue Diamond Almonds – particularly the smoked almonds – but I am mystified as to why anyone would think that putting that logo on a basketball jersey for a bad team is going to attract new consumers to the product. Obviously, someone in the almond marketing business thinks there is $15M of benefit to accrue from this exposure, but I don’t get it.

In another marketing/promotional deal that I do not understand at all, the NBA announced a few weeks ago that ExxonMobil is an “official marketing partner” of the NBA, the WNBA and the NBA D-League here in the US and in China. That makes Mobil 1 motor oil “the official motor oil of the NBA, the WNBA and the D-League here and in China. Pardon me, but what the Hell does that mean?

If Adam Silver punches up his Uber app to get a ride across town, does he ask the driver who shows up what kind of motor oil is in the car before he gets in?

When NBA teams fly from town to town, does the plane always use ExxonMobil aviation fuel?

It must be comforting for folks in the corner offices at NBA Hqs to realize that the Kings no longer play in ARCO Arena. Think of the conflict of interest situations this new deal would present in that town…

Whenever deals like this are announced, there is always a high-fallutin’ statement offered as to why the new deal is the best thing ever. Naturally, that happened here too. Here is what an NBA Senior VP had to say on the matter:

“We are proud to partner with ExxonMobil, a distinguished global company and proven industry leader. The Mobil 1 brand is synonymous with technology leadership and outstanding performance, and we’re looking forward to bringing these shared values to life for our fans in two of our biggest markets.”

If you immediately asked yourself, “What?” “How?” “Why?” after reading that, join the crowd…

As is traditional, someone from ExxonMobil also had a chance to put together some random words designed to make normal people scratch their heads. In this case, it was a VP for marketing:

“By partnering with the NBA, ExxonMobil can engage consumers across the United States and China, also two of our largest markets, to extend our brands’ recognition, help reinforce our leadership position, and distinguish our products in today’s competitive global marketplace.”

To which I say, “Huh? If you say so …”

Here is what I think all of this comes down to:

For the upcoming season – most of which will consist of unimportant and uninteresting games – you are going to see a lot of ExxonMobil signage and logos in NBA arenas and on NBA telecasts. Also, if you go to an Exxon gas station to fill up your car with gas, you will see NBA-themed signage. There will probably also be some sort of sweepstakes offered by ExxonMobil that will get “some lucky fan” tickets to the NBA Finals or to the NBA All-Star Game.

I’ll slow down here so you can catch your breath…

Finally, here is an NBA relevant comment from Brad Dickson in the Omaha World-Herald:

“Miami Heat guard Tyler Johnson, who played only 36 games last season and has averaged 7.4 points in his career, said he threw up after hearing the team offered him $50 million. Tyler, that makes two of us.”

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

The Big 12 Conference announced that it was not going to expand at this time – meaning they will not add 2 teams to put 12 teams in the conference. At the moment, there are only 10 teams but the conference has to be the Big 12 because the name “Big 10” is already taken – – by a conference that has 14 member institutions. Obviously, not enough student-athletes graduated with degrees in math to go to work in Athletic Departments to handle these arithmetic concepts for the moguls there.

I think the Big 12 is on a precipice; it is currently considered a major football conference based on the heritage from which it sprang. However, it needs to add quality to its roles because in recent years it has been losing teams:

Arkansas – now in the SEC
Colorado – now in the PAC-12
Missouri – now in the SEC
Nebraska – now in the Big 10
Texas A&M – now in the SEC

There are two dominant programs in the Big 12 – – Oklahoma and Texas. As long as they stay in the conference and as long as both programs to not render themselves into oblivion, the Big 12 will command some national attention. However, if either of those schools were to leave for greener pastures, what would be left of the Big 12 would be a football conference that is not significantly more relevant than C-USA. I’d call it the Bog 12.

There were rumors and “reports” – all denied – that the major TV networks paid the Big 12 to decide not to expand. The presumed basis for such payments was that the networks had contracts with the other major conferences and were happy to maintain the status quo in college football for the time being. I strongly suspect that these rumors are pure balderdash; I hope those strong suspicions are not wishful thinking. The NCAA loves to talk about the “integrity of the games”; if those sorts of under-the-radar payments are going on, I am far more worried about “game integrity” now than I was prior to reading those “reports”.

I will not pretend to understand all the politics and economics that come into play with regard to the Big 12 and its member schools. I will say this however:

Of the 5 most important football conferences in the country, the Big 12 is the least prestigious with the smallest national following. Moreover, the gap between the Big 12 and the other 4 important conferences is growing year by year.

In the last couple of weeks, two schools have fired their football coaches. I have no idea why those firings had to be done in mid-season as opposed to happening 3 minutes after the final whistle blew in the last game of the year. Neither school is going to “turn things around this year” and go to a bowl game thanks to the coaching change. I guess that these firings are symbolic acts to demonstrate the potency of the athletic departments and/or the big donors at those schools. If I am right, then those entities have demonstrated their power and their dominance. The question I would pose however is this:

If you guys are so big and so tough and so smart, how did you let your precious football program get into this mess in the first place?

Purdue fired Coach Darrell Hazell. Look, Hazell had not been super-successful in his tenure at Purdue; I understand that. What I do not understand is what benefit Purdue hopes to reap from the mid-season separation. As of this morning, Purdue has a 3-4 record with wins over:

E. Kentucky – Division 1-AA
Nevada – not a good Division 1-A team at all
Illinois – Big 10 bottom-feeder.

Purdue’s losses have been:

Cincinnati – by 18 points
Maryland – by 43 points
Iowa by 14 points
Nebraska by 13 points

If you find that unimpressive, consider that Hazell had been at Purdue for a while; this was his 4th year there. His record was 9-33 and he never won back-to-back games in his tenure. If I counted correctly, Purdue has gone 3-24 in conference games during his time there. So, that performance was OK all during the off season between 2015 and 2016 but suddenly became intolerable given the mediocrity that was evident on the field this year. Really?

The other mid-season firing was at Fresno St.; the school parted company with Coach Tim DeRuyter this week with the team record standing at 1-7. If that is all you look at, you might think this firing is not only justified but may have been late in coming. However, if you look a bit closer, you will see that DeRuyter took over the program for the 2012 season after the team went 4-9 the year before. He won 9 games in 2012 and then won 11 games in 2013. For the first two years at Fresno St., his teams went 20-6 and went to bowl games both years.

In 2014, the team just made bowl-eligibility and finished with a 6-8 record but things turned south in 2015 with a record of 3-9 and now this year’s 1-7 record. Overall, DeRuyter’s record at Fresno St was 30-30. The team cannot achieve bowl-eligibility in 2016; once again, I do not see the purpose or the urgency of a mid-season termination.

Finally, here is a news item from Dwight Perry in the Seattle Times that may give you an incentive to save your pennies:

“Ferrari claims it’s coming out with the fastest convertible ever.

“No word about top-end speed, but your wallet goes from $2.2 million to zero in just 3.5 seconds.”

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

I want to use today to clean up some items from my clipboard. Before I get to that, however, I want to note that the World Series must produce a champion for a fanbase that has waited a LONG time between championships. If your favorite team is not participating, check the Series out anyway. It will be good to see the reactions of the winning fans – and given the way both teams have been playing, it ought to be a really good bunch of baseball games.

A couple of weeks ago, I posed the question as to when NFL on-field celebrations started on the road to “jackassery”. I suggested Billy “White Shoes” Johnson and Harold Carmichael as early proponents of such behavior. I got an e-mail from the reader in Houston who is a sports historian/stat guru extraordinaire. Here is what he provided:

Wide receiver, Homer Jones, of the Giants was the first player to ever spike the ball (1965). That was in a game vs. Philly at Yankee Stadium and can be considered the first end-zone “celebration”. Following the 1964 season, the NFL had imposed a $500 fine (today, it’s $5,787 for the first offense), if a player threw the football into the stands after scoring a touchdown. So when Jones caught his first TD, a long TD pass from Earl Morrall, he was ready to throw the ball into the stands, but because of the $500 fine (Jones was making $10,000 at the time), he thought twice about it and instead threw the ball down into the end zone. It was a short, almost back-handed throwdown – not the mega-spike we’re used to seeing. He called it “The Spike” when asked about it by a reporter and the name was born. He continued “spiking” the ball over his career on each of his ensuing 35 TD catches and one rushing TD. Other players started to copy it.

As far as dancing in the end zone is concerned, Billy “White Shoes” Johnson is given most of the credit for that. Johnson was already known for his flamboyance, as he got his nickname by dyeing his football spikes while in high school and college.

But it was actually my fellow Houstonian, KC wide receiver Elmo Wright, who began the practice of “high-stepping” into the end zone at the end of long touchdown receptions. He did it at the University of Houston and then in his rookie year, he first did it in a game vs. the Redskins. While this was no comparison to the antics later displayed by such famed celebrators as Johnson, Ickey Woods, Jamal Anderson, Terrell Owens, etc., it was sort of shocking at the time and was made famous by NFL Films highlights. After seeing Wright do his thing in the end zone, Johnson got the idea for his “Funky Chicken” dance and did so for the first time in a game as a rookie vs. the Steelers in 1974. The rest is history.

So, now we all know…

There is another NFL-related item on my clipboard. Yesterday, the Giants and Rams played the second of three regular season games in London. The venue was Twickenham – which is a rugby pitch and not a soccer pitch; the stadium seats 82,000 and it looked awfully full to me. The game started at 9:30 AM Eastern Time – that would be 6:30 in Las Vegas. You just know that had to have a chilling effect on the number of people watching that game. Nevertheless, the NFL is persistent in playing games there and it has an agreement to play a game in the new stadium being built for the Tottenham Hotspurs in London starting in 2018. I know more than a couple of NFL fans who believe that these “London Games” have gone past their “sell-by date” but the NFL obviously disagrees. I think there are two reasons why:

1. The NFL revenues in 2016 are projected to be in the neighborhood of $15B and the long-term goal for the league is revenue of $25B in 2025. I am not sure the NFL can squeeze another $10B per year out of the US market alone so “international revenue” is an important component of achieving that goal. As I said, that large stadium looked full to me. I read one report that said more than 30,000 fans in Britain bought tickets to all three of this year’s “London Games”; that has to be more than encouraging for the finance folks at the NFL. Reinforcing the league’s focus on the potential for foreign revenues, there will be a game in Mexico City later this year. When they put tickets there on sale, reports said that the stadium sold out in less than an hour.

2. The players cannot hate this. If they did, they would have started to leak stories about how awful it is to go there to play so that it might become a bargaining chip in the next CBA negotiations. Fans can imagine that players/coaches do not like their routines to be jostled or that traveling across the pond produces too many dreaded “distractions”; but if these were burning issues, I would expect to have heard things by now related to how to cut down the number of these trips. I have not heard/read any such thing…

Oh, by the way, another reason the players and the NFLPA ought to like “London Games” is that if they succeed in goosing revenue up, that means there is more money to share with the players because that means the salary cap goes up too …

One more NFL-related note… The saga of spousal abuse by NFL players came back to center stage recently in the Josh Brown Matter. Obviously, the NFL did not learn much from the bungling that it exhibited in the Ray Rice Affair. In the aftermath of that debacle, the NFL instituted a policy that set 6 games as the benchmark suspension for spousal abuse/assault and battery/etc. To my knowledge, they have yet to impose a 6-game ban in any case because they always seem to find “mitigating circumstances’. Brown was suspended for one game earlier this year; more evidence came to light recently that indicates his abusive behavior was worse than understood at that time; now he is suspended with pay until the league figures out how to remove their collective heads from their collective asses.

[Aside: Replace the recently released police reports in this case with the “discovery” of the elevator video in the Ray Rice Affair and you will see a strikingly parallel set of events here.]

However, the telling thing to me about this matter is what it says about Greg Hardy. Reports now say he will move on to participate in MMA because he has had no offers from NFL teams. If those reports are true, how toxic must he be to the 32 folks who own NFL franchises? Hardy is a pass-rusher and a good one; he may not be the best one in the league, but on physical talent alone, he could probably start for at least half the clubs in the NFL. Pass-rushers are valued commodities. Nevertheless, no team wants him on the roster let alone on the field… I have two comments about that situation:

1. There is probably more information related to the various allegations levelled against Greg Hardy than has been made public but at least some of that is known to the NFL and the owners.

2. The fact that no team has made him an offer of employment – in the form of a tryout – smells like “collusion” to me. Yet, the NFLPA has been silent on that matter. I wonder if the NFLPA folks also have some insights that the public does not have …

Finally, since I discussed the “exporting” of American Football to London above, here is a comment from Brad Dickson of the Omaha World-Herald regarding a niche sport in Europe:

“And finally: There is an actual sport in Europe called shin kicking. If this is your country’s national pastime, I’m thinking your country has some issues.”

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