Quantcast
Channel: SBNation.com: All Posts by Spencer Hall
Viewing all 1537 articles
Browse latest View live

The Urban Meyer cycle continues

0
0

The three-time national champion has retired again.

1. The minute Ohio State suspended Urban Meyer on August 22nd, this was over. It was over because Meyer and the university could no longer fully trust each other, and because Meyer was dragged through the humiliation of being subservient to a school, rather than to football itself. Once the coach’s football interests became secondary to the institution’s, Meyer’s departure was set in motion.

2. That much should have been clear on Oct. 30, when Meyer began to talk publicly about his headaches caused by the arachnoid cyst on his brain. It should have been clear when the trial balloon of offensive coordinator Ryan Day becoming head coach was floated during the season or when the cameras caught Meyer bent over on the sidelines during tense moments.

This wasn’t exactly managed and scripted — but it wasn’t exactly unmanaged and unscripted, was it? We all got enough deliberate peeks behind the backdrop to see what was coming and how it would happen.

3. So now, rather than take a scandalous firing in August, Meyer gets to retire. (Again.)

The summary: Meyer took over a big program and did brilliantly on the field. (Again.) He recruited gifted players at an astonishing rate, won a championship within his first three years, and turned his coaching staff into a launching pad for assistants looking for head coaching jobs. (Again.) His teams dominated their conference, consistently competed for top five finishes, and — litmus test of litmus tests — straight up beat the standard bearer for the sport, Alabama. (Again, but don’t look at what happened the second time Meyer and Saban met at Florida.)

4. With one game left, Meyer’s seven years in Columbus produced an 82-9 record. His win percentage is better than Woody Hayes’, his resume deeper and better than Jim Tressel’s, and his ability to recruit talent is unsurpassed by anyone who’s ever held the OSU job.

Football-wise, he is the best coach Ohio State has ever had, and equaling his run there would mean hiring Nick Saban or the next Meyer to succeed him. (Again.)

5. Poor Ryan Day won’t equal him. He just won’t, and expecting him to would do a massive disservice to the elevated offensive coordinator’s prospects.

Nearly all coaching greats are followed by merely goods, because there are so few greats, period. Getting two in a row is lottery winner territory, and having any other expectations is to misunderstand basic probability. Consider how lucky Ohio State’s already been in getting Tressel and Meyer back to back.

6. No one will listen to this, and Day will be under insane pressure three hours into his tenure on Jan. 2. Get the contracts double-signed and make sure that buyout can’t budge with the weight of 10 law firms pushing on it, Ryan.

7. Meyer is a rare, rare talent — one reason he’s been allowed to do things other coaches might not be allowed to even consider.

8. For instance, Meyer was allowed to continue coaching after apparently lying about the Zach Smith case at Big Ten Media Days. Meyer would later say he misspoke and did not knowingly lie, but beating Michigan every year had to help his case with his superiors.

Meyer got a three-game suspension early in the season and was allowed to hold deeply unhelpful press conferences regarding his suspension, free rein other coaches wouldn’t have gotten. He was effectively allowed to choose his own exit, another rarity in coaching, especially at Ohio State.

9. Meyer had seemingly left Florida better than he’d found it — but then the roof caved in, and it became apparent just how much dry rot was in the walls of the place. At Florida, Meyer struggled to fill positions after staffers left for their own head coaching gigs.

At Ohio State, that attrition has been less obviously harmful to the team’s win percentage, but Meyer still struggled to replace coaching talent well. This year’s scapegoat: Greg Schiano, the coordinator whose defense allowed 55 points to Iowa in a baffling 2017 loss, repeated that with 49 to Purdue in 2018, and finished 113th in the nation in long plays allowed.

10. There was also this management issue: the time Meyer kept a documentedly ineffective staffer on because he was the grandson of a mentor, AKA Zach Smith. That staffer, repeatedly accused of domestic violence, later helped unravel Meyer’s tenure.

11. The question of whether Ohio State is in better shape going forward, rather than when he got there, has a tricky answer: give it two years, and we’ll see. The facilities, talent, and skill base at Ohio State are all undeniably better, but that was seemingly the case at Florida, too. Holding off on grand gestures about how much Meyer changed Ohio State makes sense because a.) Ohio State has been successful historically without him, and b.) making any lasting claims about a culture in college football is hard anyway, much less with a team about to shed a workaholic manager known for delegating too little.

12. There’s also the health issues (again), the bizarre inability to message anything not having to do with football (again), and the feeling that Meyer, for all his gifts, could not be a lifer at any program, and that all his success came with that price.

13. Overclocking is the word for it, when a computer is made to run faster than it was designed to run. It’s how Meyer makes a program work. Things happen fast, sometimes too fast for their own good. Coaches come and go quickly, titles fly in the window, and after five or six years, the parts start to wear down, make unforced errors, to write checks against that success, checks that will begin to bounce.

14. A difference this time: Meyer leaves after a hugely embarrassing scandal for the university, which sent a horrendous and confused message about domestic violence to the school and community beyond it. The timing of Meyer’s departure distances him from that as a story, but it shouldn’t diminish his role in the least.

15. The timing does allow for certain things. Meyer will likely return to commentary, which he’s very good at, and give him some time to sort out whatever health issues he has. It gives Ohio State a fresh start, and reminds everyone that the school is — for the moment, at least — one of the few places bigger than any one coach.

16. It also gives time for this completely hypothetical but very believable situation to unfold: Notre Dame bombs out of the postseason again, and pressure mounts on Brian Kelly as fans and analysts say he’s “taken the program as far as he can.” That might take a few years, but when it reaches a boiling point, Meyer will be right there for one of the few jobs he used to have written into this contract as buyout-free destinations: the Notre Dame head coach.

17. And when he gets there, Notre Dame will run a little too fast for its own good. It will glow and burn out like it did under the last master of overclocking a football program and immediately moving on to the next program, one of Meyer’s mentors: Lou Holtz. It’s a cycle, and like any cycle, its end is apparent from the first minute.


Atlanta United were flashy champions in a fickle sports city

0
0

In the slapstick history of Atlanta sports, no one has illustrated the city’s transient beauty better than Miguel Almiron and United.

Miguel Almiron is not “undersized.” Almiron is downright little — a 5’9 attacking midfielder for Atlanta United so slight and unassuming, and lacking marquee soccer star hair, that he can be easily lost in a crowd. If I had to tell someone to find him, I’d only be able to suggest looking for the dude with:

a.) a truly awe-inspiring set of eyebrows, and

b.) the dark-haired guy who looks like the world’s oldest fourteen-year-old.

Almiron is almost sheepish in profile.

This might explain why he was so hard to see in the postgame commotion Saturday night. Atlanta United had just defeated the Portland Timbers 2-0 to win the MLS Cup, marking the first championship by any team in the city since the Atlanta Braves won the World Series in 1995. There was Arthur Blank, the Home Depot baron and team owner, hoisting the championship trophy over his head with some effort. (It was touch-and-go for a minute, but he got it there.) There was shock-blonde Josef Martinez, the Venezuelan striker whose goal in the thirty-fifth minute broke the game open, cradling a baby who clearly wanted to be somewhere much quieter than a stadium full of fans.

Brad Guzan, the hairless 6’4” American goalie, couldn’t hide from anyone, much less the chants from the supporters’ section:

He’s big

He’s bald

He’s a motherfucking wall

Brad Guzaaaaaannnnnn

It took a minute to spot Almiron. He was standing with his dad, looking around and wide-eyed in the best possible sense of the word. He looked like a mildly surprised and maximally elated adolescent, not shocked but still not entirely expectant of what was a complete and certain victory.

Almiron plays for Atlanta United, a club in its second year of existence as a full-fledged soccer team. It plays in Atlanta, an often fickle, sometimes downright indifferent, and always tricky city for its major sports teams. There are tons of transplant residents who turn State Farm Arena into a home game for visiting NBA teams, and college football fans from all over who treat the Falcons as a pleasant but not obsessive follow on Sundays.

Even the Braves — the most consistent of all of Atlanta’s teams — had to move to Cobb County “to ensure attendance.”*

*Siphon the most taxpayer dollars off a willing county government

Atlanta, in turn, has to watch sports teams who even at their most successful have failed to win titles, display much consistency, or operate competently. Each franchise has had long fainting spells when they muddled along half-consciously. (See: Most of the Hawks history.) Some have served as little more than dark comedy vehicles until recently, and even then the highs have been marred by the lowest of lows.

Good sports things do not happen here, at least not without teeth-gnashing, or an eventual comeuppance, or maybe a biblical disaster. The first Super Bowl here happened the week of an ice storm, and Ray Lewis got tangled up in a stabbing, for instance. The Falcons blew a 28-3 lead in the Super Bowl and lost their best player ever to a dogfighting ring. The city lost not one, but two NHL franchises due to neglect. The Hawks are the Hawks.

ATL United hit a slipstream in history and skipped all that.

The team sold well from the beginning, packing houses even when they were playing in Georgia Tech’s stadium to start. The brand took root with ease, and with some savvy help from the marketing department. They left United flags on doors, got Archie Eversole to record a United-themed hype video for “We Ready”, and developed a raucous bunch of supporters clubs with astonishing speed.

United’s brand off the field and presence in the city is somehow more definite and developed right now than the Falcons or Hawks might have ever been — this, despite both of those teams creeping up on a combined century of professional residence in the city.

On the field, United had Almiron. His unassuming manner off the field was a direct contrast to his hellbent pace, left-footed volleys at goal, and his startling ability to hit a full blazing gallop from a dead still start. Playing in former Barcelona manager Tata Martino’s attacking style, Almiron had free rein to create from midfield, collapsing defenses with both change of direction and outright speed.

Coltish: The word for how he moves with the ball is coltish, like a young horse just discovering just how much grass it can cover with just a few strides. Almiron’s best plays combined all that pace and vision with the willingness to barrel into defenders, and a deft enough foot to put the ball wherever it needed to be once he’d tiptoed through them.

He wasn’t perfect for United, but there were easy ways around that. Almiron didn’t always finish beautifully, but that’s what Martinez and a freewheeling green light from the manager were for. Even with his minor imperfections, Almiron still scored 12 goals in the regular season, including this stunner of a free kick against New York City a few weeks ago. In short: If the Atlanta attack was a grease fire, then Almiron was the grease.

That’s a metaphor the home of Waffle House should be able to live with forever. What’s next for United will be harder to stomach. Almiron is likely gone in a hurry, seemingly playing his way into a bid from Newcastle in the Premier League. Manager Tata Martino accepted a four-year contract to coach the Mexican national team back in mid-November. Striker and local demigod Martinez may leave, too.

Almiron sat next to Martinez during the victory parade in Atlanta on Monday morning. He was a little easier to find this time, smiling and waving and filming the crowd with his phone. He stood atop the open bus in the back with Martinez as the team threw little soccer balls out into the crowd, and hoisted the cup up for fans sitting in misting rain. Martinez gave a thumbs-up to the crowd and nodded at chants of “M-V-P.” Almiron, in contrast, looked more like a guest of the team just happy to be there.

Someone bobbed in front of the bus carrying a cardboard cutout: Arthur Blank’s head, just visible over the assembled head of the crowd, floated down Marietta Street.

The bus rounded the corner past Centennial Park and then south towards Mercedes-Benz Stadium. This was where the old Omni stood, before it was imploded for something else. Up ahead was the new stadium, a jagged pile of polygons built just next to the space once occupied by the Georgia Dome.

Buildings, like everything else, don’t really last long in Atlanta, a city that thrives on demolition, and whose most notable landmark is the airport. That may be, in part, why United thrived here so quickly. Professional soccer is a game of traffic and turnover, full of impermanence — managers leaving, stars getting transferred, movement up and down tiers, and sometimes across continents. Staying in one place for a whole career is the exception, not the rule. Things inevitably, and often suddenly, change.

The parade may have been the last hurrah of Miguel Almiron and this United team — a team that happened in some blessed, drama-free space existing apart from the rest of Atlanta sports history. Yet even with the full admission that the celebration was also the finale, there’s also every reason to believe that more than any other place, Atlanta will be ready to drive down and meet a whole new crew at the airport to try again.

Oh, and there is an airport, if you haven’t heard. It’s kind of the whole deal here. People and things come and go all the time by design — even Almiron, the teenaged-looking midfielder who helped bring Atlanta its first championship in a long, long time. The hope is to appreciate what he was on the way up, that he thrives wherever he goes, and try to remember what he was largely responsible for — a quicksilver two years of exhilarating team soccer that almost redeemed the entire slagheap of Atlanta’s sports history all by itself. That a hard-to-spot, unassuming guy from Paraguay was an essential part of the most bankable, electric thing in town.

He has to go, and we get that. That kind of mild, fond heartbreak is the standard here.

The cup stays.

I can’t stop looking at Sean McVay’s beard

0
0

McVay’s beard is a nearly perfect system in need of just a little more balance.

The Los Angeles Rams have lost two in a row after starting the season 11-1. The first loss was a low-scoring struggle with the Chicago Bears where the Rams’ offense seemed to be exposed by a filthy Bears defense. The second loss: A loss to the Eagles where the Rams’ defense allowed a struggling Philadelphia attack to finally get on track.

These are troubling trends for the Rams. I don’t care about either of them. I would, however, like to talk about Rams head coach Sean McVay’s beard.

Before we go to the film and pick it apart: It is definitely a beard with strong fundamentals. I can’t deny that. Give McVay three weeks without shaving and he’d look like an extra from Game of Thrones. You can see that beard being incinerated by dragon’s fire, but not before noting how solid a beard it was, right? It’s good from the roots, solid and full.

Unfortunately for McVay, it’s also a beard that grows right up to his eyeballs. In football terms, it’s got range — almost too much range, really. Like a safety who can cover a little too much ground, that beard can be trouble if given too much room to roam. It could easily be the Ed Reed of beards — ironic because Reed’s current beard, much like Reed the player, is a study in controlled chaos. (Look at that chin growth. It’d get out of hand fast.)

Anyone coaching this beard is going to have to rein it in a little for the benefit of the whole system. And McVay, being a coach, definitely has a system going here. Note the hair, plastered in place with enough pomade to keep a headset from falling off his head. A mighty fortress is McVay’s hair: His product, never failing.

That beard line, though: It’s mesmerizing. It is a video game character’s beard, laid over his face like it was cut from a stencil. That is a magical golden ratio type shape he’s got going on there. That beard isn’t shaved. It’s enforced.

Scouting-wise, it could probably use some length to distract from the over-management. A beard is not a topiary, Sean. It needs some length to look more natural and less like a decal. Not too much, Sean: Like any game plan, balance is important. If growth is the run game and shaving the pass, then right now this beard is running the Air Raid, and the safeties are playing twenty yards off the ball in Cover 2.

Some free advice from someone who has had every possible variation of beard, Sean: Run the ball a little. Establish some balance, and let that ginger face take some small gains by letting it grow out for a week. Then, go over the top for a truly magnificent score with the next trim.

Bonus points: taking three or four minutes less grooming? More time to watch film, coach. It’s not negligence to let it grow out a little. It’s “enhancing beard recovery in the name of overall system efficiency.” See? Everything can benefit from a little coaching, especially if you don’t want to end up with A.J. Styles’ beard.

Everything LeBron James’ parenting moment reminded me of

0
0

I saw the video of LeBron cheering up his son, and it got me thinking about being a parent.

So I saw a clip of LeBron James talking to his son after a game, and tweeted about it. Because everyone isn’t on Twitter, I strung them all together here and added some parts I thought needed adding.

There are a few reasons to like this other than the one I chose, such as LeBron displaying how his basketball computer of a brain doesn’t even stop working during children’s games, or him striking a fine balance between being super-interested and yet not overly intense in coaching.

I particularly like this subtext: That not only will his son have to accept the analysis because his father, after all, is LeBron James, but that he won’t because ... well, he’s Dad, and no child can ever believe 100 percent of what Dad says. It’s not possible, not even if Dad is LeBron James.

No matter how right LeBron might be, Bryce James is probably thinking: You’re just saying that to make me feel better, and I know that. Because kids get parented, but they also watch you parent them at the same time. Those are different things, and yet they happen at the same time because kids are 3,000 times more perceptive than you think they are (or might want them to be.)

I’m also pleased by LeBron’s comfort in living the hair plugs/transplant/whatever he’s got lifestyle. Like Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp, he’s living his truth in public, and clearly believes the results are pretty cool.

That is a link to a really good Eli Saslow story on James. LeBron has a strange rep for alternately a.) controlling his own image and using a close circle of advisers to make decisions about access, and b.) being willing to tell his story in public on terms not always favorable to him.

There is truth to both of these angles. Among megastars of this era with long, productive careers and a lot of money on the line, James is downright vocal.

Compare him to his few male global peers here. Lionel Messi, soccer’s greatest player No. 1, is a cipher. Tom Brady sells infrared recovery pajamas and a $350 cookbook, and this is what will have to pass for insight into his personal life. Roger Federer hangs out in Switzerland with his perfect family in his perfect house in clothes monogrammed with his initials. When the fire rises to consume humanity whole, he will walk out from the flames without a single scorch mark.

It’s not an obligation for an athlete to be anything publicly. People have a right to be private. Sometimes they don’t get that choice — see the entire second half of Tiger Woods’ career — but even that can be managed to a fine obscurity.

LeBron has mostly made the choice to tell a story. That’s more than he had to do, and more than most people in his position would.

I think LeBron lets his story be known because he thinks it serves a larger purpose.

Read that Saslow story or any other story about his upbringing. There are two things that come through in every telling. The first is that of a very young child who did not have a stable childhood. The second is of a kid who found mentoring, comfort, and care through 1.) a struggling but devoted mother and 2.) the coaches and mentors who brought him into their homes.

If that story keeps coming back to me, it’s because I have kids now and got to be raised by two parents in a stable home. One of those parents, my dad, didn’t really have a great blueprint for that, or at least what anyone would call the dictionary standard. He made it work in his own way, just like a hundred million other mothers and fathers.

People do this every day. They do a job they have either never seen done before or have seen done under disastrous or chaotic circumstances, and they somehow do it well. Sometimes they do it flat brilliantly.

Periodically they fail, too. Parenting is a series of failures, an endless chain of them, and the worst part is how sometimes you know they know. It’s right there in your child’s face, like when you’re lost, and your phone is dead, and the kid has to pee, and there’s no obvious place on this stretch of road for them to pee except in the woods, and my god, wouldn’t you kill for even one dirty McDonald’s bathroom right now.

Sometimes, even at a very young age, children will look at you from the corner of their eye and think that maybe, just maybe, you’re not the person for this job. I know they do, because I remember doing the same thing despite being unable to drive, earn a living, fix eggs, or balance a bank account.*

* I’ve learned to do at least two of these. SUCCESS.

Parenting in the best of situations is about flying partially blind. For someone who grew up in difficult circumstances, it’s even harder. For someone like LeBron, it means having to do at least a little bit of that in public as well.

He’s choosing to do more than a little bit of that here. He’s mic’d up in this clip, which everyone heard and saw because he published it on his Instagram page for his small, intimate following of 45.7 million.

If you point this out like it means something bad: Go ahead. Being cynical would be a totally fine play. I can’t stop you from doing that. It would be your decision, one backed up by literally almost any other heartwarming moment ever seen on the internet.

If you acknowledge that James is being recorded here and still think it’s a great moment, come on over and join me. More than any other athlete of my lifetime, James knows he’s being watched, in the good and bad senses. Despite that, he works in the spotlight, and is willing to try and be an example. He does that in little cosmetic senses like this, and also in big, tangible ways.

There is one step further here. James is even willing to do that not just for kids, which is typically the easier sell, but for adults — even adults who have also signed up to be parents despite chaotic upbringings, or just parents period. You know we need that, right, even in the middle of the job? That it helps to see good examples of parenting, even if they’re in an obviously recorded moment from a celebrity’s life? That putting that moment on display matters beyond a moment of marketing? That in a historical moment where cruelty has been confused for leadership, this is actually leading?

That’s rare. LeBron James is rare in a lot of ways, and keeps getting rarer by the day, because I really do — even through the veil of celebrity PR and presentation — think he’s trying to pay back kindness in a public fashion. Find someone else trying to do that at the same level, and I’ll wait right here. It will be a minute.

P.S. His basketball brain has to be the most terrifyingly detailed place. James probably has the basketball scenes from Space Jam blocked out in his head in detail and can explain why one particular Monstar’s poor spacing allowed Michael Jordan to get the ball on a crucial late dunk.

‘Mean’ Gene Okerlund took wrestling seriously, so we could too

0
0
Mean Gene Okerland at the 25th Anniversary of WrestleMania’s WWE Hall of Fame in 2009.

The legendary interviewer died at 76 and leaves behind an unmatched impact on professional wrestling. 

The first impression a child watching Gene Okerlund doing an interview with any wrestler on a wrestling broadcast had to be this: He seemingly had no right to be standing there. His 5’9 frame barely came up to the collarbones of some of the Goliaths he held the mic for during promos. With midsize wrestlers, he looked tiny. Bigger wrestlers could try to blot him out from the screen entirely, reducing him to a passenger floating on a bicep.

They could try to push him out of frame, but they rarely succeeded. Despite his relative lack of size, Okerlund — who died on Jan. 2 at the age of 76 — never shrank or shied away on screen. Even when he was quiet and serving as little more than a pugnacious mic stand for any one of a long stream of charismatic, swole-shouldered lunatics, “Mean” Gene Okerlund controlled the picture, serving as wrestling’s supreme straight man for over 40 years.

Okerlund played the role of The Serious Adult in the Room on WWE and WCW’s biggest shows. He was the one who asked the questions, demanded answers, and served as the pivot for every beef, rivalry, feud, and outright war between the giants and bit players of wrestling. He hectored wrestlers like an investigative reporter. He was pushy, ornery, sometimes outright hostile to his subjects, playing up the drama while never forgetting to mention that the show was at the National Guard Armory in Nashville this coming Saturday, and that tickets were still available — but selling fast.

That was his job: giving the impression that this was serious, serious business.

Okerlund was seemingly built in a lab to do just that specifically for the sport of professional wrestling. His stentorian voice practically came with its own amplifier. His presence, though, was smallish, almost nerdy, a caricature of what Vince McMahon himself might sketch up for the role of Sniveling Broadcast Journalist. Okerlund sounded like the voice of God. He looked like God’s grumpy, slump-shouldered, balding personal assistant Kevin.

Okerlund’s presence, though, felt 8-feet tall. He was trained as a broadcaster and DJ. He might was well have come from improv theater, though given how well he controlled a scene. Okerlund would never be the star — that was not his job, and never would be. In an over-the-top medium like professional wrestling with exaggerated highs and abysmal lows, Okerlund served as the level. He kept everything on balance, and gave the exact measure of real gravitas to a moment no matter how absurd that moment might be.

Watch him wish a “gravely injured” Hulk Hogan well after getting beaten up by Earthquake and deny Okerlund’s ability to own the moment. You can’t. It is simply not possible.

Okerlund essentially reinvented one job, and invented another. The job he evolved was the old role of carnival barker. Okerlund pushed it into the age of cable TV, becoming the force multiplier for whatever the WWE needed to push that week. He did all that with a jaw-dropping consistency. Okerlund stayed on the same note and level for almost a half century of work, providing a rock-steady launching pad for the launch of three generations of wrestling’s brightest satellites.

The job he invented was being Mean Gene Okerlund. And in that job, Mean Gene Okerlund’s highest calling — and greatest moment of art — was playing the role of straight man during promos.

What Phil Hartman was for improv geeks, Okerlund was to wrestling personalities. During a promo, sweaty wrestlers observed by the viewer at a distance in the ring in Okerlund’s hands became gonzo, intimately felt TV talent. To use a sports cliche: Cutting a promo with Mean Gene Okerlund didn’t build character, it revealed it.

For instance: If The Ultimate Warrior was impossible to control — and by Okerlund’s own admission in interviews later, he was — Okerlund’s exasperation made it apparent all without losing the spot.

If a wrestler was flagging, he poked and prodded until they woke up. If they missed a plot point, he went back and effortlessly redirected. If they made a huge error — like the one relative newcomer Booker T made in legend Hulk Hogan’s direction during a 1996 WCW promo — Okerlund rapidly and gracefully got the scene back on track without fuss.

It might have been a disaster, but Okerlund made sure live disasters were brief — and in doing so, likely helped Booker T dodge any serious or lasting fallout.

Not all of it took obvious effort, but Okerlund worked smart. If they could go for days on their own — like Hulk Hogan did — he simply got out of the way and silently played the official face of Serious Authority.

Hogan is a good example of what Mean Gene did at his best. If a wrestler played along, Okerlund could play him into legendary status, all while keeping eye contact with the viewer just enough to say: I am here, and as the Serious Person I am vouching personally for just how serious this all is.

Addendum: He could do that while saying“even if the man next to me is Randy Macho Man Savage.”

The Macho Man, more than even Hogan, might be the great example of Okerlund’s on-screen powers. No one pushed Okerlund’s capabilities as a straight man further than Savage. The gravel-voiced wrestler took long, twitchy pauses without warning during his promos. He took bizarre metaphorical off-ramps, talked over prompts, and blew past questions and plot points. Sometimes, Savage reduced Okerlund to little more than a scowling, tuxedoed prop.

Even with candy piled on his head, Okerlund holds equal weight on-screen the whole time. Macho Man Randy Savage was already bizarre enough on his own — but in contrast to Mean Gene, the Macho Man’s bronzer and chains gleam a little more lightly, his voice and shaky gestures vibrate and growl with a bit more alarm and urgency. If Randy Savage is the dish, then Mean Gene is the plate, the salt, and the tablecloth the Macho Man tucks into his tank top like a huge napkin.

Mean Gene Okerlund was, in his best moments on TV, the contrast to the garish color palette of professional wrestling, a frame that made every color brighter and more definite.

Sometimes Okerlund wore a tuxedo for big events like Wrestlemania and Summerslam. A tux worn to a wrestling match is the kind of cartoonish editorial choice wrestling almost almost always makes when it comes to authority, or power, or wealth, or anything, really. The wealthy don’t wear minks everywhere like Ric Flair did. The powerful don’t walk around firing everyone theatrically like Attitude Era Mr. McMahon did, and the strong don’t tip over ambulances like Braun Strowman still does from time to time.

The master of ceremonies doesn’t really wear a tuxedo all the time, either. Gene Okerlund did, and always managed to make it a funny and serious look at the same time. It was funny because Okerlund was about to spend three hours in that tux interviewing ranting, oily men in their underwear on camera like it was the most important thing in the world. That was the gag, after all — this was a yokel of a sport, overdressing like a rube for its own working-class prom.

Yet the tux was also a serious choice. Why? Because Gene Okerlund, looking straight at the camera without a smile, came across as a gentleman the instant he opened his mouth. And if he was here, jokes and scowls and all, well: Were we all not gentlemen and ladies then, enjoying the sport of kings? The rumble was royal as long as he was there.

Santa Clara, the worst National Championship venue available

0
0

The people in charge put college football’s biggest game in a shrine to blandness on the side of the country opposite the teams who are good at college football.

The College Football Playoff final will happen Monday in Santa Clara, California. The scene: The home of the San Francisco 49ers and site of several casually attended Pac-12 title games, Levi’s Stadium, a modern facility just a few miles from the headquarters of the most powerful tech companies in the world.

It has no friends, and everyone hates it. No one should feel bad about this, try to befriend it, or defend it.

Levi’s Stadium deserves to eat lunch by itself crying.

Getting there is bad.

Levi’s sits a full hour in traffic away from San Francisco, just at the southern point of the Bay that looks like the tapering business end of the lower intestine. The traffic is appropriately craptacular on a good day, and the parking around the stadium limited and expensive.

Playing there is bad.

This is mostly because of the cursed turf, a surface openly reviled by visiting teams.

In 2015, Ravens kicker Justin Tucker fell into a mini-sinkhole on a field goal attempt.

In 2016, after both the Broncos and Panthers struggled to find the right cleats for it during the Super Bowl, Denver cornerback Aqib Talib called it “terrible.”

Pete Carroll called it “lousy” last month, over four years after the stadium’s debut.

Watching football there is bad.

Atmosphere is non-existent, as the massive, Borg-like block of hermetically sealed luxury suites dominates one side of the stadium. In the afternoon, the glass fronts of the suites reflect sun into the cheap seats across the way.

When it isn’t a billion dollar microwave that slow-roasts half its patrons, Levi’s Stadium has all the character of a freshly built county prison.

For some reason, the National Championship will be played there. Why?

There are some solid guesses.

The Pac-12 title game venue is within leisurely driving distance of the Pac-12’s extremely expensive headquarters in downtown San Francisco. It’s reasonable to guess that conference commissioner Larry Scott’s lobbying — combined with the 49ers desperately trying to book events and offering a boatload of perks and incentives — landed the game.

In a rotation likely to be heavy on Southern/Eastern cities like Miami, Houston, New Orleans, and Atlanta, putting a title game in Pac-12 country seemed only seemed fair.

That only explains why the people in charge of the Playoff might have done it, not why a sane person concerned with actually putting on a good game might’ve.

There are two West Coast sites in the rotation up to 2025: Santa Clara in 2019 and Los Angeles in 2023. Los Angeles has a long, vibrant college football history, one of its top venues in the Rose Bowl, and it generally supports at least one of its teams. (USC. It’s mostly USC.) It’s hosted other big college football things before, and did so well.

Even with Stanford’s decade-long renaissance, the Bay Area doesn’t compare. The Pac-12 games in Levi’s have been wonderful places to hear what football sounds like once the pesky sounds of fans have been eliminated from the equation.

It’s not a hotbed for the sport, so much so that during the mid-2000s when schools were jamming in seats to expand stadium capacity, Stanford downsized its stadium from 89,000 seats to 50,000. Cal did the same in 2010, eliminating almost 10,000 seats and reducing to a 63,000-seat stadium.

If locals won’t turn out to watch two teams from Alabama and South Carolina — and there is very little evidence to suggest they will — then that leaves fans to fly across the country and make this look something like an actual event.

 TicketIQ

After adding up flights that start around a thousand dollars apiece, hotels at a bare minimum of $150 a night, transportation, and food, a fan traveling to the game is looking at two grand easy ... before the ticket even enters the equation.

There is some good news: the ticket might end up being the cheapest part.

Prices have plunged as the game approaches, currently about a fourth of the previous year’s game in Atlanta between Alabama and Georgia. It might not even sell out, leaving a very real chance that someone could get into the game Monday night for face value.

The bad news: None of this will change the thinking of anyone in charge of college football, because no one is in charge of college football.

No one is really accountable for the quality of the Playoff. If no one’s accountable, then no one has to own up for the shitty surroundings. ESPN and the FBS conferences make their money regardless of the player and fan experience, and the committee’s job of matching up four teams was done a month earlier.

This happens for a couple of really stupid reasons.

The first: The waning but still disproportionate power of the Pac-12. For some reason or another, the nominal Power 5 conference gets big games on the West Coast despite winning only one Playoff game in the five years of the format, consistently racing the ACC to the bottom of the Power 5 in attendance, posting negligible television ratings in the regular season and conference championships, losing bowl games, and winning a grand total of three outright national titles in the last 50 years. (All held by USC.)

When asked why, Pac-12 commissioner Scott said:

“We do try to rotate this event,” said Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott, who served on the College Football Playoff Site Selection committee. “Generally the West Coast location has some appeal.”

That’s true if we are talking about the Rose Bowl in Los Angeles.

It’s not true if we’re talking about Santa Clara or the Bay Area, where the Pac-12 for eleventeen EXTREMELY DISRUPTIVE reasons decided to put its network headquarters and offices. EXTREMELY DISRUPTIVE in this case should be heard with whooshing space sounds playing at the same time, and be interpreted as meaning “expensive for no reason besides the illusion of prestige.”

The second reason is worse: The people in charge of college football don’t really care and don’t have to pretend to care. When the time came to stage a title game for TV, they picked a nice spot for a corporate junket — we’ll go to wine country the weekend before! WINE COUNTRY! — but a terrible place for college football. They’ll have some of those patron-cooking skyboxes and shuttle service to the stadium and will blame fans for not showing up, if they have the energy to think about it at all.

They won’t have to think about how turning the National Championship into a minor league Super Bowl invites all of the sterile mediocrity of the NFL experience on purpose — by design, even. The idea, in the end, is to play a game in a biddable nowhere, accountable to neither community nor team, reminiscent of nothing and easily sold as ad space.

In that sense, Santa Clara is perfect.

It’s already a nowhere with nothing to remember it by, just unpleasant enough to make people want to forget anything they accidentally remembered.

College football already has a deep menu of impractical home and/or neutral site destinations. These are either small college towns short on capacity but long on personality — hello, Pullman and good morning, Starkville — or huge, usually warm sprawls. They’re all bad ideas in their own ways, but unlike bad idea Santa Clara, they’re distinctly college football bad ideas.

The game itself should be excellent, but even the Bay Area’s one asset, the weather, is cooperating with the plan to make the location as unmemorable as possible. It’s been in the low 50s and raining most of the week and will be around 55 degrees and overcast for kickoff Monday night.

In other words, it’s the perfect temperature for a Santa Clara football game: lukewarm.

Santa Clara, the worst National Championship venue available

0
0

The people in charge put college football’s biggest game in a shrine to blandness on the side of the country opposite the teams who are good at college football.

The College Football Playoff final will happen Monday in Santa Clara, California. The scene: The home of the San Francisco 49ers and site of several casually attended Pac-12 title games, Levi’s Stadium, a modern facility just a few miles from the headquarters of the most powerful tech companies in the world.

It has no friends, and everyone hates it. No one should feel bad about this, try to befriend it, or defend it.

Levi’s Stadium deserves to eat lunch by itself crying.

Getting there is bad.

Levi’s sits a full hour in traffic away from San Francisco, just at the southern point of the Bay that looks like the tapering business end of the lower intestine. The traffic is appropriately craptacular on a good day, and the parking around the stadium limited and expensive.

Playing there is bad.

This is mostly because of the cursed turf, a surface openly reviled by visiting teams.

In 2015, Ravens kicker Justin Tucker fell into a mini-sinkhole on a field goal attempt.

In 2016, after both the Broncos and Panthers struggled to find the right cleats for it during the Super Bowl, Denver cornerback Aqib Talib called it “terrible.”

Pete Carroll called it “lousy” last month, over four years after the stadium’s debut.

Watching football there is bad.

Atmosphere is non-existent, as the massive, Borg-like block of hermetically sealed luxury suites dominates one side of the stadium. In the afternoon, the glass fronts of the suites reflect sun into the cheap seats across the way.

When it isn’t a billion dollar microwave that slow-roasts half its patrons, Levi’s Stadium has all the character of a freshly built county prison.

For some reason, the National Championship will be played there. Why?

There are some solid guesses.

The Pac-12 title game venue is within leisurely driving distance of the Pac-12’s extremely expensive headquarters in downtown San Francisco. It’s reasonable to guess that conference commissioner Larry Scott’s lobbying — combined with the 49ers desperately trying to book events and offering a boatload of perks and incentives — landed the game.

In a rotation likely to be heavy on Southern/Eastern cities like Miami, Houston, New Orleans, and Atlanta, putting a title game in Pac-12 country seemed only seemed fair.

That only explains why the people in charge of the Playoff might have done it, not why a sane person concerned with actually putting on a good game might’ve.

There are two West Coast sites in the rotation up to 2025: Santa Clara in 2019 and Los Angeles in 2023. Los Angeles has a long, vibrant college football history, one of its top venues in the Rose Bowl, and it generally supports at least one of its teams. (USC. It’s mostly USC.) It’s hosted other big college football things before, and did so well.

Even with Stanford’s decade-long renaissance, the Bay Area doesn’t compare. The Pac-12 games in Levi’s have been wonderful places to hear what football sounds like once the pesky sounds of fans have been eliminated from the equation.

It’s not a hotbed for the sport, so much so that during the mid-2000s when schools were jamming in seats to expand stadium capacity, Stanford downsized its stadium from 89,000 seats to 50,000. Cal did the same in 2010, eliminating almost 10,000 seats and reducing to a 63,000-seat stadium.

If locals won’t turn out to watch two teams from Alabama and South Carolina — and there is very little evidence to suggest they will — then that leaves fans to fly across the country and make this look something like an actual event.

 TicketIQ

After adding up flights that start around a thousand dollars apiece, hotels at a bare minimum of $150 a night, transportation, and food, a fan traveling to the game is looking at two grand easy ... before the ticket even enters the equation.

There is some good news: the ticket might end up being the cheapest part.

Prices have plunged as the game approaches, currently about a fourth of the previous year’s game in Atlanta between Alabama and Georgia. It might not even sell out, leaving a very real chance that someone could get into the game Monday night for face value.

The bad news: None of this will change the thinking of anyone in charge of college football, because no one is in charge of college football.

No one is really accountable for the quality of the Playoff. If no one’s accountable, then no one has to own up for the shitty surroundings. ESPN and the FBS conferences make their money regardless of the player and fan experience, and the committee’s job of matching up four teams was done a month earlier.

This happens for a couple of really stupid reasons.

The first: The waning but still disproportionate power of the Pac-12. For some reason or another, the nominal Power 5 conference gets big games on the West Coast despite winning only one Playoff game in the five years of the format, consistently racing the ACC to the bottom of the Power 5 in attendance, posting negligible television ratings in the regular season and conference championships, losing bowl games, and winning a grand total of three outright national titles in the last 50 years. (All held by USC.)

When asked why, Pac-12 commissioner Scott said:

“We do try to rotate this event,” said Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott, who served on the College Football Playoff Site Selection committee. “Generally the West Coast location has some appeal.”

That’s true if we are talking about the Rose Bowl in Los Angeles.

It’s not true if we’re talking about Santa Clara or the Bay Area, where the Pac-12 for eleventeen EXTREMELY DISRUPTIVE reasons decided to put its network headquarters and offices. EXTREMELY DISRUPTIVE in this case should be heard with whooshing space sounds playing at the same time, and be interpreted as meaning “expensive for no reason besides the illusion of prestige.”

The second reason is worse: The people in charge of college football don’t really care and don’t have to pretend to care. When the time came to stage a title game for TV, they picked a nice spot for a corporate junket — we’ll go to wine country the weekend before! WINE COUNTRY! — but a terrible place for college football. They’ll have some of those patron-cooking skyboxes and shuttle service to the stadium and will blame fans for not showing up, if they have the energy to think about it at all.

They won’t have to think about how turning the National Championship into a minor league Super Bowl invites all of the sterile mediocrity of the NFL experience on purpose — by design, even. The idea, in the end, is to play a game in a biddable nowhere, accountable to neither community nor team, reminiscent of nothing and easily sold as ad space.

In that sense, Santa Clara is perfect.

It’s already a nowhere with nothing to remember it by, just unpleasant enough to make people want to forget anything they accidentally remembered.

College football already has a deep menu of impractical home and/or neutral site destinations. These are either small college towns short on capacity but long on personality — hello, Pullman and good morning, Starkville — or huge, usually warm sprawls. They’re all bad ideas in their own ways, but unlike bad idea Santa Clara, they’re distinctly college football bad ideas.

The game itself should be excellent, but even the Bay Area’s one asset, the weather, is cooperating with the plan to make the location as unmemorable as possible. It’s been in the low 50s and raining most of the week and will be around 55 degrees and overcast for kickoff Monday night.

In other words, it’s the perfect temperature for a Santa Clara football game: lukewarm.

The process of Alabama falling apart

0
0

Clemson, Alabama, and circumstance all forced errors by the Tide, and then football’s tightest machine fell to pieces.

00:00

Nick missed the shoulder completely. Complete whiff. Pregame omens are iffy at best, but after Bevo tried to kill Uga prior to a Longhorn beatdown of Georgia, I believe all of them. Clear sign of early trouble for Alabama.

FIRST QUARTER, 13:20

Okay maybe just a fluke, since A.J. Terrell got possessed by the spirit of Ed Reed here and just stole a ball. When Reed decides to possess a DB, there’s no choice but to let it happen, and that goes for everyone, Tua Tagovailoa included.

Watch Terrell’s head snap back when he bolts. Consider making any decision in life this quickly or with this much certainty.

That’s a dog stealing a steak off the grill. You might get burned, but the payoff is dinner.

This happens, though. Might be big game nerves. It’s one mistake by one player in an aggressive passing attack. Machine’s not broken? Machine’s not broken.

11:03

Rushing three against a freshman QB on third-and-14 seems like a weird decision for Alabama? Maybe the thought was that no one would make a mistake in the secondary, and even if they did, a freshman would not be able to get the ball to Tee Higgins on time with eight in coverage.

About that!

Reaching for explanations is the thing to do after something like Clemson hammering Alabama into sheets of cheap scrap metal happens, and it’s what I’m sort of trying to do here. This explains this. This decision, while dumb in hindsight, made sense on paper.

Nothing about this game makes sense without yelling in wonderment. Clemson did nothing on first and second down all game, then hit third-and-longs like they were nothing. Clemson went 10 of 15 on them, including this bomb.

Look at the speed of recognition by Trevor Lawrence. That’s practically a hiccup by the safety, but before he recovers, the ball is over his head.

Every time Alabama left something unattended, Clemson stole it without a nanosecond of hesitation. It was hard to see that in the first quarter. Sometimes Alabama had given up long plays to start games, like against Ole Miss and Arkansas. Those games ended up 62-7 and 65-31 blowouts.

Still cool. Little shook, but cool. Like Keith Jackson would say: just two heavyweights trading haymakers.

6:23

It started here.

There’s something terrifying about watching a prepared team unravel. It’s sometimes hard to even realize it’s happening — maybe they’re just sleepy? Maybe they didn’t take their meds? I bet they have to poop.

People who are typically ultra-prepared absolutely crumble when their preparation fails them. There’s nothing left but to improvise, and Alabama has never been good at that.

A failure in the kicking game is the simplest step toward collapse. Special teams is the paperwork of football. It should be filed on time, a matter of procedure. When it fails, it feels like blind negligence, because ... anyone can hit an extra point, right?

It’s particularly bad for Alabama because:

This isn’t when panic filled Bama’s mind. Panic did text to say it was on the way over, though.

Clemson had something to do with Bama’s other errors to this point. It goes both ways when good teams play. But this is an unforced error. More will pile up as this machine becomes genuinely shook.

SECOND QUARTER, 14:18

The freaky chill had settled in, and things were definitely off. When Alabama made simple mistakes it should have shrugged off, it doubled down on new mistakes.

That crept atop the chain of command, eventually forcing errors seemingly by design.

The crucial drive was Alabama’s fourth possession late in the first quarter. Trailing 14-13 and coming off two touchdown drives, Alabama seemed poised to do that thing they do, where they put down a challenge by crushing with the run game and throwing a ball up to Jerry Jeudy, DeVonta Smith, or any other instant problem solver.

That thing where Alabama dares the other team to be as good as Alabama at the line of scrimmage, says where the ball is going, and puts the ball in that place.

For a minute, that was what Alabama did. Then, after ramming the ball to the one on first down with Damien Harris, Alabama called three more plays.

MMMM BEEFY

Second and goal: A fake dive/toss left pitch out of this tackle over formation. They’d used this formation earlier in the game to throw a TD to a wide open tight end. That tight end’s name is Hale Hentges. If someone with that name is not a used car baron or Alabama agriculture commissioner in 30 years, something has gone wrong.

Alabama had been running hard to the right for solid gains. This is kind of surprising. Bama’s left tackle, Jonah Williams, is considered one of the best in the country.

Then again, Williams was matched up with Clemson’s Clelin Ferrell. Ferrell spent a good part of the night snapping Williams back like a Pez dispenser, pressuring Tagovailoa, and rerouting runs.

So Bama might have felt better about running right, behind tackle Jedrick Wills and guard Alex Leatherwood and away from First-Team All-American Ferrell.

But when Willis false started on second and one — forced errors become unforced errors — it became second and six.

Second and goal, plus five yards: Tagovailoa throws a quick screen to Henry Ruggs III. DB Isaiah Simmons wraps it up.

Third and goal: Shovel pass to Harris, stopped in the backfield by defensive end Austin Bryant.

With much of the game on the line and in two different short yardage situations, Alabama ran one stuffed run up the middle, one misdirection away from the strength of formation, and two quick pass plays that went nowhere. When ass had to be moved, Alabama didn’t trust its line to move ass.

That was the pattern all night. Clemson’s defense gave up yards, but not when it counted, flustering Alabama into quick passes and misdirection. One team punched the ball in on the ground in Santa Clara — it was Clemson, which scored twice on Travis Etienne runs.

That is shocking, but there’s more. Alabama spent most of 2018 hitting defenses with lighting strikes. Alabama only had 12 drives all year in which the offense ran 11 plays or more, and Tagovailoa was only on the field for six of them. Ten of those 12 drives were longer than 50 yards.

This was an 11-play, six-minute drive to get just 45 yards and three points.

Clemson’s defense made a few massive mistakes. The Tigers gave up a howler of a TD to open the game. They let Alabama have 443 total yards and 23 first downs.

Yet at the crux, Clemson turned Alabama’s track meet offense into Kansas State, forcing it to plod along for cheap threes.

After this, Alabama won’t score for the rest of the game. Clemson cooked Alabama like a chicken breast — as in, Bama was done within 16 minutes at high heat — even if we didn’t know it yet.

8:05

[/run alabama.exe]

[FATAL ERROR UPDATE ALABAMA.EXE AND RESTART]

[/update alabama.exe]

[RUN TUA.EXE TO UPDATE ALABAMA.EXE]

[/run tua.exe]

[FILE NOT FOUND, RUN ALABAMA.EXE TO UPDATE TUA.EXE]

[/run alabama.exe]

[FATAL ERROR UPDATE ALABAMA.EXE AND RESTART]

THIRD QUARTER

Alabama was already down 31-16, clearly incapable of catching a break, but the contagion of mistakes is about to turn into a full-blown plague.

9:53

A team running a fake that takes the ball back an additional six yards from the line of scrimmage on what is already a fourth-and-6: a broken team.

A team that does this into the teeth of a regular defensive formation is a disintegrating Terminator running through the options menu while the lights go out.

There’s only so much one can say in the face of madness.

Props to kicker Joseph Bulovas for hitting the hole like Lorenzo Neal, seeing Christian Wilkins, and offering a light shove while moving out of the way. If Saban wants his players to treat the game like a business, sometimes they are going to make business decisions.

8:26

A quarterback is the only athlete with 12 legs and 12 arms — i.e., only as good as the offensive line allows him to be.

Clemson’s starting line got an ovation when it exited the field with under three minutes left. They earned it, playing out of their minds, picking up every random blitz, and dumping Alabama’s front four. Lawrence did not get sacked once.

Even when Clemson’s line allowed pressure, Lawrence either climbed up in the pocket (which is good!) or threw off his back foot (which is bad, unless you’re Lawrence).

I don’t even know what you do as a lineman here. You’re flailing away at a 6’5 missile platform who’s impervious to fluster. His eyes are downfield even though you’re bearing down on him. The ball comes out about 10 feet off the ground, almost impossible to bat. It’s going where it’s supposed to go, in a hurry.

This happened after Alabama opted for a doomed fake field goal on fourth-and-6 while already down by two scores, deciding to have the kicker block instead of having a Heisman finalist quarterback throw.

So this score put Alabama into beclowning territory, down three scores in the biggest possible spotlight, turning this from a close loss into something laughable, brutal, and humiliating.

But it gets worse.

Justyn Ross, the freshman who caught this pass and ended all hope, is from Phenix City, Alabama. Alabama offered the four-star receiver a scholarship. Ross could have been catching passes from Tagovailoa in this game.

Instead, there he is in Clemson orange, mercifully pulling the plug on Alabama’s malfunctioning machine.


Great teams taunt

0
0

Don’t ever listen to the Humility Police.

Good teams celebrate — but great teams taunt.

The Humility Police will try to tell you otherwise. They will tell you not to plant flags or make the hand signal of a very sensitive large university’s football program. They will tell you not to high-step, dance, or fall backward into the end zone as if it were a huge pool filled with water, floaty toys, and touchdowns.

desean

DeSean Jackson was right, and the Humility Police are wrong. The end zone IS a pool of touchdowns. In order to plunge in and grab them, one needs to be a champion with skill, imagination, and the giving heart of a taunter.

Taunting is for winners and people of distinction.

This is why.

Taunting is generous.

Yes, that is the exact word. The Humility Police will say taunting is an act of selfishness. This is — like everything the Humility Police say — a lie, a manipulation. They want athletes to give as little as possible to the audience, to get the game to the next commercial break, to be a compliant part of a machine, isolated from the crowd and the moment.

Athletes could do that. Or they could be like Marshawn Lynch, a craftsman who made the best run of his life, then decided the customer needed just a little bit more for their entertainment dollar.

Taunting invites the team, the crowd, and even the opposition to share in the presence of greatness. Taunting is a gift, which athletes create in otherwise blank, procedural periods. The taunt is one of the few genuine moments the public gets with the athletes we watch.

It’s a sincere crotch grab in the direction of the opponent. That’s special, especially if you’re a Seattle fan who pays tribute by doing this during TDs in backyard games or as you’re flopping onto the couch at the end of the day.

Taunting is petty, and petty is an endlessly renewable source of energy.

Petty is the fusion reactor of sports energy sources. Once it gets going, it practically sustains itself. Petty turns tiny grudges into the sun, burning clean thanks to just a few atoms of disrespect.

Petty is so powerful that it continually inspires weird, middle-aged fruit ascetics (who’ve already won five Super Bowls) to aim taunts at completely fictional people who counted out Touchdown Tom.

View this post on Instagram

W

A post shared by Tom Brady (@tombrady) on

Even the do-your-jobbingest of #doyourjob teams taunts — albeit by using a song from almost two decades ago and lying about being an underdog.

This team had almost won its latest Super Bowl 12 months earlier, was on its way to yet another, and has long had Hall of Fame shoo-ins at coach and quarterback. The Patriots taunting like this is like Goldman Sachs using “Started from the Bottom” as its hold music or a bank foreclosing on a house with a note reading HATERS SAID WE COULDN’T DO IT. I apologize for giving the finance industry these ideas.

Taunting creates an edge.

A marginal edge, but an edge nonetheless. This seems like something football — a sport obsessed with tiny margins — would embrace.

Every basic dude on the planet who can inaccurately quote Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday talking about adding up inches to win games: how many of them fail to consider adding up all those inches when it comes to demoralizing the enemy and energizing your teammates via taunting? How many run to the Humility Police? How many subscribe to the Joe Rogan Experience? All of them?

How many of those serious dudes would deny the importance of the 2007 Georgia end zone celebration against Florida, arguably the most hilarious taunting effort of all time?

The No. 18 Bulldogs keyed a 42-30 upset of No. 11 Florida by sending the entire team out to dance in the end zone after the Bulldogs’ first touchdown, a move that put the entire team’s asses on the line. Either Georgia would validate the swagger by winning a huge rivalry game in brazen fashion, or they’d end up a legendary laughingstock.

They upped the stakes from the jump. Georgia was crazy enough to take a hundred unsportsmanlike penalties just to prove a point, or at least committed enough to fake it.

After this win, Georgia lost the next three games in this series, probably because they did not send the entire team out to dance in the end zone in any of those three games.

See? Taunting works.

Taunting keeps a team loose.

Losing to Wake Forest 12-3 in inexcusable fashion? Former Louisville DB and current Green Bay Packer Jaire Alexander has your back.

Louisville went on to win by a 44-12 landslide.

Some might suggest the Cardinals had help because they were fed plays by a mole inside Wake Forest’s athletic department. (Not a joke, this really happened, someone tried to cheat in order to beat the 2016 Wake Forest Demon Deacons.) We know what kept Louisville in this game for real, though: sarcastic and miraculously unpenalized prancing.

Taunting is a habit of highly successful athletes.

Tim Tebow, Heisman Trophy winner and first-round NFL Draft pick, taunting LSU fans who’d gotten ahold of his phone number. How was he drafted in the first round? It happened, and that is what counts most here.

CAM

Cam Newton, Heisman Trophy winner, No. 1 pick, and 2015 NFL MVP.

Baker Mayfield, Heisman winner and No. 1 pick. Please note the name of this video. Exhale a deep and satisfying chortle as one considers the mysteries of the internet and the amazing people who use it every day.

Seven-time Pro Bowler and all-world receiver Antonio Brown, seen taunting Indiana. He thought someone needed to do this even though Indiana football is already taunted constantly by the universe as a whole.

Super Bowl champion Golden Tate.

Super Bowl champion Golden Tate.

Super Bowl champion Golden Tate.

And finally,

... Super Bowl champion Golden Tate.

Taunting is a habit of highly successful people — even those who go pro in something other than sports.

Tell ‘em about it, Anthon Samuel of Bowling Green.

Lots of power-conference rivals have mimicked the Gator Chomp while playing in The Swamp. But Samuel did so as a massive underdog with a tied score in the third quarter. What fueled this greatness?

“I think what made me do that was the lack of respect we had heading into the game,” he says. “We were the super underdogs. They had us picked to lose by 24 points. And we didn’t feel any respect from the players, either.”

The native of Miami-Dade County had been training for this moment his whole life.

“Growing up I was always a UM fan. The Gators were not my favorite team.”

When he rushed those 12 those yards in front of an uneasy crowd, he had no choice.

“In the moment, I got carried away.”

Bowling Green ended up losing, sure. But taunting is rarely about the result. It was about paying back Florida, about something beyond the score. His Falcons weren’t supposed to be within striking distance, and yet they were.

The box score says Bowling Green never led after the first quarter. Box scores sometimes lie. For about 15 seconds after Samuel scored, Bowling Green led by 35 points in the hearts and minds of anyone watching.

The refs hit him with a 15-yard unsportsmanlike conduct. His coaches chewed him out because they had to. Does Samuel regret it?

“It was 100 percent worth it.”

Samuel works in retail management for Macy’s in South Florida and has his master’s degree from Florida International. He’s a successful man with a lot going on outside his glory days. Yet when I asked about the last time someone brought up The Chomp to him unprompted, he laughed.

“About a week and a half ago. There’s a GIF out there. Sometimes they send it to me.”

Taunting is a habit of highly successful people in every sport, now that I think of it.

Winners in the NHL do it.

America’s greatest soccer players practice the dark art of taunting.

dempsey

The greats of the NBA do it all the time. By greats, I mean“Everyone, but especially Larry Bird.”

During the game, Bird took a shot from the beyond the arc right in front of Person, who was sitting on the bench, and right after releasing the rock, Larry told him, “Merry fucking Christmas!” Then, the ball went into the hoop.

Taunts after dunks have been customary since at least the 1990s.

The NBA is so good that players have taunted during plays that haven’t even finished yet.

Even overly polite, custom-regimented baseball has its quiet moments of shit-talking in motion. Bat-flipping is complex in its meanings, but they’re all variations on “kiss my ass.”

In conclusion: good teams celebrate, but great teams?

The Rams, like many great teams, don’t wait for the final score to stake their claim. Great teams never do.

Even the ancestors agree. After all, the 1985 Bears released the “Super Bowl Shuffle” almost two full months before they would meet the Patriots in Super Bowl XX. The Bears would win by 36 points, scoring a rushing TD with a 350-pound defensive lineman just because they could.

Taunting is just pre-winning, a down payment on a victory. Those who pay that mortgage off are exempt from the Humility Police forever.

Reviewing almost every frame of the NFL’s Super Bowl ad

0
0

Let’s rank everyone in the this commercial. Ed Reed is number one.

The only way to really run through the full scope of the best ad at the Super Bowl— the NFL’s chaotic, crashing ode to itself and it’s 100th season — is to review almost every frame of it. There’s that much in it, so much that I feel like we can all skip right past Roger Goodell completely and get to the players.

Speaking of ignoring Roger Goodell!

Alvin Kamara and Drew Brees are smiling because they got to read the script ahead of time and know what just happened to the Rams.

Any frame with Marshawn in it is a quality frame. I chose this one because it speaks to me on a personal level, because this is exactly how I look at cake. This is also how Marshawn Lynch looks at cake, both as someone with a well-documented sweet tooth and as a self-described prestige NFL “Fat back”. I both want the huge football cake for myself, and for Marshawn, golden football and decorum be damned.

Good storytelling is about vividly portrayed and familiar characters, the things they want, and the struggle to bridge the distance between them. That’s all this is right here: For want of cake, Marshawn Lynch upsets the world. (Worth it, because: Cake.)

Sometimes when going through casting options, it’s important to avoid overthinking things. Which player will definitely throw societal norms out first and start a brawl at a formal event? Yes, check the box, that is Ndamukong Suh, no need for second options here.

Follow-up: Which player will not, under any circumstances, get involved in that brawl because his mom might hear about it and yell at him? Eli Manning, just pencil that in and don’t entertain other choices. He had the role before we even started shooting.

Okay so you know that thing directors do sometimes where they don’t tell the actors what’s going to happen so the reactions are real? That’s what’s happening here. Mike Singletary is not acting, and has instead just done what he always does when someone rolls an unattended ball onto the ground. It’s made his life hell and destroyed his social life.

Please do not laugh at Mike Singletary or his crippling and overdeveloped football instincts. It’s not funny for him, or for his fatigued and embarrassed family.

Christian McCaffrey looks like he’s got a precious idol in his hand and is about to say “We have to stop meeting like this, Dr. Jones”. No, actually, he doesn’t think this belongs in a museum.

Really just wanted to point out how beautifully framed each shot here is. Renaissance paintings kiss my entire ass, look at that composition and range of human emotions. I’ve been saying Rembrandt is trash for years and will continue to do so when the modern competition is burying him on basic crap like Super Bowl commercials. Step up and buy like one light bulb and then paint something I can see, you cheap bastard.

Tag yourself here, this is me.

This ad is a reminder that Joe Montana is just extremely game at all times. Max effort in every role, like when he played himself in a skit on Saturday Night Live back in 1987 and repeatedly used the word “masturbate” on network television in a time when people didn’t get jobs because they said it out loud.

I haven’t watched Saturday Night Live in years. However, I think it’s safe to assume it’s only gotten better with time, and that this is something everyone agrees on universally as a matter of public opinion.

Again, this man is not acting here. I haven’t followed Jerry Rice on Twitter for years just to tell you he’s a) not trying out for a team here and b) that he isn’t convinced he wouldn’t be a 1,000 yard receiver in 2019’s NFL. Pump-fake around him in public and see if that arm doesn’t fly up to show you just how open he is at the California Pizza Kitchen at 11:45 am on a Tuesday.

Michael Irvin is the Voice of Reason here. Michael Irvin once attacked a teammate sitting in a barber’s chair with a pair of scissors. I see you, ironic screenwriter. I see everything you’re doing here, and appreciate it.

That is definitely Deion high-stepping...

...but there is no way Deion took a hit for this ad because a) CGI is an amazing technology and b) Deion is a smart man, and not a dumb one.

On the other hand, there is no way Brian Urlacher— star of Netflix’s original anime Copgod: Father of Cops— did not lay this hit himself. Not a chance.

I’m torn. Part of me wants to pay the 1972 Dolphins zero attention because they played football when there were ten plays and everyone weighed about as much as the average American in 2019 weighs.

Then again, as an aspiring old bastard, I’m very much respectful of stunting on an old record no matter how wobbly it might be in context. Also, I’ve always agreed with the ‘72 Dolphins champagne is a light, refreshing beverage suitable not just for formal events, but for a whole host of social occasions, too.

It’s fraught, so let’s just put this right here in the middle because that’s pretty much where the Miami Dolphins end up in most football-related things.

Todd Gurley averaged one touch every two minutes in this ad. In the actual Super Bowl, Todd Gurley had just eleven touches overall in Sean McVay’s game plan. If the director of this commercial had coached the Rams against the Patriots, Gurley would have touched the ball a projected thirty times, and the Rams would have had a better chance of winning.

QED: The director of this commercial is a better football coach than Sean McVay.

Barry Sanders makes two people miss in this despite having a tie knot the size of an artichoke. Legendary performance.

Emmitt Smith putting together a fully-rounded resume here: Superb line delivery (“Y’all know I have more yards than they do, right”), immaculately groomed facial hair that embraces his age, the butterfly bow-tie, a full flex with the earrings, and the impression that he’s not getting out of his chair unless the place is on fire AND out of champagne?

Flawless retired-and-loving it vibes here, no old NFL man does this with more assurance.

Peyton dunking on himself at every opportunity is his brand, and also distracts everyone from pointing out the subtle but still substantial comeback his hairline made over the last few years. Peyton also puts in a good nod early on in the ad, a hard thing to do when your head is the size of an obelisk. He’s not asked to do much here, but it’s craftsman-level work nonetheless.

Michael Strahan contributes little here but still gets a credit. Next entry is related to recent events.

Baker Mayfield calls Tom Brady old and wears a suit he got off an assassin in John Wick 2, and therefore gets an A for his work here. Tom Brady says he’s going to do something, takes off his rings, and stands up. He is seen doing nothing for the rest of the ad. This is why Tom Brady is the favorite player of every aspiring management-class person in the United States.

Again: I see you, subtly savage scriptwriter.

Rob Gronkowski looks like the heir to a bankrupt but still titled duchy somewhere obscure and European. Sure he’s a baron in title for the party invites — but he DJs in Miami three nights a week for the money. What I am saying: If Rob Gronkowski never opened his mouth, someone would hand him the keys to a dilapidated castle and the reins of a serviceable war horse without asking a single question.

Brian Urlacher with hair looks like the Father of all Cops, and also star of the Netflix anime original series Copgod: Father of Cops. He hasn’t touched his salad because “I don’t eat what my food eats”.

Ninja says hello to JuJu Smith-Schuster, the joke being that Juju played Fortnite with Ninja and Drake, and now in person does not recognize him. Juju Smith-Schuster may not really recognize Ninja here. That is fine because unlike every football player, Ninja makes a half mil a month playing video games without risk of heinous injury, and cannot be spotted or bothered on the street by 99.9 percent of Americans. WHO’S LAUGHING NOW, JOCKS?

Richard Sherman gets faked out by a child. Yes, a spectacularly gifted, pioneering, and award-winning football child. Yes, it’s also what the the script says. But if you’re a DB then that ball is yours. Why does she have the ball still, Richard? This is going to hurt during film study during the week, and I want it to, for you, Richard. I want it to sizzle. I want you to feel that burn so you don’t feel it again next week against Arizona.

A brief note to say: The play-fake by the director here to have Aaron Donald and not Ndamukong Suh be the answer to “Who will sack and hurt an old man?” is nifty. Suh would sack a senior citizen if he had to, I have no doubt of this. It’s just the role-switching and confounding of the viewer’s expectations is nice here, that’s all.

That’s three DBs — Patrick Peterson, Derwin James, and Jalen Ramsey— and two wide receivers, Odell Beckham, Jr and Larry Fitzgerald. So yes, Terry Bradshaw is throwing into what is at least double coverage. The accuracy overall here remains untouchable.

THE IMMACULATE RECEPTION HIT THE GROUND FIRST AND THE RAIDERS WERE SCREWED. STOP GLORIFYING THIS VULTURE AND HIS SIGNATURE PLAY. THE WHITE TIE IS NICE, THOUGH, I CAN’T EVEN DENY IT.

Saquon got his hurdle shot. The identity of the player completely embarrassed on the play isn’t clear, but I think it’s safe to assume on principle that he’s an Atlanta Falcon.

Patrick Mahomes being a blur throwing across his body works. So does Russell Wilson sitting down and saying “hi” politely while not getting up to join the mess. Russell Wilson is just waiting for dinner rolls and a chance to talk about a few of his favorite brands because he is Russell Wilson. Both players are deeply on brand here.

Odell gets a circus catch and crashes into a table. After watching this ad twenty times or so, this is general statement of fact: more media content should involve demolishing large cakes and elaborate banquet settings. This ad recognizes that, and I appreciate its solidarity in bringing back a hallowed American cinematic tradition of destroying expensive things for our entertainment. NO THIS IS NOT THE FILMMAKER’S CLEVER HIDDEN METACOMMENTARY ON FOOTBALL AS A WHOLE, WHY DO YOU ASK?

Von’s got a bigass cowboy hat, his eighties electrician glasses on, and the reverse white/black formal wear scheme going with an embroidered jacket. Top ten all by itself.

I want to conclude with this frame. This ad gives Ed Reed this giant hero shot like Ed is about to:

  1. Snatch a baby stroller out of the path of a rolling 18-wheeler
  2. Organize a successful casino heist
  3. Meet the love of his life, become the love of their life, and yet refuse to commit because doing so would compromise his integrity as America’s last line of defense against evil
  4. Fight Death in hand-to-hand combat and win

Ed Reed is not only capable of all of these things, but probably has done at least two of them in real life. The jacket alone would have merited top placement, but having him lurking only to strike when least expected? That’s doing your work in the film room, there. Top billing here, because Ed puts his heart in this shit.

Why Alabama’s dynasty will never really be over

0
0

After one of the Tide’s highest-rated recruiting classes ever, it’s clear their dominance goes way beyond Nick Saban.

On January 7, 2019, the University of Alabama’s football team had a very, very, very bad day.

The Crimson Tide lost by 28 points to the Clemson Tigers in the College Football Playoff Championship Game — easily the worst of the Nick Saban dynasty, both in terms of the scoreboard, and in terms of execution. Alabama’s impregnable defense blew coverages against Clemson’s passing attack, while its offense failed to score a single point in the second half.

It was the rarest of things for the Tide this decade: an unmitigated and complete disaster.

To anyone not versed in how Alabama football has worked over the past 12 years of dominance, the fallout from the game looked like a continuation of the collapse against Clemson. The coaching staff disintegrated in the weeks following the debacle. By the time the smoke cleared, the defensive coordinator was gone to the NFL, all but one member of the offensive staff had departed for other jobs, and just one member of the 2017 coaching staff remained.

This would normally indicate a program in crisis. But since 2007, only one coach has really mattered at Alabama: Nick Saban. Everyone else is just administration, and the resume is proof. Alabama has won five of the last 10 national championships, and six of the last 10 SEC Championships.

Those titles didn’t happen in streaks, either. Alabama, like clockwork, comes around about every two years to pick up its trophy. The three-year gap between the 2012 and 2015 national titles is as close as Alabama has gotten to a title drought in the past decade.

Alabama has lost just 20 games in Saban’s tenure, and 11 of those happened in the first three years. It will slip exactly 1.13 times a year, and only 1.13 times a year. The rest of the time — if a team doesn’t pull that golden ticket like Clemson did this January and hand Alabama its yearly loss — it will lose, and lose badly. Since 2008, Alabama has outscored opponents by an average margin of 22 points a game.

It’s not that they’ve just been better than the rest of college football. It’s that for a solid decade, the Tide has been three touchdowns better than the rest of college football. They’ve done it in a conference and region more rabidly devoted to the sport than any other, and done it with everyone else hiring their assistants, hoping to steal the secrets of the factory for their own.

Alabama has weathered this, seemingly with ease, all while being the best at what it does in a state not known for a whole lot of bests.

Alabama being great at making good college football teams is not a new thing. The program has had dynasties before: In the 1920s under coach Wallace Wade; and then in the 1960s and 70s under Paul “Bear” Bryant. But, this. This has been, is, and will likely continue to be different. Alabama has sustained success like no other previous Alabama dynasty, and like few other college football programs have ever done period.

That all ends up with the figure of Nick Saban, a singularly obsessed figure unlike any other coach of his generation. But it starts with the foundation — the place, the people in a state where football is built into the very power structure of Alabama itself — and lines up all the way from the state, to the school, to the field, and the players who make the program the rare monster that it is.

They had a bad day on January 7th. But the odds say that despite that, there won’t be many bad days to come. The program, after all, has averaged a national title every other year for the past decade. The Crimson Tide failing to win a national title in 2018, by the odds, is probably just an excuse to double down on them winning it all in 2019.

There are a lot of reasons why. We are gathered here today to look at the highest level resources that go into 11 of the best and biggest college football programs, and how one of them repeatedly stands out among all of them. It’s the one you think it is.

Your team does not have enough talent

They just don’t, and there are numbers to back that up. The first and greatest indicator of a college football team’s potential success is the amount of talent on that team. Since Nick Saban’s arrival in Tuscaloosa in 2007, no one has brought in more four- and five-star rated recruits than Alabama.

No one. That margin isn’t even a small one. Using 247sports.com’s class composite rankings, a comparison of Alabama to a cohort of 11 other elite college football teams that have consistently been in the top 10 from 2007 to 2019 shows that only Ohio State comes close, with the Buckeyes recruiting 192 total four- and five-star prospects since 2007.

In the same time span, Alabama signed 236 four/five star recruits. The 44-recruit difference between Ohio State and Alabama represents two full recruiting classes all by itself. That kind of depth and talent gap is massive — and it’s the one faced year to year by the only other program coming close to the Crimson Tide in talent acquisition.

If that is what Ohio State faces, imagine the uphill climb everyone else faces in competing with Alabama. It sounds like an exaggeration, but the backups really could be a starting first-string for most other teams in college football. The full second-string as listed by Alabama for the 2018 season on offense and defense includes just four players who did not rate as four- or five-star prospects. And one of those — three-star running back Josh Jacobs— was last seen piling up 158 yards of total offense against Oklahoma in the semifinal this season.

The talent gap is real and quantifiable. Unfortunately for everyone else, it is also growing. Alabama’s incoming class for 2019 is one of its best yet, and exactly the kind of results to expect when a believable and documented part of the recruiting pitch is winning a national title every other year.

TL;DR: Alabama finished first in the nation in recruiting again in 2019, and will probably do the same in 2020. The boot is still the boot, and it will resume stomping the face immediately.

Your team is not supported by the very special and unique state of Alabama

The University of Alabama’s dominance as a football program starts with its host state. It’s a myth that the state of Alabama is poor, or at least a half-truth. There’s money there, but it’s distributed unevenly, even by American standards. Alabama is 27th in total GDP, but it sits 47th in GDP per capita.

Translated in plain English: A few people in Alabama hold a lot of the state’s money.

A lot of those people and their businesses are tied one way or another into the University of Alabama — and by extension, they are tied to its football program, the network of people around it, and the businesses and institutions that keep it all going.

At the center of a lot of those connections is the biggest example of that interconnected power behind the program, Paul Bryant, Jr. — the son of Alabama’s legendary coach Paul “Bear” Bryant — who built his fortune through banking and a lucrative portfolio of investments including dog tracks, insurance, and catfish farming.

In 2005, Junior founded Bryant Bank, a project he describes as his “winding-down project.” Bryant Bank is not a titan of Alabama banking; it isn’t even one of the biggest banks in Alabama. But it is one of the most prominent organizations when it comes to roping in a lot of people near to the cause of Alabama football — people who also happen to be on the Board of Trustees for the University System of Alabama.

This is all enough to feed a thousand SEC message board conspiracies, but the facts are easy enough. A good number of people associated with the oversight of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa are already tied together through business.

Those people have money and shared interests, and don’t have to take much input on how they do things. The Board of Trustees is a self-nominating committee, and approves replacement members and chairs of committees itself. Unlike Auburn’s board of trustees, it is a closed system — one where 12 of the standing 15 members have close ties to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

A UAB source puts it bluntly: “They tend to mix what’s good with the football program with what’s good for the schools and what’s good for the state of Alabama.”

That small, committed group of people works with the wind at their backs when it comes to both Alabama football, and with the solid amount of local power they represent. There is no competition for Alabama football in terms of entertainment, and little incentive to stand in their way when they want something.

“There’s no pro teams here,” says the UAB source. “Nothing else. You don’t want to be on the bad side of the Alabama BOT in this place. It’s a pretty powerful group.”

That all creates a sweet spot for making and implementing decisions quickly. Sometimes too quickly, it turns out. See: the failed shutdown of UAB’s football program in 2014, a move the BOT initially tried, but had to backtrack on publicly.

Even with its failures, it is a small community of well-bankrolled people with common interests and little in their way. When those people think football should get something, they do everything they can to make sure they get it.

Your team does not spend enough money on football

Don’t tell me they do. I looked it up, and they don’t.

This is not a perfect measure, but it is a start. To get an idea of how big football is as a financial entity relative to the rest of the university, I took the overall expenditures for the university for the most recent available fiscal year. Then I took the claimed football program expenditures, and compared the football expenditures as a percentage of total university spending.

There are a lot of caveats and clarifications to be made here. The money football programs spend does not necessarily come from the university, and could and does come from a lot of other sources: donations from alumni; ticket sales; TV contract money; merchandise and licensing, etc. That money isn’t even necessarily counted as university expenditures sometimes due to athletics and booster organizations being housed under tax-exempt non-profit 501(c)3 organizations.

The chief purpose of the comparison is to paint some picture of how relatively huge or small a program is compared to the university’s other reasons for being a university. It’s not science, but it is a visualization of how much of the overall economy at a school is dominated by football.

The size of a university has a bit to do with some of the discrepancies here. Ohio State and Texas, for instance, are both huge state schools with large budgets. Even an extravagantly funded football program would be a small piece of the overall financial picture at a behemoth like either of these.

Yet even compared to universities of its size, Alabama’s comparison is staggering. Florida State, another football-forward state school in the same region with just a slightly larger budget, spends what would be 3.48 percent of its total university expenses on football. Clemson and Oklahoma — both around the same size on the spreadsheet — spend around 4 percent each on football. Auburn, Alabama’s closest rival and another school of comparable financial scale, ups the ante by spending what would be about 5 percent of total expenses.

It’s widely known that Alabama spends the most annually on football. In 2017, the Crimson Tide spent $62.3 million on football alone, the highest budget in the sport. What’s new here is seeing that even on a scale relative to other schools its size, Alabama spends disproportionate amounts of cash on football.

As a percentage of total university expenses, Alabama’s football budget would equal 7.18 percent of overall spending, the highest in the 11-team sample here. That is a staggering sum given what other schools spend — even other schools like Clemson and Oklahoma, where football is openly and rabidly supported by the administration and community.

Following the money — even through a pretty simple comparison like this — shows how committed the university is to football. How committed are they? By the relative numbers, Alabama is more committed financially than any other team in the nation.

You don’t spend that money quite like Alabama does, or count it the same way

To understand how important football is to the university in 2019, consider what the university did in the 2000s just to get here. Most observers around the state will tell you that the big change happened with the arrival of one very important person not named Nick Saban: Dr. Robert Witt, who became President of the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa in 2003.

Witt became the instrument of many boosters who believed the University had fallen behind as an academic institution and as an athletics program. According to a high-ranking source at UAB, “Some of the prominent alumni, Paul Jr. being among them, got very concerned that Alabama was becoming a very average school and a very average program.”

The two — the football program and school — were an inseparable brand. Rather than fight that, Alabama embraced it, mostly because they had no choice. Football was woven into the network of people who controlled the University of Alabama, and the brand was arguably as valuable as any other asset the University had.

That same UAB source says the message became clear. “Together they decided that Tuscaloosa was, and always had been, honestly, the crown jewel of the university system and that they needed to get that in order.”

The crown jewel of the university’s public face was football, and to reboot the school’s image and fatten enrollment, football had to be a visible, successful asset. And in the early to mid-2000s, Alabama football was visibly and painfully unsuccessful. Alabama’s facilities were average, their teams inconsistent, and their coaches a source of boredom at best (see: Mike Shula), and scandal at worst (see: Mike DuBose, Mike Price). Worst of all, the school was losing games to hated in-state rival Auburn, at one point dropping six in a row to the Tigers.

The creation of the Crimson Tide Foundation in 2005 embodied Witt and the boosters’ complete commitment to football. A 501(c)(3) non-profit, the Crimson Tide Foundation’s paperwork listed Paul Bryant, Jr. as its Chairman, and under its “exempt purpose” section stated that that the Foundation “... provides a channel through which gifts are solicited for the University of Alabama’s intercollegiate athletics program, including facilities, scholarships, and other areas of support.”

Using a nonprofit to channel a university athletics program’s finances is common in college athletics. A search of Guidestar’s nonprofit database pulls up nine programs in the SEC alone that filed the Form 990 that nonprofits usually send to the IRS yearly. Auburn, Ole Miss, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi State, and South Carolina all submitted forms for 2017. LSU, Texas A&M, and Arkansas all at least filed in 2016. There are archives showing basic financial statements going back to most of these organizations’s founding, sent in dutifully to the feds each year by administrators.

The University of Alabama’s charitable arm, the Crimson Tide Foundation, has one 990 on record: Filed in 2005, it lists the aforementioned officers, purpose, and basic information on finances, and an Astra SP — an upgrade from the Cessna the program had been using to make the rounds.

The jet would end up being a huge tool in Alabama’s endless football recruiting tours, but even that disclosure was enough for the program to give up reporting altogether. Since 2005, the Crimson Tide Foundation — still claiming 501(c)(3) non-profit status — has claimed it is exempt from filing those pesky 990s.

Instead, the Foundation’s numbers are included annually in the University’s financial reports. In their own words, the Crimson Tide Foundation is a “blended unit.” Translated: The Crimson Tide Foundation is a private organization that works under the umbrella of the very much public University of Alabama. The university includes some numbers about the program in that report, and the university also files required basic information about the program with the NCAA.

But overall, compared to other athletics programs in its conference alone — some of which produce their own 40-page annual audited summaries like small companies would — Alabama operates with a lower degree of transparency and a different reporting system than other schools do.

That unique approach to program support pops up elsewhere. Alabama already made waves by poaching a sitting NFL coach when it hired Nick Saban away from the Miami Dolphins. Paying him $4 million a year was unprecedented at the time, but that number seems like a bargain compared to the $11 million Saban made in 2017 — not just the highest salary of any college football coach that year, but possibly the highest salary of any American sports coach.

The bulk of that salary is paid out by the Crimson Tide Foundation, which has found other ways to keep the coach happy.

Some of those ways don’t even necessarily show up in the form of salary numbers. In 2013, the Foundation purchased Nick Saban’s house in Tuscaloosa for $3.1 million, letting the coach live there for free while picking up the tab for the existing property taxes. Future property taxes would not be a problem for the Crimson Tide Foundation. As a non-profit, it does not owe property taxes on the home.

None of this has to wind up with anyone wearing tinfoil hats talking about football conspiracies. The basics are all right there. Alabama has money. They will spend it on football quickly and decisively, and account for it in the way of their choosing. Everyone at the university and its oversight board will be fine with this when the team wins championships, generates all kinds of ancillary benefits for school enrollment and the surrounding business community, and regularly beats Auburn. (Especially when they beat Auburn.)

When it comes to some things, they will spend whatever it takes. No. 1 on that list for more than a decade running: Nick Saban, the head coach and an investment Alabama believes has been worth every penny, and more.

You don’t have Nick Saban

The final piece of the equation that makes this all work is their coach, a singular and obsessive manager in a place singularly obsessed with football as a brand and as a pastime.

The match starts with philosophy, is backed up by on-field success, and maintained by a ruthless focus on process and message control.

If the administration prefers to work drama-free with an emphasis on information control, then Nick Saban is the perfect control freak to feed that silence, forbidding players and coaches from talking to the media for most of the year, and instead doing the heavy PR lifting himself. There is no leaking, no divergence in message.

A former assistant no longer with the program says it’s all done with control and efficiency in mind.

“One thing you notice over time — nothing is social media driven at Alabama.”

It’s true. Nick Saban isn’t on any form of social media, and his assistants generally keep a low profile across the board. Press conferences feature Saban, and Saban only, with the exception of playoff and bowl appearances by players and staffers. The recruiting happens mostly via phone calls because Saban doesn’t even text, much less send DMs to people.

“In today’s world, look at everything that’s social media driven. You can’t pressure them, you can’t get them to overreact, you can’t them to acknowledge it.”

That also lets assistants focus on things other than messaging or putting out fires, says the former Tide assistant.

“It also eliminates something on their schedule that can be replaced with more effective use of time.”

That ruthless efficiency is everywhere, even if it borders on the performative, like ... the button. Yes, Nick Saban has a button on his desk to open his office door, because the seconds it takes to get up and down from his desk are seconds he could spend doing something productive and football-related.

Yes, Alabama players came in from a weather delay against Missouri in 2012 to find the chairs arranged by position group, dry shoes, and briefing materials ready to go.

Yes, a Tuscaloosa condo complex with a solid view of Alabama’s practice field requires its residents to sign an agreement that they won’t stand on the balconies during Alabama football practices.

Yes, the process involves so much detail in scouting and game planning that it even exceeds the required paranoia of Saban’s mentor Bill Belichick. Belichick’s run with the Patriots mirrors that of Saban’s with Alabama for its secrecy, focus, and success, but not even Belichick wants the number of options Saban has on game day. Saban draws up multiple looks for a given game situation, while Belichick — the one who coaches professional players who have all week to look at this stuff— just wants his staff to choose one.

Yes, the Alabama defensive playbook — in PDF form at least— is 430 pages long, longer than many NFL playbooks.

Yes, he employs a squad of consultants, analysts, and former coaches and assistants, constantly gathering new information on his program. No one comes closer to running a football program like the RAND corporation, analyzing threats to the program and counter-programming accordingly. The program sheds assistants hired away by other programs to steal a little piece of The Process, and simply replaces them with new assistants without losing a step.

That begins and ends with the head coach, who from the jump has been on the same page with his management.

The former Saban assistant says that, more than anything else, is the envy of other programs and coaches.

“People who visit the program or coaches who come through, do you know what they’re jealous of? It’s not the buildings or stadiums. Everyone is in complete alignment. From the administration down to everyone in the department or the coaches, anyone who touches [the team]. Same goals, same philosophy.”

Success deepened that control, so much so that Saban operates the program with greater autonomy than any other coach in college football. Alabama — as a state, as a university, and as a power structure — wanted to give football everything it needed to succeed. Once Saban got rolling with a national title in 2009 and repeated trips back to the trophy case, he got whatever he needed.

“He just doesn’t have to fight the battles. He doesn’t fight any battles at Alabama for anything. Every request is granted. There’s implicit trust ... he will make the right decision and they will execute on it.”

At other programs there will be questions about every single request, often from different levels of management above the coach. The athletic director may question the hire of an assistant, for example, or the president may get involved in program affairs, or a booster might have demands in response to a request for donation. At some programs there is quite a lot of that, leading to conflict and power struggles within the department itself.

At Alabama, Saban asks, and the university provides.

“Now he has 100 percent autonomy. No other coach has that. No other coach has the ability to execute on exactly what he wants for his program.”

Per the former Alabama assistant, there is only one question when it comes to an ask for Alabama football.

“Does it help you win? Win in recruiting, win in player development, win in coaching? If the answer is yes, the decision is yes.”

Without Nick Saban, you won’t get Nick Saban-level results

That drama-free marriage between Nick Saban and Alabama’s football-industrial complex gets results that have been, and likely will remain horrifying for everyone else in college football. The endless bumper crops of four- and five-star recruits into Tuscaloosa has already been covered, but what happens when they get there?

The answer is they win, and play at a level that has been the standard for the better part of a decade.

Per Bill Connelly’s S&P+ rankings since 2007, it’s clear: No one has been better than the Crimson Tide in doing everything a good football team should do. Since 2007, they’ve been better on offense and defense than anyone else in college football. Since 2010, they’ve either been first or second in the nation every single year.

In terms of player development, the Crimson Tide gets results beyond the field, too.

Only a thin slice of college football players get to play in the NFL, but if that’s the goal then no other school is more likely to put a player in the league besides Alabama. Eighty players from Alabama have been drafted since 2007. Starters who spend a year or more at Alabama at the top of the depth chart have a 55 percent chance of getting picked in the NFL Draft, a margin of 10 points higher than the next best competitor, Ohio State.

At this point, Alabama football is in a powerful feedback loop for program success. The school and its management buys into football hard, and wants it to be good, so they spend the money to make it happen. The generational talent at coach both recruits and develops talent to keep it successful on a level no other program can match for more than a year or two at a time.

That talent wins titles — which pleases the administration via football revenue and all the other ancillary halo benefits Alabama football has for the university — and then gets drafted by the NFL. Getting drafted sells the next class of recruits on Alabama, and now we’re back to square one of the Alabama Success Loop.

That rolls downhill in the form of six national titles, eight SEC titles, a 141-20 record overall since 2007, and a merciless, decade-long grip on college football’s throat.

You probably won’t have much luck replicating any of this

Everything about Alabama’s particular spot in college football has been unique for a long time. Yet even in the long history of the state, its football program, and its obsession with football, the Nick Saban era represents something unique within all that already exceptional and exceptionally weird history.

It’s not just that Nick Saban wins football games. It’s that the particular alignment of place, school, and personalities created this, a time and place in the history of the sport where Alabama can book championship appearances every other year on the calendar without being overly presumptive. That’s what has happened: Alabama will win a championship every other year at this point, and most likely appear in the playoff or championship game itself if it doesn’t manage a title.

That is a rare thing, one the former assistant doesn’t think could be done quickly anywhere else — and possibly not at all.

“I guess you could replicate it somewhere else if you had enough time. But I think what he has here is different than anywhere else he’s been.”

The future — at least until Nick Saban rusts out or retires — is more of the same, with little reason for anyone else to hope to compete.

LSU can come close in talent level, but fades badly on the same field, with the Tigers losing six in a row to Alabama at this point. Ohio State doesn’t spend like Alabama does, and sits just a thin margin behind the Tide on the field.

Even Georgia — the school who has gone furthest in trying to mirror Alabama’s blueprint — has come up short so far. The Bulldogs hired longtime Alabama assistant Kirby Smart, who recruited Georgia’s best classes ever, built a Saban-style defense in Athens, and brought some of Saban’s control-freak tendencies over with him. For instance: Smart took part in discussions with lawmakers in Atlanta to delay responses to open records requests about the football program at one point, a move so extreme Nick Saban has never even tried it.

Georgia made the playoff championship game in Smart’s second year in Athens. The Bulldogs lost in OT after leading for almost all of the game. The two teams met again in the SEC Championship, and Georgia lost again at the end of the game, this time only surrendering a lead or a tie when Jalen Hurts scored a touchdown with one minute and four seconds on the clock. Even at full throttle, they’re still one minute and four seconds behind the University of Alabama in the race to be college football’s best.

Only Clemson has caught up to the point of being considered Alabama’s equal at this point. The two teams have split their last four games, with Clemson taking the last installment in shocking fashion. Clemson has done this by doing a lot of things Alabama does — recruiting well, fundraising aggressively, and being committed to football down to the roots of the program.

They do a lot of things differently, though. Unlike Alabama, they keep a lot of the same staffers from year to year. They’ve played the same aggressive spread offense for years now, before even Alabama eventually switched to a variation of college football’s default attack. Alabama’s football facilities are a streamlined tribute to football efficiency. Clemson’s are, too — but there’s also an adult-sized slide in the football facility, and a general sense that things are looser than they might be at other huge, world-beating college football programs.

The Alabama machine will recalculate, though. When Clemson meets Alabama in the 2019 College Playoff — which they probably will — Alabama might be doing all those things, too, and sometimes even doing them better. A team facing Alabama is in trouble already. But if the 2019 offseason has Nick Saban putting a fireman’s pole and Fortnite lounges into the players’ facility at Alabama? If he’s caught wearing a Hawaiian shirt on a newly instituted Casual Friday, telling his coaches how much he loves every single one of them?

That’s how everyone will know they’re in real, unavoidable trouble.

The Colorado mountain lion that trail runner strangled turned out to be a ‘kitten’

0
0

But let’s not forget that a 40-pound mountain lion kitten is still a horrifying machine designed to kill and eat you.

On Feb. 14, trail runner Travis Kauffman publicly discussed his life-or-death fight with a mountain lion at a press conference in Fort Collins. Ten days earlier, Collins had gone one-on-one with the big cat when the juvenile mountain lion had stalked him during a run through the Horsetooth Mountain Open Space.

Kauffman, fearing for his life, fought and killed the cat “with his bare hands.”

“There was a point when I thought I could end up there and stay there,” he said.

For the average person, the reaction was probably: “Wow! A mountain lion! With his bare hands!” Because that is crazy, an absolutely not-normal, terrifying thing to happen to you combined with a stunning result. This is what a normal person would normally say when you tell them about a man killing a mountain lion without a gun or a knife.

For the person suffering from Acute Internet Poisoning, though, there were four questions that needed answering:

  1. How much mountain lion we talkin’ here buddy?
  2. Is this a viral marketing stunt, and, if so, how?
  3. How is this person going to reveal themselves to be a terrible person in the next 12 hours online?
  4. Dude looks like Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter. Something must be sketchy here.

Questions two and three seem to be invalid here. Questions one and four turned out to be related, because the results of a necropsy by Colorado Parks and Wildlife revealed that the mountain lion Kauffman asphyxiated in their trailside match was, in their carefully chosen words, “a kitten.”

The necropsy performed by Colorado Parks and Wildlife veterinarians in Fort Collins identified the lion as a “kitten’’ with a weight of 24 pounds. However, the animal was heavily scavenged and officials estimated the animal’s live weight was 35 to 40 pounds. The report listed the animal in “fair condition’’ with no diseases noted.

The Colorado Parks and Wildlife report praises Kauffman for doing what he had to do. It even goes out of its way to say he was completely justified in his actions, and still seems quite impressed he was able to fight and kill the cat.

They should be, because park rangers and vets already know that animals are terrifying in general at any weight. I once had a terrifying encounter with a Canada goose that had to weigh at most 15 pounds. He wanted the bread more than I did. I wanted to be away from a honking, flapping, avian murder-machine more than he wanted to be away from a screaming grown man.

We both won that day, the goose and I, when I ran away and dropped the bread. Who is to say my retreat from the scene was an indictment of my character? You, who have probably been run out of a living room by a pissed-off house cat at one point in your life, or recoiled at the snapping jaws of a pet dachshund? Because you tried to get overly familiar and pet a dog bred to hunt rats in tunnels, who therefore hate everything besides their owner? Because you forgot that dachshunds are basically homicide-sausages looking for a fight 24/7? Some of us never forget this, and that’s why we’re respected in the dachshund community.

The main point stands: Animals are terrifying, especially ones that eat garbage off the bottom of lakes and have no national loyalty to you as a fellow American. Canada geese, in general, can go to straight hell honking.

I see you, though, anonymous Colorado Parks and Wildlife employee. You didn’t have to put the word “kitten” in there. You didn’t, but you did, and I appreciate the gentle elbow to the cougar-strangling trail runner. Somewhere there’s a grizzled Coloradoan park ranger smiling to themselves quietly in their mountain office, drinking coffee, hitting send on the press release, and thinking: Come back when you fight a proper-sized cougar, Sparky.

In my mind this guy has an eyepatch he wears as a result of a scrap with a legendary mountain lion somewhere north of Telluride. The mountain lion’s name is Steve, and he and the park ranger came out of the fight with an understanding and a new respect for each other and their roles in the great tango we call Nature. They go fishing together on Thursdays when they can, but don’t say much, really. The silence of contented companionship and the poetry of the mountains is enough to speak for both of them.

The trial of the century (in Alabama)

0
0
Birmingham, 2017.

The case against Donald Watkins Sr. and his son would’ve been one of the biggest sports stories of the year had it not been happening in Birmingham.

The trial of Donald Watkins Sr. and Donald Watkins Jr. — both indicted on 10 counts of wire fraud in 2018 and convicted in March 2019 by a jury in federal court in Birmingham — was some astonishingly good late-capitalist swindle drama.

In summary: Between 2009 and 2014, a prominent attorney and his son were accused of bilking investors out of more than $10 million in investments in a biofuels company. These investors included professional athletes like NFL great Takeo Spikes, former NFL players like Gibril Wilson, and NBA legend, TNT commentator, and future governor of Alabama Charles Barkley. All of them testified or were deposed in the case, appearing along with witnesses like former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and civil rights activist Martin Luther King III.

At one point it kinda involved trying to buy the St. Louis Rams? And a man cross-examining himself on the stand? There is a lot here, is what I’m saying, and most of the country missed it. If this trial had happened in New York or Los Angeles, there would have been no other sports stories happening that week. But it happened in Birmingham.

Here are the highlights — i.e., the parts they will make a podcast or streaming true-crime story out of later this year.

Watkins Sr. defrauded athletes, including one of the NBA’s most voluble commentators, out of millions in a scheme involving a biofuels/energy company.

Investors like Barkley and Spikes believed they were buying shares in an up-and-coming energy company called Masada Resource Group. Masada was worth potential “billions,” according to Watkins Sr.

According to the SEC’s filing in the case, Masada became a funding vehicle for Watkins Sr.’s personal finances. He used investors’ money to pay off his own financial liabilities, including money he owed to his ex-wife, outstanding debts from a prior investment in a local bank, his girlfriend’s home expenses, a payment on a Cessna airplane, and delinquent taxes.

Barkley estimated he lost around $6 million on Masada. Spikes testified in court that he lost a million to the scam. He also had a chance to address Watkins Sr. from the stand personally, and did not waste it.

Please notice Spikes found a way to tell a man “be thankful you are not catching this entire FDA prime-grade ass-kicking personally” in a court of law and still not get found in contempt of court. Between this and having a neck so thick it has its own section in his Wikipedia, put him in the Hall of Fame immediately.

Takeo Spikes #51
This is the most terrifying pic of Takeo Spikes we could find.

While this was all going on, the central figure in the case tried to buy the Rams.

In 2009, while getting money out of athlete investors for a company he ultimately didn’t even own a share of, Watkins Sr. decided to multitask a little. He was one of the named suitors in the bidding for the majority stake in the St. Louis Rams.

Like his previous ownership bids for the Minnesota Twins, Montreal Expos, Tampa Bay Devil Rays, and California Angels, Watkins Sr.’s campaign to buy the Rams failed. (His credit score at the time: 699, one point shy of “good.”) That share was eventually sold to current Rams owner Stan Kroenke, but not before Watkins Sr. got to be listed in the media as a potential buyer.

He did get something else out of the pursuit of the Rams. He tried to convince a member of the Rams’ former ownership, the Rosenbloom family, to invest in his energy company in 2010. Watkins Sr. went as far as to say in internal emails afterward that a partnership with the Rosenblooms was all but a done deal — the opposite of what a member of the family said in sworn testimony in the case in February 2019.

The defendants sold shares in an energy company they never actually owned.

Watkins Sr. was a successful attorney when he offered to buy half the shares in Masada Resource Group from co-founder Terry Johnson in 2007. Watkins Sr. and Johnson agreed in principle on Watkins Sr. buying $3.2 million in shares from Johnson, making Watkins Sr. the owner of 50 percent of the company.

As CEO of a promising biofuels company, Watkins Sr. immediately began soliciting investors for funding. He did not mention he’d missed the deadline to actually buy his own shares.

Instead of pushing Watkins Sr. to pay, Masada co-founder Johnson simply changed the deadline six times, including in the last amendment to their agreement, in 2017. In court in 2019, Johnson stated that because he never received payment for the shares, Watkins Sr. never even really owned the shares of the company he was selling.

Masada Resource Group has not built a power plant to date — including the one it was slated to build in Sierra Leone in partnership with Gibril Wilson, the former NFL player. Wilson went on to try and build the power plant with other partners, while Watkins Sr. attributed the failure to, among other factors, an outbreak of the ebola virus.

Watkins Sr. went big-big on name-dropping in order to woo investors.

To get investors on board, Watkins Sr. mentioned the former owners of the Rams. He went much, much further than that, though. Watkins Sr. also told them that Condoleeza Rice was joining the company’s board and would be working with them. Rice did not join the board, and testified she never seriously considered working with the company in any capacity.

Watkins Sr. also emailed investors to tell them Martin Luther King III would be lobbying President Barack Obama at Camp David on behalf of the company. King testified that this was not promised and would not happen.

The company — worth alleged billions to potential investors — did not even have a bank account.

No, really!

Watkins Sr. represented himself. He cross-examined Watkins Sr., aka himself, in court.

It was not as awkward as it could have been.

Prior to getting involved in a bioenergy scam of pro athletes because he was overextended financially, Watkins Sr. was an accomplished trial attorney. His experience includes taking on big civil rights cases in Alabama, defending former Birmingham mayor Richard Arrington, Jr. against corruption and bribery charges, and representing Auburn defensive back Eric Ramsey in the case that helped force the resignation of Auburn football coach Pat Dye in 1992*.

*Of course there’s an SEC football scandal tie-in here. It’s required in all big legal cases in Alabama.

Watkins Sr. also successfully defended former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy against 85 felony counts for fraud and violations of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act concerning his oversight of the company. Watkins. Sr’s website sums up his success in that case:

No white-collar criminal defendant before or since the Scrushy case has defeated 85 felony charges in an individual case.

That seems like a lot of felonies! Watkins Sr.’s website is also a repository for glowing summaries of the Masada Resource Group’s business, hot takes on everything from the conditions at the Greater Birmingham Humane Society to the unfair and dishonest reporting at AL.com, and his very positive review of the animated film Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.

Anyway, yes, he represented himself.

Watkins Sr. took care to note that he was going to avoid leading the witness. Himself. The witness, who was himself.

He performed well for someone representing himself, though he was warned to avoid tampering with the jury after riding the elevator with jurors several times during the trial.

One other issue with Watkins Sr.’s performance as Watkins Sr.’s attorney: the outcome of the trial.

Watkins Sr. was convicted on all 10 counts against him.

On March 8, after a day of deliberation, the jury found Watkins Sr. guilty, convicting him on seven counts of wire fraud, two counts of bank fraud, and one count of “conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud relating to a conspiracy.” His son, who also represented himself, was found guilty on two charges and acquitted of the remaining charges against him.

Watkins Sr. issued a thank you on his website to his supporters following his conviction. He also did way more than hint that the Masada case is persecution for his support of civil rights cases and other causes unpopular with those in power.

In my case, the cost of my advocacy for transparency and accountability in government and respect for humanity has been character assassination and may include imprisonment. My visit in 2012 to the small prison cell on Robbins Island in South Africa where Nelson Mandela spent 27 years of his life in isolation has prepared me psychologically for this moment.

Watkins Sr.’s sentencing will take place July 16. The investors in the case won’t recover any of their investments with Watkins, because they’re long gone. This includes Charles Barkley, by far the biggest investor among the athletes, who ended up losing more than $6 million.

Barkley hasn’t commented on the verdict yet. In his 2017 deposition in the case, Barkley initially goes to great lengths not to badmouth someone who took millions from him. He says Watkins is a friend, and someone he trusted. Barkley states that he just wants to get this over with and go on with his life, and that the whole thing is a waste of his time.

Yet after repeated reminders of the SEC’s findings in the case — like the emails between Donald Watkins, Sr. and Jr. saying they needed more “Barkley money” to pay their bills — even Barkley ends up at the same place as everyone else who gave Watkins, Sr. money.

“So you do consider him a friend?” asked Watkins’ attorney

”That’s a loaded question right now,” Barkley replied.

1 thought about all 64 March Madness schools from someone who doesn’t know college basketball

0
0

AKA you ...

  1. Duke. It is okay to root for otherwise malignant Duke because everyone loves watching Zion Williamson romp over and through lesser humans. I’m not fully okay with this either, but I’m also not okay with seeing less of something that startling on a basketball court against people who will be working at rental car offices in three years.
  2. Virginia. Don’t. No one has to watch Virginia basketball, not even Virginia students. It’s not required in any way by anyone, and don’t let anyone tell you it is.
  3. North Carolina. Luke Maye is peak state of North Carolina college basketball player because grown men three times his age inexplicably love him or hate him, and also because he will not play in the NBA for longer than 10 minutes. Will probably play Duke in the final, and no one in college basketball can ever complain about college football’s shallow pool of contenders again.
  4. Gonzaga. I’m struggling to find anything to say about Gonzaga that makes it cool or hard or even remotely metal. But! Adam Morrison is probably Gonzaga’s greatest player. Morrison played in professional basketball only briefly, but did manage to play for two of the hardest franchises in sport: Beskitas, Istanbul’s resident anarchist club, and Red Star Belgrade, which is named RED STAR BELGRADE.” They also have a Japanese player, Rui Hachimara! These are the only interesting things about Gonzaga. They seem fine.
  5. Tennessee. Ooh, my favorite: The football school struggling with the confusion of having a good men’s basketball team. They want to be artists, but are suddenly good at accounting! Tennessee is having a quarter-life crisis in front of the whole country and will either go deep into the tourney or apply to law school.
  6. Michigan State. No? No.
  7. Kentucky. Run by a man who nakedly wants to put amateur athletics out of business. God, with a pistol to my head, could not get me to say a single negative word about John Calipari.
  8. Michigan. If you want to pull for a smart school while still keeping state school cred, though just barely.
  9. Houston. Houston wears red, teams that wear red as a primary color never win championships in American sports, otherwise fine. (Don’t say Alabama unless you want a thousand random strangers with “HUSBAND FATHER FOLLOWER OF CHRIST” in their bio emailing and @-ing you yelling about how “It’s not red it’s Crimson Roll Tide, who lets you publish this “journalism.”)
  10. Texas Tech. For those who wish in their hearts there really was a team from the Moon: Lubbock will have to do.
  11. LSU. Coach is on tape making a “strong-ass offer” to a recruit in cash in a federal investigation of college basketball. Pull for them to win the entire thing, and pull hard.
  12. Purdue. They got Drew Brees and Neil Armstrong, everything past that is greed, including success in the NCAA tourney.
  13. Kansas. I like everyone I know from Kansas, but also feel like their basketball team deserves no support from anyone outside Kansas, either. Calling their arena “Allen Fieldhouse” is sort of precious, isn’t it? Like it should have a sliding barn door and shiplap on it. I just Fixer Upper’d Kansas basketball, and I’m sorry for that.
  14. Florida State. There is no reason to root for Florida State at all.
  15. Kansas State. The farm version of Kansas, which just seems excessive considering the base level of farm-ness is “Kansas” here.
  16. Virginia Tech. Somewhere between hilljack Virginia and the New Jersey expats who go there, there is the soul of Virginia Tech, a person who can do calculus but also field dress a possum if necessary. This is free, Virginia Tech brochure writers. Take it at no cost and be blessed. (Virginia Tech: “Smart people, but also possums.”)
  17. Marquette. An easy way to tell if someone went to Marquette: They know where Marquette is, and what it is, and will tell you without being asked either.
  18. Auburn. Bruce Pearl is Sexy Discount John Calipari. This is meant to be a compliment.
  19. Wisconsin. Still stuck on the idea that Minnesota and Wisconsin are brothers. One is the hard-partying but lovable dude who dies at 55 from what the doctor calls “everything”, and the other is Minnesota, who dies at 88 wealthy and well-respected, but later is discovered to be a serial killer. Don’t watch either’s basketball team unless forced.
  20. Mississippi State. The Kansas State of Mississippi, if such a thing is possible. The most trucks I have ever seen on a campus, and that includes anywhere in Texas, to the point where “are trucks enrolled as students in Starkville” is a legitimate question to ask.
  21. Villanova.“A good basketball school” which also equals “no one outside Philly can find it on a map”. This isn’t an insult, it’s just a reminder that March Madness keeps lovable, weird-ass college basketball alive by giving Villanova and Kansas State literally the only thing they will ever have in common in the form of the tourney.
  22. Maryland. One of America’s most baffling places both in accent and in identity. Proof: They rally around a.) a perfectly fine but unspectacular seafood seasoning blend and b.) rioting. That’s a helluva Venn Diagram right there.
  23. Buffalo. Rooting for Buffalo in anything: A sentimental charity and a fool’s investment are the same thing.
  24. Iowa State. Mascot is a bird with teeth. Pass.
  25. Louisville. Another bird with teeth. Again, pass.
  26. Nevada. Decades of watching Reno: 911 have made me incapable of pulling for anyone against Nevada. They’re so Western they came up with a football offense and named it the Pistol! YEEHAWW AND ARROOOOOOOOOO, brother.
  27. Cincinnati. Cincinnati is America’s most lukewarm place, and their pro team just cut Vontaze Burfict. A Noble Gas of a city and by extension, a college.
  28. Wofford. The Terriers are one of a thousand strange, tiny private schools in the Carolinas. I could tell you anything about any of them and it would seem believable, because no one knows them all. Mars Hill is actually a bingo hall that operates tax-free as a college, Davidson only uses a North Carolina mailing address for accounting purposes and is actually located in Ohio, and Wofford was founded by a wealthy salamander with a terrible temper named Admiral Johnston. None of these things are falsifiable.
  29. VCU. Virginia Commonwealth University, which is kind of repetitive because Virginia is by definition a commonwealth. It’s calling it Virginia State State University. VSSU is the new brand, get with it before we copyright it and make this expensive for you, VCU.
  30. Syracuse. As always, enrage Syracuse grads by asking if Syracuse is part of the SUNY system. They love that.
  31. Ole Miss. The nihilist’s choice because the chances of any wins or losses being on the NCAA’s books in three years once the investigations clear is 50/50 at best.
  32. Utah State. Like most top-tier schools, is located within easy driving distance of a ski resort and several places named after bears and beavers. In a just world, they would win everything.
  33. Washington. The University of Michigan’s twin brother who moved to the West Coast and started smoking weed. Like Michigan, is smart and will not win anything.
  34. UCF. Huge state-funded skate park with excellent athletics.
  35. Baylor. Baylor in all things is never necessary, but usually present.
  36. Oklahoma. Has Blake Griffin ever hung out with The Flaming Lips? Please say this has happened more than once.
  37. Iowa. As in all things, Iowa is respectable, unspectacular, and will get mad if anyone points out these things at the same time.
  38. Seton Hall. Villanova, but over there on the other side of the river. Dick Vitale and Bob Ley went here, in case you doubted the place’s range. See: It makes two completely opposite kinds of older white men who work for ESPN.
  39. Minnesota. One time I went fishing with a guide in Northern Minnesota and peed off the side of the canoe in full view of five people and yelled “It’s raining, assholes!” I don’t think either calling the fish a bad word or the public nudity was necessary, but it was the most relaxed and honest I’ve ever seen someone from Minnesota be. They’re fine.
  40. Florida. Barely squeaked into the tournament, something most Florida fans will realize only after finding out they crashed out of the first round two months from now. Football school life is great.
  41. Ohio State. The biggest donor to Ohio State athletics is the founder of Abercrombie and Fitch. Sometimes the universe is 100% in tune with itself.
  42. Belmont. A charming and atom-sized private school in Nashville specializing mostly in cranking out country music producers responsible for bro-country like Jason Aldean. Therefore: Probably guilty of war crimes under international law.
  43. Saint Mary’s (Calif.). Mahershala Ali played guard for them, which I just work into the bio of Juan, the character he plays in Moonlight. He could have made the league! Now it’s all so much sadder, y’all.
  44. Arizona State. Root for Arizona State in all things or suffer the Sun Devils Curse and find your children out of school, your wife under indictment by the feds, and your bad t-shirts no longer on sale at Target.
  45. Murray State. Legit the first school I had to look up here. It’s in Kentucky! We all learned something today.
  46. Oregon. Why didn’t you go to Oregon? Did you ever think about that? It’s beautiful, not too hard, and located close to all kinds of accessible outdoor recreation spots, and it has a Duck for a mascot. Because this is a Pac-12 team, they even transcend the need to be competitive at sports anymore, because...well, what are you really competing against, man?
  47. New Mexico State. The school’s reputation rests mostly on running that rocket-powered sled they annihilated stuff with on Mythbusters. That’s enough in our minds.
  48. Liberty. They hired Hugh Freeze and are run by a televangelist’s son. Next!
  49. UC Irvine. An Orange County edition of the California system so I assume it’s like going to school inside a really nice chain restaurant. The Carrabbas of the UC system, I’d guess.
  50. Vermont. I went to Vermont for the first time this past summer and it’s so nice it has to be hiding something. DON’T TRUST THESE ORGANIC FARMERS AND THEIR SMILING FACES! LIES AND A SORTA BORING PRINCETON OFFENSE ARE WAITING IN THE WINGS!
  51. Saint Louis. Their wiki says they have a campus in Madrid and goodness do we want to see the faces of the Spanish exchange students when they get off the plane, see St. Louis, and are then offered pizza made from ketchup and weird cheese on crackers.
  52. Northeastern. Pulling for them because if there is one thing Boston needs it is a successful sports team at last.
  53. Yale. No!
  54. Old Dominion. Beat Virginia Tech in football in the past year already, seems like they’re full on success already.
  55. Georgia State. The best university in Georgia based on graduates and output, and by that I mean “Ludacris, and I don’t need anyone else to make this argument.”
  56. Northern Kentucky. Kentucky has far too many directional schools for Kentucky. Consolidate a few and we’ll come back to this.
  57. Montana. They have an Aussie on the roster, 6’10” Ben Carter. His pedigree of “Australian living in Montana” means he’s pretty much already a licensed bounty hunter in 48 of our 50 states.
  58. Colgate. No one knows what Colgate is, but as far as we know they don’t try to ban reporters for not supporting their “brand.”
  59. Bradley. No one knows what Bradley is, and this still didn’t stop them from thinking they had enough of a “brand” to ban certain reporters from press conferences.
  60. Abilene Christian. A school, and also a really specific lifestyle brand and men’s blue jean?
  61. Gardner-Webb. See: “One of a thousand small NC private schools we could tell you lies about that no one could or would refute all day.”
  62. Iona. See: “Colgate, but closer to New York?”
  63. Fairleigh Dickinson. The writers are running out of material at this point, this is just Iona but relocated to New Jersey.
  64. North Dakota State. THE MIGHTY BISON. There are only 500 people in Fargo but all of them will kill you for disrespecting this team. Therefore, we respect them immensely, and you should too.

Welcome to a reverse NFL mock draft, where the players choose their teams

0
0

In case you were wondering, Miami is the best possible place for a 23-year-old with too much money and no dependents to live, for at least 50,000 reasons.

The NFL Draft, like most things in football, has everything backwards. In any other job, the top performers out of college or professional school would have their pick of potential offers. They would select the one they liked most based on salary, location, benefits, and other intangibles like proximity to family, culture, and number of Whataburger locations within driving distance of the office.

That last one isn’t accurate. Eat a honey butter chicken biscuit for breakfast and seven hours and five handwashings later the hands will still stick to a steering wheel. Whataburger is so very tangible — perhaps too tangible at times. This may not seem relevant to a discussion of the NFL Draft, but I assure you: It very much is.

College football botches this by half. Recruits can sort through offers, but technically receive only the compensation of a free education for their labor. For instance, they might attend practice after going to philosophy, where they would encounter the Liar’s Paradox. One version of that classic logical paradox would be this sentence: I am a liar, so trust me when I say that no one has ever paid a college football player under the table to attend their school.

After three or four years of college messing up their job situation, pro football then botches the other half of the equation for players. Players get paid for real this time — an improvement! — but instead lose a lot of their ability to choose their first employer out of college. If a player wants to play professional American football at the highest level, they have to do it in the NFL. And if they want to play in the NFL, they have to enter the draft, where teams select them, not the other way around.

When we talk about the NFL Draft, that dynamic equals talking about “what the Jets need” and not “What the player needs, which in all likelihood is not playing for the Jets, something very few players in the history of the NFL have ever needed or wanted.” No one loves or cares about the Jets as a company, not even the ownership. (Maybe especially the ownership, now that I think about it.)

The players, in a perfect world, should be able to choose. If the top 15 players or so did this for the 2019 draft, then we might be talking about their decision process something like this.

Kyler Murray, quarterback

An ever-so-slightly undersized quarterback from Texas with undeniable arm talent and an Air Raid pedigree needs a few things. He will need a coach able to work with his talents, not against his literal and figurative shortcomings. He will need a low-stakes franchise where success is measured not in championships, but maybe in terms like “got to the Super Bowl once, and that was pretty great, and no, we aren’t going to talk about how the game went!”

He’ll need time and patience. A lack of intense media scrutiny until he gets his sea legs as a starter would be nice, too. Some place to fake it until he makes it, or signs with a better franchise after putting up big offensive numbers for an entertaining but damned 6-10 team. Some place to show his potential, but not cash it in completely for a lost cause of a franchise.

He’s also from Allen, Texas. In order to attain peak performance, our man will need the aforementioned Whataburger availability, blazing temperatures, a desolate landscape to feel at home in, and access to only the finest chain restaurants in America. There is really only one choice here — the actual place he’s most likely to go in the 2019 NFL Draft anyway.

Sign with: Arizona Cardinals

Nick Bosa, defensive end

Generally accepted status as surefire first-round hit for a team desperately in need of a pass rusher. Spent a lot of time in dreary-ass Ohio, and probably wants some sunshine after all that permacloud. Loves him some President Donald Trump; hates Beyonce and Black Panther. Has rocked a headband and long hair. Likely needs a city with a barbell gym, while preferring a state with no income tax or semblance of social services.

It’s either Texas or Florida then, and here’s where we have to get granular. Houston is out, Beyonce will not let him live there. (She has that power.) Dallas has occasional freak ice storms. Having no tattoos, the Miami Dolphins— and living in South Florida again in general — are off the board.

This leaves Tampa and Jacksonville. The lack of tats, no obvious fondness for death metal, and Bosa’s huge but lean physique eliminate Tampa. (Cuban food = at least three carbohydrates per meal, a no-go for lean bulk.) Jacksonville has fresh fish, which Bosa eats slabs of, and a professional football franchise that nearly made the Super Bowl two years ago. That still happened in real life!

Sign with: Jacksonville Jaguars

Josh Allen, edge rusher

Let me just say this: Josh Allen was brilliant toiling in obscurity at Kentucky, more brilliant than even his high draft rating might show. He was all over the place, so present in everything Kentucky did well that you could tell us anything about his time there and I would believe you. Tell me he played tight end for five games and caught seven TDs. Could be true. Wouldn’t even check the film.

He’s delightful even after getting paddled in high school in Alabama for his grades. (This is somehow still a thing in the 2010s.) I want him to succeed. Success requires comfort, and comfort requires some degree of familiarity.

So: Allen needs a team where he can shine in the dark, leading the way in an otherwise abysmal pit of bad football. In college, Josh Allen crawled through 500 yards of dismal Kentucky football to lead them to a clean 10-3 season on the other side. The NFL has nothing to compare with that journey.

Except: The Bills.

Oh God, the Bills still exist, and I want Allen to be happy, and it seems like being a happy football player in Buffalo long-term is a really low-probability kind of event.

Then again, I’d say the same for Kentucky, and Allen thrived there. Maybe he can’t be broken, this man. Maybe being the light in the gloom is his destiny. Maybe, with the Bills signaling they would consider taking a defensive lineman in the first round, Allen is the spiritual leader this team — nay, this city needs to lead them to the promised land.

Or you could just go be rich and shirtless for five years in Miami. That seems a lot easier.

Sign with: Miami Dolphins

Quinnen Williams, defensive tackle

Still calls his grandmother “Mrs. Henderson.” Is nicknamed “Big Baby,” and still has braces. Had this moment with the media before the Oklahoma game.

Williams is a fluid killing machine on the field — a big, cuddly, and very shy killing machine. I want him to go to a very gentle place fond of very un-gentle defensive line play. I want him in like, two hours driving distance of his family, too, because despite all the film where it looks like he’s teleporting through double-teams as a 300-pound nose guard, he still has braces.

Atlanta is three hours and 55 minutes away from Tuscaloosa. Nashville is three hours and 52 minutes away from Williams’ hometown.

Sign with: Tennessee Titans

Dwayne Haskins, quarterback

No one’s quite sure what to make of the top running QB in the draft.

As someone who watched him a fair bit in college, I’ll sincerely try to help.

The one thing I definitely know about Haskins: He already knows that it is very smart to get the ball to fast people quickly, and then let them do the work. This seems basic, but a lot of college quarterbacks never learn this. This refusal to learn the value of a checkdown can be awesome viewing: See Rex Grossman, RGIII in college, or even Russell Wilson, who was an accomplished and shockingly efficient chuck-and-ducker in college.

Haskins can throw a nice deep ball. He also wisely lets fallen leaves rot on the grass as natural fertilizer instead of sweeping them up, and sets out his clothes for the next day ahead of time. He is on his way to being a work smarter, not harder kind of dude already, is what I’m saying.

To that point: Haskins was calling swing pass audibles in high school. So if someone could just put him in at QB for the Giants and have him throw a hundred short passes to Saquon Barkley in the flat, that would be great.

He’s ideal in more ways than one. The sometimes miserable life of a New York football player is fine here: Haskins originally committed to Maryland, and then switched to Ohio State. Quality of life is obviously not a top concern, nor is good weather or cost of living. Haskins is fine riding trains and eating hot pressed sandwiches standing up for the rest of his life.

Giants fans wouldn’t even have to adjust to new flaws. Eli Manning has slow feet? Well, the big knock on Haskins is slow feet, too. It’s not a flaw, Giants fans. It’s tradition.

Sign with: New York Giants

Jawaan Taylor, offensive tackle

Big, mean offensive lineman who allowed one sack on passing downs during his whole career at Florida. Zero buzz because he’s a lineman, and because he’s played most of those downs for Gators teams stuck in rebuild or demolition mode. In a normal draft where teams pick, Bill Belichick would somehow get him in the third round for two 2009 fourth-round picks and 17 American dollars, because the Patriots are smart and very few other teams are.

Based on what we know about him in a scenario where he got to pick his own team, Jawaan Taylor probably doesn’t care much and just wants to take the shortest distance between him and destroying defensive linemen.

The closest franchise to Gainesville is the Jaguars. Taylor can be on the practice field in pads in Jacksonville in like, an hour 45 tops with traffic. He will be, because I am telling you that he is on his way right now. You need to get ready, and you need to not forget your mouthpiece.

Sign with: Jacksonville Jaguars

Montez Sweat, edge rusher

Just spent a significant amount of time in charming but very tiny Starkville, Mississippi.

Sign with: A TEAM IN A BIG CITY

Wait. Which one we talking here?

Sign with: ANY OF THEM

Ed Oliver, defensive tackle

Oliver’s family is from Houston. He grew up in Houston. A five-star recruit coming out of high school, Oliver turned down offers from bigger programs to become the first five-star recruit to play football at the University of Houston.

At this point in his life, Oliver might want to look outside of Texas. Embrace change, broaden the horizons a bit. Go someplace where J.J. Watt won’t be stealing the limelight from you on the defensive line, or maybe someplace where the average humidity isn’t 75 percent. If you thought I’m making that number up, I am not. Houston is both a city and a type of stew.

Then again, there’s this:

Oliver would never voluntarily leave Texas for work. And in this draft, he doesn’t have to.

Sign with: Houston Texans

Devin White, linebacker

Already has a Tennessee walking horse.

Sign with: Tennessee Titans

Drew Lock, quarterback

Needs a franchise that will understand a quarterback with a good arm, a fearless attitude, and the occasional need to throw a perfect ball screaming right into the hands of someone on the other team. Is listed as “J.D. McCoy” in teammates’ phones. Could use some time somewhere relatively exotic after a lifetime in Missouri.

Note: “Relatively exotic.”

Sign with: Dallas Cowboys

Devin Bush, linebacker

Listen: Most of these will end with me suggesting someone go somewhere warm where they can be young, wealthy, and comfortable.

This is not one of those. Devin Bush runs down the line of scrimmage like a crab at the beach hauling ass to get away from a seagull. He’s smart and terrifyingly good at play recognition, and he needs someone who will take what is already a terrifyingly good football crab and turn it into an awe-inspiring megafootball crab.

They don’t even need a linebacker, really, but there’s only one place to send him to become the brainiest telepathic misery machine possible. Yes, there, the most miserable and successful place in the NFL. But maybe he doesn’t want to be cold and miserable. Bush went to Michigan. Cold and sometimes miserable places full of nerds do not dissuade Bush in the least.

Sign with: New England Patriots

T.J. Hockenson, tight end

An Iowa native, meaning that by law he has to move to Chicago after graduating.

Sign with: Chicago Bears

Christian Wilkins, defensive tackle

Went to high school at a small prep school in New England, then went to Clemson, where he learned that being cold is absolutely a choice in this life. That choice usually runs in one direction: Cold climate to warm climate, and very rarely in the reverse order. Wilkins is also notoriously frugal, and known for bumming rides with teammates to save money.*

*Actually true!

That points to signing with a team in a warm, walkable place with an affordable cost of living, and a need for a do-it-all defensive lineman. This describes nowhere in the United States, a country so smart its cold cities require walking, and its warm cities all but require sitting inside steaming cars for 45 minutes to get anywhere. Was this where you expected to read about the failure of American transit planning? No, but we’re here, aren’t we?

There is one city that is fairly warm, scores really well on walkability, is at least more affordable than its derangedly expensive neighbor across the bay, and adores athletes who hit the community involvement component of pro sports life hard.

Sign with: Oakland Raiders

D.K. Metcalf, wide receiver

Metcalf can run faster in a straight line than any DB covering him. He’s the overpowered muscle car of available receivers — right down to the high price tag, lack of adequate brakes, and complete inability to turn quickly. He needs an offensive mind capable and willing of getting him the ball on huge go routes and easy end-arounds. He needs someone who can do that in a creative fashion. He needs a quarterback who can throw the ball 60 yards like he’s hitting a three-yard checkdown.

Does anyone know a team that can do this —

 A collage by Jon Bois
Yes, Jon Bois had to put all these different frames together just to get all the distance Pat Mahomes covered with one pass into a single frame

Tyreek Hill and Metcalf running through the back wall of the stadium 11 or 12 times a game and leaving cartoon silhouette-shaped holes of their profiles in the concrete seems delightful to me.

Sign with: Kansas City Chiefs

Clelin Ferrell, defensive end

Everyone may remember defensive lineman Ferrell for getting 11.5 sacks and 20 tackles for loss during Clemson’s 2018 title run. They may remember that, or that he remixed Suge Knight’s COME TO DEATH ROW speech with teammate Christian Wilkins at the championship game.

Either way, he’s memorable, and now also kind of has to go somewhere on the West Coast for branding reasons.

With Wilkins already enjoying walkable Oakland, putting Ferrell somewhere in Los Angeles only makes sense as the remaining available member of an iconic West Coast-affiliated duo. He’s also from Richmond, Virginia. Just in case Ferrell ever wanted a city that was the exact opposite of Richmond in every way, it would be Los Angeles.

The Rams couldn’t be the pick. Putting him on the same defensive line as Aaron Donald would be excessive, too much, a nauseating combination of power and speed. No one with any sense of taste or proportion would do this to any football league, much less the decorous, respectful ranks of the National Football League.

I have no taste or sense of proportion.

Sign with: LA Rams


The blind confidence of drafting Daniel Jones

0
0

If Jones was such a flawed quarterback, how did the Giants get here?

I think it’s a good place to start by saying this: It’d be great to roll through life with the blind confidence of someone like Dave Gettleman. It would be amazing. It would mean parallel parking without looking back, paying every bill without ever checking your bank balance, and eating the most suspect oysters with gusto.

Life would be one long heat check if I had the confidence of someone like Gettleman, and I’d hit every corner three without even looking to see if it went down.

That might be what being an NFL general manager feels like. It might be one reason why Gettleman, the general manager of the New York Giants, took Duke quarterback Daniel Jones without flinching in the first round of the NFL Draft. The sketchiest oyster of them all in the NFL’s seafood buffet of talent, Jones got a no-look vote of confidence, first-round money, and a shot at an NFL starting quarterback gig from Gettleman and the Giants for reasons that frankly not even Gettleman seems to be able to explain without making the situation worse.

Jones got drafted at No. 6 despite leaving Duke with little to suggest he deserved first-round consideration at all. His numbers didn’t make him one of the top picks in his own college football conference, much less in the total talent pool of the 2019 NFL Draft. He performed poorly against good defenses, didn’t inspire any particular awe in peer and coach reviews, and didn’t knock anyone flat with his physical prowess. Gettleman saw Eli Manning where a lot of others saw Cooper.

In other words, no one who watched a lot of college football who saw Jones saw anything remotely like a first-round pick at quarterback. Not that Gettleman knows a lot about college football, since he put Ohio State in the Big 12 last week when discussing his decision to draft Jones (Gettleman has spent a lot of time defending the pick post-draft).

Gettleman claimed he had to draft Jones that early because two other teams were looking to draft him before the Giants’ next pick at No. 17. Those two teams were (supposedly) the Denver Broncos and the Washington NFL team. One has drafted every talentless hat rack over 6’4 for the past 10 years, and the other is the Washington NFL team. This is not the kind of company that should inspire confidence in your own decision-making.

Gettleman claimed that in lieu of actual quantifiable production, Jones instead succeeded in a difficult situation and displayed “fiber.” There is a joke here about a 68-year-old man like Gettleman having an exaggerated valuation of the word “fiber,” and I just made it.

If these explanations still don’t seem OK, then maybe the testimony of one Definitely Real Guy at a bagel shop will convince everyone that Gettleman made the right call.

Bagel shop guy loves it, and therefore you should, too.

If Jones was so underqualified, so grossly unable to make his case on the field, then ... how?

How did any of this happen in the first place, especially with more obviously talented and productive quarterbacks available like Dwayne Haskins, eventually picked by division rival and possible competitor for Jones’ services, Washington?

Step one to understanding how this happened is this: When someone tells you how they’re bullshitting you, don’t interrupt them. Gettleman probably should stop talking for his own benefit, but letting him go at least helps pick out the specific brands of gibberish here — namely some very old and very unscientific justifications for selecting the sixth-best quarterback in the ACC in 2019. (Maybe seventh, it’s up for grabs here.)

Jones had a connect, and connects in a network of good old boys and “prestige bloodlines” are always to be trusted unequivocally.

Jones played for David Cutcliffe, the same well-respected coach who tutored Mannings Eli and Peyton, and who also runs an influential high school camp for developing quarterbacks. I’m sure Cutcliffe believes Jones can be successful. I am also sure he believes Jones, regardless of any future success, should get paid as much as possible playing football, and go as high in the draft as he can.

These things are not contradictory, but they aren’t exactly complimentary either.

Jones fits a type.

The extent to which people rely in general on “things that kind of look like what is supposed to be here” is genuinely scary. Jones looks like the top-down, managerial, and pedigreed concept of the professional quarterback people relied on 20 years ago. He played in a sort-of pro-style offense, or at least one coached by someone well-versed.

He is a 68-year-old man’s idea of the prototypical quarterback copied and pasted directly from the year 1990 and into the present: A big sturdy white dude who interviews well, works hard, and doesn’t try to do too much.

As a player, Jones works within a system, takes instruction, and isn’t a terrifying freelancer.

He will do what he is told, work hard, and look a certain part while doing it. Fun fact about this type: The manager is always in charge, not labor, and receives credit for any and all successes by the management-anointed successor.

The NFL is full of control freaks doing things control freakily. Picking a QB with a limited upside and a real need to stick to the script is peak control freak design, and the logical complement to what Gettleman might be trying to do with the Giants.

*Might? There is no plan, but let’s pretend there is just for fun.

Jones looks a lot like Eli Manning.

Really, he does, it’s terrifying how much I want to make the argument that Gettleman just went down the list and picked “Replacement Eli.” I’d make him do the sand bucket photo if I could.


All of these are non-quantifiable reasons. These are considered deeply uncool in the year 2019, when most football people will admit that the game is one of data, information, and rigorous evaluation by set metrics. Talent evaluation, more than even game management, has come to rely on that kind of hyper-picky analytical work and scouting. It’s not enough for a scout to just have a hunch despite the numbers, tape, and statistical resume.

It is, apparently, enough for a GM to make the call against all evidence.

That anyone noticed this, raised hell, and reduced Gettleman to citing The Bagel Guy as a public defense is probably a good indication that:

a) football in general has come a long way in terms of understanding and recognizing talent

b) the Jones pick is an outlier, rather than standard operating procedure

c) Gettleman might have a case of walking brain-eating amoebiasis

It’s also a reminder the NFL — while not alone in this — still runs on a lot of reliable old vices and decision-making shortcuts. Connections still work way too well. Management still sometimes has a phobia of being outshined by talent. Stereotypes of the nastiest possible variety still creep into the conversation about positions, talent, and evaluation. (See: NFL analysts inadvertently getting into very strange and bad territory by using weird terms like “strong bloodlines” in the most literal sense possible on air.)

*This is all without getting into how the game itself is still sometimes called — an ongoing cultural struggle inside football where NFL offensive coordinators still try to “establish the run” at all costs, even though nothing has shown it to be an effective strategy for anyone.

None of this is Jones’ fault. He will get paid more than most people earn in a lifetime, and should take it running. (Preferably away from football, and toward his Duke buddies in finance or some other lucrative non-contact industry.)

Even the obvious screaming comparison to Jones’ good fortune in this draft — Ohio State’s more qualified Dwayne Haskins, who had to watch Jones get picked ahead of him — only had to wait nine spots to get picked by Washington. He got the Brady Quinn waiting room treatment for a hot minute on ESPN, but on the whole? Haskins came out of this with the same result.

But maybe, just maybe, I don’t want the kind of blind confidence Gettleman thinks he has. Maybe what I really want is the real kind of blind confidence that would take Buffalo’s Tyree Jackson with a draft pick. Buffalo didn’t even need to spend one to get the closest analogue to 2018 draft success story, Wyoming’s Josh Allen.

Buffalo now has not one, but two huge, risky, and still mostly unproven tree-sized prospects on the roster at quarterback. Buffalo GM Brandon Beane’s idea of what a quarterback should be might be a dangerous strain of crazy. But to his credit, he obviously feels it deeply and is very committed to it. There should be a real respect or a commitment to that kind of lunacy.*

*Also might be worth asking why someone like Tyree Jackson ends up undrafted out of the MAC, but the similar Josh Allen gets a first-round pick out of the Mountain West. Miiiight want to look into that!

Gettleman’s variety of crazy here pales in comparison. It’s less a bold devotion to an idea, and more of a move they were going to make no matter what was actually on the buffet.

To come back to the buffet: Gettleman and the Giants walked into the draft less like chefs looking for what was good, and more like a beach vacationer determined against all sense to eat oysters. And like someone eating at a restaurant out of season and well above their price range, the Giants will have to eat it simply because it’s already on the plate.

The Lonely Island’s Bash Brothers special is a work of art

0
0

I don’t know why this exists, but I’m so glad it does.

  1. This is a compliment: I don’t know why The Lonely Island Presents: The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience exists, or what its purpose is. It is a 30-minute fever dream — “a visual poem” according to the summary — about baseball players Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire during their time together on the Oakland Athletics from 1988-1992. Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer from The Lonely Island play the duo despite resembling neither McGwire nor Canseco in any way.
  2. There is an 11-song, 25-minute long soundtrack to go with the visual poem. Almost all of the songs mention heavy steroid use. Only one mentions an elaborate sex act involving 100 cardboard cutouts of period-appropriate swimsuit model Kathy Ireland and a broom. That’s about the right ratio between those two, if anyone was wondering.
  3. If making a 30-minute hip hopera about an iconic and scandalized pair of anabolically-inclined late-80s baseball players seems like a very specific pull for a very specific niche audience, well: it is, and it also isn’t. It is specific in the sense that those with a faint memory of the Bash Brothers — namely big sunglasses, giant biceps, an iconic Costacos Brothers poster, highlights of home runs blasted into the sun-drenched stands of Oakland-Alameda Coliseum, and a certain 1990-ish pagers-and-Lamborghinis vibe surrounding everything — will enjoy how much Samberg and Schaffer clearly adore the whole era.
  4. It also isn’t in the sense that The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience is also essentially Beyonce’s Lemonade, but done instead by three nerds who met in a Bay Area middle school, and written about the 1988 Oakland A’s most juiced pair of sluggers. That kind of barely-anchored surreality has its own logic and needs no excuses. Samberg and Schaffer float underwater in baseball uniforms asking questions like WHERE WILL WE HIDE FROM THE SUN WHEN ALL THE TREES ARE DEAD? McGwire rips the bones out of his own arm. The pair appear with burning angels’ wings, on the deck of Noah’s Ark, and in an ad for a workout video about lifting women instead of weights. “Oakland Nights” is just a solid two minutes of the pair rapping about spending their nights in silk robes and kimonos while Schaffer drops the line “I’m solo and I’m flexin’ but don’t try to soloflex me.” Sia sings the chorus. She is played in The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience by Sterling K. Brown dancing shirtless in silk pajamas and a Sia wig. It’s fine, it’s all fine.
  5. About that: I have no idea why Sterling K. Brown isn’t the most successful person in Hollywood. He made Killmonger’s dad seem sympathetic in about two minutes of screen time in Black Panther. He was so scary as a homicidal dentist in one episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine that he almost undermined the comedy part of the show by himself. He is tearjerking on This is Us, an entire show based on the concept of being tearjerking at all times. He might be a better Sia than Sia, if we’re all being honest here. Someone pay him to play the most terrifying villain of his generation and let him be the titled legend he already is in reality.
  6. Oh, and the “don’t try to soloflex me” line? It’s better than anything Big Sean has ever written. That is a double-edged compliment in that Big Sean is embarrassing, and a low bar for any rapper to clear, but also because after more than a decade doing parody rap, the members of the Lonely Island have advanced from bad-good to kind of good-good at rapping and picking beats. Samberg drops a team-themed verse in “Let’s Bash” that is legit impressive by itself, and maybe more impressive because it’s preceded by a deep cut Walt Weiss joke. They’ve got range now, is what I’m saying, even if it is range employed in service of a 30-minute musical fantasy about Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco.
  7. I love that they did this, and particularly that they did it about a sports thing. The past 20 years have seen a deep and increasingly formal canonization of sports history, driven by docuseries like 30 for 30 and imitators, but also by the internet and the demands of its very particular economy of attention. There are lists, and more lists, and Mount Rushmores, and top 10s, and slideshows, all part of a boundless archive of well-considered lists of the Most Important, Most Consequential, and Most Essential. The lists of bests and most memorables are fine — everyone does them all the time, for all the right and wrong reasons — but they also bypass the experiential, turning history into something more collectible and sterile. Arguing about what’s best in sports is natural, but it ignores a lot of why people watch sports to begin with: Because of the experience, and not because of where their favorite teams or player or moments fall on among precisely sorted commodities.
  8. There are like, maybe three historical facts in the whole of The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience. That’s enough, because the rest is emotionally factual. The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience implicitly argues that baseball was insanely cool when people could and did take terrifying amounts of steroids, which is true. (Problematic! But true.) It reps early West Coast rap beats, Oakley sunglasses, ‘80s-model Lamborghinis, and neon-accented pastel decorating schemes. It feels way more like what I remember about the Oakland A’s from that era, even if they don’t namecheck Dave Stewart or Mike Gallego.
  9. That’s why I kind of love The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience, despite its complete lack of substance. It’s a thing I didn’t even know I was missing, a way of remembering a soap bubble of a moment in sports that was more vibe and less a series of events with import, weight, or legacy. Someone else might remember the precise impact those A’s had on modern baseball. Cool: I remember huge swole dudes with gold chains jacking dingers and making posters that ended up on my friends’ walls.
  10. That’s real, or at least more real than most of the overblown summaries at the end of sports documentaries about “a team defining a city” or “a legacy that will live forever.” Those messages feel forced, and fall short of illustrating how a moment truly felt. That’s not the fault of the documentary, which is a clean, clinical way of nonfiction storytelling. But where nonfiction like the documentary leaves off, art has to pick up. And yes, I just called a 30-minute parody video about Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco where Maya Rudolph and HAIM sing the words “shake four halves of butt” a work of art. If the label fits, the label fits.
Viewing all 1537 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images