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AGW had an incredibly rough start. However, the Nas/Durant and Michaels/Costas interviews were really really good.

 

Simmons was figuring out what his show actually was, which was giving time for outside-the-ordinary questions with entertainment leaders. Some of his skits were actively bad, but the interviews really shined.

 

It's too bad when something different gets canceled. Nothing gold can stay. (I'm being melodramatic, obviously. Just kind of bummed.)

1 hour ago, ShutUpLutz! said:

and the drunken doodoobags jumping off the tops of SUV's/vans/RV's onto tables because, oh yeah, they are drunken drug abusing doodoobags

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Maybe he can take his face for radio and voice for print back over to his fast-fading Medium account and turn it around before that one guy nuts all over a TV showing a Capital One commercial.

 

If you've been following the politics thread, you know I think Vox is a garbage site for garbage people by garbage people and this slipshod "data" journalism solidifies my point:

 

Quote

It is truly embarrassing to be fooled into believing something improbable happened, thanks to an unscrupulous scammer and a misunderstanding of statistics. Unfortunately, Manjoo was the one who got scammed, and Romano was the unscrupulous one.

On inspection, Vox’s claim that @RaysFanGio’s work was “an example of a classic confidence scam” contains no evidence that any such scamming took place. 


. . . 

In other words, as Vox sees it, back in 2014, @RaysFanGio seeded Twitter with tweets about future sports events so that he could promote the winning one with a Twitter feature that would not be introduced for another two years. Some people might find that to be a more remarkable accomplishment than predicting who would meet in the World Series.

Vox did not ask @RaysFanGio—who is a real person, a Rays fan named Lenn “Gio” Fraraccio—if he had done any of these things. The article called the tweet a “prediction scam” and assumed that he chose to “bury” the evidence, didn’t provide any convincing proof that Fraraccio had actually done anything of the sort, and made its claims without having tested them by (say) asking him if he’d been up to anything nefarious.

Most of the remainder of the post is padded with background information about confidence artists and the history of people joking about the Cubs winning the World Series. The latter is where Vox inadvertently crosses over from butchering traditional journalism to butchering its own thought-experiment-based neo-journalism. Vox knows that thousands if not millions of people have been making jokes about the Cubs someday winning a championship, but it fails to apply elementary reasoning to that knowledge.

 

 

 

♫ oh yeah, board goes on, long after the thrill of postin' is gone ♫

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I like the Amin/Wos/Ethan TrueHoops pods more than the Windhorst/Pelton pods, but they're all pretty good.

 

What's not good is then Amin brings on Kaileigh Brandt and they all pretend she says anything interested. I finally looked her up on Twitter and now I get it. Plenty of women can meaningfully contribute to a basketball conversation. Ramona Shelburne comes to mind. So does Rachel Nicholas. Kaileigh just laughs at everything while Amin extends far more patience to her than he ought to.

 

Why don't Amin and Windhorst appear on the same podcasts?

1 hour ago, ShutUpLutz! said:

and the drunken doodoobags jumping off the tops of SUV's/vans/RV's onto tables because, oh yeah, they are drunken drug abusing doodoobags

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  • 2 weeks later...

Oh man. And Bill used to be such a fan of his!

 

The TrueHoop team answered my election-related Q on the Friday mailbag podcast. I asked why NBA coaches are commenting on the result and other coaches aren't. It was an interesting discussion that followed. (Side note: Kayleigh is becoming increasingly insufferable.)

1 hour ago, ShutUpLutz! said:

and the drunken doodoobags jumping off the tops of SUV's/vans/RV's onto tables because, oh yeah, they are drunken drug abusing doodoobags

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42 minutes ago, Cujo said:

 

Never understood the popularity of Bill Simmons. Can somebody fill me in on what makes him so great?

While I don't think he's great on some pedestal, unlike most every single other voice in sports, Bill doesn't have to cater to a party line.  Nearly everyone else on an island is a scream yoke like Stephen A. or Bayless.  Cowherd is plain & talks too much, I grew out of Rome's schtick.

That, & I enjoy much of his rolodex, namely Chuck Klosterman, Malcolm Gladwell, & Cousin Sal.  

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@2001mark

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3 hours ago, DG_Now said:

Oh man. And Bill used to be such a fan of his!

 

The TrueHoop team answered my election-related Q on the Friday mailbag podcast. I asked why NBA coaches are commenting on the result and other coaches aren't. It was an interesting discussion that followed. (Side note: Kayleigh is becoming increasingly insufferable.)

Today's Sandomir piece on Simmons was even worse to him.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/sports/bill-simmons-hbo-any-given-wednesday-ringer.html?_r=1&referer=http://deadspin.com/cris-collinsworth-dunks-all-over-bill-simmons-on-twitte-1788966738

 

As for TrueHoop, I'm aligning with you on Kayleigh. If she is listed on the summary, I pass.

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Simmons' appeal was always that he was just a fan, except he's smarter than the average fan (or maybe just has more free time to think about this stuff) and he found that niche where "smart" people can read him and don't have to be embarrassed about watching 9 hours of the NFL on Sunday as long as they break down the happenings in long and tenuous pop culture comparisons. Overall I like his podcast, but I pretty much only listen if I'm interested in his guest. I think it's at its best when the guest is smarter than him. I don't care about his college buddies or AGW writers, or gambling lines so I skip those episodes. The rest of The Ringer podcasts are pretty much butt and I gave up on listening to them. 

 

Maybe now that the show is cancelled his podcast will become more frequent and with better sit downs than he's had since TV show went on the air. 

 

I think the show failed for a couple reasons: 1. The thing everybody saw coming out of the first episode was Ben Affleck on quaaludes yelling about Deflategate. What is everybody in sports is tired of talking about? Boston sports, Boston sports fans still finding things to bitch about despite unprecedented success, and Deflategate. The country basically told him to STFU about Boston sports. I'm not saying never have Ben Affleck on to yell about the Patriots, but maybe couch that in the middle of the second season. Not E1. So that went viral in a bad way for him and likely turned a lot of potential viewers off maybe from the first time they'd ever heard about the show. The show got smarter from there and had some good discussions with good guests, but a lot of people never tried to seek it out after that first hiccup. 2. It felt forced and it proved what I've always thought about his podcast - he's not a good host. Also, "Here's my unbuttoned dad shirt and trendy white guy sneakers. My studio looks like a rich guy's basement. I'm young and fresh." Just didn't work. 

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On 14/11/2016 at 4:57 PM, BlackBolt3 said:

Gotta bring this back just to show y'all Cris Collinsworth just murdered Bill Simmons on Twitter (yes he deleted it but still):

 

 

Collinsworth is Bill's latest guest on his podcast... soo... invalid a bit this charade.

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@2001mark

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  • 2 weeks later...
4 minutes ago, MadmanLA said:

Adam Schefter re-ups with ESPN, and now adds NBA sideline duties and a podcast to his busy schedule...

http://www.si.com/tech-media/2016/11/30/adam-schefter-espn-extension-media-circus

 

 


Meh.  The NBA sideline duties are probably just to give him exposure and set him up to become ESPN's future equivalent to Yahoo's Adrian Wojnarowski.  Maybe not.  Eh, I say.  

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"You are nothing more than a small cancer on this message board. You are not entertaining, you are a complete joke."

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This tweet from a Tuscaloosa News sportswriter caused a stir yesterday within college football writers.

 

 

Heather Dinich is the ESPN writer who used to cover the ACC, but has moved to exclusively cover the College Football Playoff committee.

 

http://awfulannouncing.com/2016/cecil-hurt-says-bar-patrons-are-more-qualified-than-espns-heather-dinich.html

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22 hours ago, dfwabel said:

This tweet from a Tuscaloosa News sportswriter caused a stir yesterday within college football writers.

 

 

Heather Dinich is the ESPN writer who used to cover the ACC, but has moved to exclusively cover the College Football Playoff committee.

 

http://awfulannouncing.com/2016/cecil-hurt-says-bar-patrons-are-more-qualified-than-espns-heather-dinich.html

I think she is actually pretty good. I generally value her opinions, unlike those opinions of a newspaper writer that is isolated in Sabanville.

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10 hours ago, MadmanLA said:

 

Yeah, I agree...Turner's relationship with Bleacher Report has gradually killed SI.

I can usually hover over a link to see if it's sending me to the FanSided garbage, yet there's been times when there's a bait & switch with terminology.

The issue I have isn't so much that I can't avoid it anymore, it's that si.com simply enables it, on their home page, near the top of headlines.  

ESPN.com is all white noise to me, I've been an si.com reader/user(?) since their first few months online- I was a mag subscriber back in the day, I was along when they began promoting their digital footprint via print.  I'll surely be with si.com until the end, for better or worse.

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@2001mark

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I gave up on SI.com when they did their major responsive redesign, and I haven't really been back. Everything about the site turned to garbage, and it basically unusable.

 

At this point, ESPN has made the best balance of mobile and desktop design. Most importantly, ESPN's game day box score pages fit all content on one scroll; most other sports sites (Yahoo Sports, SI.com, others) haven't been able to figure that out.

1 hour ago, ShutUpLutz! said:

and the drunken doodoobags jumping off the tops of SUV's/vans/RV's onto tables because, oh yeah, they are drunken drug abusing doodoobags

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4 hours ago, DG_Now said:

I gave up on SI.com when they did their major responsive redesign, and I haven't really been back. Everything about the site turned to garbage, and it basically unusable.

I thought it was an improvement, even if they're lazy & won't turn off auto vid play.  That's still a get off my lawn pov from me, because I don't wanna waste usage on vids I don't want or need.  They've at least made it a whole lot simpler to pause & vanish vids, enabling better reading experience.  

Alas, I've noticed their headlines are becoming more clickbaitish.  Other than a handful of headline games/stories, most of the home page is dotted with clickbait.  MLS semi finals & they were still flooding about USMNT stuff - what ifs, hindsight bs, potential cuts/lineups/etc.  That needs to stop.

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@2001mark

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