The_Admiral

The "pussification of America" stuff is really overboard with this. There's cold and there's cold. They've never played when there's lightning, either.

Looking at that clip from the pregame, they put a big picture of Krause on the jumbotron, which drew the Pavlovian response, then said "and here's his widow!" Would you break out into rousing applause if suddenly you saw this? Knowing from the Kenny Williams/Ozzie Guillen soap opera how much Jerry Reinsdorf is a messy :censored: who loves drama, it would not shock me one bit if the plan all along was to bait-and-switch people like that so that the organization and their puppets could get all high-handed about everybody else's classlessness and what a great man Jerry Krause truly was. Maybe try winning more than one playoff series in the last ten years before dry-humping the corpse of the "Organizations Win Championships" guy.

No. I'm not going to. He insisted upon himself too much and no one is going to give him, his widow, or his memory that pleasure. Should have tried being humble while having Michael Jordan. This was just Reinsdorf dunking on everyone. None of this is anything they had to do.

I don't know precisely when NBA fans all became St. Louis Cardinals fans but with essay-length thoughts on Kendrick Lamar, but what a negative development for the entire world. Krause was a loathsome figure in Bulls history who needlessly antagonized everyone around him except for his close associates, who in turn were fiercely loyal to him. (Remember, Krause was a White Sox guy who basically transferred departments.) Everyone remembers hating The Jerrys through the '90s, and not just when Krause decided he would run Michael, Scottie, Phil and the rest out of town to build his own team his own way, from which the organization has not recovered to this day. And for those who somehow don't remember the golden years, ESPN ran this documentary that pulled an enormous audience and made Krause look like a tool all over again, despite Jerry Reinsdorf's best efforts to rehabilitate him. Speaking of Reinsdorf, the state of the White Sox is the worst it's been in my entire life. It's early-2000s Hawks bad, right down to running the local-boy broadcaster out of town and being weirdly loyal to some decrepit white-haired drunk. The situation has devolved to the point where fans think the team is moving to Nashville or Charlotte or one of your other overgrown hick towns, and they don't entirely seem to mind. Oh, and the Bulls suck, too. All my homies hate Jerry Reinsdorf, as they should, and they hate him running up the score on everyone yet again, forcing an audience to applaud his friend and getting mad when they don't. This is not the moment for the organization to celebrate itself, its own way of doing business, and its disregard for everyone else. But part of being a billionaire is that you never have to read the room.

They really shouldn't. They're overthinking it if their idea is to "represent the snow-capped mountains with our heads" or something. NFL branding should not have that much thought behind it. Just look like the Denver Broncos. It's not hard.

The lettering is hideous. It splits the difference between writing out the full name and not writing the name at all, which is very awkward. The bolt is just plopped over the circle instead of coming out of it as it did on the original. Overall, just a poor update to a logo that was bad in the first place. Didn't Phil Esposito draw it on a napkin?

How many teams don't let players wear socks that don't match the team? I've never seen the Packers or Raiders allow it. No team should. Eventually, why ask anyone to wear the same thing? That's oppressive. I will never stop.

MLB had batting practice jerseys like that around 2009-2010 or so. Thanks but no thanks. Cardinals fans, would you welcome some variation on the old R/W/B striping on a button-down jersey? I sort of see the appeal but I much prefer the blank jerseys and pants for them now: the birds-on-bat is the most detailed script in the league and would suffer from having more design elements to compete with.

He did a good job having Richard Sherman, who went to Stanford. Wasn't Dan Quinn a miserable failure as a head coach once already? or was that a different one?

This sounds like the McCaskeys and how they're still haunted by Mike Ditka, making sure every coach since is the opposite of Mike Ditka. So far, one out of seven wasn't an idiot who sucked.

What I've taken from this whole situation is that there are three different visions for ESPN that are at war with one another here, but all of them seem to be bad, or at least not particularly good. The first is the allegedly enlightened era of the channel as ushered in by Dan Le Batard and his friends, based on deconstructing the entire concept of "sports talk" and reimagining it as an infinitely self-referential Show About Nothing that could also pivot to a battlefield for the greater culture war, but anything but simply talking about the ol' sporpsball. This content is created by people who attended expensive schools for the benefit of others who also attended expensive schools and any other attention is incidental. The second is what normal, non-media-savvy people want it to be, which is basically Barstool as embodied by McAfee and his band of doofuses: bro talk, loud arguments, and lots and lots of gambling. Barstool is ascendant while ESPN loses relevance by the billing cycle, so it only makes sense. However, it's anathema to the overamplified media class and they want to destroy it the only way their people know how to do anything anymore, which is by appealing to a powerful central authority/adjudicator--in sports terms, working the refs. Barstool itself was almost on the network until journalists successfully worked the refs, and now they have this ersatz Barstool to get rid of. Then you have Disney/ESPN senior leadership as represented by Norby Williamson, who doesn't seem to care for either of the warring clans and would prefer to be rid of both. Nullifying both of these insufferable groups of people sounds good on its face until you realize what that would mean, which is 24 hours a day of Mike Greenberg. I think right now they're at like 15. This is not appealing to anyone except maybe Mike Greenberg. When you see the list of people who ran afoul of Norby Williamson--Jemele Hill, Dan Le Batard, Michelle Beadle, Bill Simmons, Dave Portnoy, Keith Olbermann, Bob Ley, Pat McAfee--the only conclusion you can draw is that he doesn't want anyone to do anything remotely interesting anywhere on the spectrum. I don't know what the right path is for ESPN, but it can't be one that disposes of that wide a cross-section of people. Oh and by the way, Kimmel's business partner was Epstein's chef and head charm-offensive guy, so suspecting Reformed Blackface Comedian #603 landed on Little St. Jeff's was in no way unfounded and so pinning Rodgers with slander would be like catching a greased pig.

Vrabel probably heads to New England. Any word on what the Bears have decided to do?

And wrestling fans know how people in Atlanta would get fired...

I mean it should only originate on over-the-air network television and maybe some cable. The Peacock game is already set: whoever @ Chiefs.

No NFL game, playoff or regular-season, should be on a streaming platform. Disgusting.

FedEx Failson threw a big fit about it after the game.

Wow, 148 yards with no touchdowns and 5 sacks, can't believe how much everyone else's fault this is

They're being unfair to LeBron. I mean Justin Fields.

Nice to see the Jets send Belichick out, almost vindicates three years of every game ending with "you know you just can't say enough good things about Robert Saleh and the job he's done with this team as the Jets lose this one 42-10"

I don't think they should tie themselves to the Buccaneers for a couple of reasons. One is that the Buccaneers' warm-grey uniforms are bad to begin with and should be abandoned anyway. But more that, conceptually, they're two very different organizations that paint two different pictures: the Lightning are a gold-standard operation that pretty much does nothing wrong (with the help of a low-pressure market and no state income tax) while the Buccaneers are a big shambling mess that falls ass over applecart into success in spite of itself (also probably with the help of a low-pressure market and no state income tax). They should stay separate. Not sure I'd insist upon gimmicky names and numbers if they finally got the color scheme right; as with the original Sharks, the novel color scheme does the heavy lifting and extra details would get in the way.

And yet I'm sure it would have been perfectly acceptable if Le Batard had trashed Norby Williamson on the air, because Le Batard is in good standing as a right-thinking member of the media class and Pat McAfee is not.

ESPN has a long history of palace intrigue between meddling executives and on-air talent that has captivated media observers for years, only this time the on-air talent used to work for Dave Portnoy, sworn enemy of all good people, so now everyone is acting like this is a capital offense and not, I dunno, the same gimmick Howard Stern worked with Mel Karmazin and Pig Virus all those years. And yeah, whatever Mcafee is saying about "some people not wanting him on the air" or whatever is absolutely true. I think there are a lot of people who are very upset that this guy stormed the castle and prevented ESPN from just being Mina Kimes and Bomani Jones making inside jokes to each other for eight hours a day. Maybe Norby Williamson is trying to sneakily engineer McAfee's demise, or maybe it's a worked shoot to get more attention and take the heat off the Jimmy Kimmel thing. Either way, not worth the pearl-clutching; ESPN executives suck.

There is literally no precedent for a media personality calling out his boss on the air. No one has ever done this before. This is not normal. Anyway, Jim Spanfeller is a herb.

Electric/Honolulu blue sweaters and socks with black helmets and breezers is so obvious but they can't seem to do it outside of an alt or two. And any version of the Florida Bolt is better than anything they've actually used as a primary.