The_Admiral

He's not from America. He may think Philadelphia is just coated with a layer of ambient grease. Good educated guess, though.

On 11/27/2023 at 12:21 PM, Sport said:

Tepper is an Owner to Watch. 

Yeah, just watched him throw his drink on a fan.

The Bears could get a first for Justin Fields from an idiot if they try, but then again they're kind of idiots themselves and may have talked themselves into keeping him. 

19 hours ago, Sykotyk said:

Chicago, both play at United Center. Owned by the owner of the Blackhawks.

The Bulls and Hawks each own 50% of the arena and its holding company, a big part of how the Blackhawks "lost money" winning championships.

39 minutes ago, JerseyJimmy said:

legalizing betting was the single biggest mistake in american sports history.

I am not some Christian zealot but I feel Satan's presence in omnipresent gambling content.

Well, whatever they do, I'm sure it'll have all the environmental considerations, pedestrian-friendliness, and aesthetic charm that we've come to expect from the North Texas Disgruntled Taxpayer Containment Zone. I mean Dallas-Fort Worth. 

Oh good lord I thought we agreed not to talk about Game of Thrones. 

Nobody cares! Just talk about eating the Pop-Tart man.

Ethan Strauss wrote about the NFL taking Christmas away from the NBA:

Quote

Last year, the NFL flooded the zone with three Sunday Christmas games for the first time ever, roughly 5X’ing the NBA’s viewership. This year, the NFL flooded again with three Monday Christmas games, roughly 10X’ing basketball’s viewership. Or, as Sports Media Watch put it, “NBA Christmas viewership sacked by NFL.”

 

. . .

 

In 2015, 11.17 million people tuned in to watch Steph Curry’s Warriors play LeBron James’ Cavs. Why am I highlighting this? Mostly because that Christmas happened on a Friday, with no competing NFL games slated. Also because the NBA getting 11.17 viewers on one network channel seems almost unthinkable right now (Lakers-Celtics led the NBA pack with 5 million in audience on Monday). If you identified Christmas of 2015 as the NBA’s post Jordan peak, I wouldn’t argue.

 

Since this point, the NFL, once deferential to the NBA’s turf when Christmas fell on a weekday, has started to encroach on basketball. Why the change? First, because the NBA started to weaken, ceasing to produce eight figure marquee games on Christmas. After interest in the NBA dropped, the NFL was less worried about scheduling games against it.

Second, because, back in 2020, Nielsen started smoothing in Out of Home viewing (OOH) to its overall audience numbers.

 

. . .

 

The NBA was certainly thankful for the newly juiced numbers as it attempted to rebound from reports of lost audience share. Unfortunately for the league, in an odd twist of fate, the inflated counting they craved came at the cost of their premier regular season event. Two decades of branding NBA Christmas is now down the drain, largely because of a quirky Nielsen reform.

Interesting stuff about the vagaries of "out-of-home viewing." Feels like an easy way to fudge numbers, sort of like how the NHL started pushing "tickets distributed."

Yeah, but they're doing it without him, that's the feel-good part. I mean, yes, they still signed him, but we can't live in the past.

14 hours ago, BBTV said:

He was responsible?  Didn't the taxpayers get stuck with half of the cost of the arena?  And donate all the land?

Yes, but all that was under Marc Lasry's ownership and Scott Walker's governorship. Herb got the Bradley Center for free. His responsibility for the Bucks' recent success is that he could have sold the Bucks to Michael Jordan in the early 2000s, who probably would have moved the team, but ultimately chose not to. I think he kicked in some money toward the arena, but most of it came from taxpayers and from robbing the UW system.

What I remember about Kohl's time owning the Bucks is that it was kind of the worst of all possible worlds: he seemed to be too busy being a senator to do a good job running the team, but still found time to meddle poorly, and in doing so wasn't even a magnificently bombastic idiot like Vivek or Dolan or the Maloofs, he just quietly made them a lousy organization.* Part of the reason it was kinda neat to see the Bucks win the title is that they're Milwaukee's answer to the Blackhawks, a fanbase that was just beaten into non-existence, so they're kindred spirits to an extent.

*EDIT: Kohl was a classic Stern Guy, a mid-market owner who never got any big ideas or made any waves, see also, Bill Davidson, Larry Miller, Les Alexander, whoever owns the Spurs, contra selfish nuisances like Ted Turner, Jerry Buss, Jerry Reinsdorf, and later Mark Cuban. Lasry/Edens, however, are classic Silver Guys: more douchebags who run hedge funds. 

Thrilled for Browns fans. Everyone outside the AFC North without a dog in the fight should be behind these guys. What a story.

I don't think he really ripped anyone off, he's on a rookie deal, he's just not complete enough to win playoff games with. I think he'll be an enticing project for a team or two until his legs give out. I could see the Falcons or Saints taking a flyer on him, maybe the Broncos, maybe even the Raiders, they're always doing dumb crap that makes no sense.

Just now, SFGiants58 said:

Which players though? I’d think a Cutler or Grossman jersey in orange would produce extra numbskullery.

URLOCKER

I'm surprised they didn't go with a Chicago team if Big Ten volleyball has been a significant part of the sport's development. This seems tailor-made for either the Sears Centre or sharing the Rahmdome with the Sky.

10 hours ago, Old School Fool said:

The genius of the Bears orange jersey is that it's a color swap, which I think is a lost art among alternate jerseys nowadays in sports.

First time I've seen "genius" and "Bears orange jersey" in the same sentence given that an orange Bears jersey seems to pop up at tailgates on the dumbest people you'll ever meet.

2 hours ago, Lights Out said:

My take on Christmas uniforms is that they should just take the teams' normal uniforms and change the colors to red and green.

Falls apart as soon as you consider the heresy of the Lakers in red and green.

D.J. Moore, who is very good, and Cole Kmet, who is no slouch.

A funny thing about the Fields cult is that they're the people who 15-some years ago stood diametrically opposed to the Kyle Orton cult who loved him, to use terminology we weren't using 15 years ago, based on vibes. And hanging every shortcoming of Fields on bad coaching, bad protection, bad receivers, and good opposing defenses means that they, albeit in a different way, are also just basing their entire assessment on vibes. 

Fields 4th quarter stats: 41/80, 463 yards, 3 TD, 6 INT, 8 sacks

Purdy 4th quarter stats: 54/83, 849 yards, 9 TD, 3 INT, 5 sacks

I don't think they'd go 16-1

49 minutes ago, PERRIN said:

This isn’t the gotcha you think it is. Perhaps handling people disliking your comments with a tad more grace would make your comparisons sound less outlandish.

Disliking comments is itself without grace. It's passive-aggressive and empty. I would rather have people verbally rip me apart for my many bad thoughts than just post a little yellow face rolling its eyes.  

On 12/19/2023 at 6:45 PM, OnWis97 said:

I don't know whether there was a connection but some in Minnesota were melting down that the one with green had a resemblance (if you really wanted to see it, which they did) to some subdivision in Somalia. 

See, my first thought was Timberwolves Palestine, and a lot of people don't want to associate themselves with the Timberwolves.

"Athens of the South" is such a funny little insistence when there's a college town actually named Athens that is also in the South. Factories for bad music and girls from St. Louis County throwing up on themselves, yeah, real center of erudition, guys! Anyway their uniforms suck ass and I miss the Oilers.

Never was a huge fan of the Expos' road jerseys. Too red-heavy for a Quebec team, and the fleur-de-lis didn't read as an accent aigu because there's nothing slanted or line-like about it, so it just felt like a little floating thing. 

1 hour ago, BBTV said:

That's one name I don't need to ever hear again in any discussion of top QBs.  I'm not sure if he'll even be a starter anywhere after this season.  Hasn't shown that he can rise to the occasion, only seems to excel when it doesn't matter, and doesn't have the type of skillset that works well even as a backup, since it requires an offense to be kinda tailored to it.  The team always sucks, but we've seen how truly great QBs can either carry a lousy team, or at least show that beyond a shadow of a doubt, they're not the problem.

Fields looked good against an astonishingly bad Cardinals team with a weird dope at head coach, but his stats when it's late and/or close are really, really bad. Watching the game he blew to Detroit where he fumbled the ball beyond the endzone for a safety was a rare window into the life of a Minnesota Vikings fan where you get to witness new and exciting ways to screw everything up, but the Vikings would usually wait to do that until they won 11 games. He's not taking anyone anywhere meaningful.

But they're saying that the Saints' old gold is too "mustardy" and thus undesirable, or at least less desirable than what Vanderbilt does.

The shade on this jersey looks just fine to me. Even if I didn't know what the Saints uniforms used to look like before they went with champagne/pale beige, I would think "oh, they should have kind of an old gold because New Orleans is old, or you know, like brass, because musical instruments are made of brass." I see the problem with the matte pants, and performance skirts are always a problem, but I like that color better than the copper on Vanderbilt.

44 minutes ago, Chawls said:

What qualifies for an MVP-worthy candidate? Lately, it just seems to be whomever is the full-season, starting quarterback of the best team at the time.

That's about the long and short of it, yes. Whether it should be is a separate debate, but yeah, quarterback on the best team/best quarterback on a top team.