The_Admiral

Greg Popovich got on the mic in the middle of the game to scold Spurs fans for booing Kawhi Leonard. Just yelled at them like they were unruly children at a homecoming rally! It's one thing to get on the mic in a last-ditch plea for sanity if, like, everyone's throwing garbage and a riot is about to break out, yeah, but just booing the road team shooting free throws? Imagine that kind of scolding for booing the guy who left town in baseball or the NHL, where it's every at-bat or every puck possession. You can't. That's King Canute commanding the sea. What a bizarre, bizarre league.

The Seahawks, the most "how to epically own your racist uncle back home with facts and logic" team getting a Thanksgiving game just shows that the nation is healing and the vibe is shifting. The all-green is still a bit much, though.

The Steelers don't even suck! They could easily win the next five in a row. Wouldn't amount to much even if they did, but it looks good.

53 minutes ago, Chromatic said:

The whole uniform just looks dingy, I think that's the best way to describe it. Its like they tried to infuse the 'dive bar' or 'grimy hot dog stand' aesthetic into a hockey uniform. 

Interesting, because the original spaghetti-skate uniform had no such foresight: it was just the end of the gradual calming-down of the Flying V sweaters: putting the logo in front, adding normal stripes, muting the colors. 

I don't know how they're gonna get by the Eagles, but the Lions, who are eschewing wunderkind-coach conventions by just having a big loud dumb guy tell everyone to try hard, have all the makings of a team that gets to the Super Bowl and loses. It's like the football version of the Doin' It All With A Hot Goalie.

4 hours ago, MCM0313 said:

That emoji is so played out by now. I wish teams would give it a rest. 

Sports social media as a whole is played out. All the graphics start to look the same, everyone's voice is either like "we tried to warn you that we were gonna have to do it to you" or something else Drake could hypothetically murmur at the beginning of a song, or they're just doing dril tweets. It's an artform, if you can call it that, that peaked about eight or nine years ago. It's a deluge of Content that we can only hope to tolerate.

I just learned that only because of the strikes has Monday Night Football been on ABC every week this season rather than just here and there in the absence of anything better. That worked out well. Eagles-Chiefs, Super Bowl rematch with both leading their conferences, actually feels worthy of prime-time network television. I think it's worth reimagining Monday Night Football as a true #2 game of the week with ABC branding and all that. It'll never happen, though.

I'm eager to see what the Browns can do without Watson the rest of the way. They remind me of the '05 Bears where every game was a dog walking on its hind legs but they almost always won. It's even more of a novelty now in a league that is much more offense-oriented than it was 18 years ago.

I'm not a mod but I know a wayward path when I see one

1 hour ago, See Red said:

For one, innocent until proven guilty applies to the justice system, not to HR departments.

But that raises an interesting question. What do people believe in more: America, or HR departments? 

8-2 Lions is pretty neat but it's also ridiculous that they're going to play again this Thursday. Why would you not want all your Thanksgiving teams to come off byes together? Don't you want everyone as rested as possible for your league's day on the calendar, or at least not playing two games in five days? Everyone has to have a bye week; what does it cost you to have theirs be before the Thanksgiving games?

EDIT: Also, I've said it before and I'll say it again, 49ers-Seahawks is a wet fart of a late game, real missed opportunity not making the third game belong to Kansas City. 

15 seconds between gloves off and the first punch. If you can't throw a punch within 10 seconds, the linesmen should break you up and call you slurs.

No reason for the Bears not to fire Eberflus and whichever of his assistants haven't already been fired for workplace misconduct yet. Completely coughed this one up. I can't believe some mid-tier career position coach got to be head coach of the Chicago Bears by writing an acrostic for the word "hits." Wait, yes I can.

I have never been one to accuse the refs of giving calls to the Steelers, but I just watched them take a safety away from the Browns based on vibes.

The triangles, drop-shadow, and purple really bring out the Factory Pomo provenance of the original. One of the last gasps of the movement as far as pro sports goes, I think.

The NBA is post-care. It has transcended caring in a way no other league has. I don't know how on earth they thought a fully painted court would ever change that.

The Bay Area territory issue never made sense to me. The Dodgers and Angels have the same territory. So do the Cubs and White Sox. The White Sox almost moved to the near western suburbs and would have been, though farther from Wrigley itself, closer to the Cubs' suburban base than to the Sox' own base. The A's shouldn't have been in the position to sell San Jose to the Giants because it should have been both of theirs all along. What a stupid situation.

35 minutes ago, spartacat_12 said:

What makes you think the Carolina Hurricanes have any sort of national fanbase?

You think the fans of their wacky hijinks and bad-angle shots are strictly limited to Raleigh-Durham?

5 minutes ago, LAWeaver said:

I've been a sideline reporter once or twice (okay, it was when I was in college radio covering a D3 program...) but honestly, I totally get where they're coming from, minus the bit about coaches smelling their perfume.

Rod Marinelli dodging bullets like he's back in Vietnam, the story is somehow not him going "mmmm you smell niiiiice"

https://www.mediaite.com/sports/erin-andrews-and-charissa-thompson-make-up-sideline-reports-to-protect-nfl-coaches-he-was-telling-me-all-the-wrong-stuff/

About two years ago, Erin Andrews and Charissa Thompson both joked about fabricating or heavily paraphrasing their so-called reports. One big difference: they didn't do so on the sworn enemy of respectable media.

Do we think the Broncos could take the old too-light blue from their '80s/'90s helmets and embrace that as a team color rather than navy? I don't think they could do a simple paint-bucket on their existing uniforms but it would be nice retroactive continuity and set them off from the Bears a little more.

Studio Simon does what Brandiose wishes it could do. Nicely done. 

that double H in Chowdahheads looks very awkward and the name is stupid. 

25 minutes ago, Korkie said:

Walker Kessler wore it to the arena. I don’t know how or why he has one. 

With a name like "Walker Kessler," maybe he thought he played in the NHL.

I'm going to dissent and say that Charissa Thompson is in big trouble for this, not for what she said but where she said it. She delegitimized journalists while guesting on Barstool. She will be punished for that. Even if she keeps her job, she will become a pariah in her professional circles.

7 hours ago, ruttep said:

I both love and hate how much the Hurricanes twitter account leans into their persona. It's actually infuriating.

It's funny, because I know I've said before that I could have envisioned the Hartford Whalers making a play for a low-density national fanbase through sheer idiosyncrasy: "a team for the rest of us," kind of what the Oakland A's have done. Someone here told me I was wrong and delusional and such a thing would have been impossible, but the Hurricanes seem to have done precisely that by being Weird Twitter: The Sports Team, and I can't help but think what ever sort of wackiness I had envisioned for a staying-put Whalers would be nowhere near as insufferable as what these McMansion sprawl-creatures have given us.