The_Admiral

19 hours ago, BBTV said:

As for the Bears, whether they have Fields or not is irrelevant.  He's nothing, will be nothing, and never was anything.  The perfect example of why you don't draft a QB simply because you need one.  That pick set them back years.  Bears fans deserve so much more.

Fields is not the guy, Bagent is barely a competent backup, and the Score is trying to start a race war over the whole thing because they bet big on Fields and lost. Even by Bears discourse standards, it's unedifying.

9 hours ago, TBGKon said:

From what I gathered, Benetti was the proactive one who looked into Detroit first and the White Sox let him.

I don't think that's the whole story. It comes back to, as it so often does, Jerry Reinsdorf not believing in negotiating with agents. Do you really think a Homewood-Flossmoor guy whose lifelong dream was to call Sox games would kick the tires on Detroit without being made to leave first?

White Sox kick local guy and lifelong Sox fan Jason Benetti out the door and to Detroit, in devastating news to the razor-thin overlap of people who like the White Sox and have also read Infinite Jest.

Make it red and orange-yellow and build a primary around it.

It's bad enough to go to a Bears game and have to watch the Bears. It's even worse to see them dressed as some second-rate Illini.

The schedule is based on a formula, yes, and cross-division games rotate between home and away, but when it comes down to whether those matching-place games are at home or away, the league decides that, and that's how you wind up with x-place Kansas City hosting x-place Buffalo every time. There should be more of an effort to make sure that doesn't happen. I think the same thing used to happen with Favre's Packers always having to play the Cowboys in Dallas.

Do lovesick morose goths keep trashing your house? You need Cure Insurance. 

Just thinking about the time Vivek wanted to make the SacKings play 4 on 5 so that there was always just a guy hanging out by himself ready to dunk the ball uncontested. They didn't do that, but think of all the dumb stuff they did do, and all the stuff the Heat didn't do because they're not run by an idiot. Or Belichick and the Patriots against everyone else. You can go remarkably far by just not being an idiot.

I used to think the last NFL on CBS theme, the one they picked back up in '98, was what they had been using since their heyday of '80s NFC hegemony. No, only since like 1992. I still miss it, by the way, hate the big loud dumb one they have now, always have. 

I think NBC got a decent run out of that slower one from the mid-'80s.

Also interesting to learn how much sports music, like game show music, was written by Edd Kalehoff or Bob Israel.

20 minutes ago, SFGiants58 said:

Texas, Washington, and Nevada also don’t have state income tax. It’s not like Florida is a haven in that regard.

But there's the other end of the continuum to consider, too. Quebec has high taxes because they're not entirely a giant pyramid scheme like America is, and that keeps players away from what are supposed to be the New York Yankees of the NHL.

It would not be entirely without precedent for the commissioner's office to just throw out semi-arbitrary cap relief figures on a team-by-team basis, because that's the way the league does revenue sharing now in order to accommodate the Coyotes. The Habs could benefit from a Whiny B-tch Cushion to sign players, and the league benefits from strong Habs.

Same thing with Tampa and the Bolts. Yes, it helps that Canadians are big weepy diaper babies who can't stand being recognized in public or paying their taxes, but the organization under Vinik has been first-rate and has set the stage to take advantage of generous tax breaks and spotlight-averse athletes. The Stars and Panthers have had the same benefits and still sucked ass for years at a time.

The '94 theme had a hook but the two before that were pretty forgettable. AFC football was not really NBC's core competency at the time. Kinda weird that all three of them were contemporaneous with golden-age Seinfeld, though. Sometimes 1993 feels like just yesterday and other times it doesn't.

Does anyone have the NHL on TSN secondary theme, the one they use coming out of HNIC? I think that could stand on its own. I wish the CBC would just get the damn theme back.

We will get rug burn on the processed petrochemicals of the non-believers

I wish we had known how corrosive to the beauty of baseball Fire Joe Morgan would ultimately be. Maybe we could have prevented Parks & Recreation, too.

The Heat have had the steady and competent hand of Pat Riley guiding them all these years. That helps a lot. Consider how many front offices routinely do stuff that's really, really dumb. The Bulls front office did really dumb stuff while they were winning championships. Desirable weather and tax situations certainly help, but the Heat have a higher floor than most because they're not run by an idiot.

29 minutes ago, RichardWitham said:

honestly, i think maybe this DESIGN wasnt the best idea, but i dont hate colored courts as a concept. and some of them do look decent. i think alot of the hate for them is just simply because they are new. 

Watching a game on a fully painted court is like eating a cake made entirely of frosting. If you showed me a purple and green court from 1947, I would say that looked bad then, too. Even the '90s courts with the arcs filled in went too far.

2 hours ago, ruttep said:

Yeah, I have no idea why they decided to go with a green helmet and black pants for the late 80s/early 90s jersey:

Two possibilities:

They thought a black helmet was too much black, or, more likely, they didn't think at all, and figured what the hell, we already have green helmets, why buy black ones when green matches green just fine. NHL branding was unsophisticated in the late '80s, and the North Stars more unsophisticated than most.

You're surprised a team hasn't done a Stuart Smalley court design?

What? No! He just posts!

I like that the Nuggets have one court with far too much paint on the field of play and one court with no paint there at all. I guess America really is more divided than ever.

24 minutes ago, WestCoastBias said:

I think these courts are 

I agree. The Bulls look like they're playing in the depths of hell.

On 10/15/2023 at 4:12 PM, parallaxish said:

If my hunch is right it has to do with how the font is built. Tabular numerals (i.e., the ones where the one has a line on the bottom) are monospaced, while proportional numerals (no line on the bottom of the one) have variable width. If they were to use the same proportional numerals through the whole bug, the clocks would constantly be shifting left and right because the total width of the numbers would keep changing.

This is where you hire a consultant to hire a consultant to tell Fox that they should just use one font with non-variable-width numerals.

8 hours ago, Kramerica Industries said:

The coverage of the MLB playoffs has already shifted years ago to the point now where almost every game except World Series games end up on cable instead of over-the-air. I remember in 2017 when Game 7(!) of the ALCS was on FS1 while the college football game on Fox was a Kansas-TCU game. That really happened. And that ALCS involved the Yankees! This is a battle MLB should've fought harder years ago and didn't; the television contract where Fox began shifting LCS games onto FS1 began in 2014, the first full baseball season where FS1 existed. They willingly signed up for that. They've helped dig their own grave. I can't really feel too sorry for the state they find themselves in today. Speaking now for myself, I still like baseball as a sport, I've actually found a bit of renewed energy from going on /r/nyyankees and ridiculing the Yankees for the clown show organization they've become in recent years - I have no interest in discussing that here, you guys have no interest in reading it, and I'm pretty sure it's been years since I talked about the Yankees on this website - but my overall interest has dipped a lot in recent years, pretty much since the illegitimate COVID season and all the stupid on-the-fly rules changes they used (especially the ghost runner rule which has stuck around and is now permanently part of the game; that thing is worse than hockey shootouts and I've made no secret how much I hate hockey shootouts), and I'm also probably now to the point where I'm not sure I'll ever recover the level of interest I used to have. I'm different now than when I was 16 years old, it's just the way things go.

It speaks to my own disengagement that I forgot what a farce it was to move postseason games to FS1. The fact that we were being made to unearth the channel that used to be Speedvision in order to watch the Chicago Cubs win the pennant was ridiculous. We tolerated mid-series Stanley Cup Final games on the channel that used to be the Outdoor Life Network because, well, the NHL, but an LCS, especially one between Los Angeles and Chicago, should have been be free-to-air. It was embarrassing for baseball, or should have been, and yes, they did dig their own grave. Turner's coverage has the same problem as Fox with baseball and ESPN with NBA games: it's just more content they have, not what they put their heart and soul into (in order: basketball, football, and arguing over being unfair to LeBron). 

People will say "well, you'll never love the game as much as you did as a kid." That is not true! Anyone who has or knows a Cubs Fan Lesbian Aunt, a very specific type of person that definitely exists, knows this need not be true! 

On 11/2/2023 at 12:17 AM, throwuascenario said:

Side note: It's crazy to me that while uniforms go up and down in quality so heavily, NFL logos have almost exclusively gotten better and better. I don't think it would be a stretch to say that the Rams and the Buccaneers are the only two teams not using their all-time best logo as their current primary logo. 

If we're counting Oilers/Titans, that's a downgrade. Also not sure how we're counting the Bears flipping primary and secondary in an effort to not be from Chicago, but that's a downgrade, too.

11 hours ago, DTConcepts said:

I don't understand the hate for the Flyers’ contrasting nameplates. I always thought they were a charming little quirk.

The white one makes some degree of sense as an ad hoc solution and as a more legible alternative than white on orange. It doesn't need an inverted version: you already had the white nameplates and black letters on hand for white. 

I wish it became a signature quirk of the Flyers from day one rather than being dug out of a historical footnote in the late 2000s. It's one that could only work for them: we don't care about precious details, we only care about beating you up.