Digby

There's something deeply unpleasant and clash-y I find about the Mariners' teal and standard-issue away jersey grey. I don't feel that way about the silver accents in their logo package, especially when the silver is shiny. But saturated, bright colors pop in an uneasy way when mixed with grey, for me. Maybe in this brave Nike retro-future of teams not needing a grey jersey, that will be a solvable problem, though maybe it'll cause new ones too.

1 minute ago, dont care said:

How many teams are going to hire doc rivers as this basketball savior not realizing he’s actually a bad coach who only won one championship because of the big three, not him.

These three post-ring coaching gigs he's got have always been with front offices that I would, charitably, say have championship ambitions but a lack of smart and rational thinking. Also, messy bitches who love drama are always drawn to each other. I'm still in disbelief at this business about under-the-table working for/maybe undermining the previous coach while also analyzing that team on TV.

I do think he was a good coach for that Celtics team, but that Celtics team was also the end of an era of the NBA, and the rest of us have moved past that template/system.

5 hours ago, Brian E said:

so what are we thinking for the mets CC uni? skyline? neon? some goofy "GOTHAM" thing? a jersey with a bunch of chop shop signs?

I would die laughing if they tried to pull a chop shop aesthetic off. They should have a Disney World-ified "chop shop" concessions row of $20 chicken sandwiches and acai bowls at Citi Field, if they don't already.

Bucks fired Adrian Griffin. For those keeping score at home, that's two coaches they've fired in the past 6 months or so despite being a 2nd-place team. 

Trying to hire Doc Rivers as his replacement. Apparently he's was being an informal associate for Griffin. Not that I hold ex-jock, ex-pro TV commentators to some lofty journalistic ethical standard, but doesn't this seem a little weird?

Quote

While the Bucks had compiled a 15-6 record leading up to their trip to Las Vegas and made their way to the semifinals of the In-Season Tournament, Bucks’ leadership organized a meeting between Griffin veteran NBA head coach Doc Rivers, who was broadcasting In-Season Tournament games for ESPN. Per league sources, the organization believed Rivers, a 24-year NBA head coach and NBA champion, may be able to offer Griffin advice and guidance on how to navigate his first NBA season with high expectations and a championship-caliber team in their Las Vegas session.

I don't know much about Front Office Sports as an outfit but they seem to have even more detail. Apparently the content-farm current publisher missed a licensing payment, which caused the weird IP holder operation to revoke the licensing (but they were thinking about doing so anyway). 

Also the guild employees still have 90 days to work while the others get laid off immediately. Unionize your workplaces, kids!

If you'd like to read several layers of sordid, gross, boring business machinations by suits who add no value: https://frontofficesports.com/sports-illustrateds-publisher-lays-off-entire-staff-future-unclear/

This latest Revolution stadium push has gone quiet since the attempt to get first-level state approval got dropped at the end of the last state house session, but the current governor has been low-key signaling support to resolve that via a standalone bill, so it's not dead, just in stasis with a renewed push coming in next session. It would be very weird but funny to me if the Krafts never managed to get state support for a stadium when it was a long line of Kraft's milquetoast corporate country-club bros as governor, but the progressive lesbian manages to help make it happen.

I'm increasingly suspecting that the Boston NWSL team will end up there too, if they ever exist at all. I have a bad feeling about the Franklin Park stadium project.

(Also the Revs quietly announced Richie Williams as their new Revs II coach, which is interesting as the rumor mill has suspected him of being the one whose HR complaints got Bruce Arena forced out by the league. But nobody really knows.)

I don't know what equivalent we have to SI in modern times; every second of every game can be archived on YouTube and yet that has nothing to say and feels like a substantially worse way to catalogue an era. There's no particular reason this has to happen except that robber barons got put in charge of the thing.

I knew she's been having knee problems since basically the 2019 World Cup but still, bummer news for Sam Mewis at age 31. A sad day for (half of) the pride of Hanson, Massachusetts.

Orlando's stadium is being renamed to Inter&Co Stadium. I am losing my mind at how dumb this is. What a time to be alive.

https://www.orlandocitysc.com/news/inter-co-naming-rights-orlando-soccer-specific-stadium 

Siakam is probably a good get for this particular Pacers team. Three firsts is overpaying for him and whatever contract they throw at him this summer will probably also overpay, but what else are they gonna do? They're playing with house money, which is the only way they'll compete these days, so you may as well.

On 2024-01-14 at 8:43 PM, MJWalker45 said:

I have it for EPL games, the kiddo has it for the WWE PPV events. 

I know we're past the era of American soccer fans as the hipster set, but in this case the soccer crowd has had needless money-suck Peacock exclusives AND leagues/networks as 100 percent state-run media before they were mainstream. Those poor, poor MLS Extra Time dudes having to deal with the Open Cup abandonment with the vibes of a hostage tape.

I guess the good news is that Peacock has gone through every possible channel to offer free or heavily discounted subscriptions. I think I'm currently getting it for free through my credit card. As long as you're setting reminders to cancel once a month, it's still basically free. But the principle of it remains dodgy as hell.

On 2024-01-14 at 11:25 PM, The_Admiral said:

Is the billionaire a victim here? Who has more cultural currency, Taylor Swift or Tony Dungy?

We don't need to feel too sorry for Tony Dungy either, the man gets a multimillion salary to be a part-time talking head despite being the sort of person who believes that purple-haired teens are using litter boxes in high school.

That shade of red strikes me as too dark for a color-vs-color matchup... sounds about right for a year of NBA that's had its share of unwatchable matchups.

I've always thought "NWSL" is a clunky acronym that doesn't roll off the tongue at all, but that train long ago left the station. All the women's leagues want to use the "W" and it's a shame that, as a letter, it's a lot of syllables to add in there. W-League would've been nice but now the USL one's got that. Considering the long history of women's soccer leagues folding after a few years, it's probably best to keep the NWSL name and lean into it being relatively stable at this point, but upgrading the branding to something more distinct and less low-rent would be a win in itself.

Gavin Wilkinson, last seen being run out of Portland due to his complicity in one coach's sexual abuse and his conveniently accidental cover-up of a player's wifebeating, is the newly hired sporting director at Sporting Kansas City. 

https://www.sportingkc.com/news/peter-vermes-named-sporting-kc-chief-soccer-officer-and-manager-gavin-wilkinson-  

2 hours ago, MJWalker45 said:

https://theathletic.com/5193316/2024/01/11/espn-emmys-fake-names-college-gameday/

So apparently ESPN won several Emmys using false names, then handed them to their on-air personalities. 

This is so bizarrely stupid, and so perfectly ESPN. Basically a dumb Emmys rule, the network with an orders-of-magnitude dumber response, all just to get participation trophies and keep Kirk Herbstreit's ego healthy. Industry award stuff is always pretty self-aggrandizing and pointless, so it's a natural thing to hatch a whole scheme over. What a stupid timeline.

19 hours ago, pmoehrin said:

I have family members who took demonstrably false information at face value, and it cost them their lives. That's why it's personal for me. That's where my anger over this comes from, and I direct as much of it as I can at the people I hold responsible for spreading that garbage. Aaron Rodgers is one of the names on that list. He ain't at the top, but he's there.

 

That is kind of the thing about these conversations always ending up in both-sidesism, as if it's still pre-2015. The size and the ultimate effects of the respective grifts are not proportionate. 

Thorns badge could be tweaked. That Bank Gothic font choice was dated from the day they released it, beyond being way too boxy for a round badge. But the colors and graphic elements are hard to beat.

I'm just wondering what happened to the other two Crew men.

11 hours ago, vtgco said:

I'm mostly glad we didn't keep the red shoe-horned in, but I agree that the gold is still a big downgrade from the silver. Alongside the darkened and reduced use of blue, this scheme feels slightly uncomfortably LAFC-ish...

 

That crest looks like a quick Photoshop recolor job if you look closely, so I'm wondering if it'll still be tweaked ... but not a lot of time for a move of this magnitude. I do think blue, a darkish-teal maybe too, and silver are the best look for them. The Sounders color scheme wouldn't fit this logo and it's too good to start anew. But anything that's a step away from the international franchization of teams is a positive.

First news: 

The Seattle-area team most recently known as OL Reign is in the process of being sold and is returning to its original name of Seattle Reign FC, as well as the original branding with an updated color scheme. This was a no-brainer but I'm pleasantly surprised that it's happening so quickly, and bringing back the original top-tier crest. (Not loving the update of adding gold to it, but fine.)

I don't think the off-centered chest logo on a pullover looks weird at all. Even in soccer I don't think there's a need to reach for poetic license. Embroidery over the left breast is a pretty common standard on tops going back a very long time, even on certain formalwear.

I'd actually take that over the old Blue Jays pullover that put the arched wordmark over the centered bird/ball logo. The size and placement of the graphics there made the jersey look even more like a fan t-shirt, not the gravitas you'd expect with a piece of the pro sport uniform.

I would imagine any sort of pullover works better from a merchandizing perspective because they're a better fit for off-field wear for fans to buy. A basketball jersey looks very silly as a piece of casualwear for a regular person, but it just looks "right" in-game (and trying to nudge that toward casualwear is a bad idea, as Adidas found out in the '10s). A button-down baseball jersey isn't quite that extreme, but does follow a similar arc.

Range of incoming MLS coaching changes is interesting. You've got Charlotte hiring an English Championship/Premiership guy, RBNY hiring a Bundesliga guy, Revolution hiring an MLS guy but one with title pedigree. (And also the forever on again/off again relationship between Klopas and Chicago.) (And no use trying to explain Phil Neville in PDX.)

12 hours ago, CaliforniaGlowin said:

The whole game looked very faded to me, but I guess that was the old school look they were going for.

One thing I find kind of confusing, aesthetically, about some of these games is how the on-ice product is meant to look "faded" or retro or fauxback or whatever, but then you have all the elaborate, theatrical decoration around the ice, putting up fake shipwrecks and docks like it's a touristy mini-golf course. Feels like those two things are a little at odds. 

5 hours ago, Ridleylash said:

I think my only real qualm with Vegas' is that the combo of cream and gold kinda ended up blurring together on the TV camera side of things. Kinda surprised they didn't just paste the layout of the socks across the rest of the jersey; I think the grey striping being on the jersey would've really helped make the gold pop more. Same with outlining the gold yoke in grey.

 

For me the gold that Vegas was using is juuuust brownish/mustardish enough that it didn't bother me as much as, say, last year's Penguins cream/yellow combination. In general I agree that shades of yellow/gold tend not to go well with the vintage white schtick, yet it keeps happening in Winter Classics.