See Red

23 minutes ago, DG_ThenNowForever said:

 

Wouldn't the ACC picking up the best remnants of the Big XII (Baylor, WVU, Kansas, other) be the play here?

They need Notre Dame as a full-time member and then one from the Big XII .   I think ND's the one school out there that makes the Big Ten or ACC member schools more money.

Without Notre Dame, I think there's always a fear Clemson and FSU bolt for the SEC first chance they get. Although the hurdle for leaving the ACC is higher than it was for OU/Texas. 

On the plus side, this whole thing may be terrible for college football but it is definitely bad for Baylor, which is good. 

College football realignment: FSU president John Thrasher does not want Florida State to be ‘left behind’

Welp... the ACC isn't long for this world.

32 minutes ago, Luigi74 said:

ESPN is the one pulling the strings, if the Big 12 goes kaput Texas & Oklahoma can start SEC play before 2025 and the remaining Big 12 schools combined with the AAC is an upgrade from the current AAC. 

 

Bowlsby is fighting this since he's out of a high paying cushy job that a 5th grader could do.

Sure, but surely the best case scenario if P4 invites don't happen is that the eight Big XII teams stay together, get every penny owed by Texas and OU (maybe win a lawsuit against ESPN?), and bring on a handful of AAC programs (UCF, Houston, Memphis, Cincinatti) that would actually contribute to a better media deal.  Whatever money they get is going to be a huge step down from what they were getting but I don't see how Ok State joining the AAC and now having to share money with programs like ECU and Tulsa is an option. 

Feels like there would be more sense in the Big XII poaching some AAC teams, like UCF, Houston, Cincinnati, and Memphis, no?

I feel like either way you still have a second tier conference that lacks any star power, for lack of a better term, but at least that way some of the deadweight gets shed.

But then again it's probably ESPN behind all this, so what makes sense to them is what matters. 

This video is perfect.

1 hour ago, DG_ThenNowForever said:

If you have a Defector subscription, the above-linked Richard Sherman piece is worth a read. Not just because it's about football, but also for insights into 911 dispatching, and the calculus people have to do when calling the police on a loved one, especially when that loved one is a black man.

 

https://defector.com/what-we-know-about-richard-shermans-arrest/

This part...

Quote

Both Redmond PD and four state troopers responded to the scene with a K9 unit. Police said Sherman was cooperative until he was told he would be arrested, at which point they claimed he began to walk away. Officers then set the police dog on Sherman and he was placed under arrest.

They set a K9 on him because he walked away.  That is reprehensible.

5 hours ago, spartacat_12 said:

 

Sure, but he never transcended the sport and became part of the zeitgeist the way guys like Bonds, Jeter, or A-rod did. That's the point Stephen A was trying to make, although he didn't do the greatest job presenting his argument.

Ichiro never chased down and beat Hank Aaron's HR record, played shortstop for the New York Yankees, or signed the first real mega deal in the league's history.  Bonds was a jerk, A-Rod was disliked, and Jeter was boring and spoke in clichés.  They're not part of baseball's zeitgeist for anything they did off of the baseball field (unless you count steroids, but I don't think that changes anything).

1 hour ago, Hat Boy said:

The problem lies with MLB, not Ohtani.  Mike Trout speaks English and baseball does a lousy job promoting him.

I don't think Trout wants to be promoted.  Not much they can do if that's the case. 

1 hour ago, Michael Bolton said:

Man, what a shame about Richard Sherman. He's definitely not a guy I would ever have thought I'd see in this kind of predicament.

It's kind of surprising but also not at all surprising.  He's gotten a lot of mileage for being a Stanford grad for someone who doesn't get into Stanford if he wasn't good at football.  I've only seen him on TV like most people but he always seemed like an :censored: to me. 

16 hours ago, MadmanLA said:

 

In the mornings, I'll usually flip back and forth between First Take and Skip & Shannon, and that depends on the topic at hand (between the two shows, it's nothing but NBA and NFL talk, and very rarely delve into other sports).  Hell, since the pandemic, the days I work from home, my daytime viewing has largely consisted of those two, Colin Cowherd (& Joy Taylor), newscasts, and old sitcoms reruns between Antenna TV, Logo, Decades, and whatever else is on some of the Viacom channels (BET, MTV2, and VH1).  Beyond that, I don't watch much ESPN or FS1 outside of certain live events...I more or less tapped out on Around the Horn and PTI awhile ago, and they were my two favorite shows on ESPN.

But like... why?  I can't understand why anybody willingly watches Skip Bayless or Stephen A. Smith.  What's to gain from watching people make intentionally absurd arguments (loudly, in Stephen A. Smith's case)?

1 hour ago, Gothamite said:

 

We’re talking about one of the best teams in baseball, though.  First place from Opening Day to the very day they clinched a pennant. 
 

And still, could only draw flies. 

 

 

They could be the 1927 Yankees and I'm still not crossing the Howard Frankland Bridge into St. Pete during rush hour to watch them play the freakin' Baltimore Orioles in a Costco. 

I don't know how people struggle to understand why people won't drive to a dumpy stadium that's a pain in the ass to get to to watch players they barely know because they all get traded as they hit their prime just to line the pockets of an owner they despise.

Tampa itself is a bit of a mess with its sprawl and is considered a pretty miserable city for commuters to start with.  The stadium isn't near the population centers and it isn't near the wealth.  As far as I know, there isn't much in the way of public transportation to get from Tampa to the stadium in St. Pete and commuting there requires crossing one of two bridges and one of them, I-275, is one of the most congested roads in the country.

I don't know if baseball in Tampa can work, but the current situation is a pretty bad one to judge whether it can or can not by.

12 hours ago, Crabcake said:

Seeing the Rays mentioned has reminded me yet again that I would love a 30 for 30 about Tampa Bay’s relocation madness. Seems to me (albeit I have done little to no research on the matter) that they were constantly brought up as a city for the MLB to move to and seemed to be kind of the #1 option when teams were pursuing relocation/#1 bargaining chip when owners wanted to hold cities hostage for new stadiums. They even had a deal to get the Giants at one point. Yet when baseball finally did get to Tampa it flopped, and flopped hard. 

They are probably not the only hurdles the Rays face, but they have a combination of bad ownership, a bad stadium, and bad stadium location.  On top of that, while it's impressive what they've managed to do on the field despite their budget, regularly trading off your best players for prospects doesn't do much to build loyalty.  They have a generational talent that will likely be debuting this year in Wander Franco and it's difficult to get too excited because you know five or six years from now he'll be shipped off for prospects.  The presence of the Yankees in Tampa doesn't help.  One of the local sports radio stations plays coverage of Yankees games at night (or did as of two years ago).

If they were owned by Vinick (Lightning owner) and had a more accessible stadium that actually added to the experience of attending a baseball game, they would be a lot more successful.  I don't think it's a guarantee they'd be successful enough, though.

59 minutes ago, spartacat_12 said:

 

I always thought that Bridgeport Sound was the geographic indicator for the team, and Tigers was the nickname. Now I'm trying to wonder what a Sound Tiger is supposed to be.

 

Also, love to see a team not playing on an island called the Islanders.

Bridgeport, CT is located on the Long Island Sound, so that's where Sound came from in the name.

The new identity is awful -- I didn't particularly like the old name or logo (although I have a uniform from when they were blue/yellow/black in my closet) but at least it had character.

I suspected it being mid-season in the NFL was relevant because it would either mean the XFL season would have to run in the fall, which is a non-starter, or that the QB of the team representing the XFL in that game would likely be on an NFL depth chart or practice squad by then. 

On 3/12/2021 at 10:31 AM, darthjocan said:

Outside of the two Super Bowls in the first two years of the current set and the Manning era, the Broncos haven't been that good since their current uniforms were introduced. They have two playoff appearances in years where John Elway and Peyton Manning weren't the QB in that time.

Well that's not true.  They made the playoffs with Brian Griese within a year or two of Elway retiring.  They made the playoffs with Jake Plummer three times.  And they made the playoffs with Tebow once.  They have the 9th best record in the league since 2000 (and are ranked even higher if you consider '97-'99) and until the last five years or so, outside of the year they were bad enough to draft Miller at #2, their bad years were eight or nine wins and being in playoff contention.  Really, since they've switched, imo, there's only been three or four teams you could argue have been more successful than them overall.

As for the Jaguars... they look like the blah franchise that they are.  A return to the Fred Taylor-era uniforms would give them one of the best looks in the league again.

5 hours ago, fouhy12 said:

The semifinals look very good. Four great uniforms. 

The one improvement would be Clemson in O-O-W, but beyond that, yeah, they all look great.

2 hours ago, The AFC South said:

They should permanently make that helmet part of the rotation.

That's my new favorite helmet.  It's perfect!

Pretty sure Florida is trolling Oklahoma by wearing orange-white-white since it's what they wore when they beat OU in the BCS National Championship game last time they played.

8 hours ago, OaklandIsBack said:

The Cheez It Bowl in Orlando used the Dolphins word mark for Miami’s end zone 

 

 

 

Speaking of this game, I really love the Cheez-It Bowl logo.

Florida's endzones will be painted differently this week.  More recently they've been orange, with blue font and blue along the sidelines.  I'm not a fan of these endzones.

I don't think I like that at all.

I'd like this a lot more if the helmets weren't matte finish.  Blue/white/blue would look pretty good, though.

Yeah, some sort of all-white ice uniform seems like the obvious guess considering the helmet is sitting on ice.

Edit: all white confirmed by Eleven Warriors. 

https://www.elevenwarriors.com/ohio-state-football/2020/11/118456/ohio-state-to-wear-alternate-whiteout-jerseys-for-this-weekends-game-at-illinois

Florida's made a change to the striping pattern on the white helmet, which they will be wearing at Vanderbilt this week. Brings it in line with the uniform striping. 

New:

Old: