Sport

He's a born-again contrarian and he loves to take the minority opinion with everything because he thinks it makes him smarter when it really just makes him annoying. His siding with Precourt in the whole Crew saga was upsetting and annoying. He was the only person I saw in favor of the super league and his take on Qatar was the other countries should've bribed FIFA more. His religion now is the free capitalist market over anything else, which is, again, weird for the guy who was the face of hippy soccer in the 90's. His response on Qatar has been, "if you don't like it then don't watch" and it's like obviously, that's why I'm mad about it, idiot. Also weird stance for someone who should be trying to grow the sport's popularity in the US. I'd like to watch, but they're putting me in the position of choosing to ignore human rights abuses in the name of entertainment. He lives in a very black or white world - I am capable of not watching soccer while also voicing complaints on social media, Alexi. Those two things are not mutually exclusive.

I know this is well-covered territory, but it's still so weird to me that this guy turned into such a corporate shill.

I've been curious about how this was going to look for 11ish years and it hasn't disappointed. In many ways it's worse than I imagined. Back when it was announced that they were hosts we didn't have "Fyre Fest of BLANK" as shorthand for disastrous and poorly planned event - this is officially the Fyre Fest of soccer. I've never really had a hard time abstaining from soccer, which Gothamite once scolded me on here for saying after the number of deaths building the stadiums came out, but I tried to watch some of that game yesterday and it felt gross. I don't think I'll have a hard time not watching much of this tournament outside of US' games.

I do think the Panthers look is pretty attractive, but ever since it was unveiled I was trying to put my finger on why it felt so familiar. Finally occurred to me today why I liked it so much

The Stars have already played more years in Dallas than they played in Minnesota. In 2026 the Wild will have played more seasons in Minnesota than the North Stars played in Minnesota. The Stars belong to Dallas, people.

I like this! I give it a gentleman’s 7.

They really deserve every bit of this. Last year for the playoff game a bunch of Raiders fans camped out by the portable toilets in the parking lot of Paul Brown Stadium and harassed any Bengals fan who dared use one during the pregame tailgate. I've never seen another fanbase do that. Not even Steelers fans who, as everyone knows, are the worst people alive.

Kind of fun to imagine the alternate universe where instead of throwing out the fisherman entirely they just dialed it back and cranked the 90's down. Probably would've eventually evolved into something resembling this RR look. That's a free concept series idea for anyone who wants it and is less lazy than I.

If it looks how I think it's going to look then I think I'm really going to like it. Almost like a reverse Dodgers.

That's actually been a gear-grinder of mine in terms of how these are being presented and covered by the teams. A guy who works for the Blue Jackets tweeted a picture of the RR display in the team store and said "throwing it back to 2003". No, we're not. I would LOVE it if they were actually throwing it back to 2003. The jerseys in 2003 looked good.

Sorry, boys, but I love this too.

Waiting for someone in the know to pop in here and tell me they're all the same color, but the new RR looks like a more rich purple, while the others look more like the "Forum Blue" purple. I like the new color a lot better.

I think if you draw the line at making facemasks reviewable and end it there it would be fine. Whether or not the facemask was used to tackle is a pretty black or white ruling without a lot of wiggle room. I don’t see the problem.

Yeah that part was pretty dumb. Especially because they put it right where hockey players often hold their hands and stick so it was always a covered mess.

River City Relay is my favorite one because the Saints missed the extra point to tie, which adds another level of comedy to the whole thing.

Totally agree. They must see stuff on review and say 'we blew that one' all the time*, but because it's non-reveiwable then they have to get back on the mic and sell it like it's the correct call. If you can use the review to check whether a blade of grass separates a guy's foot from out of bounds then you can review whether a guy used a facemask to tackle someone. Shouldn't be this complicated. *this wasn't the NFL, but the refs who did a hideously bad job in the Alabama-Texas game this season watched this play over again when reviewing whether to eject a dude for targeting and went "GULP we f****ed up that's not close to roughing the passer.", which would've given Alabama a first down. That was such a bad call they decided they couldn't give Alabama a first down even though by rule they shouldn't have been allowed to pick up the flag for the roughing the passer call. To get around that they made up some excuse that the penalty was initially described incorrectly to the head official. Also it was probably a safety, but they couldn't review that so they got the call wrong 3 ways and then half "fixed" it by lying about the initial penalty. Every year at least five plays happen in the NFL with some rule I've never heard of and then the refs are like "That's an illegal handoff, which can't be reviewed if the play occurred on second or third down with less than a minute left in the first half" and everyone is like WHY IS THAT EVEN A RULE? I can't wait for the next one. I hope it doesn't happen against my team.

6-8 and I got the Panthers game right too. Damn. Titans Bears Eagles Patriots Commandos Saints Bills Ravens Giants Broncos Cowboys Bengals Chiefs 49ers

Makes me insane. The white uniforms are fine, it's the decisions made with the blue uniforms that kill me. First of all, why would you go back to your classic colors, but not the blue uni that won 4 straight cups? If you're going back to the 1976 jerseys, which it looks like they did, why go out of your way to use socks that don't match the hem or sleeve stripes when the socks and sleeve stripes actually did match on those uniforms.

Sorry, boys, but I will always love this uniform with the shield logo and purple socks. One of my true guilty pleasures. I saw these up close when they came through Columbus early in the Blue Jackets inaugural season and the colors looked so cool in person. 13 year old me was mesmerized. Also they pantsed us 7-1 so I really only had the uniforms to keep me engaged.

So why can't we review if a facemask penalty was missed?

The person with the worst case of that affliction is Elon himself. I hope this wakes a few people up and dispels the mystique of him as some benevolent genius set on improving humanity. He's a memelord idiot who got lucky with some trust fund investments. Dickhead could've wiped out world hunger with 44 billion and instead he did this because he got mad about some non-existant grievance with a website. What's funny to me is I knew he'd be bad, but he's destroying it in ways that nobody could've guessed. Destroying the verification system so you can squeeze 10-15 million a year out of users when the debt is in the billions every year and in the process losing WAY more than 10-15 mill in ad revenue as a result. Never saw that coming because who would think he'd attack a common sense system like the one that lets users know the information is coming from the real person? This is the biggest unforced error in business history, right? I'm a little interested in seeing whether the exodus actually happens and to what extent the damage will be. I'm tweeting less, but I only have 1500 followers, but will the actual blue checks stay? The people with 100's of thousands of followers can't just leave and start over somewhere else that easily. It's like they're suddenly holding a currency that has half the value it had two weeks ago.

To finally use a black helmet and then make the choices they made in execution instead of some very obvious (to me) choices was disappointing. The single color stripes should've matched the shoulders and pants. Why they don't makes no sense. The single color logo with the whole color 10 inches away on the sleeves makes no sense. I know the logo without the keyline has been their brand standard since they redid it and I think it'd be fine if a different team tried the no keyline look, but that logo's details are too thin - it needs a key line!, the matte finish and therein the weird texture of the decals looks worse than gloss. Would've been easier to do a gloss helmet with glossy decals with stripes and logo that match the uniform it's sitting on. They went out of their way to look worse!

This is the Reds too. They might happen to cobble together a solid collection of prospects who despite bare minimum efforts from the front office actually turn into a winning group ala the 2010-2013 years, but once they have the winning core they never spend to add more talent or do the extra work to improve the team so they're always at a disadvantage in any September race or playoff series in the rare event they actually make it that far. Take 2020 - The 15-19 rebuild actually produced a decent team and they made the Covid NIT, but they refused to add an extra bat or fix the big hole in the bullpen, which resulted in losing 2 close playoff games to the Braves without scoring a single run. It's why I think Reds Rebuild Twitter is some of the most delusional people on the internet. The prospects they acquired this season look good? Congratulations, I'll circle back in 2025 when they're traded for a new crop of teenagers you guys are going to jerk off about. My new theory is it's a defense mechanism. They love baseball and they love the Reds so they can't give it up, but that also means watching 162 Reds games a year and admitting the truth - that the current owner's main use of the team is simply a tax shelter is incompatible. So they lie to themselves and pretend that there's an actual end goal to this rebuild so that all the time they spend following this baseball team isn't completely pointless. There's not an end goal other than doing the bare minimum to staff a roster and if it ends up producing a good team then it's, like you said, a happy accident.

I'd rather they wear gold pants too, but I want to be a benevolent uniform czar and not a tyrant. The Saints can request to wear black pants and socks and I might let them once, maybe twice a decade.

last time I remarked on what I thought the Blue Jackets looked like I got in trouble so I'll just say that the helmets, pants, and socks only contribute more to looking like that. As a fan I'm not a fan. Ducks - black pants and that should be your full time road uniform. Every minute that's not your road uniform is another minute you're doing it wrong. Coyotes - no opinion and can't muster any energy to care. Bruins - love it. Keep it around as an alternate moving forward. Flames - That looks better than the original red jerseys with the white stripes looked. I like the pedastal for the logo. Downvote me if you wish. Hurricanes - Reverse Retro to Canada's 2002 olympic uniform? Throwing things back to your active road uniforms? Why? Sabres - Congratulations to like 10,000 different posters over the last two decades whose Sabres concept from the concept forums came to life and then got to see it ruined by white pants. Blackhawks - no opinion and can't muster any energy to care.