BBTV

I don't love the idea of putting blame on coaches for not challenging. Challenges are huge risks, especially when challenging spots. I imagine the percentages of winning spot challenges is lower than most others. Also so many angles are usually necessary that it's not always possible to get the necessary information before the next play is ready to be snapped. There should definitely be auto-replays - that, or the referees should err on the side of calling a TD to force that replay - but that just sounds stupid to need to do. There should definitely be replays for balls within an inch of goal line, and any penalty that results in an automatic 1st down (roughing the passer, other personal fouls, defensive holding, PI, etc.) The issue is that some of those are so subjective that even if it's obvious that the flag shouldn't have been thrown, it's hard to argue that technically it was within the description of the penalty, so I don't see too many of them being reversed, but they're too big to not be looked at. Same with obvious PIs that aren't called. They're too important to get let go. And referees should be disqualified just like players are, and a backup ref take their place. It's one thing to make a human mistake - the game moves fast, and some of these guys are 100 years old and about to take their last breath. But some of these guys are simply incompetent and embarrass themselves and the league, and make people challenge its legitimacy. That's bad, and doesn't seem to happen nearly as much in other sports (with the exception of some trash-ass home-plate umpires.)

And we can start the debate as to whether Philadelphia is mid-atlantic culturally, architecturally, or only geographically. In other news, No Play Slay, right after saying that he played great against Dallas and everyone else sucked, had knee surgery and is out for the regular season, leaving complete idiot-loser-dickwads to play against DK and those receivers on Monday. I don't care who's throwing the ball, if you're picking the Eagles, you may need to enter concussion protocol.

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yeah I tweeted that to PL earlier.

That's one of my favorite monochrome looks. There's enough striping to make it not look like the typical unitard look. Navy socks are absolutely superior with this look - the white ones that the guy on the right is wearing stand out way too much and become almost the focal point.

That's a very underrated aspect of some foods. These Beard-nominated chefs can spend all the time they want prepping some fancy-ass dish with a bull-semen reduction, but sometimes a dude just needs something to pair with some whole grain dijon.

yeah they'll have to make the ball lighter to compensate. Maybe they can come up with a lacing "system" or new "chassis" for the ball that will make it get to the base a 0.000314 seconds faster. But the player will need lighter gloves so they can apply the tags faster. I'm sure there's some parts of the glove that could be perforated or shaved down a fraction of a millimeter. Gonna need to get some egghead engineers on that.

Eagles OC apparently apologized to the team at a meeting, admitted he's been sucking, and will try to get better. Offense is predictable and plays take too long to develop. So basically what we all knew, but he's taking ownership. Unfortunately, taking ownership don't mean a damned thing if you don't fix it. DC claims he's making right calls, but getting caught with practice-squad rookies covering guys like CeeDee Lamb, and other teams simply making good calls against the D. LOL dude - isn't your job to make it so they don't make good calls against your D because maybe it's disguised? And try to hide losers as much as possible by either giving them help with a safety or doing whatever the good DCs do? Season is a total disaster, and at least the OC is admitting his role. DC is awful, but his loser-ass DBs and LBs aren't helping. For as great as Howie is, he left them with no depth once two key guys got hurt - really one key guy (Avonte Maddox, who's injury prone anyway, and a GM like Howie should have invested more in depth that can play this year, not rookies that might be great, but not right now.) Coming off of last year, and with the caliber of dudes they have, this is a failure of GMing, coaching, and a handful of the players. With upcoming nearly-certain retirement of Kelce and Brandon Graham, possible retirement of Lane Johnson and Fletcher Cox, and continuing decline of No Play Slay and James Bradbury, this is going to get worse a hell of a lot sooner than it's going to get better.

what you call smaller, they call lighter

Coulda just stopped right there.

Oh that's weird - the Soto jersey has set-in sleeves, while the one to its right has raglan sleeves (like they wear in real life). The one to the right is clearly coolbase, while the Soto is clearly a replica, so my question is if Yankees replicas always had set-in sleeves, or is this new? It doesn't appear to be on the new template but can't say for sure. I'm hoping that the new template doesn't interfere with the raglan templates that several teams still use, and are superior for pinstriped teams.

I assume the narrower placket makes that difficult.

this just made me realize that I haven’t had a pig in blanket for nearly 20 years. I’m not necessarily sure I need that to change, just found it interesting. Where does the PiB fall on the cheap-ass hors doeurve hierarchy? I remember my parent having it at parties when I was a wee lad, but it seems to have fallen out of favor since then, in favor of things like sliders, bruschetta, and much fancier things. Sometimes a frozen PiB can hit the spot as well as some fancy-ass thing that some wannabe-Noma chef prepares.

Let it be like hockey. Someone does you wrong, you dance around each other, punch each other till one goes down, shake hands, and it’s over. Teams play short handed for 5 minutes. I literally see no flaws in this plan. What could go wrong.

More on how it works: https://www.espn.com/mlb/insider/story/_/id/39104627/shohei-ohtani-contract-dodgers-deferrals-free-agency Everyone does it, just not with this much money, and with such a high percentage of the deal. According to the article, "In Peter Angelos' tenure as the owner of the Orioles, he preferred contracts that deferred salary, to be paid later rather than sooner. For example: when slugger first baseman Chris Davis signed a seven-year, $161 million deal in 2016, there was so much deferred salary within the details that Angelos personally assessed the present-day value at closer to $117 million." "Agents will sometimes agree to deferred money to affect the perception of the contract -- to hit certain salary benchmarks, to establish new precedent. The optics have always mattered." In terms of a standard contract, it's a 10 year $460,814,765 deal. The Dodgers are not getting a break anywhere. The "$700M" number isn't real (meaning, while he will eventually receive that much, it's not real in present value as if a traditional contract was signed.) But it sounds cool for the agent to say. It's basically $46M/year, but the team is holding it and paying it into escrow - they're not able to sign new players because they aren't paying him - rather than paying him directly and letting him invest it. I'm not sure why the player wouldn't want the $46M and simply put it into safe investments, other than this puts the risk of weird things - like a global pandemic - on the team, not him. Look - I'm no Dodgers fan, and hope nothing more than for them to fail, as they're a roadblock for my team - but this isn't nearly as dramatically bad as people have made it out to be, and the Dodgers are hardly the first team to do this (they've even done it with Freeman and Betts.)

Could be because in that lighting, the turquoise kinda vanishes against the white. Maybe if it was a different color, the number would look more normal.

But I don't think that's what's actually happening. They're putting $46ish million into an account each year. That's all (other than the $2M/year) they're paying for him. Using a future value calculator, at 6%, with compound interest and each subsequent $46M, that comes to $690M. So tweak the numbers some to get it to $680M, plus his $20M ($2M*10), and there you go. Unless I'm completely wrong about how this deal works (and I think it's been confirmed that I'm not) this is a 10/$460M contract, it's just that he'll get $700M total by 2044, which any player could do if they invested the majority of their contract. In fact, I assume most of the stars do, and probably get even more at the end of 10 years. The way they're able to afford other players is because by paying him the money later (which I assume is accomplished via compound interest) they could sign him to a lower-value present value contract, which lowers the payroll and tax. But again - any player could simply put 98% of their salary in an interest-bearing account. The only difference is that the team is doing it before paying him, which actually hurts him because he could earn far more by investing himself. https://www.calculator.net/future-value-calculator.html?cyearsv=10&cstartingprinciplev=46%2C000%2C000&cinterestratev=6&ccontributeamountv=46%2C000%2C000&ciadditionat1=end&printit=0&x=Calculate#calresult (Note - these numbers are not accurate, just an approximation based on some of what's been thrown around. I have no idea how to get to the actual amount of money and interest, but I think these are reasonable assumptions.)

Apparently there's an out clause, though unsure how it's triggered since it has yet to be reported who this is talking about (manager, GM, owner, backup catcher, etc.) The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal reports that Ohtani has a clause in the deal which states, “if specific change in Dodger personnel, player may opt out of contract at end of season the change occurs.” (per NY Post. I haven't fact checked.)

They almost certainly would, but I think the contrast in helmets - silver vs green - might be enough to make it acceptable, even if the jerseys are kinda close. That matchup wouldn't really have an impact though, since the teams played each other 4 times during the era of those uniforms, and the Eagles were in kelly green zero (0) times (they wore WAH during their only game in Phila.)

I agree, but it's possible that he's the reason why it's not there. Maybe he wants too much and isn't willing to bend over as much as other sites do, or maybe it's an Arlington thing (not sure who actually bids on it - Arlington, Dallas, or both.) Maybe they didn't get the expected economic windfall last time.

Is there convenient PT to this new site? Given the transplant population in DC proper, I'm' not sure how many city residents are Wizards/Caps fans, but it'd be a damn shame to rip an accessible arena from them and essentially shut them out from seeing their teams.

I have no idea what this means. As for the Patriots, I kinda feel that in most cases, socks should match helmet*, despite the perceived imbalance of white on the bottom. I think that could be remedied if his stripes were higher on the calf like they are designed to be. *not a hard rule, but a place to start when designing. Full exceptions made for teams with metallic helmets, because the pants should always match with their dark uniforms, and almost always match with their white ones**, and the metallic isn't possible to replicate on socks. **for the very few of you that don't take copious notes on all of my uniform rules, the allowance here is that teams can wear the pants that match the color of their home jersey with their white jersey, even if their metallic helmet doesn't match (see old Boston College). This should be scrutinized on a case-by-case basis, and when it's done, the socks should be primarily white with some stripe pattern.

Cool, a team taking $900M from the residents of its mid-sized home city. I get why people would vote for it, and I probably would too if it meant losing the only team I had, but it still seems scummy from the team, when others can somehow privately finance their own arenas (I say that knowing that the city usually pays for infrastructure upgrades and they do get tax breaks, but not that much.)