Everything Else

How Does Andrew Luck Retiring Affect The Leafs?

By Sam Fels 2478 0

Ok, not really, but it was a fun joke to make.

There is a great fear in football, which was there before Andrew Luck retired but is now only exacerbated, about a shrinking player pool. And that’s at every level. As you probably already know, the level of participation at the youth level has been dropping for years, as more and more parents have decided slowly killing their children is less than ideal. And at the top level, more and more players are retiring at younger and younger ages because they’ve made their money, don’t feel the need to ruin their later years, and can still get out with everything mostly intact or as close to it as they’ll ever be.

The other sport with concussion issues, or at least a lawsuit because of it (baseball probably has one too at least behind the plate) hasn’t had this rash yet. We haven’t seen a lot of players retiring early when in the peak of their careers unless there was no other choice. Nathan Horton didn’t have a choice. David Clarkson had piled up so many injuries he didn’t have a choice. There are other names who simply could not even consider playing again. But they’re a far bigger rarity than what we’re seeing in the NFL.

But with Andrew Luck being the biggest name to decide it wasn’t worth it (rightly) anymore, is this something the NHL will have to fear in the near future? I tend to doubt it.

One, and the big one that both sides of the brain-injury debate in football tend to miss, is the very nature of football is destructive to the brain. It’s not the blow ’em-up, wince-on-your-couch hits that are the problem, or THE problem. The arbiters of the game think it is, a lot of fans on both sides think it is, but it’s not the major issue. It’s the contact on every play. It’s the simple blocking and tackling, the sub-concussive contact that adds up over a game, season, career that does most of the damage. And you can’t measure that damage on the brain until it’s too late. It’s also that contact that leads to a ton of other injuries, the type that Luck decided he’d had enough of. Football is just a dull ache at best all the time, disastrous on the body at its worst.

Hockey doesn’t have that. It has contact all over the ice of course, but nothing like football. There are probably entire shifts players can go through without contact (cue Don Cherry losing his mind about Europeans here). Hockey’s injuries come from the big hits, and those are the ones that the rules-makers are ham-handedly trying to fix. You could actually get these completely out of the game if you weren’t so terrified about an old white man with a nose the size of Idaho and as red as Mississippi losing his goddamn mud over it. That’s another debate, but the rate of major injury in hockey just isn’t the same.

Second, hockey players just don’t have the safety net that Luck does.

We joke about hockey players being dumber than donkey shit all the time, but this does enter into it. Luck has a Stanford education, and while there are hockey players from Harvard, Yale, Michigan (it’s a seriously good school I’m not being biased here), Brown, Cornell, BC, BU, and a few others, the ones who stay all four years and graduate tend to be fringe NHL-ers anyway. Your major stars in the NHL are in college maybe a year, some don’t even go, and a ton aren’t in school past like seventh grade in reality. The only thing they can do is hockey. They’d be lost without it.

While a lot of football players don’t do much on campus (and actually we’d be much better off if too large a number only did nothing instead of bad), they have to be there three years. A good portion of them do get somewhat close to a degree if they want, and a good portion go back and get it even while playing, no matter how much of a star. Their options are a little more varied.

Magary covered this yesterday, but one thing hockey and football probably do have in common is searching out players whose life is only the sport they play. This is much easier for hockey scouts, and probably getting more and more difficult for football scouts and GMs. But you’ve seen what hockey minds think of any player who shows any personality or outside interests. Hell, we made fun of Jonathan Toews’s and his interest in green science, because it was fun to do so while also happy that he actually did have an outside interest. But do you think there were some in the Hawks front office who worried his new passions led to his dip in production? You better believe there were.

Unlike football, hockey has the ability to change the things that make it destructive. And at times, it feels like they want to but don’t know how. But it’s not as urgent as football, which is probably why they’ll stick with half-measures for the meantime.

Football

I’m Not Here To Not Get F**ked Up

By Brian Schmitz 1363 0

As everyone knows, the nationwide attention given to the legalization of sports gaming in many states has provided yet another avenue for the NFL to increase its already robust popularity. Twitter is filled with as many “gambling gurus” as there are “models.” As a veteran gambler and former professional football player, I can tell you one thing: anyone who is charging for their gambling picks is a hack. There is no doubt that there a few guys out there who have been super successful over a long period of time. These types of guys don’t share their picks with anyone; much less whore them out on twitter. These guys have made more than enough money gambling that they certainly don’t need the “$85 Tuesday Night MAC-tion Play of the Year!!!”

During this year’s NCAA and NFL seasons, I will be giving out my picks for free. Of course, I can’t make any promises on winnings, and frankly, I don’t really care if you win or not, but I can share with you that I have never had a gambling season under 53%. I think I can help you make some money, but so does Eddie O with his horse(shit) picks and I think I’m roughly 1-73 when taking his advice on the ponies. But that’s neither here nor there.

In my previous life and a professional athlete, I learned a lot about what to expect from a team going into a game. My biggest gambling takeaways from my experiences are this:

  • Teams take on the personality of their coach.
  • Always pay attention to the previous game as well as the following week’s game.
  • If you are unsure on a pick, don’t bet it. But if you hell-bent on betting it, always take the NFL home dog.
  • If you are a trends guy, then only look at the current season. Previous years trends are for losers.
  • Never, ever bet on pre-season games.

Back in my Arena Football League playing days, I would never bet a game that I was playing in. Not because I couldn’t or didn’t want to, but because I had too much respect for my coach and my teammates. However, I would often give family and friends my insight on games and they were free to place a bet if they so choose.

Another gambling story from my playing days was when the University of North Carolina Tar Heels were playing in the Las Vegas Bowl. Our first day there, we were given a stern lecture by a Caesar’s Palace sportsbook manager about how gambling spreads are not a prediction of who was going to win the game, but a way to get two sides to bet evenly on a line. While this thinking is most likely true, the two statements are not mutually exclusive. I feel that an opening line is the truest indication of a final score. The movements in the line then account for the books to get equal action on each side.

Finally, as a gambling side note, here’s a quick story: The Las Vegas Bowl is the greatest bowl game around. You can have your Sugar and Fiesta Bowls; I’ll take playing the Las Vegas Bowl every time. I could fill pages and pages with stories from that week, but in the interest of time and to cater to our readers 2nd grade attention spans, I’ll only share one:

Every day after bowl practice, we were given per diem. This would amount to the value of all our meals and incidental expenses. Every day, without fail, you would have 100 guys take this brown per diem envelope and make a bee-line to the tables. As the entire, and mostly underage, UNC football team was playing blackjack, craps, and roulette, I saddle up to a good friend of mine (who will remain nameless) to play roulette. What I saw next is something I will never, ever forget. My man, who was an All-American and 2x Pro Bolwer, began betting on both red and black at the same time. I see this and I’m like “What the fuck are you doing? It is literally impossible for you to win!” What he said next was either the dumbest or smartest thing I’ve ever heard – to this day I’m still not sure. He looks at me with 1000% seriousness and says “Dawg, you don’t get free drinks if you’re not gambling and I’m not here to not get fucked up.”

Now, almost 20 years and 40 trips to Vegas later, I cannot walk past a roulette table and think to myself “I’m not here to not get fucked up.”

Football

Bears 2019 Success Is Tied To Mitchell Trubisky

By Wes French 1486 0

The Bears are through a week and a half of practices and we’ve learned that the defense is still incredible, the beat writers LOVE the kicking  competition and no one knows if anything has improved in the play of Mitchell Trubisky.

Mitch and his development sort of flew under the radar this Summer when Cody Parkey‘s GMA appearance and the sideshow kicking competition dominated most of the offseason headlines. Training camp brought our boy Trubs back into the spotlight and all the reports have been more or less the same we’ve seen the last two years, with every great play there is an equal and opposite awful one. Inconsistency is Trubs game.

But he’s practicing against the league’s best defense! Pfft. This is supposed to be the year he takes “the step” forward and develops into the “First Division QB” that takes Chicago from mediocrity to contender for a decade.

So, is that what they’ll get?

Mitch, through no real fault of his own, is a polarizing figure destined to be measured against the two men Ryan Pace chose to pass up. The 2017 QBs taken after Trubs are routinely discussed as better than him; one (Patrick Mahomes) is an MVP already and looks like he’ll be better than most at the position for a decade, while the other (Deshaun Watson) shows brilliant flashes but has already undergone major knee surgery. You can spend literally hours talking about the merits of all three, and it will never goddamned matter. Please don’t do this. They can’t go back and draft Mahomes. Embrace that fact. Mitch is what they’ve got, and what they do to maximize what they’ve got is all that matters.

Now, how to maximize whatever Mitch is. His organization didn’t do him any favors at the start.

Mitch was essentially thrown into a garbage system coached by John Fox and a staff that knew they were all DOA once Pace took over, but were allowed to weekend-at-Bernie’s the 2017 campaign as the McCaskey’s weren’t about to pay another coach to not work for them. Mike Glennon (WOOF) was only able to help drag Fox’s body around for four weeks before the job was heaped on our young Jonathan Silverman. No Andrew McCarthy around to help carry the weight, Mitch just chucked shit up and hoped *checks notes* Dontrelle Inman or any TE/RB might catch something. Seriously, the top ten list of 2017 Bears reception leaders reads like an Iowa fan’s wet dream with FOUR tight ends. No, none of them were over 20 catches. Man, 2017 sucked.

So you have a young Quarterback that started a single year in college, thrust into a system no one cared about with sub-par players no one intended to keep around. This is a failure. Pace seemingly gets a pass for this, as in it’s never discussed, but this was a major misstep and really didn’t even begin true development for Mitch. Off to a great start.

Year two Trubisky was more fun to watch in Matt Nagy’s system but that lack of coaching in year one shown more often than anyone, I’m sure Mitch included, would like to see. He can’t help but constantly heave the ball off his back foot, but his post-snap reads are where you really see the need for improvement and reps in the offense. Mitch also tends to lean on his mobility, for better or worse. He’ll make an escape and hit a receiver or scramble for big yardage; the next play, he bails on the pocket and attempts a throw across his body that becomes an interceptable ball while he’s locked in on one target the whole time.

2018 Trubisky teased some gorgeous throws while missing wide open targets with regularity. He ranked 30th of 35 qualified QBs for depth-adjusted accuracy(sub required, and recommended. It’s $12, cheapass). Mitch was a fairly high 93% accurate on short (line of scrimmage or behind) throws, but on anything beyond that his accuracy starts declining. Sharply. (Per Pre-Snap Reads data):

  • 1-10 yards – 77.6% (24th/86.5%-1st)

  • 11-20 yards – 54.3% (27th/69.9*nice*-1st)

  • 20+ yards – 38.1% (21st/61.5%-1st)

For every pretty ball dropped in-stride to Tarik Cohen on a wheel route down the sideline there were three terrible overthrows of Taylor Gabriel on a corner post or Anthony Miller on a blown coverage in the seam that arguably result in touchdowns. Those throws have to be made. It’s what good QBs do.

From Cian Fahey’s offseason review of Mitch, “He’s a very different type of player to prime Joe Flacco, but that would be the caliber of quarterback you’re working with.”

Exciting! Flacco won a Super Bowl…He also makes a living on gaining large swaths of yardage via P.I. Not ideal.

A late season injury only blurred the lines further on where exactly Mitch is developmentally. The offense appeared almost scaled back for baby boy upon return, but the problem areas remained the same. The issues don’t seem to be about understanding the plays, but the decision making and execution of what Nagy and Co. tee up. The Playoff loss was a microcosm of his season – a perfectly timed and thrown ball into a small window to Robinson helped to set up the double-doink sadness, but only AFTER a terrible read that should’ve been intercepted a handful of plays earlier.

How Nagy works now to change Trubisky’s bad habits will define this era of Bears football. Improving accuracy and reads are mandatory, with defensive regression and kicking headaches guaranteed in 2019. It’ll also go a long way in telling if 2018 was improvement over 2017, or just a system with much better players propping Mitch up and dragging him around with them.

The good plays are great. The misses are egregious. That is what Mitch is right now – inconsistent, and the spectrum is VAST. So-so Mitch got them to Wild Card Weekend. Consistent Mitch makes the Bears a real problem for the NFC.

Football

Bears in Bourbonnais: Boring Ain’t So Bad

By Wes French 1709 0

Do you hear anything? No? Me either. No noise. No torches and pitchforks. No jobs on the line (yet). It’s pretty boring around here.

Usually in late July we’re all too eager here in Chicago to begin HOT TAKE SZN surrounding the Bears and the NFL. This July, though, feels different. Is everyone just happy to banter about the Cubs division chase and Sox future potential? No, we’ve been doing that every July since 2015. The NBA had a pretty big summer, but the Bulls largely sat that out and everyone is just content they MIGHT make a surprise run at the 8-seed in the East. Hawks prospect camp and convention?? OK, I’m done.

So with nothing new or exciting going on in major sports around the city, why is this late July so different? The Bears, coming off their first playoff appearance since 2010 and second in the last 13 years, have had the quietest offseason in about as long. No new head coach/GM/Front Office personnel. No major signings/high draft picks. Hardly any turnover on the roster/staff, and no real starting positions up for the taking. GM Ryan Pace didn’t even get to make a draft pick until the third day, and there’s been little discussion about the his team or the impending camp since.

The biggest offseason story? Kickers. Cody Parkey long fired into the sun, the talk of both mini-camp and now training camp is the kicking sideshow. Each day’s camp breakdown thus far has started with the accuracy for that day’s kicker; Elliot Fry is 17 of 20 so far! He’s hit from 60 and banged in from 48 and 51 in the driving rain! Eddie Pineiro hit from 63 after doing his best 80s macho movie hunk routine – after his coaches asked him to try from 60 he replied “nah, how ’bout 63”! Suh gnarly, broseph.

The crowds are another HOT story coming out of Bourbonnais. Attendance day one? OVER 8,000!!! Videos tweeted of fans LIGHTLY JOGGING to get front row standing room to see the Midway Monsters strap on the pads and paw at each other! Whoa, did you see that 50-yard bomb from Mitch to Gabriel?? Kahlil Mack and Eddie Jackson are sooooo goood OMFG!!!! I mean, it’s great to see the guys you want to excel succeed in practice, but that’s the bar here, no? To be as good as advertised?

This shit is BORING. But boring doesn’t really mean bad. Consider:

-There was one major coaching change in the offseason, but not the normal refrain of a deficiency in some area. Vic Fangio left to go be the head coach in Denver because his defense was so amazing (while the rest of the team was total ass for most of his tenure). The ensuing hire? Chuck Pagano, a highly regarded defensive mind in his own right that mostly just needs to keep the ship on course. There also are no ‘hot’ seats to speak of at the moment. Weird.

-The players lost to free agency were seen as priced out of their worth at Halas Hall and nary a tear was shed for Adrian Amos or Bryce Callahan. The replacements and other new signings were mostly budget buys met with a collective “meh”.  HaHa Clinton-Dix and Buster Skine swap in for Amos and Callahan. Mike Davis and Cordarrelle Patterson are here to do something in the backfield. Great, fine. I bet you didn’t even know they signed Ted Larson, again, for O-Line depth or Marvin Hall and Peter Williams. Only one of those guys is made up, but I’m guessing you have to look it up to tell me which one.

-The draft was pretty uneventful as well, unless you count trading up 14 or so spots in the 3rd round “eventful”. Sure, they got their GUY at running back in David Montgomery, or so they’ll tell anything with ears. Even he hasn’t generated much buzz since the draft, a soft spoken type that just does his work and stays quiet off the field. Booooooring. The rest of the draft was all lottery tickets and undrafted free agents because Pace only had five picks to work with. They got a Ridley? No, not the one from Alabama.

-There aren’t any big injuries to get all worked up about, either. Adam Shaheen hasn’t practiced in two days, but that’s basically his whole bag of tricks since being wildly overdrafted three years ago. Someone named Emmanuel Hall is recovering from groin surgery. HaHa is on the PUP list, rehabbing a lower body injury but expected back before too long. Whatever.

So this late July, the start to camp is boring. Embrace the boring, it means that most of us are looking forward to September and could give a shit about what happens between now and then. We don’t even get another open practice for a few days; the team has a shorter, closed practice today and is off Wednesday. There’s a preseason game a week after that, so maybe by the weekend we’ll start to get some real battles for the edge of the roster. Those are the positions that help to define serious championship contending NFL teams from the dregs they beat up.

Boring kinda sucks, but we’ll take it after the last decade worth of summers overstuffed with tough questions. Wait and see how these jokers fighting for their NFL lives fair in game reps in a week or so. If you need your fix the rest of this first week, keep refreshing that twitter account of your favorite beat writer to see where Steady Eddie P tells coach he’s spotting his next kick. HOOOOO BABYYYYY!

@WFrenchman on Twitter

Everything Else

In Defense Of Replay

By Sam Fels 1630 0

Been meaning to get to this for a week, so not even sure if it’s relevant now. But hey, that’s never stopped me before! Hey, here’s another Zeppelin reference!

Last week, there was a ton of debate about replay in various sports, and whether it’s already gotten out of control or become something we can do without. There was the disallowed goal in the Man City-Tottenham semifinal that swung the result from one side to the other (one which I certainly didn’t find gratifying and hilarious at all!). There have been various reviews in the NHL Playoffs that have sent fans into orbit, be it goalie interference or an offside call or high-sticks and whatever else. While hardly the same stakes, last night’s Cubs game was an excellent argument for robot umps for the strike zone. We can agree that these kinds of debates aren’t new, just how hot the discussion is that week and how many incidents are bunched together.

By now, you know the argument from the anti-replay crowd. It takes too long, interrupts the rhythm, and they prefer the “human element.” But all of these are terribly flawed arguments, and let’s start with the last one first. What you’re saying with “human element,” is that you like mistakes. That’s it. You’re probably trying to show compassion for the arbiters of the game, and fair enough, but that’s what you’re saying. No person can get every call right, so we just have to understand that the people in charge are doing the best they can.

That’s fine and dandy when there isn’t a better way. But there is. When these rules were drawn up long ago for whatever sport or game is your favorite, they weren’t written as, “as close as you can get it.” Or “this is how this rule works, at least as often as it’s called that way but hey sometimes you’re going to miss one and that’s cool.” The rules were written with hard lines (except for maybe basketball?), and the only reason humans were charged with enforcing those rules and hard lines is that there wasn’t another option in 1884 or 1921 or even 1956. This was the best we can do.

You’ll get some who will tell you that Raheem Sterling’s chalked-off goal due to Sergio Aguero being fractionally offside isn’t “the spirit of the rule.” (They’re named Adam Hess). Or you’ll hear that in a bevy of other situations. Yeah? How do you know? How do you know the inventors of the game didn’t want everything black or white? If you could go back in time and offer them the technology that would enforce their rules pretty much perfectly, what do you think they would say? The rules are almost always cut and dried, and should be enforced as such.

It’s the last part, and the other parts of the argument against, where it gets murkier. Because at the moment, most sports are trying to blend technology and the human eye where technology can’t get to yet. But what we’re living through is the trial-and-error stage, the evolution of it. It was never going to be a turn-key, overnight success. These things have a process, and sometimes the process isn’t fun or it goes off the wrong way and we try something else.

Each sport has its own unique issues that make this harder. The main one to me is that the NFL introduced this borked challenge system, but because everyone wants to be the NFL, hockey soon followed suit and so did baseball. And that’s ridiculous. The NFL has been trying to get away from this slowly for a while, making every scoring play and turnover reviewable. Which has led to the imperfect solution of refs on the field calling pretty much everything a turnover or touchdown knowing they have the safety net of a review afterwards. You see this in hockey where I’m sure linesmen take razor thin decisions to the side of not calling it hoping a challenge will bail them out. Soccer linesmen have been instructed to do this in line with VAR.

Obviously, this leads to the problem of watching something and wondering, “Does this count?” The impulsiveness and suddenness of the emotions of sports gets clouded. And that is something to notice and be concerned about. But is it such a problem? Is this not something we could become accustomed to in time? And as the tech gets better and quicker, might this be something that’s solved at the time? Certainly offsides calls can be.

There are those who will tell you, in the case of the City-Spurs match, that we’ve lost the elation of the ball hitting the back of the net. Maybe, but try telling Spurs supporters they should go without the jubilation of having that goal against rightly chalked off. They’re not the same, but they’re not so different either.

Where technology and replay are struggling to forge acceptable levels is where the rules are not all that well defined. The NFL is going to try and it’s going to make this worse, because first it couldn’t decide what was a catch and now it’s going to try and define what’s pass interference and that’s a mess. And then maybe they’ll back off of it, and try something else that will work.

The length of time to get to these decisions is something we’ll all agree on. Until the tech is better, and we may never live to see it, no review should take more than 30 seconds. It’s either obvious or it’s not, and if it’s the latter let’s stick with the call and move on. We could speed that up by having a dedicated official in a replay booth, like soccer is doing with VAR, who simply radioes to the relevant head official on the field or ice. I don’t mind soccer having the main ref come take a look for himself, because it would dull his authority a bit if he’s getting overruled by a voice in the sky we can’t see. And for the most part, this process has been pretty quick.

There will always be calls that are just too hard to get instantly. A fumble in football. Until they define goalie interference clearly, we won’t have that either. Penalties in soccer. But we’re getting closer. It’s just unfortunate timing for us that we’re here for the kinks stage, the developmental one. In the long run though, it will almost certainly be better for everyone. As long as we accept going backwards would be worse.

Everything Else

This Is What You’ll Get

By Sam Fels 2408 0

Admittedly, comparing what goes on between the lines/boards of football and hockey is hardly a perfect juxtaposition. These are different sports with different rules, different methods, and different aims. So let’s say that up top. But last night’s Steelers-Bengals game was particularly ugly, and could be a huge piece of evidence against the “FIGHTING WOULD SOLVE EVERYTHING!” crowd in hockey.

There are probably a couple more caveats here. First off, the Bengals and Steelers is probably football’s most poisonous rivalry at the moment. And there’s a long history. So this is the absolute extreme of the ugliness football can have on the field when two teams feel they have to “sort it out themselves.” You wouldn’t get this from say, Packers-Cardinals or something. But it’s not like hockey doesn’t have teams with ugly history where everyone is on high-alert from the opening whistle. It wasn’t so long ago that Hawks-Canucks felt more like WarGames than it did a hockey game. And it’s a good thing that hockey feels less and less like this, and you need look no further than last night to see why.

I’ll let Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky sum it up:

But they can’t police each other. Or rather, this—last night—is what that policing looks like. It’s enforcement. It’s punitive. It’s an escalating cycle of revenge. You take out our guy, we’ll take out your guy. And it doesn’t work. If it worked, if players feared retaliation, we wouldn’t see the dirty hits in the first place. But we still do. We always have.

Seeing as how Barry is Deadspin’s leading hockey guy, I think he knows exactly what he’s saying here, or at least has written very similar thoughts about hockey. Because this has always been the theory for those who can’t let go of the past. That if hockey players could police themselves there wouldn’t be any hits from behind or boardings or goalies run or whatever else.

And that’s always been bullshit. One, those things have always been part of hockey even when Dave Semenko or Dave Schultz were allowed to pile-drive anyone they saw fit and barely get a penalty for it. To wish for a simpler time in hockey when players respected each other and never did anything dirty to each other is to wish for a time that didn’t exist.

If hockey were to let this go, things wouldn’t end with “just a fight.” There would be vengeance for that fight, and on and on it would go until someone really got hurt. And what would be solved then, other than a few very insecure men in the crowd feeling their oats? Because nothing bad has ever happened from that, right?

Much like Barry goes on to say later in this post, discipline needs to be the league’s job.. And if it’s serious about player safety, which it only is to the point that it doesn’t end up in court, it would really start to get the hammer out. Radko Gudas should have gotten 20 games, if not more. Attempts to injure, and do not fool yourself because  blindside hits and boardings are in most cases, need to have 5-10 game suspensions. The next Raffi Torres shouldn’t have to commit seven to eight utterly heinous acts before he gets a 40-game suspension.

But the NHL won’t because it still fears the backlash of a bunch of crusty, angry fans who are going to show up anyway. In truth, the fact that they yell the loudest almost certainly signals they are in the minority, because that’s how it usually works.

We make a pact with ourselves of course whenever we watch football or hockey (or MMA or boxing or pick whatever you want here). We know they’re highly dangerous, and really all we ask is that the players on display are fully aware of the risks they are taking. At this day and age, I think most are and are still more than happy to be out there. And we can live with that.

But last night crossed a line, and I can’t imagine I know anyone who watched Ryan Shazier or later the hits on Vontaze Burfict and Antonio Brown and felt good about it. And I know you can sit here and say Burfict is the dirtiest player in the league, and you’d probably be right. And maybe you think that makes what happened to him justified, but who draws that line? Do you think they feel that way on the Bengals sideline? Do they come looking for their own bounty in return? Who decides when it’s settled?

And that’s what hockey would look like if we returned to the 70’s and 80’s, except the players now are bigger, stronger, and faster. Trust me, Dave Schultz today would get his ass handed to him on a nightly basis (he was 6-1, 190. That makes him the same size as Patrick Sharp, basically.

It would become something no one would want except the truly unhinged. Sadly, hockey has always bowed to its unhinged quality, fearing that it cannot live without them.

Everything Else

This Above All: To Thine Own Self Be True

By 1495

Let’s get one thing straight—the owners of NFL teams are terrible people. They’re succubi who feed off of young men, particularly young men of color, by profiting from the damage done to those young men’s short- and long-term health in exchange for a large sum of money that, while still large, is actually a fraction of the wealth of the owner, and more importantly, a fraction of the wealth that the player will bring to the owner, who ends up coming out way ahead in that deal. They’re succubi who feed off of taxpayers by extorting stadium funding, the receipts from which go overwhelmingly back to the owner, rather than the community that paid for the building. This is the most blatant of their extortions, but they also suck out subsidies and tax breaks that, like a slow bleed, drain resources away from the very community that is then threatened by the owner with the loss of their team.

Everything Else

Your NHL-less Weekend Viewing Guide

By Sam Fels 1246 0

I’d like to think this will be the second to last one of these I have to do. But I’d like to think a lot of things. If it isn’t, I probably will be hooking up a hose to my car’s exhaust anyway and there won’t be one next week, so I guess there’s a chance this could be my last one. Anyway, you wanted the best and they didn’t fucking make it, so here’s what you get…

Friday

Bulls v. Heat – Of all the stupid things a large swath of Bulls fans think, the idea that you’re somehow a traitor or an idiot for thinking Lebron James is close to must-see TV might just take the cake. While I try and not wade into the argument of whether he’s the best player ever (and I think you could make a pretty convincing argument that he is), I think there’s little argument that he’s the most unique. A man that size, that quick, that flexible, able to guard and play all five positions, it’s astounding. The only other guy who could claim to guard and play all five spots that I can think of is maybe Magic Johnson, and he wasn’t nearly as quick or as explosive at James and certainly not nearly as interested in defending. Even to a basketball-agnostic like me, I find it staggering to watch. Anyway, you should get a decent two quarters here before the Heat are up 40. If they’re interested.