NFL announcers are maroons. At least, according to Gregg Easterbrook.
Why?
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
Archive for the ‘NFL’ Category
TMQ Watch: November 27, 2018.
Thursday, November 29th, 2018TMQ Watch: November 20, 2018.
Sunday, November 25th, 2018How about that Chiefs-Rams game on Monday night?
If you didn’t like the Chiefs at Rams game, then you don’t like football.
And didn’t someone write something a while back about how ESPN gets stuck with bad games?
After the jump, the rest of this week’s TMQ…
Obit watch: November 25, 2018.
Sunday, November 25th, 2018Catching up:
Bob McNair, owner of the Houston Texans. NYT.
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Does his family sell the team for tax reasons? If so, do they sell it to someone in Houston? Who? Tillman Fertitta?
Nicolas Roeg, noted director. The only thing of his I’ve watched is “The Man Who Fell To Earth” back over thirty years ago. (Lawrence, last night: “How long was the version you watched? Two hours or three?” Me: “I think it was four days.”) I just bought “Don’t Look Now” on Criterion (but we’re saving that for next October), and I’ve had the DVD of “Walkabout” for quite a while now but haven’t watched it…
Historical note, suitable for use in schools.
Saturday, November 17th, 201850 years ago today, at about 3 PM Central Time on November 17, 1968, the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders began a football game.
TMQ Watch: November 13, 2018.
Wednesday, November 14th, 2018Sorry about last week, folks, but between the elections and our wanderings over the state of Oklahoma (motto: “It’s not Scotland.”) we just flat ran out of time before this week’s edition rolled around.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
Obit watch: November 3, 2018.
Saturday, November 3rd, 2018Obit watch: November 2, 2018.
Friday, November 2nd, 2018Bernard Bragg, actor.
He graduated from the New York School for the Deaf in 1947 and enrolled at what was then Gallaudet College, studying theater there and acting in school plays. Though he enjoyed performing, there was no obvious career path in show business for a deaf person; instead he took a teaching job at the California School for the Deaf in Berkeley, occasionally performing skits and directing small shows at conventions and clubs for the deaf. Then, in 1956, he made a life-changing trip to see Marceau perform in San Francisco.
Marceau’s ability to hold the crowd’s attention without words so struck Mr. Bragg that he sought Marceau out after the show and, with a note, introduced himself and asked where he could study mime. Marceau asked him to return the next day with a sample of his work, which he did: He performed two original sketches, one in which he played Noah and all the animals on the ark, the other in which he depicted all the instruments of an orchestra. Marceau invited him to study with him in France.
He spent the summer of 1956 doing just that, and when he returned to the United States he began performing in nightclubs, schools and universities in the San Francisco area. His routines were generally a mix of set pieces and improvisation.
He went on to become one of the founders of the National Theater of the Deaf.
Paul “Dr. Z” Zimmerman, SI writer. I really didn’t follow his work for the magazine, but I do have a copy of A Thinking Man’s Guide to Pro Football somewhere. (I’ve heard good things about it.)
TMQ Watch: October 30, 2018.
Wednesday, October 31st, 2018
Ah, Cleveland.
Monday, October 29th, 2018Well. Well well well. Well.
The Cleveland Browns just fired head coach Hue Jackson.
(waits for the deafening cries of “What took them so long?” to subside)
Really, what took them so long? The man was 3-36-1 over two and a half seasons.
Also shown the door: offensive coordinator Todd Haley.
(Hattip: Lawrence.)
TMQ Watch: October 23, 2018.
Wednesday, October 24th, 2018Oddly enough, the subject of Hallmark Channel Christmas movies came up at dinner Saturday night. We have a couple of folks who are big fans of those movies – though it seems like they are fans in sort of a post-ironic hipster kind of way, if we may say so.
Anyway, after the jump, this week’s TMQ…
Your loser update: October 23, 2018.
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2018NBA teams that still have a shot at going 0-82:
Chicago
Cleveland
Lakers
Oklahoma City
===============
I wanted to do some analytics on the NFL losers. Specifically, I wanted to get an idea (and perhaps express it in graphical form) of how many losers there were at various points in the season. Week 1 isn’t very interesting: there’s generally 16 losers out of 32 teams1. But week 2 and the weeks following are the ones where things become more interesting.
This is an HTML file containing the loser data from 2009-2018. Year’s on the left, week is across the top. So for example, in week 1 of 2018, there were 15 teams that had a chance to go 0-16.
I tried graphing this in Excel, but wasn’t totally happy with the results I was getting. Perhaps someone with more experience in data visualization can do something better.
1 I say “generally” because there are exceptions. There was a tie in week 1 of 2018, which knocked two teams out of loser contention. In week 1 of 2017, one of the games was postponed due to a hurricane, which left those two teams at 0-0 and with the potential to go 0-16 that week, for a total of 17 possible losers.
Noted without (much) comment.
Monday, October 22nd, 2018TMQ Watch: October 16, 2018.
Thursday, October 18th, 2018Apropos of nothing in particular, a musical interlude:
There. Feel better?
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
Obit watch: October 15, 2018.
Monday, October 15th, 2018Catching up:
William Coors is dead at 102.
…
Along with his younger brother, Joseph, a Coors executive who supported Ronald Reagan’s rise to the presidency, William Coors, although not as overtly political, championed bootstrap success and free enterprise, and was widely admired by conservatives.
But he alienated unionists, blacks, Hispanics, women and gays with views and policies that critics called racist, sexist and homophobic, and members of those groups joined informal boycotts of Coors beer in increasing numbers in the 1970s.
Jim Taylor, one of the great Green Bay Packers:
NYT.
Cindy Lobel, food historian. I actually wasn’t familiar with her work, but I generally admire people who write about food and food history: I’m adding her book to my list. Plus: 48 is too damn young to die.
Betty Grissom, Gus Grissom’s widow. Thing I didn’t know: she ticked off a lot of people by suing North American Rockwell (the primary contractor for the Apollo program).
Her action brought Ms. Grissom considerable grief, with strangers accusing her of being unpatriotic and the close-knit space community shunning her.
The experience embittered the family, said Mark Grissom, who was 13 when his father died.
“We got the dark side of NASA,” he said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “People who were my friends were no longer my friends. A lot of people turned their back on us, and Mom got a lot of hate mail. They were like, ‘How dare you sue NASA?’ We were no longer part of the NASA family.”
…
She told an interviewer that her husband’s sacrifice had helped pave the way for future missions in which other astronauts made it to the moon.
Still, she said, “I’m pretty sure he got to the moon before they did.”
“Of course he didn’t make it,” she added, “but in spirit I think he was already there.”
TMQ Watch: October 9, 2018.
Wednesday, October 10th, 2018Geezers on geezers on geezers. Wheel in the sky keep on turning.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…