Lawrence pinged me this morning, but in truth, he was just nudging me to do something I was contemplating anyway.
Yes, there are no NFL teams that can go 0-17. Or at this point, even 0-16-1.
But: the NBA season has started. I don’t care much about basketball, but why not kick a few teams around?
NBA teams that have a shot at going 0-82 this season:
Orlando Magic
Sacramento Kings
Los Angeles Lakers
Charley Trippi, football player.
Although he was a football star at a time when many players appeared on both offense and defense, Trippi was especially renowned for doing just about everything but kicking field goals and extra points and snapping the ball.
In his nine years with the Cardinals, he ran for 3,506 yards, threw for 2,547 yards and amassed 1,321 yards in pass receptions — the only player in the Pro Football Hall of Fame to have exceeded 1,000 yards in each category. He played at left halfback and quarterback, punted and returned punts and kickoffs, and finished out his career at defensive back.
Trippi took Georgia to an unbeaten 1946 season when he was runner-up for the Heisman Trophy behind Army’s Glenn Davis. He received the Maxwell Award, which also honors college football’s leading player.
He was a member of both the College Football Hall of Fame and Pro Football Hall of Fame. Mr. Trippi was 100 when he passed, and at the time was the oldest living member of both.
Roger Welsch, tractor guy.
Okay, that’s a little misleading. He was also a regular on CBS “Sunday Morning”, a professor of anthropology at the University of Nebraska, founder of the Liars Hall of Fame:
and a honorary member of the Pawnee, Omaha, and Oglala tribes. And a tractor guy.
His practical interest in tractors, especially antiques, became a fixation in his writing and speaking, and for years he maintained a popular website full of geeky farm-implement arcana. In 1988, The New York Times wrote that Mr. Welsch “is to tractor restoration, and the Allis-Chalmers in particular, what Thoreau was to the lakeside cabin.”
He wrote more than 40 books about love, tractors, dogs and women, including “Everything I Know About Women I Learned From My Tractor” (2002) and “Busted Tractors and Rusty Knuckles: Norwegian Torque Wrench Techniques and Other Fine Points of Tractor Restoration” (1997) — a book as funny as its title is droll.
Executive vice president of football operations Jack Easterby out in Houston.
More from Pro Football Network by way of Lawrence.
Not much more to add to this, really: nobody seems unhappy with Easterby’s performance in the role. There’s a lot of “it was just time”.
The Texas are 1-3-1 and had a bye this past week.
Matt Rhule deposed as head coach of the Carolina Panthers, in the first NFL coach firing this season.
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As with the offensive coordinator dilemma, Rhule never identified a long-term, efficient quarterback. The team signed journeyman Teddy Bridgewater to lead the offense in 2020, but he was traded to the Denver Broncos following a 5-11 debut season under Rhule.
The Panthers traded three draft picks to the New York Jets for former first-round pick Sam Darnold last offseason. Darnold faltered as the franchise QB in Carolina, as he did in New York, and the Panthers remained on the hook for his salary through this season after picking up his fifth-year option following the trade to acquire him.
This summer, the Panthers tried to upgrade the QB spot by trading for former first overall pick Baker Mayfield. Through five games, Mayfield has struggled mightily, completing just 54.9% of his passes for 962 yards, four touchdowns and four interceptions.
Mike Matheny out as general manager of the Kansas City Royals.
Also out: pitching coach Cal Eldred.
While they avoided a 100-loss season, the Royals (65-97) finished in last place in the AL Central and recorded the fifth-worst record of any club in the majors. They went an MLB-worst 26-55 on the road.
Matheny inherited a 103-loss team in 2019. In his first season, the Royals went 26-34 playing a pandemic-shortened 2020 schedule.
The Royals went 74-88 last season after adding veteran pitcher Mike Minor, first baseman Carlos Santana and left fielder Andrew Benintendi.
ESPN:
Missed this yesterday: Paul Chryst out as head coach of the Badgers.
The team is 2-3 this season.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-17:
None.
Didn’t watch any of the games, again: I’ve been feeling kind of puny and spent most of yesterday sleeping. But the Raiders won, and that ends the loser update for 2022.
We’ll see you again in 2023, assuming we’re all still here.
Joe Bussard. No, you’ve probably never heard of him (unless you read the same books I do): he was an “obsessive collector” of 78 RPM records.
From his home near the Blue Ridge Mountains, Mr. Bussard (pronounced boo-SARD) drove the country roads of the South seeking 78s that had been languishing in people’s homes. He was selective about what he brought back to his basement. He loved jazz but detested any jazz recorded after the early 1930s. He loved country music but decreed that nothing good came after 1955. Nashville? He called it “Trashville.” Rock ’n’ roll? A cancer.
“How can you listen to Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw when you’ve listened to Jelly Roll Morton?” he said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2001. “It’s like coming out of a mansion and living in a chicken coop.”
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Mr. Bussard was one of the “characters” (so to speak) profiled in Amanda Petrusich’s Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records (affiliate link), a book that I both liked and found depressing.
Lawrence emailed an obit for Drew Ford, of It’s Alive Comics.
Edited to add: I forgot I wanted to include this one. Antonio Inoki.
He was also a professional wrestler.
Perhaps most famously, he fought Muhammad Ali in a MMA match in 1976.
The result of the fight, a draw, has long been debated by the press and fans.
Gavin Escobar, former tight end for the Dallas Cowboys. He was 31, and had been working for the Long Beach Fire Department. According to reports, he and Chelsea Walsh died in an apparent rock climbing accident “in San Bernardino National Forest near Tahquitz Rock”.
Geoff Collins and athletic director Todd Stansbury out at Georgia Tech.
Georgia Tech is 1-3 this season. That one win came against Western Carolina.
(Apologies for linking to ESPN, but the AJC is pretty much unreadable and unlinkable without a subscription.)
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-17:
Las Vegas
Still nothing much to say about the weekend’s games, since I was busy having fun all day yesterday. But I will throw in a quick obit watch: The Pro Bowl.
Robert Sarver is selling his majority stake in the Phoenix Suns. Also the Phoenix Mercury.
Valery Polyakov, cosmonaut.
He was also a physician, specializing in space medicine. He volunteered for a mission to see how the human body would hold up in micro gravity on a proposed Mars trip.
That’s still a record.
He worked out while in space and returned looking “big and strong” — “like he could wrestle a bear” — Wired quoted the American astronaut Norman Thagard as saying.
Rather than be carried out of his capsule on his return, Dr. Polyakov walked on his own strength, sat down, stole a cigarette from a friend and began sipping brandy, according to “The Story of Manned Space Stations: An Introduction,” by Philip Baker.
Rev. John W. O’Malley, prominent Catholic historian.
He was prolific, publishing 14 books and editing eight more. He wrote in a breezy, precise fashion that managed to convey deep thoughts in simple terms, and many of his books sold as well among lay audiences as they did among academics. Several were translated into multiple languages.
“This approach is a form of correction to myself,” he said in a 2020 interview with Brill, his Dutch publisher. “I have to be humble enough to acknowledge that if the 10-year-old does not understand, it means that, deep down, I did not understand.”
Father O’Malley wore his learning lightly. Friends called him puckish. His personal page on the website for Georgetown’s Jesuit community lists the Italian composer Giacomo Puccini among his favorite artists, but also the outré filmmaker John Waters. (Father O’Malley was especially partial to Mr. Waters’s movie “Hairspray.”)
He was perhaps best known as a historian of the Jesuit order, which was founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1540 to provide, according to conventional wisdom, the Vatican with a militant defense against the Reformation and to expand its influence through the founding of educational institutions.
Starting with “The First Jesuits” (1993), Father O’Malley showed that neither of those qualities were present at the order’s creation. By wading through thousands of letters written by Loyola and others, he concluded that the Jesuits were in fact designed as a pastoral project, intent on saving souls in the face of the dramatic social upheavals rocking Europe in the late medieval era, and only gradually took on their later reputation.
Arnold Tucker, Army quarterback.
At a time when college rules restricted substitutions, Tucker played not only quarterback but also safety, punt returner and kickoff returner. The one blemish on his team’s records was a 0-0 tie in a game against unbeaten Notre Dame in 1946 at Yankee Stadium.
That same year he earned first-team All-America honors and came in fifth in Heisman Trophy balloting — behind Blanchard and Davis, of course. (Davis won the trophy that year; Blanchard got his the year before.)
But before graduating in 1947, Tucker won the Sullivan Award as America’s outstanding amateur athlete. He was drafted by the Chicago Bears but never played professional football. For several years in the mid-1950s he was an assistant coach at West Point to Vince Lombardi, who went on to glory with the Green Bay Packers.
Blanchard and Davis were Felix “Doc” Blanchard and Glenn Davis, “Heisman Trophy-winning running backs remembered in football lore as Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside”. They somewhat overshadowed Mr. Tucker, who actually died on January 10, 2019.
There was a paid death notice published online and buried in the pages of The Miami Herald that January. And at the end of the year The Associated Press listed Tucker (just his name and age) among the many “notable sports deaths in 2019.” But his death was otherwise not widely reported in the mainstream press, which had, almost 80 years ago, chronicled his (and Blanchard and Davis’s) gridiron exploits and later, when their time came, gave both Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside substantial obituaries, Blanchard’s in 2009 and Davis’s in 2005.
Reached by phone on Tuesday, Tucker’s daughter, Patricia Nugent, confirmed his death. And when asked why it hadn’t gotten much publicity, she said that she had never reached out to the national news media. The Times discovered he had died in seeking to update an obituary about him that was prepared in advance in 2010.
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In his rookie season with the Dodgers, the team won the World Series, defeating the Chicago White Sox, who had their own outstanding base-stealer in Luis Aparicio. Wills stole 50 bases in 1960, his first full season, and went on to win the National League’s base-stealing title every year through 1965.
He was named the league’s most valuable player in 1962. He played on Dodger World Series championship teams again in 1963 and 1965 and a pennant-winner in 1966, teams powered by the pitching of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale.
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Dear Mr. Chubb:
When your team’s defense gives up 13 points in the last two minutes of a game – the first time this has happened in 21 years – the loss is not your fault.
Just saying.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-17:
Cincinnati
Tennessee
Las Vegas
Atlanta
Carolina
Not a whole lot to say this week. I didn’t catch a minute of any of the games.