Gus Malzahn out at Auburn after a 6-4 season.
But they got stomped this season by Alabama, Texas A&M, and Georgia, and also lost to South Carolina.
Lovie Smith gone at Illinois. 17-39 over five years, and 2-5 this season.
Kevin Sumlin out at Arizona. The precipitating event seems to have been a 70-7 loss to Arizona State Friday night, but he was 9-20 overall (in a little more than two seasons) and Arizona has lost 12 straight games.
World War II ace. Aviation pioneer. A giant within the Air Force.
Join us in celebrating the extraordinary life and mourning the loss of Brig. Gen. Chuck Yeager. May he rest in peace and his legacy live on forever. pic.twitter.com/gJ0113M5ge
— U.S. Air Force (@usairforce) December 8, 2020
Fr @VictoriaYeage11 It is w/ profound sorrow, I must tell you that my life love General Chuck Yeager passed just before 9pm ET. An incredible life well lived, America’s greatest Pilot, & a legacy of strength, adventure, & patriotism will be remembered forever.
— Chuck Yeager (@GenChuckYeager) December 8, 2020
(Edited: fixed link.)
NYT obit. I can’t do justice to the man. I’m not sure who can.
Natalie Desselle-Reid, actress. She was 53.
The man who Tuesday Morning Quarterback refers to as “the tastefully named” Gregg Williams is out as defensive coordinator for the New York Jets.
And speaking of TMQ, another recurring theme:
As previously noted, I got a little behind yesterday, so I’m playing catch-up.
David Lander, prominent TV actor perhaps best known as “Squiggy” on “Laverne and Shirley”.
Interesting connections:
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Lenny and Squiggy were not the brainchild of the show’s creators. Mr. Lander and Mr. McKean invented them in college (Squiggy was called Ant’ny then) and had been performing as those characters with the Credibility Gap, a comedy performance ensemble that also included Harry Shearer.
The characters sometimes broke away from their own series. Mr. Lander and Mr. McKean appeared on the fictional talk show “America 2-Night,” hosted by Martin Mull.
Portraying two imaginary actors who supposedly played Lenny and Squiggy (but looked and talked just like them), they made small talk and sang “Creature Without a Head.” That song was also on the 1979 album recorded by Lenny and the Squigtones, their imaginary musical group (which included Christopher Guest on guitar). Principal Squiggy (Mr. Lander) appeared in “Scary Movie” (2000), and Squiggy himself turned up on a 2002 episode of “The Simpsons.”
Of course, Guest, McKean, and Shearer were all in Spinal Tap. I kind of wonder why Lander wasn’t involved. (According to Wikipedia, Guest was actually credited as “Nigel Tufnel” on the Lenny and the Squigtones album.)
Lawrence sent over an obit for Pamela Tiffin. She had what seems like an odd career: Billy Wilder’s “One, Two, Three”, “Harper” (a Ross MacDonald adaptation), “State Fair”. “The Hallelujah Trail”…and a bunch of Italian movies.
Paul Sarbanes, the man who put the “Sarbanes” in “Sarbanes-Oxley”.
Also by way of Lawrence, and this is breaking as I write it, so no links yet: Fred Akers. Links probably tomorrow.
For the historical record: NYT obits for Warren Berlinger and Walter E. Williams.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
New York Jets
I was concerned about this game: as it turns out, probably rightfully so. It sounds like the Raiders pulled this one out at the last minute.
Next week: Seattle in Seattle. I’m feeling good about this one.
(Edited to add: Sorry about the weirdness with this. I started a draft of this in advance, published it this morning because I was distracted yesterday afternoon, but WordPress for some reason published this with a date of December 5th.)
Dave Caldwell out as general manager of the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Jacksonville has lost 10 straight games this season, and have gone 39-87 since Caldwell took over in 2013.
Caldwell’s biggest downfall was his inability to draft a franchise quarterback, which included sticking with ineffective Blake Bortles for too long. Bortles was the third overall pick in the 2014 NFL Draft, going 24-49 in 73 regular-season starts and a 2-1 mark in the playoffs.
During the regular season, Bortles threw 103 touchdowns and 75 interceptions and posted a quarterback rating of 80.6 before he was released by the Jaguars in March 2019. Bortles is now on the Denver Broncos practiced squad.
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Caldwell failed at his job from talent evaluations to sending away too many veterans in trades in exchange for draft picks instead of equal talent in return. Caldwell traded veteran defensive captain Calais Campbell, cornerback A.J. Bouye, quarterback Nick Foles, safety Ronnie Harrison and disgruntled defensive end Yannick Ngakoue, all for draft picks this offseason.
”We can’t afford a rebuilding year,” Caldwell said in early September. ”Our mindset is to put the best team out there to play, to compete, and to win. We feel like these guys, the guys in this locker room, nobody has seen them play together. Nobody has seen them play a game so, like I said, we’re going to know where we measure up.”
The Jaguars have lost 10 or more in seven of the eight seasons under Caldwell. His lone successful season was in 2017 when the Jaguars fared 10-6 and advanced to the AFC title game. Currently, the Jaguars have lost 16 of their 19 games, which includes 11 by 10 or more points.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
New York Jets
Next week: the Raiders.
Derek Mason out as head coach at Vanderbilt.
The team is 0-8 this season, and Mason was 27-55 in approximately six seasons.
Coach Matt Patricia and GM Bob Quinn out in Detroit.
The two were tasked with elevating the Lions from their perpetual state of mediocrity to a perennial playoff contender, and instead brought more despair to a franchise that has not won a playoff game since 1992.
The Lions went 13-29-1 with Quinn and Patricia in charge and are in the midst of their third consecutive losing season. Patricia’s .314 winning percentage was far below that of the man he replaced. Jim Caldwell, who Quinn fired after going 9-7 in 2017, won 54.5% of his games, best among full-time Lions coaches in the expansion era.
I always say: “It’s not Thanksgiving until Detroit loses.” And the final straw seems to have been Detroit losing to Houston, 41-25.
Not exactly firings, but I don’t have any place else to put these:
1) The Denver Broncos have no quarterbacks for their game tomorrow against the Saints.
Driskel tested as COVID positive on Thursday.
2) Santa Clara County (who you may remember from “iPads for Permits”) has banned all contact sports in the county for the next three weeks, at all levels: San Francisco 49ers hardest hit.
You know, they told me if I looked hard enough, something positive would come out of this. And they were right.
For the historical record: Diego Maradona. ESPN.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
New York Jets
Next week: the 6-3 Miami Dolphins.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
New York Jets (bye week)
Next week: the worthless Los Angeles Chargers.
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Hornung scored a record 176 points in the 12-game 1960 season on 15 touchdowns, 41 extra points and 15 field goals. He also passed for two touchdowns that year.Hornung was the league’s most valuable player in 1961, when he scored a championship-game record 19 points (on a rushing touchdown, four extra points and three field goals) in the Packers’ 37-0 victory over the Giants.
All the while he pursued a robust night life of women and drink that seemed to have little effect on his on-field performance. His movie-star looks certainly had something to do with the attention: He was blond and handsome, 6 feet 2 inches and 215 pounds. He wore No. 5 in honor of his boyhood idol, Joe DiMaggio.
But Hornung’s career was marred when the N.F.L. commissioner, Pete Rozelle, suspended him indefinitely in the spring of 1963 for gambling on pro football, including Packer games, over several seasons. Hornung said he had bet on Green Bay only to win, and the league found no evidence to the contrary, but he remained suspended for the entire season. The ban was an outgrowth of an N.F.L. drive against gambling by players that also brought a one-year suspension for Alex Karras, the Detroit Lions’ star defensive tackle.
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Hornung expressed few regrets about his nightlife.
“I’m sure that during my playing days I wasn’t considered a good role model for the nation’s youth,” he wrote in his memoir. “But the way times have changed, I’d look like an altar boy if I played today. I never beat up a woman, carried a gun or a knife, shot somebody, or got arrested for disturbing the peace. I never even experimented with drugs during the season.
“All I did, really,” he went on, “was seek out fun wherever I could find it. Everything was all tied in together — the drinking, the womanizing, the partying, the traveling, the gambling. And, of course, football made it all possible.”
In other totally unrelated news, Hell is having a busy day today:
Tom Metzger, white supremacist.
Peter Sutcliffe, the “Yorkshire Ripper”.
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Sutcliffe’s 13 known murder victims were Wilma McCann (1975), Emily Jackson (1976), Irene Richardson (1977), Patricia “Tina” Atkinson (1977), Jayne MacDonald (1977), Jean Jordan (1977), Yvonne Pearson (1978), Helen Rytka (1978), Vera Millward (1978), Josephine Whitaker (1979), Barbara Leach (1979), Marguerite Walls (1980) and Jacqueline Hill (1980).
He is also known to have attacked at least 9 other women: an unnamed woman (1969), Anna Rogulskyj (1975), Olive Smelt (1975), Tracy Browne (1975), Marcella Claxton (1976), Marilyn Moore (1977), Upadhya Bandara (1980), Maureen Lea (1980) and Theresa Sykes (1980). Claxton was four months pregnant when she was attacked, and lost the baby she was carrying.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
New York Jets
Next week is the Jets bye week. Vegas has the bye as a 14 point favorite over the Jets.
A few obits from over the weekend. I’ll start by just quoting the lead from this NYT one:
More:
He was trying to develop new material when a club owner made an offhand comment about one of the club’s cabaret dancers. The owner, who had given the young woman a ride, “came into my dressing room and he said to me, ‘Find out if the girl is staying over or if she communicates,’” Mr. Crosby recalled. “I said, ‘My God, a lot of people talk like that. Maybe that would be fun.’ So I started the play on words.”
He tried it in Massachusetts, he added, “and the places I worked, unfortunately, people didn’t get the difference.”
Because of the particulars of his Latin Quarter booking, Mr. Crosby’s routine was not an immediate breakthrough with Times Square audiences either. He started out performing 12-minute filler sets between stage acts during his weeklong engagement, and his jokes were largely ignored. “I was on for five minutes before anybody knew I was out there,” he said.
At the end of the week, a dejected Mr. Crosby packed his bags and went to pick up his check from the manager, who apologized for the difficult assignment and promised him a better slot in the show. Once audiences had a chance to get the joke, he was a hit. He stayed at the Latin Quarter for 18 weeks, after which the prestigious William Morris Agency began representing him.
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Speaking of Senator Goldwater, he said, “When President Johnson declared war on puberty, it was Senator Goldwater who said, and I quote, ‘Wherever there is unemployment, you’ll find men out of work.’”
He was a pitchman in the late 1970s and early 1980s for Anheuser-Busch’s Natural Light beer, appearing in commercials with Mickey Mantle, Henny Youngman and Joe Frazier.
In one commercial, he declared, “I always keep Natural on hand while I watch these athletes perspiring to achieve victory, cause these sporting computations make me so dehybernated.”
Robert Sam Anson, noted magazine writer and author.
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Finally, Eddie Johnson. My feelings about the NBA are well known, but this is a depressing story.
Johnson, who was nicknamed Fast Eddie for his explosive first step, was drafted out of Auburn University in 1977 by the Atlanta Hawks. He soon became one of the team’s top players and started the 1980 and 1981 All-Star Games.
“He was built like a linebacker and was as fast as they come with the ball in his hands, putting it on the floor, attacking someone off the dribble,” Mike Fratello, who coached the Hawks during some of Johnson’s nine seasons with the team, said in a phone interview. “And he could defend because of his strength and his ability to move his feet.”
But he also got into cocaine.
Johnson began to use cocaine in college and continued using it during his N.B.A. career. During his professional playing days, he was charged with cocaine possession, writing bad checks and car theft; he was hospitalized at least twice for treatment of manic-depressive disorder; and he successfully fled two men shooting at him in a motel parking lot after what the police said was a drug deal gone wrong.
In 1981, Johnson discussed his cocaine use in an interview with Sports Illustrated. “I partied a little extensively, but I wasn’t abusing it,” he said. “The whole idea of me abusing drugs is outlandish.”
He was traded to Cleveland, went to Seattle briefly, and was banned by the NBA in 1987.
When there were no games left to play, Johnson’s life unraveled. By his own count, he was arrested at least 100 times. Between 1987 and 2001, he was convicted, among other crimes, of burglary, battery, drug sale and possession, violently resisting arrest and grand theft.
He committed his most serious crime in 2006. Prosecutors said he had entered the unlocked front door of an apartment in Ocala where an 8-year-old girl and her three brothers were alone watching television; a babysitter had stepped outside.
The girl testified at Johnson’s trial in 2008 that he had followed her to her bedroom, locked the door and pushed a dresser in front of it before sexually assaulting her. He was convicted of sexual battery and molestation. He received a mandatory life sentence.