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Your loser update: week 14, 2020.

Monday, December 14th, 2020

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

New York Jets

Next week, the Jets play the Rams in LA. The Rams are 9-4, so I kind of like their chances here. After that, the Browns play at the Jets: this would worry me in an ordinary year, but the Browns are actually kind of good this year. (9-3 currently, and the Browns play Baltimore tonight.)

So it pretty much comes down to week 17: the Jets play at the Patriots. New England is about average this year, and I’ve seen speculation that, if they’re not playoff eligible, the Patriots may bench their starters and write this game off. On the other hand, do they want to be the only team to lose to the Jets this year?

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Quick firings watch.

Sunday, December 13th, 2020

Gus Malzahn out at Auburn after a 6-4 season.

Malzahn finishes his Auburn tenure with a 67-33 overall record, a national coach of the year award, two SEC West titles, one SEC championship, a national runner-up finish and two New Year’s Six bowl berths. He had only a 2-5 record in bowl games, with wins against Memphis in the 2015 Birmingham Bowl and Purdue in the 2018 Music City Bowl.

But they got stomped this season by Alabama, Texas A&M, and Georgia, and also lost to South Carolina.

Malzahn’s seven-year contract, which he agreed to and signed in December 2017 after leading Auburn to an SEC West title, included 75 percent of the deal’s value fully guaranteed. His buyout, as of this month, is $21,450,000, with 50 percent of that owed within 30 days of his termination and the remainder paid in four equal annual installments.

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.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 8, 2020.

Tuesday, December 8th, 2020

(Edited: fixed link.)

NYT obit. I can’t do justice to the man. I’m not sure who can.

Fred Akers. Statesman. ESPN.

Natalie Desselle-Reid, actress. She was 53.

Posted in History, Movies, Obits, Planes, Sports | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

Monday, December 7th, 2020

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:

Williams was universally criticized for calling a risky, Cover 0 blitz while protecting a four-point lead against the Las Vegas Raiders. The result was a 46-yard touchdown pass with five seconds left in the game that gave the Raiders a 31-28 win and dropped the Jets to 0-12.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 7, 2020.

Monday, December 7th, 2020

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:

He and his comedy partner, Michael McKean, were members of the cast of “Laverne & Shirley,” a sitcom about boy-crazy brewery workers in 1950s Milwaukee, from its debut in 1976 until it left the air in 1983.

…

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.

Posted in Law, Obits, Politics, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Your loser update: week 13, 2020.

Monday, December 7th, 2020

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.)

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

Monday, November 30th, 2020

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.

…

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.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | 1 Comment »

Your loser update: week 12, 2020.

Sunday, November 29th, 2020

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

New York Jets

Next week: the Raiders.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Firings watch.

Sunday, November 29th, 2020

Derek Mason out as head coach at Vanderbilt.

The team is 0-8 this season, and Mason was 27-55 in approximately six seasons.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

No! No, not Detroit!

Saturday, November 28th, 2020

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.

The Broncos’ three eligible quarterbacks — Drew Lock, Brett Rypien and Blake Bortles — were each deemed to be a “high-risk” close contact to quarterback Jeff Driskel, and none of the three can be in uniform for Sunday’s game, sources told ESPN.

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.

Posted in Firings, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 25, 2020.

Wednesday, November 25th, 2020

For the historical record: Diego Maradona. ESPN.

Posted in Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Your loser update: week 11, 2020.

Sunday, November 22nd, 2020

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

New York Jets

Next week: the 6-3 Miami Dolphins.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Your loser update: week 10, 2020.

Monday, November 16th, 2020

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

New York Jets (bye week)

Next week: the worthless Los Angeles Chargers.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 13, 2020.

Friday, November 13th, 2020

Paul Hornung.

Hornung, who won the 1956 Heisman Trophy with Notre Dame, could run, throw passes and catch them, block, place-kick and punt, and he returned kicks and played defense too. In nine professional seasons he helped propel the Packers to four National Football League championships and led the N.F.L. in scoring from 1959 to 1961.

…

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.

…

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”.

He was convicted in 1981 in the murders of 13 women over the course of five years in northern England and given a life sentence for each, the maximum permitted. The murders, which occurred between 1975 and 1980, gripped the public and the authorities, and the lengthy investigation was “a source of considerable embarrassment to the police,” The New York Times wrote at the time.

…

A 1981 report into the police investigation’s failings was released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2006. Known as the Byford report, for the official who wrote it, it cited a “curious and unexplained lull” in Mr. Sutcliffe’s criminal activities between 1969 and 1975. The report concluded that it was “highly improbable that the crimes in respect of which Sutcliffe has been charged and convicted are the only ones attributable to him.”

…

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.

Posted in History, Law, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

Your loser update: week 9, 2020.

Tuesday, November 10th, 2020

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.

Posted in Loser, NFL, Sports | Comments Closed

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