There can be only one.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ. If it isn’t Scottish, it’s crap!
Archive for the ‘Sports’ Category
TMQ Watch: October 30, 2018.
Wednesday, October 31st, 2018Firings watch.
Tuesday, October 30th, 2018I think this counts.
Izaia Bullock, a linebacker for the Rutgers football team, has been dismissed.
“For violating team rules?” I guess you could say that…
…I do believe most teams have rules against murder plots.
Bullock, 22, “initiated a plot to murder the family members of an acquaintance” earlier in the week, according to a statement from the Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office.
Bullock was charged Tuesday with two counts of attempted murder in the first degree and two counts of conspiracy to commit murder in the first degree.
I wonder if this was one of those situations you see played out so often on the Justice Network: rich child hires patsy to whack his parents while rich kid is off somewhere setting up an alibi…
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.)
Loser update with bonus firing: October 29, 2018.
Monday, October 29th, 2018NBA teams that still have a chance to go 0-82:
Cleveland
On a totally related note, Cleveland fired head coach Tyronn Lue on Sunday. I believe this is the first firing of the NBA regular season.
He was 128-83 over three years, and had one NBA championship and three finals appearances to his credit. But…the team is 0-6 for the first time since 1995.
Update from the shoe beat.
Thursday, October 25th, 2018We have our first convictions in the great NCAA Basketball shoe scandal of 2017. (Previously.)
There’s a little more editorial commentary mixed in with the reporting than I’d like, but this is noteworthy:
Though the verdicts’ larger impact on college basketball was not immediately clear, after Wednesday the following may be safely said: There is precedent that cheating N.C.A.A. bylaws can have consequences beyond collegiate infractions.
“Now you don’t just have to worry about what the N.C.A.A. does to you — you have to worry about going to jail,” said Dan Beebe, a former Big 12 commissioner who consults with conferences.
Personally, I’d like to see the N.C.A.A forcibly disbanded, but sending people to prison is a good alternative.
Also worth noting, but with a grain of salt: one of the defense attorneys claims that Rick Pitino and Bill Self (Kansas basketball coach, who is still employed) knew what was going on.
…
The three men charged in the case had pleaded not guilty, and none of them took the stand. Their primary defense was that their behavior may have violated N.C.A.A. bylaws, but that it was not a federal crime.
“N.C.A.A. rules were broken,” Michael Schachter, one of Gatto’s attorneys, said in his opening argument. “Jim and Adidas helped out financially a few families whose sons are among the most talented athletes in America. That happened.”
However, he added: “The N.C.A.A.’s rules are not the laws of this country. The N.C.A.A. is not the U.S. Congress.”
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
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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…
Norts spews.
Tuesday, October 9th, 2018We have our first firing of the NBA season. You know, the NBA season that hasn’t started yet.
Phoenix Suns general manager Ryan McDonough out.
From ESPN:
He drafted the likes of Devin Booker, Josh Jackson, TJ Warren, Alex Len, Dragan Bender and Deandre Ayton. He had some early success, but the Suns are still in the same rebuilding mode that they were in when McDonough was hired. The team went 155-255 during his tenure.
The Suns also had five different coaches under McDonough. Last season, they fired coach Earl Watson three games into the season and named Jay Triano interim coach. In the offseason, they named Igor Kokoskov head coach.
In other news, I missed this story until Popehat tweeted part of it. Ken White’s take on this was more “look at the stupid things clients do”, which surprised me: I’ll touch on the reason why shortly.
Summary: the Los Angeles Dodgers (and other baseball teams) may be in trouble. Legal trouble.
…
…
FanGraphs has an interesting supplemental piece. The part that jumps out at me – and the one that I’m surprised Ken wasn’t all over:
Did the Dodgers do the RICO? I am not a lawyer. But the person who wrote the FanGraphs article is: I think she presents a good argument that, if the Dodgers are found guilty of human trafficking, that’s a “predicate offense” for RICO purposes.
Mail and wire fraud are also predicate crimes. So one count of human trafficking, and one count of wire fraud…to quote FanGraphs:
Admit it: wouldn’t you love to see the Department of Justice seize the Dodgers in asset forfeiture and try to run a baseball team? I know I would: a government run baseball team would make the 1899 Cleveland Spiders look like a model of competence and sanity.
Your loser update: week 5, 2018.
Monday, October 8th, 2018The Browns actually won a second game this season. The New York Football Giants are 1-4. And the worthless San Francisco 49ers lost, which is good: but to Arizona, which is bad.
Also: Mike Stoops out as Oklahoma’s defensive coordinator.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
None.
The loser update will return at the start of the NFL season next year. There may possibly be special updates between now and then, but it will definitely be back in 2019 (assuming we all live that long).
Your loser update: week 4, 2018.
Monday, October 1st, 2018Four weeks into the season, and one team left standing. By comparison, at this time in 2017, there were four 0-4 teams. On the other hand, Cleveland was the only winless team at this point in 2016, and Detroit was the only one left in week four of 2015. So I don’t know, Bob.
Also: TMQ is either going to ignore this story, or be his usual insufferable self this week.
And this amuses me:
I doubt Ryan Fitzpatrick was the problem, and I doubt Jameis Winston is the fix. Then again, I didn’t watch a minute of the game.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Arizona
And it looks like the MLB regular season is (more or less) over, and B’more finished 47-115. By my count, that’s 15th on the all-time list.
TMQ Watch: September 25, 2018.
Thursday, September 27th, 2018Just not feeling the snark this week. So after the jump, this week’s TMQ…