Just not feeling the snark this week. So after the jump, this week’s TMQ…
Archive for the ‘Sports’ Category
TMQ Watch: September 25, 2018.
Thursday, September 27th, 2018Your loser update: week 3, 2018.
Monday, September 24th, 2018The Browns won for the first time since Donald Trump took office. The worthless Buffalo Bills actually beat Minnesota in what ESPN calls “the biggest NFL upset in 23 years”. The New York Football Giants beat hapless the Houston Texans. New England is 1-2. And we’re down to three teams standing. But at least we didn’t have another tied game.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Houston
Oakland
Arizona
In non-NFL news, the NYT ran an interesting article on the Baltimore Orioles.
I admit I haven’t been paying much attention, because:
1) Baseball.
II) FiveThirtyEight, as of today, is predicting that Baltimore will finish 47-115, or a .290 winning percentage. That’s 15th place on Wikipedia’s list. Historically bad? Maybe. That’s certainly a worse record than the bad Astros teams of recent memory, but it’s still better than the 2003 Detroit Tigers.
I report, you decide.
The Court of Last Resort.
Thursday, September 20th, 2018Back in the day, when Argosy was publishing Erle Stanley Gardner the creator of Perry Mason’s “The Court of Last Resort” column, they noticed a sizeable circulation uptick. (According to Wikipedia, the magazine was “never terribly successful”, but they did get a “significant boost in sales”.)
These days, the “large mass market publication brings attention to a wrongful conviction and gets the guy off” story is so common as to almost not be news anymore. Texas Monthly has done this several times that I know of, the legendary Gene Miller won two Pulitzer Prizes for his stories at the Miami Herald, and given enough time I could probably come up with more examples than Carter had liver pills.
But this is an unusual first, as far as I know: guy has his conviction vacated after spending 27 years in prison (“the bulk of it in the infamous Attica Correctional Facility”) because of the work of a lot of people: the Erie County district attorney’s wrongful convictions unit, the Georgetown University Prison Reform Project, his daughter (who raised money for his legal fees by selling his color drawings of golf courses online), and the mass media…
Said it before, I’ll say it again: we need a new “Court of Last Resort” as a regular feature in some large circulation publication. And we need more public intellectuals like Erle Stanley Gardner, too.
(Edit: forgot to include hattips: Popehat on the Twitters, and Lawrence.)
TMQ Watch: September 18, 2018.
Wednesday, September 19th, 2018Someone who isn’t us asked why we didn’t mention Vonte Davis in the loser update this week.
The truth is, we just didn’t have anything to bring to the table on that subject. We do have one thought, but we’re not comfortable sharing that in public: it would be irresponsible speculation on our part. We do (sincerely) hope for the best for Mr. Davis.
Apparently, Gregg Easterbrook has almost nothing to say on the subject either. But he does have things to say on other subjects, including the Clay Mathews penalty.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ and why his commentary is problematic…
Your loser update: week 2, 2018.
Tuesday, September 18th, 2018Not a whole lot to say this week.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Buffalo
Houston
Oakland
New York Football Giants
Detroit
Seattle
Arizona
TMQ Watch: September 11, 2018.
Wednesday, September 12th, 2018Ah, the first week of football season. There’s a wonderful scent of mold in the air (due to all the recent rain), friends are trying to provoke us into doomed bets on the Texans, and Gregg Easterbrook finally has something to write about.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
Your loser update: week 1, 2018.
Tuesday, September 11th, 2018Administrative note:
The loser update is primarily for teams that have a shot at going 0-16 over the course of the NFL season. (Secondarily, the loser update is for teams that have a shot at going 0-(x) over the course of some other sport’s season. Thirdly, the loser update is for teams that are just plain bad, or other noteworthy loser related items.)
Teams that have a shot at going 0-15-1 don’t count. I’m just a little sorry to see the Browns come off the list, and more sorry to see Pittsburgh go. But, technically, neither team has a chance to go 0-16: if one or both of them wind up going 0-15-1 this season, there might be a special acknowledgement. But for now, neither team is part of the loser update.
(I have not heard that the beer fridges have been hacked yet. However, the word from Bud Light is that a tie is not a win, so the fridges officially stay locked for now.)
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
Buffalo
Houston
Tennessee
Indianapolis
Oakland
Chargers
Dallas
New York Football Giants
Detroit
Chicago
New Orleans
Atlanta
Seattle
San Francisco
Arizona
TMQ Watch: September 4th, 2018.
Wednesday, September 5th, 2018The regular season starts Thursday. And TMQ gets back to something closely approaching normal next Tuesday. But for now, we have one more week of filler.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
TMQ Watch: August 28, 2018.
Thursday, August 30th, 2018We keep saying we’re going to get the TMQ Watch out closer to Tuesday, if not actually on Tuesday.
And then things keep popping up.
We apologize for the lateness. Perhaps next week.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
TMQ Watch: August 21, 2018.
Thursday, August 23rd, 2018Like those truck stop enchiladas you had for dinner last night, Tuesday Morning Quarterback is back on The Weekly Standard.
And like the Genesee Cream Ale you washed those enchiladas down with, so is TMQ Watch: albeit a little late this week.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
Obit watch: August 22, 2018.
Wednesday, August 22nd, 2018I wasn’t originally going to post this one, but there’s a story here that’s too good to pass up.
Don Cherry, noted singer and noted amateur golfer. He actually passed away April 4th, but his death was not widely reported until recently.
He was also the voice of Mr. Clean at one point.
Because of his dual pursuits, he nearly sabotaged himself on the eve of his inaugural Masters, in 1953.
The owner of a local nightclub hired him to sing each night of the tournament. When Clifford Roberts, a founder of the Masters and chairman of Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, where the tournament is held, learned of the sideshow, he called Mr. Cherry in for a talk.
“We never had anyone play in the Masters and sing at a local nightclub at the same time,” Mr. Roberts said, as Mr. Cherry recalled in his memoir.
“My reply, without being disrespectful and with a little Texas naïveté, was ‘Mr. Roberts, I have looked at the people playing in this tournament and can’t see anyone else who can sing.’ ”
Your loser update: pre-NFL edition.
Wednesday, August 15th, 2018Actually, this sits at the weird intersection of a couple of things:
You’ve stood by us through it all. We love you for it, and so does @budlight.
These special fridges will unlock celebratory beers when we get our first regular season “W”.#VictoryFridge pic.twitter.com/LgsGNabMpt
— Cleveland Browns (@Browns) August 14, 2018
Which do you suppose is going to happen first: a Browns win, or someone hacks the fridges? My money is on the latter.
Cleveland hackers, you’ve got at least 25 days to prove me right.
More from the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.
And how about a little musical interlude? We haven’t had one in a while.
Pilot error.
Monday, August 13th, 2018The Dallas Wings, who are a team in the WNBA, fired their head coach Fred Williams yesterday.
The root cause was apparently not that the Wings have lost eight games in a row: they are 14-17 so far this season, and could conceivably make the playoffs. The root cause appears to have been that Mr. Williams and the team president/CEO got into “a postgame altercation”. It isn’t clear to me if punches were thrown or exactly what the nature of the altercation was: either it was serious enough that CEO Greg Bibb felt compelled to fire Williams before the season ended, or (possibly) Mr. Bibb is just a little oversensitive.
In any case, the Wings are still one game ahead of…that’s right, the Las Vegas Aces.
(Apologies for linking to ESPN, but the Dallas paper was really obnoxious about ad blockers. I couldn’t find any mention of this in the Statesman or HouChron.)
This never happens.
Tuesday, August 7th, 2018But when it does, I can’t miss commenting on it.
Friday night, the Las Vegas Aces were scheduled to play a WNBA game against the Washington Mystics.
But things happened along the way. I can’t find specific details, but the general summary is that it took the Aces 26 hours to get from Las Vegas to Washington, D.C. They arrived around 3:45 PM on Friday. The game was scheduled to start at 8 PM Friday, so they’d been travelling all that time and had about four hours to rest and get ready for the game.
The team thought this was unacceptable. The Aces had already been in contact with the player’s union throughout the whole travel fiasco, trying to get the game delayed: but the WNBA schedule is so tight at the moment the league didn’t feel like they could delay.
So the Aces just refused to play.
The Aces felt like they could trust the league to make a decision. And the league decided today.
There was little precedent for the decision because the WNBA has never before canceled a game. There have been only a handful of instances over the past few decades in major sports in which teams have had to forfeit.
Most of those occurred because of fan involvement, notably the Chicago White Sox’s infamous Disco Demolition Night in 1979, when the field was so damaged the second game of a doubleheader could not be played.
As far as I can tell, while there is a Wikipedia page on forfeits in sport, and a seperate one for baseball specifically, I can’t tell if any basketball game – NCAA, NBA, or WNBA – has been forfeited before now. (The NCAA has voided wins, but that’s different.)
The last forfeit I know of in NCAA football – or in any other sport before now – was the Grambling State-Jackson State game in 2013. I welcome correction if anybody has a more recent example.
Edited to add: Ooops. Missed that California University of Pennsylvania forfeited one in 2014 after five players were charged with assault.
(“Don’t WNBA teams fly charter?” I think that’s covered in one of the links, but the short answer is: no, the league ordinarily doesn’t allow charter flights in order to keep a level playing field, since some teams have more resources than others. The league did give special permission to the Aces to arrange a charter while all of this was going on, but the team wasn’t able to arrange one on short notice.)
Obit watch: August 7, 2018.
Tuesday, August 7th, 2018Joël Robuchon, noted French chef.
Lawrence and I often joke about French cooking: “High prices. Small portions.” And I’ve never eaten at a Robuchon restaurant. But he sounds like someone who had the right ideas.
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Paul Laxalt, former Senator.
Tom Heckert, former general manager of the Cleveland Browns. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
Amy Meselson. She was 46 years old, and had a reputation for defending immigrants to the United States. Her obit opens with a great story about her zealous advocacy for Amadou Ly, a Senegalese immigrant who was part of a winning robotics team at his high school.
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Ms. Meselson earned her middle name by surviving a life-threatening respiratory disease. Besides dealing with depression, she had recently been given a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder and extreme anxiety — all aggravated when she traveled to Greece two years ago to volunteer at a camp for Syrian refugees, Sarah Meselson said at a memorial service.
At the service, she said she wanted to recount her daughter’s maladies for two reasons.
“One,” she said, “is to emphasize what everyone already knows — that it is not always possible to comprehend the level of suffering that others may be experiencing, especially when they appear to be successful and to excel to the extent that Amy did.
“The other,” she added, “is to applaud my daughter for all that she accomplished despite her mental illness.”
In that vein, this is hard as hell to read, but worth it. (Hattip: Popehat on the Twitter.)