Maybe 20 years ago, I read an article that alleged that there had been a huge increase in the number of certified 300 games, which the article attributed to alley owners waxing the lanes to turn the ball into the center (the idea being that the publicity around a 300 game was good publicity for the alley).

I understand your point about sunk costs. I also understand that no one has seen Hundley or Callahan operate an NFL offense as much as McCarthy has, so you have to kind of assume he knows what he’s got better than we do. But does anyone truly believe Hundley/Callahan is remotely likely to replace Rodgers better than…

“A knock on top-level European prospects is that they’re harder to grade than their American counterparts since they aren’t tested by the best available competition. That’s laughably untrue in Dončić’s case[.]”

Weah’s at PSG; Sargent will be at Werder Bremen. This is what US soccer needs; we can not wait for MLS to catch up to the world. Against T&T, a must win game, we started 3 European players, 2 Liga MX players, and 6 MLS players; we substituted 3 more MLS players (with two European players still sitting). While the…

Not to switch contexts too roughly, but this is exactly how the 49ers became the dominant team of the ‘80s: develop internally well, scout for solid trade values that other teams don’t recognize, create an attractive, winning atmosphere to attract free agents, and spend money to win.

See, this is why football is going to eat itself. Tackling is an essential skill in football and it is an inherently violent act. However, due to ESPN and morons, “effective tackling” has been replaced by “big hits!”, to the detriment of the game. How many times a game do we see a defender whiff on a tackle because…

I thought it was only turtles beyond the void?

I’m a Cal guy and watched the game with another Cal friend. We missed the first field goal, so when I saw the 3-0 score I said, “Jeez, we’re up 3 on the no. 8 team in the country. Hell, I’m calling this a moral victory; we should go home now.” Glad we stayed.

Yeah, but UW needed to not shit the bed before the Apple Cup. Oops. Bad weekend for the state.

Yeah, but he’s getting roasted on the court and in the locker room regardless.

Kid needs to be arrested and told in open court that he sucker-punched a guy sitting down, which is the definition of chickenshit. I say this as a lawyer.

As Billy Beane once famously explained the A’s regular season dominance and post-season flameouts, “My shit doesn’t work in the playoffs.”

I think you put waaaaay too much power in the hands of the pitcher. The new-ish stat of BABIP is valuable because it indicates how variable things are after the ball leaves the bat (since it varies wildly from season to season - for both batters and pitchers - it shows it isn’t an actual skill, just luck). But you…

I think we can all agree that Roy Williams is the real victim here. I, for one, am just happy that the cloud over Roy’s reputation has lifted. Now he continue doing the Lord’s work: making millions a year off the free labor of teenagers. Whew!

Except you can’t play Teodosic and Beverley at the same time. Beverley is offensively at least an order of magnitude less than Paul and we’ll have to see how Teodosic plays defense in games that matter (particularly at crunch time). Yes, CP4 was a dick to play with (even though he made everyone better), but that’s a…

The only way the US is going to raise the quality of our players to the level of the Europeans and South Americans is to adopt their academy system of training, which flies in the face of everything Americans believe about youth sports.

Up front, let me state the I love soccer. Played it as a kid way back in the ‘70s (during its first rise in popularity in the U.S.), my daughter has been playing competitive club level soccer most of her childhood (she’s now a senior in HS), and we watch Premier League games every weekend. So I think I have some…

So this pretty much puts all the slavish dick-sucking about STUDENT-athletes to bed, right? Meanwhile, Roy Williams and UNC get a stern admonishment for having their student-ATHLETES attend fake classes. Fuck this.

One thing I’ve always wondered about the Templars was how corrupt they actually became. Its hard because most of the contemporary writing about them comes from the purge time, so its probably as reliable as Dan Brown’s take on them. Because history shows that with great wealth comes great power AND great corruption,…

That’s meaningless sales puffery. Government is far less about innovation and vision than it is about making fucking sausage. Even ostensibly visionary innovators in industry are generally full of shit: Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both were smart enough to get in early on a socio-technology turning point, but its not…