Is that update really good news? I am skeptical they won’t give writers the same kind of freedom and opportunities they had at Grantland. In my view they axed GL because that kind of writing is largely off-brand for them, and they’re keeping the writers on to prevent them from all moving to a new platform, not because…

It’s very easy to use basic joint control techniques to make someone go where you want them to, particularly if there’s that kind of size differential. An elbow at most, usually a wrist suffices, especially with handcuffs. It can cause momentary pain but unless it’s done with deliberate intent to harm there won’t be…

Am I stupid for wondering how anyone could see a controversy on this? Fox is there to broadcast the game so fans can watch it, not to enable the ghoulish tendencies of malcontents. Postgame analysis, maybe you can speculate about whether it affected the performance of Volquez or coaching decisions or whatever. But I…

Don’t be silly - you need months, if not years, of watching football to understand how the game works. Baseball is a little less but still demands quite a bit of understanding, whereas I feel like basketball, soccer, and hockey are the most straightforward to get into.

That’s the thing - it used to be either/0r. Eric Liddell laughs his way to gold; Harold Abrahams trains obsessively to do it (Chariots of Fire is incorrect in its specifics but correct in its generalities). Now, though, you need both. Even the genetically blessed have to put in time in the weight room and on the…

I always wonder whether Billy actually believes the nonsense he writes (and badly) or if it’s really just some kind of extended satire of terrible soccer journalism. No one writing at a place as self-deprecating, sarcastic, and snarky as Deadspin can be so unaware of themselves, can they?

Can we please just admit now that the conference system is a failure and just start putting FBS teams into leagues or tiers or whatever based on how good they actually are? Instead of “You finished 11-1, but at the top of a shitty division and guarantee good ratings for TV, so here’s a playoff invitation.”

Yeah, but which one? I can wrangling over the NFL’s process for deciding who gets to stay to be next year’s off-season legal drama.

I’d complain about them having time and collegiality to do this during a session rather than passing meaningful legislation of any kind, but I know all too well at this point that they wouldn’t have passed any laws anyway. Might a well use the Capitol for settling stupid bets so somebody gets a use out of those tax…

All I can say is, some of my best nights have started after sunrise.

That would be the worst.

My guess would that the whole thing was kind of kept secret. It might raise problems if it were revealed that Leia is Vader’s daughter, and Luke might have decided that not training people to use the Force is the best way to prevent any more Sith from emerging. As far as anyone outside the core cast is aware, Luke is…

Heffelfinger steamrolling Harvard’s flying wedge in 1892.

I would have said Dwarf Fortress, but yes.

Right, but my point is that it’s absurd that a couple of islands that actually belong to Denmark (or maybe it’s just the Danish king, whatever) get to be taken seriously for these competitions. You might as well let the Vatican have a team.

I’m as much for fighting sexism as the next person, but you can’t really complain about being left out of a profile of talk show hosts if you aren’t currently hosting a talk show, can you? Rather than attacking Vanity Fair over not including someone that doesn’t belong there, why not direct your anger at the networks…

So, I’ve got to wonder - are articles like this meant as satire of the minute tea-leaf-reading and colossal over-reacting that’s characteristic of European soccer journalism (and, to a lesser extent, sports journalism in general), or is Billy just unhinged himself and projecting it on to various teams and fandoms?

The irony being that choosy moms read ingredient labels and choose real peanut butter over peanut-flavored hydrogenated soybean oil. Choosy developers also choose better image formats.

How do the Faroe Islands even have a team? That’s like Terre Haute, Indiana having a national team.

I remember reading once that Playboy was the reason Esquire dropped its nude pictorials - “Playboy out-titted us”, according to some publisher or other. Now it seems that other magazines are out-not-titting Playboy.