For a long time I figured Joe Paterno was being scapegoated by the University and the Freeh Report was a hatchet job. I’m still reasonably convinced that both of these things are true, but incidental to the fact that Paterno was an enabling piece of shit.

it’s depressing that doing it is enough to make people think a man’s a saint.

Best tip for never developing a credit history and being unable to get a loan to buy a house or start a business in the future: yours.

neither the USOC nor its major corporate sponsors support athletes’ training, nor pay athletes for competing at the Olympics

The USOC actually has exceptional “super-trademarks” enshrined into law at the federal level, so there are things they can do that you or I can’t. “Rio” is probably a bit much, though.

Athens got modernization and expansion of their transport infrastructure and it’s helped boost Greece as a tourist destination. In the abstract, it may have been possible to just forego the games and put the money directly into infrastructure and ad campaigns, but it can be hard to drum up political support for that.…

Baseball alone all the way. You can justify the other shit as some kind of theatrics to pump the team up or something, but playing a team sport all by yourself is just straight up nutso.

Damn, this is the hardest one so far.

This is good Haisley.

No, most people slide into managerial positions from outside, either directly from school or being a manager somewhere else.

This. Basketball is not a parity sport. Even if every player got re-drafted every year, no trades, and they all got paid about the same, to make things as balanced as possible, the best 3 teams will be the ones with the #1, #2, #3 players. 82 games, 25+ shots per game, the law of large numbers takes over. That’s why…

It’s a fundamental tension in sports - everyone wants to put together the best possible team, but the more success a team has with that, the worse the league/sport gets as a whole.

Nah, Steven A. Smith was like that from the beginning, even back when he was just a newspaper guy. He’s probably patient zero for the hot take epidemic.

You want to be emotional? Go drink rosé and have your period in the ladies’ restroom.

They are, in fact, called “kicks from the penalty mark”, which you’d know if you actually knew anything about association football. It’s only called a “penalty” if it’s awarded after an infraction, as, you know, a penalty.

No, he’s performing astonishingly well by the measure of the people who pay his salary (i.e. the owners). His fuckups are banal: they keep the sport in the media and the public eye without actually hurting its brand or credibility at all, which means people are talking about the NFL, watching the NFL, and buying NFL…

A buddy of mine from school became an EMT and his first call was to a car crash. When they got there, as soon as his partner saw the scene, he told my buddy to go back to the ambulance and sit in the driver’s seat. “A full decapitation is probably a bit much on your first day.”

False equivalence is the bread-and-butter of centrist swing voters.

It’s a well-worn literary device of (mostly male) authors. Consider Ishmael vaguebooking his reasons for wanting to leave New York and go sailing in Moby Dick. There’s a difference, of course, namely that Ishmael’s reticence to provide details is a literary device to develop his relationship with the unfolding…

You guys can hate on them if you want, but I think it’s handy to be able to see long-term weather trends when making plans, especially for outdoors stuff. It’s nice to be able to see that the second weekend in August is, on average, X degrees and there’s a Y% chance of rain. Of course it’s not necessarily going to be…