Meanwhile, athletes who haven’t bothered to offer lame excuses or make teary shows of contrition—Lance Armstrong comes to mind, but there are certainly others—have stayed on the relative fringes.

Belichick was curiously conservative at the end of both halves. Perhaps... suspiciously so?

Seeing Character A take an ass-kicking from Character B... is a real thrill both in terms of the movie’s plot and for the way it works as a mockery of the kind of aggrieved nerd to whom Hollywood has fully devoted itself to pandering, leading to an endless string of morose genre pictures about how sullen, callow young…

And the debt balloon payments run until December 2045, when currently youthful pitching ace Steven Matz will be 54 years old.

That’s a very charitable interpretation!

Yes, I know the Colts getting to the second round is unlikely, joyless grays.

WON’T ANYONE THINK OF BILL SIMMONS??!

That said, imagine if [say] the Patriots get screwed in the playoffs on a bad call, and everyone knows Dean Blandino was in the referee’s ear. We will never, ever hear the end of it.

Right, that’s fair.

Oh, absolutely.

They’ll demonize the owner - a repugnant, greedy shitbag who deserves it - and at the same time, many of them will berate their elected representatives for not throwing enough cash at that shitbag to appease him. And the Rams will either play at a gleaming new stadium in L.A. or a gleaming new stadium in St. Louis…

It’s sort of weird how many things that the NBA counts as bona-fide statistics are sort of subjective when you think about them.

I’m sure it’s a mix of things, including that the refs aren’t full-time employees (as someone else commented). I also think an underrated element is the influence of replay, causing the refs to be indecisive or tend toward rulings that they know will be reviewed, because they’re scared shitless of botching a judgment…

While it’s all they could do in time for the playoffs, this is clearly an instance of treating the symptoms and not the disease. The disease in this case being the NFL’s needlessly-byzantine rulebook, which is so convoluted that even the refs seem incapable of keeping the rules straight, which gives the average fan…

From a certain perspective, this could be viewed as a compliment: Dennis Thurman apparently believes it’s still possible to disgrace the NFL.

Oh God whhhhyyyy did I click “show comments” on the Star Tribune story why why why don’t I know better...

Nah, my position is that the FSU job is a better job than the LSU job, and it’s a bad idea to go from a better job to a worse job. FSU is better for recruiting, no worse in terms of pay, and a better place to regularly compete for national titles. Clear enough?

Except Fisher was paid about $850K more this year than Miles. How much higher than Fisher’s FSU salary could LSU have possibly been prepared to go?

Right, I get why LSU wants Miles gone, just not why Jimbo would want to leave FSU and take those yearly beatings himself.

I know it’s taken as a given in college football circles that Jimbo Fisher would want the LSU job, but... WHY would Jimbo Fisher want that job? He’s among the top paid coaches in the country, in a talent-rich state, at a program well-positioned to regularly compete for a national title.