“Without a lot of depth at corner” is about the nicest possible way to put it. Other than Wentz, Darby was probably the least replaceable player on the team. Fuck.

Where did you pick up even an ounce of complaint here? Piss off.

This (and the way Luck’s career has gone so far) sucks. Give Luck an average offensive line and average weapons and he’d be dominating. Such a likable player too. Fuck the Colts.

Why’d you guys get rid of the roundup of the best Gameday signs?

He buried it so hard. The fact that Metz stayed with them at 1-1 for that long is pretty remarkable and deserved more than a quick aside towards the end of a long article.

Hey, remember when the score was 1-1 until a red card? That seems pretty important, no?

That’s like a phrase Gregggggg Easterbrook would use around his grandkids attempt to sound hip. “Well children, your old pop-pop here used to get UNSPEAKABLY LIT at the shindig with the other hooligans down on Main Street back in the ‘60s!”

“unspeakably lit”

Dear lord I’m hanging on for dear life. WHAT COMES AFTER THE COMMA?

Yeah what Graterol did is obviously not illegal, and I don’t think anyone (including myself or Chapman) was arguing that it’s illegal. But that screaming catcher in your example (which I actually think might be illegal) also shouldn’t take such umbrage if a hitter says “hey dickhead shut up”.

Yeah, it was easy enough to ignore when it happened infrequently. It would be very unusual for it to happen to every batter for an entire game, though. Have you ever seen an MLB highlight where this happened? If it was common, it probably wouldn’t have turned into this much of a story.

I know this doesn’t go along with the Deadspin angle on this stuff or the tradition of making mediocre puns and jokes in the comments section, but I actually agree with Chapman here.

But that’s an indictment of the tournament, not the teams themselves. The World Cup could just take the 32 best teams by FIFA’s ranking, but then there would be a debate about the mechanisms whereby those rankings come to be, and how teams’ international schedules would look after the current structure was dismantled,…

Dang, you really missed this response completely. I don’t even know what to respond to, because you didn’t directly respond to a single previous point that I (or others) have made. We know you have developed cities and that not every single person in China lives in poverty. The Chinese Super League is irrelevant. The…

Yes. Good points.

Yeah, I agree. There are some rare exceptions when a team is winning and a star player gets hurt mid-game. But 99.9% of the time, you win or you didn’t. Injuries and luck effect everyone.

This is dumb moralizing. If they qualify for the tournament, they deserve to make the tournament.

Miko Grimes is impressed.

Population is just one part of the equation. China’s crippling poverty and history of even more crippling poverty and a society that does not prioritize youth sports and has no historical infrastructure surrounding youth sports overcomes their massive population. They are an outlier, as far as population goes.

Much of China is still incredibly impoverished. Through the 80s and 90s the vast majority were living on pennies, and that generation (and all the ones before it) was obviously not spending their time playing sports. They have nearly no infrastructure related to youth sports, and nearly no professional athletes in the…