If I recall, this is a fairly recent development. Earlier he was very much in the anti-Messi camp.

If Romo wants a mercy rule, he can play in my kid’s T-ball league.

We already did make football safe, and people love it: the Puppy Bowl.

He’s learned his lesson. The lesson is, as long as you pretend to be contrite and say the right things to the right people, you’ll be forgiven and get another chance (and another, and another...) along with the money that goes with it. The people with power don’t care about morality, they care about control. You pay…

Someone in the greys has a sense of humor, and you do not.

MMA fans are the kinds of people who thought McGregor had a shot against Mayweather, so I can’t expect them to rationally judge their abilities against Nate Diaz, either.

Or have the hosts automatically qualify, but actually seed them with the rest instead of putting them in the top-seeded pot.

In the old days, an American company would look at a saturated market and say, “Here’s a great opportunity to make money by providing a better service for less money. Let’s figure out how to do that!” Instead we have executives with the attitude that if they can’t extract economic rents in perpetuity, it’s not worth…

Not just him. Everyone was the monster. No one could look past the freak on the outside to see the human on the inside, except of course for the old blind man who couldn’t look at all. 

He didn’t, even. It’s a straight pass. You just have to know where your target is going to be.

That’s really not the point.

The obvious problem is that if the opposing team knows you’re going to do that move, it can go very wrong very quickly, even more so than a simple blocked shot. Usually, too, the defending team has better awareness of the opposing team positions and will make those adjustments when there’s a player in a position to…

I think this is one of the defining characteristics of the German national team - they keep playing until the final whistle, without giving in to desperation tactics. Even when they lost to Mexico, they never got down or even sloppy, just playing their usual game and hammering away at the goal whenever the opportunity…

Yeah, that’s how soccer tournaments work. As the rounds progress, you play better and better teams, and if you can’t beat them you go home.

Counter-counterpoint: The USMNT’s biggest rival was and remains the USMNT.

Yeah, but it’s black goop.

It’s not just the people that won’t consider him the GOAT, it’s the people - especially from his home country and possibly even some his ungrateful teammates- who consider him a goat just because the rest of the Argentine team can’t or won’t support him up front. You can blame him for not finishing well on the…

Tactically speaking, Ronaldo is indistinguishable from just about every other top-flight striker in the world; he’s just also a lot better at it than the rest. That’s why, when you have a normal team, if you could drop any one player in for a game it’d be Ronaldo, because he’d do everything your old striker did, only…

Argentina has an embarrassment of riches on the attack but they don’t remotely fit together well. Playing Messi behind a classic striker like Aguero or Higuain pushes Messi back into a midfield role which is not very effective. Messi would be more useful on the wing with Aguero in the middle.