I still think this is all part of a long plan, a Process if you will, to blow the team up completely so they can make a splash in their debut season in Las Vegas. Gruden’s $100 million guaranteed contract is basically blood money for doing such a bad job he’ll never work in the league again.

You’re mostly right, but the big problem is that you’re applying a trend from oveseas sports fandom to domestic fans, which I don’t think is valid. Fans of Barcelona or Real Madrid may have actually spent time in those cities on exchange or as tourists, but I doubt very many American Man U fans have actually been to…

Nah. The plan is for the soccer execs to ride the bubble until it bursts, cash out, and let someone else clean up the mess.

MLS has a lot of flaws, but I don’t think promotion and relegation are really the solution. Someone investing in a new team is going to want some ability to assure themselves that it’s not going to be a total waste when the team gets pushed down to the second tier after two years, especially since the media rights for…

They’re never going to touch WWE’s market share precisely because WWE pulls shit like this to keep any stars from jumping ship to another promotion, ever (or at least keep them off the stage long enough to lose whatever heat they had). They learned their lesson from the WCW wars.

Ackerman McQueen helped transition the NRA from a niche gun enthusiast organization to the political powerhouse

I’m still waiting for the candidate with the courage to admit that the biggest problem for the project of political reform in this country is the Democratic Party. Everyone wants to blame Trump but no one wants to understand the problems of the system that created him.

You don’t have the tradition like you do in (American) football of the referee explaining the decisions in depth (which is itself only a decade or two old; I remember the days when you had to know the hand signs to know what foul was called). I think it’s less about the nuances of the offside rule (which a decent…

Hitting a player with a pitch needs to be an automatic ejection. If it’s intentional, the pitcher is trying to hurt the opposing team and needs to be thrown out. If it’s not intentional, the pitcher is a danger to everyone at the plate and needs to be thrown out. The fact that this would also help deal with a lot of…

There’s a similar thing in martial arts, called kogan katsu in Japanese, where you gently drop someone on their butt a few times to make them stop hurting sooner.

They bought Coutinho as a replacement for losing Neymar and needing another attacker to feed balls the Messi monster, but you’re right that Coutinho is too much like Messi for that to work. The question is, could they train to play with either Messi or Coutinho as the lead attacker? It might involve learning a…

More like a big -27.

It’s pretty narcissistic to suppose that, if you chat with someone for a while, get a face pic, and then are not interested, that it’s going to be some world-shattering even for the person you’re rejecting. Get over yourself and just do it.

Welcome to sports fandom!

This is a funny year. Liverpool is poised to win the premiership, FC Bayern looks almost vulnerable in Bundesliga, Ronaldo is out in the Champions League, and we might see two English teams in the semi-finals.

Except... that’s not really the case. US labor is not the biggest cost contributor to most of the things we spend money on anymore, except for things that require roughly the same amount of human work as they did before the industrial revolution: teaching, healthcare, some parts of finance... - and in most of those…

Actually, it’s also about as wide as puddle.

The first six were written roughly one per year, and it’s not clear whether Druon planned a seventh book from the start and didn’t get around to writing it, or released a six-book series and decided years later to revisit it.

This doesn’t really help them fight the addictive behaviors, either. What happens if you feel full but you’re not satisfied or haven’t fully come down from what’s causing you to stress eat? You start to force feed yourself. It’s a less drastic version of stomach stapling, and in the long run is likely to have the same…

It was, just like Burning Man was supposed to be for counterculture anarchists instead of SV royalty, but here we are.