Quick Misses

Robert Indiana was off by a letter

NO time for an intro. To the buzzard points!

• Think your team is having a bad year? Parma F.C. is have a worse one. The club currently sit bottom of the table of Italian Serie A with only 10 points from 23 matches, and have had to postpone their past two matches because they are broke. Their home match with Udinese was scrapped because the club couldn’t afford to pay for the electricity and security at their home football grounds. Faced with playing a game behind closed doors in a browned-out stadium, players from both clubs balked. This past Friday’s match with Genoa was postponed as well – there was no money available to pay for the travel and lodging. The players were planning, at first, to drive to Genoa in their own cars, or hitch a ride on a coach hired by some traveling club supporters, and a $22,000 advance from a sponsor appeared to have been hastily arranged to cover the costs. But the players finally decided they’d had enough, and threatened to strike in protest of the failure to have the club’s tenuous, and quite ludicrous, financial situation resolved.

Parma F.C. are Friends of The Lose. These guys are awesome. These guys need some love.
That, and a paycheque. Pay them, for heaven’s sake!

Parma F.C. are on their third ownership group already this season. They qualified for European play last season, only to be denied their place (and the accompanying revenue such games generate) because the owner had failed to turn over payroll taxes in a timely fashion. The club was sold to a Russian-Cypriot conglomerate, which then flipped it to an Italian businessman who purchased the club for €1 after he agreed to pay off €100 million in club debt – which, of course, hasn’t happened. Yes, somehow the Italian FA allowed a guy to waltz in and buy a club for €1. To the surprise of absolutely no one, whatever money was  supposed to be there hasn’t turned up. An administration hearing is set for Mar. 19, club property has been seized for auction by local authorities, and the players haven’t been paid all season.
Read that again. The players haven’t been paid all season. The Italian Players Association are, suffice to say, not amused. All Serie A games are starting 15 minutes late this weekend in protest. One of the golden rules of The Lose states that in any dispute involving soccer players and wages, the players are always right. The game is a bastion of shysters and would-be kingpins and tycoons. Far too many owners have far too many delusions of grandeur while being wofully undercapitalized as they attempt to compete in an arena where the cost of doing business is often determined for you by the actions of other clubs. There are megaclubs which serve as idle playthings for the preposterously rich, for whom money is no object, and even some of the game’s most storied clubs have wound up drowning themselves in red ink while vainly attempting to keep pace – the most notable in that category being Rangers, who have spent the past three seasons working their way back up through the Scottish league system after going bankrupt and being relegated to the fourth division.
It’s all an utterly impossible mess which can’t possibly end well – although sadly, for Parma F.C., there is precedent in this, as they were under administration from Italian authorities from 2003-2007. The club was a beacon of attractive play in the otherwise defensive and grey Serie A of the 1990s, winning several European trophies at the time, but their fate was inexorably tied to their parent company Parmalat, the Italian dairy conglomerate that decided to try their hand at derivates trading and other fraudulent acts and wound up becoming the largest bankruptcy in European history.
Amazingly, the club’s players have tried to maintain some sort of professionalism and dignity through all of this. Given all they’ve had to put up with this year, it’s somewhat remarkable Parma has taken any points at all, much less 10. Actually, they took 11, but the club was docked a point for not paying the players. Pretty stiff penalty, that one. No wonder the players blamed the Italian FA’s “lack of interest” in refusing to play this weekend. Pay the players! Seriously. Pay these guys already, and/or let them find work elsewhere. They’ve more than fulfilled their contractual obligations. The FA says they can’t do anything until the club enters administration. In the meantime, other Serie A clubs have contemplated trying to find a way to run the club for the rest of the season, in part because having a club go out of business in the middle of the season makes a mess of the standings and the schedule. Pay the players! Free Parma F.C.! Enough of this nonsense.

• And now for something completely different, I give you the New York Knicks:

The actual ESPN play-by-play of this was “Alexey Shved misses 6-foot.” Note absence of the words ‘shot’ and ‘pass.’ I’m not sure what this was, but the likes of it has never been seen in an NBA arena before.

• I’ve never seen so many confounding, head-scratching trades all at once as I saw at the NBA’s trading deadline. I would have better luck explaining Quantum Physics than I would trying to explaining all of those deals. The Warriors wisely made no changes at the deadline, as their front office brass likely got on the phone with some other NBA GMs, decided that everyone on the other end of the line was cuckoo bananas, and promptly put down the phone and sent all the ensuing calls straight to voicemail. Deals in the NBA are almost all inherently, laughably lopsided in this day and age, given that the considerations are almost entirely driven by cap and contract considerations, and thus deals are being made from a position of significant weakness. It was pretty apparent that a good number of franchises involved in the wheeling and dealing were doing so for the purposes of essentially giving up on the season. It speaks to just how cool the game of basketball is that so many fans will still actually turn up to watch games even though their team has basically decided to throw in the towel.
From a financial standpoint, I know that the league is doing fine, and the product on the floor this year has been pretty good (and from a San Francisco viewpoint, it’s been remarkable), but from a competitive balance standpoint, the NBA model is broken and has been for years. But I don’t know what the answer is. History has shown us, time and again, that the coveted #1 pick in the draft is really, if ever, a panacea, and so many of the league’s franchises seem interminably mired in this “Wait ’Til Next Year” mentality which is never proven out. But being an 8-seed in the playoffs isn’t much better than being a 25-win team. Unlike their winter counterpart, the NHL, where you can seemingly luck your way into winning the Stanley Cup, you can’t do that in the NBA. Remember another Rule of The Lose: the lower the score, the easier to pull the upset. You can’t park the bus in front of the rim. Your fatal flaws get exposed mercilessly in the NBA on a minute-to-minute basis. If you’re bad in the NBA, you’ll lose and lose and lose some more.
In the end, as much as I’m enjoying watching the Warriors pound people into submission on a regular basis, I just find it impossible to invest that much of myself in a product where so many of the entities seem to have little interest in succeeding. (Not the players, mind you, but the organizations who employ them.) Not merely attempting to assemble a winning club and failing at it, mind you – Warrior fans endured about 30 years of that – but not even attempting to put forth a legitimately competitive product. There is this air of artificiality to it. Fake fun. As fake as all of the bells and whistles which go off constantly in an NBA arena in an effort to keep you entertained. Hey, I have an idea. WIN THE DAMN GAME! I think winning is pretty entertaining, don’t you?

• Read this article. The Lose believes analytics are an important part of the business of sports, and using data and a logical approach can pay long-term dividends. The Lose also believes that most of the amateur stat nerds who dominate the conversation on sports message boards don’t understand that you cannot take the laptop with you out onto the field. You can put players in positions to better succeed through analytics, but those players better have some fucking talent to begin with. The Philadelphia 26ers can be branded analytics darlings all they want, but all Sam Hinkie has done in his tenure as GM is create a sub-replacement level roster with a sub-salary floor payroll which only does one aspect of basketball well, which is lose at it.
And I never quite understand what stat nerds think the point of the sport is that they actually follow. The objective is to win. I came across an amusing argument on a Seattle Mariners fansite the other day, where they were revisiting an off-season trade where fan favourite/WAR darling/constantly injured OF Michael Saunders was shipped to Toronto. (The impetus for this discussion being that Saunders had just torn up his knee at spring training by stepping on a sprinkler head in the outfield.) A stats disciple made a point on there where he said the process involved in trading Saunders to the Blue Jays for pitcher J.A. Happ was a bad one – even though the trade is presently slanted heavily in the Mariners favour with Saunders hurt, and that he “would rather have GOOD PROCESS = BAD RESULTS instead of BAD PROCESS = GOOD RESULTS.”
Bullshit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit. I want good results regardless of good process, bad process, dumb luck, miracles, acts of God or anything else. The objective is to win the game, and ultimately win the last one of the season after which they give you a shiny trophy and you get to have parades. If all we cared about was assembling a team on paper with the biggest WAR, we wouldn’t care a whole lot about watching the actual game, now would we?

• As I mentioned previously, The Lose is a worldly individual and I find the ICC World Cup of Cricket to be quite entertaining. Most of the excitement in the 14-team tourney so far has been generated by the ‘associate’ nations participating – Ireland, Afghanistan, UAE, and Scotland – winning a few games and scaring the dickens out of some of the established nations in the process. The minnows should enjoy it while it lasts, since the International Cricket Council, in a move laced with greed and protectionist interests, is actually contracting the tournament the next time it occurs four years from now. This doesn’t make any sense from a competitive standpoint – the minnows have been entertaining and mostly competitive, whereas a lot of the games between established sides have been awful blowouts.
But this excellent New York Times article explains what’s going on: it’s far more important to keep Indian viewership, and Indian sponsorship dollars, flowing in than actually attempting to grow the game worldwide. I’ve labeled this similar phenomenon in the soccer world The Zusi Effect. When Graham Zusi’s headed goal against Panama saved El Tri’s ass a few years ago, he also saved League MX and the Mexican FA literally millions of dollars in sponsorships and broadcast rights which would’ve been lost by El Tri failing to qualify for the World Cup. From a financial standpoint, it would’ve been somewhat disastrous for Mexican soccer. They owe Graham Zusi more than he probably realizes.
Cricket is suffering from a Zusi Effect – depending entirely on the well-being of one particular team, and having them do well – and that’s the sort of loser thinking which ultimately dooms you. Even in a small group of nations like the 10 in the highest ranks of cricket, there is bound to be some ebb and flow, some give and take, and sometimes you’re just not going to win because others will be better. It’s the nature of most competitions. Not even the American basketball team has been immune to that over the years. And not even a self-contained entity like the NFL is content with having only a small marketplace – hence their constantly having games in London. (Which folks across the pond keep attending, even though they’ve been fed a steady diet of the Jacksonville Jaguars.) Sure, India’s cricket market is massive, but India’s market for everything is potentially massive. If they could ever develop some good footballers there – and with 1.2 billion people, the odds surely are in their favour – the place seems like a potential gold mine. And the beautiful game has always had a curious way of chip-chip-chipping away at a nation’s collective sporting psyche. It may take a few years, or even a few decades, but if FIFA wants it, eventually football starts to take hold.
For as many shots as I’ve taken at FIFA, they knew years ago that developing untapped markets was the key to further growth. The more good players there are, and the more good footballing nations there are, the better the game is as a whole. Their efforts at development included holding their most sacred event in a trio of baseballing nations – the U.S., Japan, South Korea – all of whom have now asserted themselves as legit footballing nations with strong domestic leagues that have produced a few world-class players. Rugby’s gotten in on the act as well, planning on holding their World Cup in Japan in 2019 and looking to grow the game in places such as the U.S., a huge nation where there is room for almost any sort of sport or pastime to thrive on some level or another. Given that the U.S. lost to New Zealand’s All Blacks 74:6 last fall in Chicago, the rugby folks clearly have a ways to go, but 61,000 turning up at Soldier Field for that match shows the potential interest to be there.
There is a big difference between being self-interested and short-sighted, with the foundations of failure very often rooted in the latter. And while there is and has been an abundance of graft, corruption and political in-fighting in institutions such as FIFA and the IOC, such behaviours are often far, far worse in smaller institutions, where there is a smaller pie and thus more incentive to be crooked. It’s best that the I.C.C., and entities in general, to continue striving for expanse, rather than simply turning inward and trying to protect that which (they think) they still have.

• Non sporting note here to close: RIP Leonard Nimoy. On the booze cruise that was the original Starship Enterprise, Spock provided the Shakespeare. His was the eye and the voice of the poet, the soul of the philosopher. It was the ethos of Spock which was at the heart of the rebirth of the Star Trek franchise many decades later, for it was that character – with his honorable characteristics of reason, humility, and grace – which truly resonated with people. Leonard Nimoy’s on-screen creation – a character founded within his own background and life experience – was proving it was cool to be smart half a century ago, and for that, we should all be grateful. He lived long and prospered. He has been, and shall always be, our friend.

Quick Misses

Wait a minute, something is missing here ...

IT GETS no worse than this – being forced to play with only four players. This fate befell Southern Mississippi on Thursday night in their 73:71 OT loss to Florida International. The Golden Eagles only dressed seven players for the game on account of injuries, disciplinary actions and having had two players ruled ineligible back in January. Three players fouled out during the game, leaving the Eagles to play the last :45 of the game with only four players on the floor. The Eagles are going through a death march of a season – this loss dropped them to 6-17 on the year. To make matters worse, the school is subject to an ongoing NCAA investigation into potential recruiting violations by previous head coach Donnie Tyndall, who bolted for Tennessee and appears to have left something of a mess behind him. If so, then he fits right in over in Knoxville, where the Vols previously had to fire coach Bruce Pearl in 2011 after he lied to the NCAA and turned a minor rules violation into a full-on tire fire. Pearl was served with show cause (the NCAA equivalent of a blackballing) for three years and now has turned up at Auburn. If you are charming and you win, you seem to get an abundant number of chances.

The Lose has played 4-on-5 before. It is not pretty. You can do OK on defense, as you sink into something of a rhombus or a square and try to get them to shoot outside. Offense is where the problem comes – they can mark you up and leave a 5th guy free, either a little guy to scamper around and pickpocket you or, more commonly, a big guy to roam about the key and try to swat your shot to jesus. Fortunately, it usually does not last for very long, since it is likely near the end of the game when this occurs. And at first, it is something of a challenge that you embrace, but reality sets in pretty quickly. Credit to the Golden Eagles here, who very nearly sent the game to double OT. Kids will play hard under any circumstance. Never believe any college coach who claims the effort is not there. Kids will play hard under even the most hopeless of circumstances.

To the buzzard points!

• We all want Sepp Blatter gone. He is up for reëlection as head of FIFA this spring, and we fans of the beautiful game can all agree that the organization is bloated, corrupt, and in desperate need for reform. Unfortunately, we are not the ones doing the voting. It’s the heads of the FAs from the 210 members who do the voting. Three candidates have come forth to challenge Blatter in the election – Portuguese footballing great Luis Figo, Dutch FA bigwig Michael van Praag, and Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan, who appears to be the most viable opposition candidate. The Americans want Blatter gone, the Brits want him gone, and the Europeans want him gone as well – but that is only about 55 votes. So where are the other votes going to come from?
To get some insight into this predicament, consider the two recent confederation championships which took place. First up was the Asian championship, taking place in Australia and won by the home side in a 2:1 victory over South Korea after extra time which certainly was entertaining and thrilling for the home fans, if not necessarily all that well played. Well-played football seems to have gone missing on the continent of late – Asian sides took 3/36 available points at the last World Cup, and there was not a single team ranked in the Top 50 in the world at the start of the tourney in Australia. Asian federations have been a big benificiary of FIFA's global initiatives to grow the game. FIFA is awash with cash, and Uncle Sepp has been a big proponent of grants and other financial incentives to help the rest of the world catch up to the Europeans and South Americans. This has made him many friends, of course, but if there has been any major improvement on the field, it sure was not evident in Australia. (The prime exception being the Chinese, who have decided to make a concerted effort to get corruption and other nonsense out of the game, and promptly won their group in Australia.) FIFA has kept the euros flowing, but who knows where they have gone. So, even with an Asian representative up for election, he is unlikely to mine many votes out of his own confederation.
And then there is Africa. Welcome back to the mess. A quick summary of the CAF's African Cup of Nations:
– The tourney was originally scheduled for Morocco, but the hosts wanted to delay the tourney due to concerns about Ebola – a somewhat odd request, since one of the quarantined nations, Guinea, was playing their home qualifiers in Morocco.
– CAF refuses the reschedule, yanks the tourney away from Morocco, fines them a total of $10 million and throws the Moroccans out of the 2015 tourney and the next two AFCONs after that.
– Needing to find a new host in a hurry, CAF settles on Equatorial Guinea, who have plenty of time on their hands because they have been thrown out of qualifying for fielding ineligible players. (Stop me if you think that you have heard this one before.)
– The host nation, ranked 118th in the world, rises up and reaches the quarterfinals, where they face a Tunisia side rated 90 places higher. Tunisia has a 1-0 lead late in stoppage time, an Equatoguinean flops in the box and a penalty is given. Calling it a soft penalty would be an affront to softness. The hosts convert, leveling the score and sending it on to extra time, at which point an Equatoguinean player flops again and a free kick is awarded – which is expertly taken, I must admit, and which gives the hosts the lead. The Tunisians are incensed, and a fight ensues between the two benches which has to be broken up by security forces. At the close of the game, a 2:1 upset win for the hosts, the Tunisian players promptly chase the Mauritian referee off the field and down the tunnel as he is hurried away by security forces.
– CAF fines the referee $50,000, suspends him six months and, probably more importantly, delists him, meaning he will likely never work in international football. They also fine the Tunisians $50,000 for nearly starting a riot. The Tunisian FA's response is to have their head guy resign from the CAF board and openly state that the match was fixed. CAF then threatens to kick the Tunisians out of the next AFCON in 2017 unless they apologize.
– In the semifinals, the hosts are playing Ghana in Malabo and the referee isn't having any nonsense. He awards a penalty to the Black Stars late in the first half after denying endless foolish appeals from the home side for fouls. This outrages everyone, even though he was kind in not sending off the Equatoguinean keeper, who probably deserved it. Ghana scores twice in quick succession, taking a 2-0 lead at half, at which point the fans start throwing water bottles onto the pitch. The players have to be escorted off the pitch under cover of riot police shields. In the second half, Ghana scores again to make it 3-0, at which point all hell breaks loose. The Ghanaian fans leave the stands and take refuge on the athletics track encircling the pitch. There are water bottles, stones, pieces of shattered mirrors, pieces of stair and all sorts of other debris being flinged out of the stands. The players are all standing in the center of the pitch, that being the only place safe in the whole building, as riot police charge into the stands and police helicopters buzz the stadium, chasing away spectators.
– For this chaotic mess, CAF fines Equatorial Guinea only $100,000. They should, by all rights, not be allowed to play a home match before spectators, but CAF allows the 3rd-place game in Malabo to go ahead anyway. It's a slap on the wrist. (To make matters worse, I now read that the president of Equatorial Guinea has pardoned all 150 or so people who were arrested during the mayhem.) It's a disgraceful scene all around.
– The final of this tourney was appropriately daffy, a 0:0 draw between Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire which went to penalties. Many African Cup of Nations finals go that route, since after six games with quick turnarounds in 95° heat, the players have almost nothing left in the tank. This penalty shootout went 11 rounds before Côte d'Ivoire won on a goal from their goalkeeper – and their backup goalkeeper, no less, who had been pressed into service when their regular #1 suffered an injury. It was a terrific win for the Elephants, but the whole tournament was an exercise in Theatre of the Absurd.

CAF president Issa Hayatou put forth this gem of a response when asked about the Malabo upheaval during a press conference:

"The press always dramatise, particularly the western press. When something bad happens in Europe, they say it's an error. When something happens in Africa, they begin talking about corruption. What happened in that [abondoned 2012] match between Serbia and Italy? It's the same as what happened here, but when it's Africa it's different. It's irrelevant that it's a semifinal. It's a football match. The western media are simply here to perpetuate colonisation."

Uh ... huh?
And what does Uncle Sepp think? He being on hand for the final in Bata, he offered up this rambling response:

"Good news is no news, bad news is news. We only talk about the bad. Football – which is such a good thing – let it live, leave it in peace, it's well organised, let them do it. I don't see the negative side of African football that the media presents. It's normal, we criticise what's good, never what's bad. The unhappy role of the media is to assume and to forecast. In the past, the government made a decision and the media passed it on. Today, we make decisions and the media have already presented it. We become slaves to the media who have already given an opinion. The media can play a role, must play a role, but they must play a role where the notions of respect and fair play are the basics. Today the world opens the newspapers, watches television, and sees only murders and killing. We never talk about princesses marrying any more."

Welcome to Uncle Sepp's Fantasyland.
And as you may have guessed, CAF members are among Blatter's biggest supporters. He wasn't about to bad mouth them, even though the greatest showcase of the continent had turned into an ungodly mess. Nope, you're not going to find any no votes on that continent.
So good luck getting rid of Sepp Blatter. That is two giant federations who will likely bloc vote to keep him in power. We appear to be stuck with him for the forseeable future. It will be interesting to see what comes about in 2017, when FIFA awards the 2026 World Cup. The Americans are the logical choice as hosts, but the Americans are also leading the charge to get rid of Sepp, and he is known to have a bit of a vindictive streak in him. Then again, there is still the possibility that FIFA is keeping the Americans in reserve if/when the Qatar thing fizzles. The politics of football seem to be growing even more murky.

• Speaking of Qatar, Friend of The Lose journalist Stefan Fatsis wrote this piece for Slate about the recently-concluded world championships of team handball which touch place in the country. The article is not exactly a ringing endorsement of the home nation, who went out and bought a team for the event, and even bought some spectators as well. (Nor is the piece a ringing endorsement of handball, whose internal politics make FIFA look angelic.) It paints a less-than-rosy picture of the nation's ability to host an international event as massive as the World Cup. Now, The Lose has no axe to grind with Qatar, which is a small country that has achieved a remarkable amount of prosperity and success in a short period of time. It's just that this World Cup proposal makes no sense, and never has made any sense. The original plans called for building stadia in cities that don't even exist yet. Where are they going to put a million visitors, or more? And doing this in June, when temperatures reach 125° in the nation, is nuts. They insist they can air condition the stadia, but what fan zones? That is where the real danger from the heat actually lies. In order to believe this proposal, you must first suspend disbelief. Organizers insist they are going to pull this off, and insist the constant allegations of corruption are merely sour grapes. I cannot help but be skeptical.

• Why is George Karl coaching the Sacramento Kings? George has always been at his best working on the fringes of the NBA – he was a huge success in Seattle, Milwaukee, and Denver – but taking this job is a head-scratcher. Now, for the purposes of full-disclosure, The Lose made no bones about the belief that this franchise would be better suited being relocated to Seattle, and also admitted that I used to be a former season ticket holder in Seattle. That being said, I believed it was the right move for the long-term benefit of the franchise. A healthy franchise in a rich market, backed by the richest ownership group in the history of sports, would have a far more likely chance to thrive and grow and succeed over the long term.
Instead, the Kings are still in Sacramento and now owned by Vivek Ranadivé, who has acted like something of a nutjob. He fired coach Mike Malone after an 11-13 start, saying that he wasn't playing an attractive enough style of basketball, then replaced him with NBA lifer/retread coach Tyrone Corbin, at which point the Kings started playing much flashier and attractive ball – if your definition of 'attractive' involves losing all the time. Now they've fired Corbin and hired Karl.
The Lose giggled a bit when I was reading some of the local press, back in 2013, talking about how great it would be to have new ownership of the Kings. They would have a tricked out building, they would be able to spend money on free agents, yadda yadda yadda. Anyone who thinks that Sacramento is ever going to be an attractive destination for free agents is a fool. (I have written about this before as well.) The Kings rose to relevance and prominence early this millennium through keen draft research and savvy trades. They have consistently whiffed on both fronts since then, are now laden with strange, unfitting pieces and bad contracts and a superstar, DeMarcus Cousins, who is toiling away in obscurity and counting down the days until he can leave. The franchise may have a new arena coming in a few years, but so what? Everyone has gotten a new arena recently, even the most awful franchises in sports. That revenue, in and of itself, is not going to make you any better, and is not going to bring a franchise back to life.
The Lose resists engaging in schadenfreude whenever possible, but it's going to be really difficult to do that in a few years, when the Cousins-less Sacramento Kings are still terrible, and when the Kevin Durant-less OKC Blunder are losing 55 games and drawing 10,000 people. At that point, the NBA will have two dead franchises on their hands. Franchises can change course, of course, but the former continues to be incompetent and the latter continues to be cheap and not particularly bright, having squandered their chance to win an NBA championship and then made the horrible James Harden trade.
And I cannot for the life of me understand why George Karl would want to get back into coaching bad enough to take a job coaching the Kings. At least his previous stops had some talent and creativity in their midsts, very little of which is apparent over in the Central Valley. Now, if anyone can pull the rabbit out of the hat in Sacto, it would be Karl, but this seems like to much for even his ample magical abilities to pull off.

• Basketball lost a couple of its greatest minds this past week with the deaths of Dean Smith and Jerry Tarkanian. The Lose's dislike of the notion of the college basketball coach is well-documented, but these are two guys who I always admired. The former was professorial, the latter more of a used car salesman. The two of them plied their trades mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, when college basketball was somewhat crazy – the buildings were weird, the coaches were out of their minds, the strategies were wildly variant, and the games could be 42-40 one day and 100-98 the next.
The best compliment that I could ever give Dean Smith is that his players always made great pros, because they were so well-prepared and fundamentally sound that the transition to the next level often seemed seamless. They could play so slow as to sufficate the clock and drive you crazy – remember, it was after N.C. froze out Virginia 47-45 in a #1-#2 matchup that the NCAA moved to add a shot clock – but then his teams could also run and gun, and they could motion offense you to death if they wanted. Whatever game you wanted to play, North Carolina was better at it than you were.
As for Jerry Tarkanian, I met him once at a speaking engagement, and he was hysterically funny. How could you not want to play for that guy? He coached the greatest team I've ever seen which didn't win a championship, the 1991 team that went undefeated during the regular season and lost to Duke in the national semifinals, and his first truly great team – a 1977 unit that reached the Final Four and averaged 110 pts. a game – completely changed the way the game was played from then on. Tarkanian also fought the NCAA for years – and won – and called them out for being selfish hypocrites long before it was fashionable to do so.
The game of college basketball, which is mired in sluggish play and manned by cookie cutter CEO coaches on the sidelines, could use both Dean Smith and Jerry Tarkanian right now – one to actually make individual players better in all phases, and the other to make the game fun again.

• Finally, The Lose is a worldly sort who likes all sorts of sports, and certainly likes seeing them done well, and so I'll definitely be paying attention here to the ICC World Cup 2015 taking place in Australia and New Zealand. Yes, cricket. I have played cricket before and rather enjoyed it. I find Test matches dry as tea in the Sahara, but the 1-day format of the ICC World Cup suits my short attention span ... wait, what was I talking about? Lest you sneer at cricket, keep in mind that the grudge match on Saturday ... or was it Sunday, what the hell time is it in Australia? ... between India and Pakistan was thought to be the most watched cricket match in history, with over 1,000,000,000 people tuning in. That's a lot of zeroes. This is serious business. (India won, by the way, continuing their World Cup mastery of their rivals.) The host Aussies are the favourites, and England got thrashed by the hosts in a sorry display certain to draw the ire back home. The Lose needs to find some appropriate rooting interests. I always have a soft spot for Bangladesh, of course, and I will root for Ireland in almost any sport. The up-and-comers in the sport are apparently from Afghanistan, who are thought to be quite talented and wildly inconsistent. Yep, there is my team to root for right there.

RUN THE DAMN BALL!

I WILL have some thoughts about the recently-concluded NFL season here (aka The Year The NFL Couldn’t Do Anything Right) in a few days. There has been a abundant amount of naysaying and critique going on about at the way the league conducts its business, pretty much all of it well-deserved, but after all of the chaos and tumult and all of bureaucratic idiocy the NFL has displayed, the best thing possible for the league took place on Sunday night in Phoenix – a great Super Bowl. A legendary Super Bowl. An instant classic. Arguably the best of the 49 Super Bowls ever played, and certainly the one with the most confounding ending. And this game also allows the league brass to wriggle off the hook for at least a little while, in that while most critiques of Goodell & Co. focus upon a negligence in regards to handling CTE and off-field issues, the immediate critique of this game goes instead to pure, old fashioned incompetence on the part of the Seattle Seahawks brass.

In short, RUN THE DAMN BALL!

A Super Bowl eerily similar to this was the infamous ‘Wide Right’ of Super Bowl XXV, when the New York Giants defeated the Buffalo Bills 20:19. In that game, the Giants held the ball for over 40 minutes. The Patriots’ Bill Belichick was the defensive coordinator for the Giants at that time. Now, I happen to think Belichick is the best coach in NFL history, and I’ve never had any animosity whatsoever towards the Patriots, but this suck up to Belichick article on Grantland featured a wondrous case of historical revisionism. That game, 24 years ago, had pretty much nothing to do with the Giants defense and everything to do with an offensive strategy in which the Giants milked every second possible off the clock to keep the Bills record-setting offense off the field. The Bills gained 20 yards a minute when they had the ball. They simply ran out of minutes, and they still could’ve won the game with a last ditch FG.

Fast forward 24 years, and the Patriots’ patient, relentless strategy of ball control through the short passing game was brilliantly conceived and exquisitely executed by Tom Brady – and the Pats needed every second of their more than 33 minutes of possession, as it turned out, because their defense got gashed. The Seahawks averaged 5.6 yards per rush and 11.8 yards per pass. Had the outcome been different, most of the second guessing would’ve been heaped Belichick’s way for his choosing not to use his timeouts in the final minute, thus saving more time for Brady to work after the Seahawks scored. Trusting his defense in that spot – a defense which had absolutely imploded in the 2-minute drill in both halves – was something of a curious move, if not out-and-out foolish.

But Belichick doesn’t have to face up to any scrutiny today, because the Seahawks didn’t RUN THE DAMN BALL. Instead, with :30 to go in the game, on the Pats 1 yard line, with a power-rushing offensive line, with the best RB in football and the best running QB in football in the backfield, the Seahawks inexplicably decided to throw a slant pass to the goal line to Ricardo Lockette, their 4th WR, and Pats backup DB Malcolm Butler jumped the route:

Behold the worst play call in NFL history.

And calling it anything short of that does it a disservice. So much on the line, so many things going for the Seahawks, the Patriots seemingly being complicit by not stopping the clock, and the Seahawks run that play? WHAT? You’re going to run a double stack on the goal line and try to pick Brandon Browner, the most physical CB in the NFL (who promptly blows the play up by standing his ground, giving Butler time and space to jump the route), and throw the ball into the defense to a backup WR? Are you serious? To hell with that. RUN THE DAMN BALL!

And before we go any further here, let me introduce a new feature that I was already planning here at In Play Lose, the Tool of the Week, which this week goes to Seahawks offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell.

Bevell not only called this terrible play, but then threw Lockette under the bus, saying repeatedly to the press that the Seahawks WR “should’ve been stronger to the ball.” Hmm, methinks Bevell should’ve been stronger in his decision making. Bevell obviously has the makings of a college head coach, since he’s already speaking like one. One of the fortes of college coaches is finding ways to blame the players when you fuck up on the sidelines. In college, the coach has total control, of course, and dissent is pretty much nonexistent. That doesn’t work so well in the NFL, however, which is a players game, and the Seahawks players were less than pleased:

“I don’t understand how you don’t give it to the best back in the league on not even the 1-yard line … We were on the half-yard line, and we throw a slant. I don’t know what the offense had going on, what they saw. I just don’t understand.” – LB Bruce Irvin
“Um, yeah. I mean, I really don’t know. I still haven’t figured it out yet.” – WR Doug Baldwin, when asked if he was surprised by the call.

The reporters stationed near the tunnels said many of the Seahawks players were echoing these sentiments when they left the field. The Seahawks true leaders manned up in the aftermath, with Carroll saying the blame was on him, Wilson saying he felt like he lost the game for his team, and Lynch refusing to point fingers by saying “it’s a team game.” Players make mistakes on the field all the time, but they also bust their asses and their bodies trying to make plays. The last thing they need is some smug guy with a headset and a clipboard trying to cover his ass after the fact. That pisses players off.

Damn you Auto Correct!

And they should be pissed off, because this play call was absolutely stupid. Pete Carroll did try to explain the logic that went into this play after the game. And I’m going to give him some leeway here, since this was right after what was, without question, the most soul-killing defeat anyone involved had ever experienced. Trying to come up with sound explanations in the aftermath of defeat can be difficult, especially when you know that you just blew it. Logic doesn’t always work so well in that instance. (The bizarre comment by Mike McCarthy about 20 second-half rushing attempts in the aftermath of this disaster falls in that category.) But here is the logic Carroll put forth:

The Seahawks wanted to try and kill out the clock completely, give Brady as little time as possible after they score. (To be honest, I think they were surprised Belichick didn’t call a timeout, since there was all sorts of uncertainty as they lined up on 2nd down.) They have one timeout left. If they throw a pass on 2nd down and it falls incomplete, the clock stops. If they run, and they don’t get it, they have to burn the timeout, which cuts down the options for what to do on the next play. The Seahawks plan was to throw a pass on 2nd down, run on 3rd, call a timeout if they don’t make it, and run on 4th. Furthermore, Carroll said the New England went ‘heavy’ with a goal line defense, which made running the ball more of a challenge, and the Seahawks felt they had a bad matchup with the Patriots defense, which is why they switched it up.

OK, there’s the logic. And my answer to that is RUN THE DAMN BALL.

And full marks to Butler, the Pats DB on the play, for sniffing it out. It was pointed out in a fave Seattle media outlet of mine that Butler got torched by the Patriots scout team on that exact play, and got lit up by Belichick for doing so, so when he saw the formation, he was looking for the play which the Seahawks ran. This speaks to excellent preparation on the Pats part, of course. While it’s a stretch, in my opinion, to say the Pats ‘knew’ the play was coming, film study and preparation suggested to the Patriots that this play might happen.

Which just makes the play call even worse. Not only were the Seahawks stupid, but it turns out they were also somewhat predictable.

But let’s go back to that logic Carroll was using for a moment. First of all, running the ball on 2nd down and not getting a TD and being forced to use a timeout isn’t that big of a deal. You’re still a yard from the end zone. You have the most mobile, agile QB in football, one who is very likely to score himself if you spread the field on 3rd down and give him a host of run/pass options. 3rd and 1 takes away the Lynch power run, but there are, in fact, even more options available and the Patriots have to account for even more possibilities. Wilson can roll out, can run a QB draw, all of that sort of stuff. The Patriots have spent the entire game trying to minimize Wilson’s edge game for a reason: Russell Wilson, on the move, in open space, is a mismatch for every single member of the Patriots defense. Instead, the Seahawks essentially made it easy for the Pats to defend Wilson by giving him a play call, on 2nd down, where there is ONLY ONE OPTION, which is to throw the slant. There is no Plan B there. There is no check down.

And as for the defensive alignment, well, the Seahawks kind of got it wrong. Sure, there are eight in the box playing the run, but the Pats also have 3 CBs in the game. There is no reason to have three corners in the game if you think you’re getting nothing but power run. That defensive alignment suggests the Patriots are, in fact, hedging their bets – if not out-and-out selling out – by looking for a pass play. So, whatever logic being used based by the Seahawks, based upon was the Pats defense was doing, was faulty from the get-go.

Science, bitches! Now run the damn ball!

And this is where some nifty Game Theory comes into play, which gets complicated by the clock. If the Pats use 3 corners on 2nd-and-goal, and the Seahawks go with a power run formation, New England probably has to take a timeout, because they’re outmatched. This is good for the Seahawks, who are dealing with under a minute of game time. Any clock stoppage while they have the ball is good for them. The clock is the Pats’ ally, but only until Seattle scores, when it becomes an enemy. As it stands, the Pats’ 3 CB look is the right defense on the field for what they think Seattle is going to do (which the Seahawks then did). Now, probably the right move here for Seattle is for Wilson to audible out of the play call, but doing so takes time off the clock Seattle cannot afford to waste.

It’s triumphing in situations like this which makes Belichick the best coach in NFL history. Pete Carroll is a terrific football coach, but he got beat by the best. I’m reminded of a conversation I had several years ago after the Louisville-Michigan NCAA basketball championship final, a game which turned when Louisville put their best player, Russ Smith, 30 feet from the basket in the second half, which took him out of the game but also created good 1-on-1 matchups and opened up the Michigan defense, who had to have a guy chase Russ Smith around as he acted as a decoy, stand 30 feet away and take themselves out of the play as a consequence. The person I was explaining this to then said, “so Michigan got outcoached,” and I said, “well, Rick Pitino’s in the Hall of Fame for a reason.”

But to hell with all of that game theory stuff. RUN THE DAMN BALL! The Seahawks rushed for more yards this season than had been seen in the NFL since 2006. Marshawn Lynch is arguably the best all-purpose back in the sport, and the team is based upon a power run game, which keys Wilson’s fleet feet and sleight of hand in the passing game. Everything the Seahawks do is predicated on the idea that they just line up and flatten you and run over you. So do it, damn it! IT’S WHAT YOU DO BEST! The Pats didn’t stop the run worth a damn the whole game, whereas the Seahawks had been unable to get anyone open in the passing game, which consisted mostly of throwing the ball up for grabs and having it work out from time to time. Where was Chris Matthews all season for the Seahawks? Wow, that kid was terrific. (Conversely, New England DB Kyle Arrington was absolutely horrible on the coverage. He got repeatedly toasted and got promptly benched by Belichick at halftime.) I was somewhat shocked the Seahawks didn’t use Lynch as a receiver more, and they didn’t use the tight end for anything more than being a 6th lineman. The Seahawks gained a helluva lot of yards with a passing game that didn’t really work very well. Given two drives with chances to salt the game away on two separate drives, the Seahawks either missed open receivers or dropped the ball. Hell, the fact that Seattle was at the goal line with a minute to go was miraculous to begin with:

Yes, that actually happened

But how do you not trust your best guys to do what you do best when you’re a yard away from the end zone? What the hell is that? What the hell are you thinking? WHERE IS YOUR BRAIN?

We were having some good-spirited banter at the start of the game, and the Pats fan said “they’re gonna run the ball,” and I said, “Brady’s going to throw the ball 50 times in this game.” You’re playing the best defense in the NFL, and you’re telling me you expect LaGarette Blount to win the game for you? Bullshit. This ain’t the Colts toreador run defense you’re facing. And you have Tom Brady, one of the best QBs in the history of the game. I’m taking my chances with that guy, especially with three DBs for the Seahawks already playing hurt, and two more injuries during the course of the game hindering the Seahawk defense even further. Sure enough, Brady was 37-50 for 328 yards, and Blount was watching the game from the bench. The Pats put the ball in the hands of their best player. The Seahawks, meanwhile, tried to be clever and outsmarted themselves.

RUN THE DAMN BALL! Have Russell Wilson shake hands with Lynch, and then have Lynch shake everyone’s hand after he scores. RUN THE DAMN BALL! It’s really not that complicated, so don’t make it complicated. Hell, if they’ve got three corners, audible out of it, and spread the field. And don’t throw a slant! The Seahawks suck at running the slant. They botched the slant repeatedly against Green Bay, who basically dared them to throw it and caught more of those passes than the Seahawks did. The defense is probably going to guess slant, since you only need a yard, they have no safety help, and they have to pick their poison. For fucksake, don’t give the defense a chance to make a play. Throw the damn thing to the pylon if you have to. Throw it way up high to Matthews or the big tight end. No, forget the pass entirely. RUN THE DAMN BALL!

And what the fuck was this? That Nationwide ad was the worst Super Bowl ad that I ever seen. Who is the nimrod in the Nationwide marketing department said, “Hmm, I don’t know, I think we need more dead kids in this ad, because dead kids are always a wonderful way to sell a product.”

And now I’m completely exasperated, so I’m going to run a gif of a dancing shark while I regain some composure:

The dancing shark who doesn’t know the steps, and who gives no fucks, is my new hero.

And now that I’ve thought about it some more, I think my opinion is RUN THE DAMN BALL!

And this is not to discount the Patriots’ performance in any way. They were terrific. Honestly, the whole game was terrific, featuring an amazing ebb and flow as the Pats held the ball and held the ball and held the ball and then BAM! Seattle would make some big plays. It was an incredible football game to watch. But people who try to minimize the impact of this goal line gaffe by saying that there is a bunch of stuff that goes wrong here and there over the course of the game completely miss the point. In a game that comes down to who has the ball last, you can’t make the last mistake. And for the Seahawks coaching staff to go completely brain dead at the end like this is unconscionable.

And this is a tough one for the Seahawks to overcome, but if there is a team that could do it quickly and reestablish dominance, it is them. They’ve got a loaded team. They’re younger than almost every other team in the NFL. They’ve got a Whiz of a GM, salary cap flexibility, and not a whole lot of contract issues to work out. Indeed, the Vegas oddsmakers already fancy their chances for winning it all a year from now. But jeez, this one is a doozy. Last year’s title cushions the blow somewhat, but for a franchise that’s often seemed star-crossed, this defeat is an extraordinary tough and bitter pill to swallow.

And what a baffling, stunning, remarkable series of playoff games involving the NFC. Every successive game featured an ending more confounding than the previous one. First the Lions, then the Cowboys, and then the Pack, and then this. Wow. Words fail me at this point.

Well, I can think of four more words. RUN THE DAMN BALL!