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| At what point did ugly sweaters become a thing? I’m a Seahawks fan, and I wouldn’t be caught dead in this. |
WHAT a week of lose! There hasn’t been that sort of diversity of failure packed into one week in quite a while. So much carnage, so little time. To the buzzard points!
No, wait, before we get to the buzzard points, a word about the Buzzards. There has not been a more confounding loss in the NBA this season than what occurred Wednesday night in Washington, when the Wiz somehow lost at home 108:104 to a 2-15 Los Angeles Lakers team playing a back-to-back after getting trounced in the dream matchup with the 76ers the night before. Fresh off a typically bombastic and inefficient 7-for-26 performance in Philly, Kobe Bryant went off for 31 as the bumbling Buzzards stumbled their way to defeat. The Wiz are 8-10 and one of the league’s bigger disappointments so far this season. For years now, it’s been the hope of the D.C. faithful that native son Kevin Durant will one day come home to lead his local childhood club to the promised land. But if I’m Durant, knowing I’m going to get paid finely regardless of the name on the front of the jersey, I’m looking at this underachieving franchise, and thinking about all of the demands that get put upon you when you go “home,” so to speak, and thinking it’s probably not worth all the bother.
Durant’s a free agent this summer, of course, and speculation about his future is likely to be a huge distraction in OKC all season, one likely to mushroom as the season moves along. The Zombies are in sort of a strange spot (boo hoo), as a weird quirk in the NBA salary cap allowed them to essentially sign two “Designated Players” in Durant and Russell Westbrook. (Wikipedia has a decent basic synopsis of how the salary cap works.) OKC got away with it at the time, but as is always the case, you have to pay the piper at some point, and now the time is fast approaching where the Zombies have to figure out if/how they can pay all of these guys. It struck me as something of a strange decision by Billy Donovan to leave the Florida Gators, where he won two NCAA championships, and take the OKC head coaching job, simply because the two most appealing things about the job – Durant and Westbrook on your roster – could both very likely be gone within a couple of years, at which point you’re stuck coaching a weird franchise with weird ownership who also have a propensity for being cheap, and unless you somehow luck out in the draft again, you’re likely never going to land talents like Durant and Westbrook again and the franchise is likely to disintegrate, and wouldn’t that be a wonderful, wonderful thing, indeed …
OK, so, where was I? Oh, right. Let’s ride bikes! No, wait, I was talking about last week’s Lose. That’s right. Sorry, I have a short attention span. To the buzzard points!
• The Cleveland Browns and Detroit Lions tried to outlose each other last week. Now, as two of the NFL’s most tormented franchises – neither has been to a Super Bowl, and neither has won an NFL championship of any kind in more than 50 years – both clubs seem to possess an inherent aversion to success, but their failures last week were impressive even for them.
What looked to be one of the worst matchups in the history of Monday Night Football – the 2-8 Browns hosting the 3-7 Baltimore Ravens – made up for it by producing one of the more ridiculous endings imaginable, as the Ravens blocked a field goal on the last play of a game tied 27-all and returned it for a touchdown.
I say that’s ridiculous, but as I pointed out previously, I’ve seen more bad special teams this year across high levels of football than ever before. I’d never seen a game end on a blocked field goal returned for a TD before, and now it’s happened twice in a matter of months. (And I don’t even know what to make of this.) Bad special teams are where poor teams are often exposed, because special teams are all about attention to detail, and mistakes in the kicking game – an aspect of the game easily taken for granted – can create transition plays that drastically alter the course of a game.
What would be a colossal loss for most NFL franchises was, somewhat sadly, the norm in Cleveland. As the author of this list points out, this loss barely registers in the Top 10 in the history of Browns v. 2.0, which started play in 1999 and has descended into the netherworld ever since. (As someone who found his will to live waning while watching 26 Philadelphia 76ers losses in a row, I find the idea that this guy went through and chronicled 178 Browns losses to be an act of both stunning bravery and downright masochism. He deserves Hero of the Week status, or maybe King of Personal Belgium status for that. And thanks to Terry for finding me that link. Terry is ... uh ... he is the Official None of the Above of In Play Lose.) The Browns have had a constant churn of ownership, GMs, and head coaches during that time, and they’ve drafted utterly horribly: they used a first-round draft pick on the sideshow that is Johnny Football, and astute viewers quickly noticed that two of the Browns’ other underachieving 1st round draft picks were culpable for the Ravens fiasco, as the two of them were blocking – and I use the term loosely – the Ravens lineman who ran them over and blocked the kick. Now 2-10 after getting blown up 37:3 by the Bengals yesterday, the Browns possess the worst record in the NFL and, in terms of the most hopeless franchises in professional sports, the Browns have to be in that conversation.
• But why should the Browns have all the fun? The Detroit Lions then decided to make the Browns look competent in their Thursday night encounter at Ford Field with the Green Bay Packers in a rematch of what was probably the weirdest game in the NFL this season. (At least, it was the weirdest until this Eagles-Pats mess yesterday. Football is going off the deep end.) The Lions blew a huge lead against the Pack but rallied to take the lead late. With almost no time remaining, the Pack attempted one of those crazy multilateral plays which never amount to anything (except when they do), and the Lions committed a face mask penalty on the play, giving the Packers an untimed down and 15 extra yards, at which point Aaron Rodgers launched this moonshot of a Hail Mary pass. Game over, Lions lose.
Now, first of all, the face mask penalty was slight, but it’s still a foul and a point of emphasis in the rules and the officials are going to call that every time they see it. (Which is a big caveat; more on that in a minute.) And you can understand it was a case where the Lions guy was hustling and just trying to make a play, but look at the bigger picture here. Aaron Rodgers wound up with the ball 76 yards away from the goal line, had no one of any worth to lateral the ball to, and all you need to do there is play it straight and make the tackle.
The Lions then completely mess up the untimed down, guessing that the Packers are going to try another lateral bonanza and not putting a hands team on the field to cover the Hail Mary pass. Indeed, the only question on the play was whether or not the three open receivers would drop the ball while fighting over it. That’s how badly the Lions covered the play.
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| Photo by Tim Fuller/USA Today |
• The standard of officiating at the highest levels of the game of football has become really, really poor. We’ve seen far too many games this season, in both the NFL and NCAA ranks, hinging and turning on officiating decisions which proved grossly incorrect. I think football is suffering from the same dilemmas many sports face – the speed of the game is so great now, with players who are bigger and faster and stronger than ever, that it’s extremely difficult for a bunch of well-intentioned but necessarily physically limited middle-aged guys to keep up with them. It would help if the rules were clarified a bit – in attempting to create catch-all rules to handle any situation, football has unintentionally created gray areas (such as what is/isn’t a catch, for example). And perhaps the replay rules need to be tweaked, as the scope of them don’t seem to be serving the higher interest of getting calls correct. I’ve argued before that the standard of proof when it comes to replay – there has to be conclusive visual evidence to overturn the ruling on the field – is the wrong one, and that a replay official needs to be able to watch plays with their own eyes and make their own judgments, regardless of the original ruling.
Or maybe I’m being too complicated with this. Maybe the officials just suck.
The ACC, the same clownshoes outfit who brought us the Miami-Duke mess earlier this year, brought us this disaster on Saturday night in Charlotte during the league’s championship game between Clemson and North Carolina. Now, UNC needed a lot of help to win this game, at this point, down 45-37 with scarcely more than a minute remaining. They needed to recover the onside kick, score a TD, and score a 2-point conversion to end the game to OT. That’s a lot to ask for. Thing is though, of all the things I just mentioned, recovering the onside kick is maybe the hardest part, and they did that, only to have it called back for offsides:
That’s not offsides. That’s not even close to offsides. North Carolina is onside by 1-2 yards! And this isn’t some complicated rules question. This is Officiating 101. There is a referee lined up even with the football, looking right at the ball and right down the line when it’s kicked.
And, of course, there was no mechanism within the rules which would allow North Carolina to challenge this call, even though it was clearly wrong and everybody could see that it was wrong. They were forced to rekick, Clemson recovered and ran out the clock, preserving their perfect season and springing them into the national championship playoff – which, of course, carries with it an enormous financial windfall. It wasn’t the play which decided the game, but it was the one which cemented the result, and that needs to be decided on the field. Whatever it takes to ensure that ultimately occurs is inherently correct. Even if, in the case of the ACC, it means firing all the zeebs and starting over.
• What’s been interesting about the dawning of a new MLB free agency period is not just the money being spent, which is enormous, but who is doing the spending. The Detroit Tigers plunked down $110 million for five years of Nats’ starter Jordan Zimmermann’s services. The Boston Red Sox then offered $217 million for seven years to starter David Price. The Arizona Diamondbacks then decided to push the envelope even further, and push the boundaries of sanity in the process, by ponying up for a 6-year, $206 million deal with Dodgers starter Zack Grienke, who had used an opt out clause in his $147 million Dodger deal in search of an even bigger payday. Well, he certainly found one.
All three of these deals were somewhat strange, and seemed to indicate that the three clubs’ ambitions are far greater than their common sense. As mentioned previously, the peril of free agency is that you’re outlaying a large sum for a player who, with 6+ of service, is likely either at or slightly past their prime. You’re thus paying for their past performance, but not necessarily for what they can do for you in the future. Now, in a salary-capped league, who have to get this balance right, because dollars are comparatively scarce, and if you whiff on a big free agent, you have to make up for that by hurting yourself somewhere else on your roster. Baseball and international soccer don’t have salary constraints, of course, but being inefficient hurts you down the line – for example, Man United sold Angel di Maria to PSG for about £20 million less than they paid for him a year ago, and Man U can afford that financially, but that’s £20 million you’re wasting and not spending on talent, when you know all of your closest competitors are going to be out looking for talent with their chequebooks open. It’s a zero-sum game, where whatever you do wrong benefits your competitors, even in small ways. And baseball is the ultimate sport of small ways, since the margins between success and failure are so minute.
What we’ve seen in recent years is a trend towards these massively large contracts in terms of length – for example, Robinson Cano still has eight years left on his 10-year, $240 million contract with the Mariners. The Mariners aren’t expecting Cano to be a productive player eight years from now, when he’s over 40 years of age. What they did, in fact, was leverage the future against immediate returns. If, in the first five years of his deal, Cano turns out to still be a great player (which he was in 2014, not so much in 2015) and the Mariners win a championship, they can live with the back half of the deal.
In short, it’s a win-now ploy. All three of the large contracts divvied out to Zimmermann, Price, and Grienke are win-now moves by their clubs. But the thing is, I’m not sure you can say that any of those three teams are close to winning now. None of these three teams finished within 13 games of their division leaders a year ago, and two of them finished last, which would seem to indicate they all have far more needs than just one starting pitcher.
The Red Sox, in particular, should know better. Their magical 2013 World Series championship, along with a collective sense of being drunk on the absinthe that is promising young talent, has fooled them into thinking that they know what they’re doing, when all recent results would indicate that 2013 was something of an anomaly. They’re still stuck with $180 million of Pablo Sandoval being out of shape and Hanley Ramirez being Hanley Ramirez, while the signing of Price brings the total of quality arms on their 12-man pitching staff to somewhere around one. Signing Zimmermann should mean that the Tigers want to win now, and yet they held a fire sale most of the last two months of the season after it started going south, which seems to make the idea of winning now a bit far fetched.
The Grienke contract is also odd in that Arizona have been rather cost-conscious in recent years, then suddenly decided to splurge. Grienke is sort of an odd personality, but refreshingly so, in that he’s blunt and direct in most everything he says, and he didn’t make any bones about the fact that the prime motivation for opting out of his Dodgers deal was simply to get paid as much as he possibly can. And I’m cool with that. Hell, time is short in pro sports, so make as much as you can. But you wonder about the soundness of the idea of spending six seasons pitching at Chase Field, which is a hitter’s paradise almost on par with Coors Field, playing for a sub-.500 club with only a few truly top-level assets (one of whom, Paul Goldschmidt, is grossly underpaid and likely to be tricky to re-sign in light of this deal). Sure, getting paid is cool, but you can get paid in L.A. or S.F. or Chicago and, you know, maybe actually win something. The Dodgers and Giants wisely opted of this high-stakes poker game, looking to fortify their staffs through more reasonable means – the Giants signing Jeff Samardzija for 5/90 was a savvy move, while the Dodgers just traded for Aroldis Chapman from the Reds. Indeed, most of the big players in the MLB – “big” as in “teams that are any good” – seem to be sitting back and watching where the market is going, letting some of their less-intelligent competitors go about spending themselves into irrelevance.
• What the actual fuck, Steve Clark?
27 seconds into the MLS Cup final against the Portland Timbers, and the Columbus Crew were down 1-0 thanks to this bit of goalkeeping buffoonery. The Timbers’ 2:1 victory over the Crew offered up everything good, bad, and ugly that you generally get from MLS. It was a close, tight, entertaining game in which neither team played terribly well and included the obligatory naïve defending, horrible goalkeeping, and terrible officiating we’ve come to know and love about the league. (The build-up to the second Timbers goal began with a linesman missing a ball going about two yards out of bounds.)
20 years in, and MLS is in something of a strange place. It’s certainly a success, with 20 teams in the league, and 4-8 planned for the near future. But the league is held back in it’s hell-bent determination to create parity. The salary structure of MLS is so tight that being able to staff a club with enough quality players to get through an 8-month season is nearly impossible. MLS has this elaborate, labyrinthine salary cap structure that also includes DPs and TAMs and all of these sorts of exceptions in order to allow
• When it comes to taunts and chants, soccer fans are always ahead of the curve and on top of every trend. Last week, we heard perhaps the greatest indicator of the sophistication of modern fandom in Cadiz, Spain, when fans began chanting “Benitez, check your twitter!”
This is some seriously great Lose.
Rafa Benitez, the beleaguered and embattled coach at Real Madrid, fielded basically a reserve side for the club’s match against 3rd Division Cadiz in the Copa del Rey, and included squad player Denis Cheryshev in his starting XI, who promptly scored a goal about 4’ into the game. Cheryshev was on loan at Villareal a season ago, during which time he accrued too many yellow cards and was set to serve a 1-game suspension – and the suspensions carry over with the player, even if you change clubs. Somehow, this fact eluded everyone at Real Madrid, even though Cheryshev’s name was on a list of players due to serve a suspension – so, in essence, they fielded an ineligible player for the game, a fact which came to light on twitter just a few moments after Cheryshev scored his goal against Cadiz.
And this completely blows up on twitter while the game is going on, of course, and the Cadiz fans start chanting “Benitez, check your twitter!” and laughing it up and loving every minute of it, since using an ineligible player in the Copa del Rey carries a penalty of forfeiting the game. It doesn’t matter how badly Real beats them at that point, be it 3-1 (the ultimate outcome) or 6-1 or 10-1. Real is OUT! Finally, someone in the Real entourage decided to figure out what everyone in the Cadiz grandstands were yukking it up about, at which point they realized that they’d fucked up. Cheryshev got yanked from the pitch at halftime, but it doesn’t matter. Sure enough, Real has to forfeit the match and is out of the competition.
They’ve vowed to appeal, claiming they didn’t know Cheryshev was supposed to be suspended, which is lame because every other club in the league seems to have known it, and ignorance of the law is never an acceptable defense, anyway. Real is a ticking time bomb of a club whose season is disintegrating. They didn’t think it could get much worse after getting completely, utterly humiliated 4:0 at home by F.C. Barcelona a couple of weeks ago. Well, guess what? It’s worse.
• Finally, as a fan of all things being done extremely well – I know that sounds hard to believe – I say RIP Jonah Lomu. Those of you here in North America may not know who he is, but Jonah Lomu was a New Zealand rugby player who was not merely a great player but who, quite simply, changed the way the game of rugby will forever be played. Great players will come and go in all sports and competitions, but few possess the sorts of abilities which transcend the confines of sport, and force the sport to alter itself because of it. When that happens, it’s really special and also fleeting, and you’d do well to appreciate it. That very thing is occurring right now here and now in the San Francisco Bay Area, in fact, but we’ll get to talking about the tenants of Oracle Arena in my next post.
