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| Geaux Aints! |
IT’S BEEN an impressive year of lose. We saw the greatest choke in history in the NCAA tournament. We saw the Oklahoma City Blunder gag away a 3-1 lead to the Warriors, who laughed at them … until the Warriors frittered away a 3-1 lead to the Cavaliers, and the whole city of Cleveland laughed about it all summer … until the Indians blew a 3-1 lead in the World Series to the Cubs. And thanks to the NFL’s changing of the rules to make the conversion into a live play, teams in the NFL have now actually discovered two new ways to lose, beginning with the New Orleans Saints, pictured above, losing 25:23 to the Broncos after scoring the tying TD and having the PAT blocked and run back for two points by the defense, only to have their NFC South rivals, the Atlanta Falcons, take it a step further in a 29:28 loss to Kansas City. The Falcons scored a TD late in the game to go ahead 28:27, went for two as the math dictates in this situation, and then Matt Ryan threw an interception run 100 yards back by the Chefs for two points. In NFL jargon, what the Chefs did is now called the “Pick Two,” what the Broncos did is called the “Kick Two,” and what the Saints and Falcons did is called “Clownshoes.”
Kickers in football have generally had a bad go of things this year. Kicking is one aspect of the sport – of any sport – which had basically been perfected. Kickers were making 99% of their PATs in the NFL, which is incredible. Now that the NFL has moved the kick back 15 yards, and also made it a live play, it’s a tougher kick because of the distance, and also an easier kick to block because of the technique. And this change seems to have spooked the kickers, because bad kicking is all over the place this season. And football, as a whole, seems to have deteriorated in terms of quality of play, which is always most evident on special teams. Even something as basic as the kickoff isn’t working out too well:
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| Uh ... huh? |
Never mind attempting the onside kick:
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| Well, it went 10 yards sideways, at least |
OK, granted, those two gifs I just posted are actually college teams and not professional teams, but it’s pretty obvious that they’ve been learning from the pros:
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| All hail the Ribona! |
If there were a position in sports, as a whole, that should garner consideration for The Lose Of The Year award, it would have to be the placekickers. And we here at In Play Lose make it a point to honor great achievements in failure here at the end of the year with our annual, highly coveted TLOTY award which celebrates incompetence, arrogance, disorganization, poor preparation, poor execution, and just being flat-out terrible.
In general, I’m willing to rule out teams that were absolutely cursed by bad luck on the injury front, even though injuries generally afflict bad teams far worse than good ones because bad ones don’t have the depth to combat it. For example, the New Orleans Pelicans may be an absolutely wretched organization, but they finished up last season with their entire starting lineup on the injured list, so you have to give them some leeway there, and you also have to do the same for the
To the nominees!
Philadelphia 76ers
A regular here at the TLOTYs, our reigning award winner finally did us all a favor by relieving Sam Hinkie of his tenure as GM and putting an end to “the process.” Hinkie’s legacy: the #1 pick in the draft which he greatly coveted coming to fruition – Ben Simmons, who promptly broke his foot and has been out all season – and a mismatched roster of bigs with no spacing and no shooting with not enough minutes to go around. (The odd man out is Nerlens Noel, who isn’t happy about it.) The good news is that the 76ers are six games better, at this point, than they were last season. The bad news is that they were 1-30 at this point last season, so six games better is 7-24, which is still terrible. But hey, at least Joel Embiid is fun to watch, so there’s that.
Hinkie apologists are the worst. Any hack can lose all the time. What’s amazing is that clowns like him actually get handed the keys, run the truck into the ditch, and then claim they know how to get out of it. The crux of “the process” is that your best chance to win is to get a star, your best chance to do that is draft one, and your best chance to draft one is at the top of the draft. And who knows, maybe Embiid will turn out to be that star and maybe Simmons will be that star as well, but you also need to put together a team in order to be successful. You need complimentary players and role players, you need playmakers and shooters and glue guys and so forth. Philly has none of those guys, because instead of actually developing those sorts of players, they’ve had a revolving door of roster churn during Hinkie’s Reign of Error. It’s up to the Colangelos to try and salvage this mess, which means making trades from positions of weakness, or maybe some random ping pong ball will save them in lottery again. In the meantime, the 76ers can look forward to 50 more games of suffering this season – only this time, instead of being deliberately awful, they’re actually trying, which just makes them dull.
Minnesota Timberwolves
The calendar year of 2016 has been something of an disaster for the Wolves, who went 17-32 after the New Year to close out last season, and are 10-22 this season going into their game on Friday night against the Milwaukee Bucks. But amid those seven months of generally bad play came the 5-month offseason, during which everyone became grossly, egregiously overenamored with the Wolves’ potential. Even with all of the losing last spring, when the Wolves were something of a rudderless ship adrift with soon-to-be ex-coach Sam Mitchell going through the motions on the sidelines, there were still signs that the pieces were coming together, including a very impressive road win against the 73-9 Golden State Warriors. Across the board, a great number of NBA pundits and podcasters and beat writers whose work I respect suggested that the Wolves wound take a quantum leap this season and vault into becoming a playoff team. And you can see why, since there is incredible talent there – Karl Anthony Towns, Andrew Wiggins, Zach LaVine. Three terrific players, all of them gifted athletes with diverse skill sets and all of whom are under 22 years of age. What’s not to like about that?
The calendar year of 2016 has been something of an disaster for the Wolves, who went 17-32 after the New Year to close out last season, and are 10-22 this season going into their game on Friday night against the Milwaukee Bucks. But amid those seven months of generally bad play came the 5-month offseason, during which everyone became grossly, egregiously overenamored with the Wolves’ potential. Even with all of the losing last spring, when the Wolves were something of a rudderless ship adrift with soon-to-be ex-coach Sam Mitchell going through the motions on the sidelines, there were still signs that the pieces were coming together, including a very impressive road win against the 73-9 Golden State Warriors. Across the board, a great number of NBA pundits and podcasters and beat writers whose work I respect suggested that the Wolves wound take a quantum leap this season and vault into becoming a playoff team. And you can see why, since there is incredible talent there – Karl Anthony Towns, Andrew Wiggins, Zach LaVine. Three terrific players, all of them gifted athletes with diverse skill sets and all of whom are under 22 years of age. What’s not to like about that?
Well, the defense, for starters. A favorite NBA commentator of The Lose’s – Nate Duncan of the Dunc’d On podcast and the Twitter NBA show – pointed this out in rather exasperating detail in the midst of the Wolves’ latest loss, a 105:103 loss in Denver which featured one bad defensive play after another after another after another after another after another after another after another. With such an immature team, and such a horrible defense, it’s no surprise that the Wolves are absolutely terrible in close games and also blow a lot of leads when the game gets tough. Clearly, this calls for some solid leadership on the bench, right?
Oh, right, the Wolves went out and hired Tom Thibodeau in the offseason, who had taken a year off from coaching after his snippy and sour relationship with the front office in Chicago finally reached its breaking point. Thibs was the NBA Coach of the Year with the Bulls in 2011 and, prior to that, he served as an assistant and defensive mastermind for the NBA champion Boston Celtics in 2008. Take a great coach and pair him with great talent. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, kind of everything, actually.
First of all, about that talent. Let’s take those three guys I mentioned before out of the equation here for a moment. Who else is any good? Ricky Rubio can’t shoot, while Gorgui Dieng is there to apparently be tall and nothing else, since about all he does is get in Towns’ way on the offensive end and force the 7’0” Towns to have to guard guys out on the perimeter on the defensive end. They have no idea if Kris Dunn, their #1 pick this past summer, is actually a serviceable NBA point guard, and they have no real impact players or playmakers coming off the bench. Perhaps the talent level, on the whole, isn’t nearly as high in the Twin Cities as we first thought.
As for the coaching, well, Thibs has a pretty impressive résumé, to be sure, but it should be pointed out that Thibs also spent a lot of his coaching career working with vet-heavy clubs who already know their way around the ins and the outs of the NBA game and who simply needed that sort of disciplined, cerebral defensive scheme work that Thibs provides in order to excel as a team. It’s not always a sure thing that a coach like Thibs is going to jibe well with a young team that, above all else, needs some positivity and needs to generally play unburdened. The Wolves are anything but unburdened. To use a hockey term – appropriate given the hockey-mad state in which they play – the Wolves are all grabbing the stick too tightly. They need to relax and just play.
Clearly, the Wolves haven’t taken to his defensive teachings. Meanwhile, Thibs is still doing some of the annoying things he was doing back in Chicago. His offense isn’t particularly creative, he plays his starters too many minutes, and he refuses to ever go small in a league where everyone is now going small – which is how you wound up with Towns trying to guard Kevin Durant 30 feet from the basket in the Wolves’ most recent trip to the Bay Area, which was one of the dumbest defensive ideas I’ve ever seen. To be blunt, this is one of the most poorly coached teams in the NBA.
And this makes the deal they offered Thibs in the offseason look even stupider, one in which Thibs is both coach and the President of Basketball Operations. This coach-as-executive phenomenon is one of the newer, and dumber, ideas in the NBA. The problem with it, of course, is that it makes it incredibly difficult, and also incredibly costly, to get rid of the guy if he doesn’t turn out to be any good. Guys like Greg Popovich, who spend 20+ years coaching one team, are the exception and not the rule. Coaches are hired to be fired.
Not that they should be firing anyone, at this point. It’s too early to be panicking, of course, and the bottom half of the West is so bad – the LOL Kings are currently the 8-seed – that there is still time for the Wolves to get their shit together and even make a playoff run. The potential is there, but potential is just a fancy way of saying that you haven’t done jack shit.
Oklahoma City
They replayed the other night, on NBA TV, Game 6 of the Western Conference finals in which OKC has a 7-point lead with about 6:00 remaining and proceeds to completely choke, enabling the Golden State Warriors to steal Game 6 and go on to win the series. It was weird to watch this again, firstly because Kevin Durant now looks strange to me wearing that daffy OKC color scheme, but mostly because it’s astonishing to see how a really good basketball team, in the most important moment, forgets how to play basketball.
They replayed the other night, on NBA TV, Game 6 of the Western Conference finals in which OKC has a 7-point lead with about 6:00 remaining and proceeds to completely choke, enabling the Golden State Warriors to steal Game 6 and go on to win the series. It was weird to watch this again, firstly because Kevin Durant now looks strange to me wearing that daffy OKC color scheme, but mostly because it’s astonishing to see how a really good basketball team, in the most important moment, forgets how to play basketball.
I mean, you could make a similar case about the Dubs in the finals going ice cold the final 4:00 of Game 7 against the Cavs, but Cleveland didn’t really do much in that time span, either, before Kyrie Irving threw up a miracle prayer of a three that somehow went in. I have never looked at the NBA Finals as the Warriors losing it so much as Cleveland going out and winning it.
With OKC, however, that was a choke job. Sure, Klay went out of his mind and made some of the most ridiculous shots I’ve ever seen to get the Warriors back in the game, and at the time, I made a point to glow and crow about what a remarkable performance it was by the Warriors to dig themselves out of a hole. But that was only possible thanks to OKC turning the ball over five times and “running” an offense consisting of throwing the ball to Kevin Durant, having the other four guys on the team run as far from him as possible, and letting KD go 1-on-5. Not even he is good enough to do that.
And with this reviewing of the game, I was trying in vain to somehow not to be gleeful, but there is this moment, towards the end of the game, when Steph Curry gets switched onto by Serge Ibaka, drives to his right and kisses a soft floater high off the glass to give the Warriors a 5-point lead where the whole of the Corrupt Energy Shortsellers Arena goes dead silent and you can actually hear, in that glorious silence, the sound of so many little OKC loving hearts breaking. It’s magnificent, and knowing it’s the last time OKC will ever truly be a relevant franchise makes it even more magnificent.
But pretty much from the moment David Stern decided to get in bed with that collection of robber barons and crooks and fuck over the city of Seattle, the OKC franchise has been at the center of how the league winds up conducting business – and it still is with the new CBA between the owners and the players which is striving to make it easier for small market clubs like the Blunder to keep their players by allowing them to offer considerably more money to their free agents than before, thus disincentivizing players from moving. (A fairly selfish and short-sighted move on the part of the players, in my opinion, but when your union is headed by superstars who feel like they’re being underpaid, you shouldn’t expect them to think of the long-term ramifications.) This is happening in direct response to the events this past summer, when Kevin Durant walked out the door on the Thunder and joined “a super team” at Golden State, to which the general response from people in and around OKC has been to whine like the bunch of babies that they are.
Like most “small markets,” OKC picks and chooses when to use that title. They want to pretend to be big players even though they’ve been dipping heavily into NBA revenue sharing from the moment they took to their new OKC home. They’ve been the franchise most heavily involved behind the scenes in lobbying against reforming the preposterous NBA lottery system which has led to the Sam Hinkies of the world blatantly tanking and writing off several seasons – a phenomenon still likely to occur with this new CBA, since now teams have a harder time signing free agents – because, you see, they’re a small market in OKC and they have a hard time vying for players … which is maybe why you shouldn’t have moved the franchise there in the first place! They bitched and they moaned when the last CBA was enacted and they had to pay Kevin Durant more, having jumped the gun and signed him to an extension the terms of which no longer applied, and they almost certainly bitched and moaned again this fall during the negotiations, having jumped the gun again and signed Russell Westbrook to an extension, which has resulted in essentially a Russell Westbrook Exception that will enable them to do that same thing again in the future when they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do that – two cases which, on the whole, suggest that maybe the problem is an inability on the part of GM Sam Presti to anticipate the changing marketplace, but for some reason the NBA decided to hold this team’s hand once more. For a bunch of tough oil magnates, they sure are weak.
Like most “small markets,” OKC picks and chooses when to use that title. They want to pretend to be big players even though they’ve been dipping heavily into NBA revenue sharing from the moment they took to their new OKC home. They’ve been the franchise most heavily involved behind the scenes in lobbying against reforming the preposterous NBA lottery system which has led to the Sam Hinkies of the world blatantly tanking and writing off several seasons – a phenomenon still likely to occur with this new CBA, since now teams have a harder time signing free agents – because, you see, they’re a small market in OKC and they have a hard time vying for players … which is maybe why you shouldn’t have moved the franchise there in the first place! They bitched and they moaned when the last CBA was enacted and they had to pay Kevin Durant more, having jumped the gun and signed him to an extension the terms of which no longer applied, and they almost certainly bitched and moaned again this fall during the negotiations, having jumped the gun again and signed Russell Westbrook to an extension, which has resulted in essentially a Russell Westbrook Exception that will enable them to do that same thing again in the future when they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do that – two cases which, on the whole, suggest that maybe the problem is an inability on the part of GM Sam Presti to anticipate the changing marketplace, but for some reason the NBA decided to hold this team’s hand once more. For a bunch of tough oil magnates, they sure are weak.
And it amused to me to no end to read stories about how great a move it was by Russell Westbrook to want to stick it out in OKC and sign a contract extension after Durant had left. Guess what? They gave him about 8.5 million reasons to do so. If someone says they’ll drive a dump truck over to your house and plop $8.5m in your driveway, why would you say no to that? And good on him for doing that. But to frame it as anything other than, first and foremost, a business decision is foolish. So stop it already with inventing this narrative about feuds and personality conflicts between KD and Russ and whatnot. KD took another job, like he’d earned the right to do under the terms of the CBA, which is something that most of us have the opportunity to do every day but NBA players do not. If Russ wants to sign on for three more years in OKC and avail himself of the opportunity to play Don Quixote and single-handedly joust the assortment of NBA windmills tilting his way, that’s fine too. Just stop it with this narrative of “aw, the poor Thunder got screwed.” They’ve stumbled their way into a relevance that lot never deserved, landed some superstars through having a few ping pong balls bounce their way, and then pissed that opportunity away all on their own. Tough shit. Deal with it.
And try running an offense while you are at it.
And try running an offense while you are at it.
New York Jets
Uh, yeah ...
Buffalo Bills
This is what happens when The Peter Principle meets nepotism. Rex Ryan and his fraternal twin bother, Rob, are the sons of Buddy Ryan, the mastermind of the defense for arguably the greatest team in NFL history, the 1985 Chicago Bears. The two of them have been using that connection to worm their way into one NFL job after another over the years, most recently with the moribund Buffalo Bills, a franchise that hasn’t been relevant since they were losing four Super Bowls at the turn of the 1990s. They’ve been getting these gigs in spite of the fact that, well, they can’t coach.
This is what happens when The Peter Principle meets nepotism. Rex Ryan and his fraternal twin bother, Rob, are the sons of Buddy Ryan, the mastermind of the defense for arguably the greatest team in NFL history, the 1985 Chicago Bears. The two of them have been using that connection to worm their way into one NFL job after another over the years, most recently with the moribund Buffalo Bills, a franchise that hasn’t been relevant since they were losing four Super Bowls at the turn of the 1990s. They’ve been getting these gigs in spite of the fact that, well, they can’t coach.
After sneaking into the playoffs his first two years while with the Jets, Rex’s fortunes rather rapidly declined thereafter and he was fired after the Jets went 4-12 in 2014. Being stuck in the frozen tundra of western New York, the Bills are always looking for some way to get attention, and hiring Rex as a head coach certainly accomplishes that, as his presence is invariably bombastic and blustery and worth the odd sound bite here and there. Rob joined the staff this year after presiding over the worst defense in the NFL last season in New Orleans. Before that, he oversaw a not-very-good defense in Dallas, a not-very-good defense in Cleveland, and a a not-very-good defense in Oakland. The Bills stumbled out of the gate this season, losing their first two games to the Ravens and then the Jets (yeech), and have been basically stuck in neutral ever since, sitting 7-8 heading into the last week of the season – not terrible, mind you, but far less than what Rex was promising to deliver when he rolled into town.
Big-name coaches don’t win you games. Nothing either of these guys has ever done suggests they are some sort of tactical mastermind. There are plenty of bright coaching minds out there looking for a head job who deserve the opportunity ahead of retreads like the Ryans.
San Diego Chargers
I’ll leave it to The Official Sauerkraut Maker of In Play Lose to sum up the Chargers: “Everyone hates them, wants them to go away, no one wants to host them. The Spanos’ are awful human beings, they run an aggressively losey team that loves to snatch a loss out of the clutches of victory.”
It seemed appropriate that the Chargers would be the Browns’ only win this season – and go about losing by having one tying FG blocked and then missing another at the gun after mismanaging the clock and having to scamper the kicking team onto the field. That sums up the Bolts 2016 season – inept, disorganized, turning success into failure.
The Chargers have an option from the NFL on becoming the second team in L.A. – which seems more and more likely to happen, given that there is no support for a new facility in San Diego to replace the Roman ruins that are Qualcomm.
Los Angeles Rams
Of course, whatever fascination Angelinos may have had with pro football is rapidly being bludgeoned out of them by being subjected to the drudgery that are the Rams, who are 4-11 and possess the league’s worst offense. It took until Jeff Fisher reached the threshold of being the losingest coach in NFL history before he finally got the boot from Rams owner/snake oil salesman/douchebag Stan Kroenke. I always thought Fisher did a pretty good job with the Titans in Tennessee, where he had to do more with less, but his Rams teams were boring, undisciplined, and consisted of nothing but guys who run fast but don’t seem to do any football skill fundamentally well.
It seems sort of appropriate that, given that the league offices and owners have been using the threat of a Los Angeles relocation for decades in order to bleed more public money from municipalities, when one of the owners did finally did get around to following through on that threat, the result turned out to be a dud. And I’m sure L.A. residents are just excited as all heck for another mediocre franchise like the Chargers to move into the city and clamor for attention. No one cared about the football teams in L.A. before, which is why they all moved in the first place. League execs have pointed out for years how good the TV ratings were for the NFL in L.A. after first the Rams, and then the Raiders, vacated the city. This is precisely because neither the Rams nor Raiders were around polluting the airwaves any longer with their mandatory broadcasts, which meant people in L.A. could actually watch a full NFL doubleheader slate every weekend featuring teams that actually knew what they were doing. Better games = better product = better ratings. To be successful in L.A. (and most places, for that matter), you either have to winners or be entertaining, and the Rams and Chargers, as presently constructed and operated, are neither of those things.
San Francisco 49ers
As seen by dozens:
The official attendance for the game referenced in that .gif file above, a loss to the Tampa Bay Bucs that was part of a club record 13-game losing streak, was listed at 71,000, which is about 50,000 more than who were actually present. But the 49ers can claim 71,000 showed because, when they relocated from The Stick to Levi’s Stadium, they sold PSLs for all 71,000 seats – licenses which 49er fans are now trying to dump as quickly as possible. After 50 years of enduring Candlestick, the organization has somehow contrived to make the football-going experience even worse.
Colin Kaepernick made himself a lightning rod for all sorts of dimwitted commentary thanks to his choosing to protest the national anthem being played by taking a knee. It’s about the only thing of any note that’s happened to this franchise all season and, in fact, Kaepernick is still probably the team’s best player and certainly the most notable. Don’t believe me? Tell me who the leading rusher is? How about the leading receiver? The leading tackler? In the Jim Harbaugh days, you could name those things, because the 49ers had All-Pro players filling those roles. They had talent at every position, they had depth, they had an identity as a team and also a creative approach to winning games when needed (remember, Harbaugh benched Alex Smith in favor of Kaepernick late in a season, saying it was his best chance to win playoff games, and he was proved correct).
Now? They have Chip Kelley, who was a bad coach with a good collection of players in Philadelphia and simply looks worse now; they have a perpetual power struggle behind the scenes between factionalized owners; they have Trent Baalke as a GM, who won the power struggle with Harbaugh and hasn’t made a single good personnel decision since; they have an empty stadium and now they have the city of Santa Clara, who spent $1.5 billion on Levi’s Stadium, asking for the 49ers to turn in their receipts and prove they’re keeping up their end of the bargain on the new building.
And remember, this team was in the Super Bowl just four seasons ago! Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, they get worse. The 49ers have mustered only a Rams and 13 record this season, the team is so bereft of talent and ideas that it’s going to take years to rebuild, and in the meantime, they’ve fostered ill will with the local press, the fans, the city of Santa Clara and just about everyone else. It’s appropriate the 49ers play in a place called Levi’s Stadium, because this franchise is absolute pants.
Rutgers
The worst major college athletic program picked up this fall right where it had left off. The Scarlet Knights put in arguably the worst single performance by a college football team in years when it managed to get blasted 78:0 by Michigan at home. The stats are appalling: Rutgers has 39 yards of total offense in the game, while Michigan had 600, and the Rutgers didn’t pick up a first down until midway through the 4th Quarter. The biggest winners in this game were all of the hungry people in Ann Arbor who went in to the Ruth’s Chris Ann Arbor to cash in on the game-related promotion. And there was no doubt who the biggest losers were.
As if you needed any further proof of how inept Rutgers was in 2016, they also got beat 58:0 by Ohio State, 49:0 by Michigan State, and 39:0 by Penn State as they staggered to a 2-10 record and a last-place finish in the Big Ten. The Big Ten added Rutgers as part of an expansion plan intended to attract television viewers in the greater New York area, but it’s pretty hard to attract viewers when the regional angle on those broadcasts is a program that is six kinds of crap.
Wake Forest
The Demon Deacons earn a shout out here for a unique sort of scandal. Far and away the most amusing scandal of the year has been recently uncovered and pertains to the Wake Forest football team, whose color commentator on their radio broadcasts – Tommy Elrod, who was a former defensive coordinator that had been “reassigned” to the broadcasts after a head coaching change – had apparently been clandestinely giving away some of the Demon Deacons’ offensive plays to their opposition. The Demon Deacons figured something was up after a game in Louisville, when they found copies of their playbook strewn about the confines of Bad Pizza Stadium.
This nutso radio announcer apparently offered the same information to the coaching staff at Army before their game, who rejected it and said something along the lines of, “we’re West Point and we don’t cheat.” It’s appropriate that it was Louisville who got caught partaking in espionage, since this university is that bastion of ethics and virtue which employs sleazbags like Bobby Petrino and Rick Pitino, sanctioned it’s own basketball program for allegations that recruiting trips included strippers and prostitutes, and somehow feels justified in paying a baseball coach $1 million a year while offering up only about a third as many scholarships as there players to fill out a team. Louisville is precisely the sort of American university which has gone about using athletics to raise its profile while selling its soul in the process. Wake, on the other hand, fell prey to an ex-employee who had an axe to grind, and wound up looking pretty stupid. It didn’t wind up hurting the Deacs too much, as they reached a bowl game for the first team since head coach Jim Grobe left the program in 2013. And speaking of Jim Grobe …
Baylor
I’m not exactly sure why Grobe was willing to sully his reputation – which had generally been considered quite good – by agreeing to be the interim coach for a season at Baylor, which is the ultimate college football cesspool. Grobe hastily took the job when head coach Art Briles was fired amid the endless, constant, and continuously damning allegations at the school: allegations of a culture in which football players repeatedly committed sexual assaults against female Baylor students and the administrators of the football program, the athletics department and, indeed, the entire administration turned and looked the other way.
I talk about fun and games on this blog, but fun and games have their place. At Baylor, that place was at the center of the school’s capital campaigns to raise it’s profile from being a pleasant, backwater baptist university to being a major institution. It was win-at-all-costs at Baylor, morals be damned.
This is disgusting. This is utterly reprehensible. Baylor so far has gotten off easy in all of this. OK, so Briles lost his job, which he should have, and Ken Starr got ousted from the presidency of the university, which he should have been, and the AD got canned as well, but that’s just scratching the surface here. In the aftermath of this scandal, which came to light in the summer, every single person involved in this program should have been fired, and every single person responsible for permitting this sort of rape culture to fester should have been fired. Every single one of them.
“Oh no! You can’t do that! We won’t be able to get a staff together for football season!”
Exactly. Football season can fuck off. Frankly, they should have had to cancel it and suffer the financial blowback from doing so. I hope everyone drowns in the lawsuits. Baylor needs to get its priorities straight, priorities which include something as basic as ensuring that young people who attend that school do so in a safe environment.
And to all of you Baylor boosters and alumni who still want to support Art Briles, what the hell is wrong with you? I know he made you feel good on Saturday afternoon because you could finally beat Texas and Oklahoma, but big fucking deal. Stop pretending you’re still in college.
And how about everyone involved at that school stop going around in the public eye and touting what good Christian values you have while you’re at it, since it’s been pretty apparent with the way you’ve let the football program run rampant at the expense of everything else that no one involved in that supposed institution of higher Christian learning has a soul.
Arizona Diamondbacks
The Snakes set out last winter to win the offseason. They’re a generally irrelevant franchise which hasn’t done of anything of note since winning the World Series in 2001. About all they’ve been known for of late, in fact, was being the single-most annoying team in all of baseball to watch, thanks to a strategy filled with throws to first, step offs and mound conferences intended to slow to a crawl, and thanks to an unchecked culture of machismo instituted by former skipper Kirk Gibson which meant that every single perceived slight on the diamond resulted in a bean brawl.
But the Snakes wanted to make a splash in 2016, beginning with their flashy new uniforms. They were determined to become relevant again in the NL West and compete with the Giants and the Dodgers, so they went out and signed 30-something starting pitcher Zack Grienke to a $206 million contract, the numbers of which were so absurd that not even the Dodgers would match it, and then they made quite possibly the worst trade in baseball in the past two decades which didn’t involve the Seattle Mariners, giving up a haul that included former #1 overall pick Dansby Swanson to the Atlanta Braves in exchange for Shelby Miller. Miller has been a solid mid-rotation starter in his career, but nothing he’s ever done would indicate that he’s worth a king’s ransom.
And this ended predictably, as the Diamondbacks were not very good. Grienke toiled through an uninteresting, injury-laden season while Miller was one of the worst starting pitchers in all of baseball. Investing in power pitching didn’t really help a whole lot in what is, on balance, one of the worst pitcher’s parks in baseball. You don’t need good pitching to win in Arizona, you need superstar pitching. You need some of the best pitching the game has ever seen. You need Hall of Fame-caliber pitching like Randy Johnson and Mr. Ketchup on the Sock. You don’t need Shelby Miller and, for heaven’s sake, you don’t need to be giving up a mint to get him. Arizona sold off most of it’s best assets to get him, and now also lack payroll flexibility to retool since they’ve attached the anchor that is Grienke’s contract to its budget. Throw in a spate of injuries all over the starting lineup, most notably in the outfield, and 2016 was nothing short of an unmitigated disaster in Arizona.
It’s amazing how many teams that set out to win the offseason wind up looking like buffoons. Arizona went out at the start of this offseason and hired a new GM, Mike Hazen, who is one of the guys that went about building up the impressive young talent base in Boston. The Snakes do have a history of drafting pretty well over the years, so all is not lost. And for god’s sake, please get rid of those uniforms already.
San Diego Padres
Word on the street is that the San Diego Padres are going to be tanking in 2017. Which begs the question: how is this different than any other season?
The Padres are still trying to dig out from ‘winning the offseason’ in 2015, and Padres GM A.J. Preller continues to confound all of us by still having a job after he got fleeced left and right in 2015 and then got suspended after failing to provide medical information about players to other teams involved in trade talks. Highlights form the Padres free fall to the bottom of the NL West in 2016 also included the owner ripping the team on talk radio and the Padres losing the single-most absurd baseball game of the season, blowing a 10-run lead against the Mariners including giving up 9 runs in an inning after there were two outs. The Padres have now gone about cost-cutting and shedding vets, which means they’re likely to be even more dreadful in 2017, with the lovely Dog Food Park continuing to serve as the ideal baseball getaway for opposing fans. Now that the Chargers seem set to leave, the Padres will rule the roost in San Diego and likely have the market all to themselves – a market so disinterested that the club’s only really good draws at the gate involve the Giants and the Dodgers coming to town and filling the stands with their own faithful. This can’t get much worse, can it? I probably shouldn’t ask.
And now for a special compare and contrast segment of this Lose post. Which is worse?
England v. U.S.A., Politics Edition
The Lose doesn’t normally talk about politics, even though politics may be the ultimate of bloodsports. It’s hard to ignore in 2016, however, given the two votes which took place, one on either side of the pond, which were eerily similar. In both cases, a charismatic and orangey con artist from New York managed to persuade just enough people to buy into his vision of a nation which can’t exist, probably won’t exist, and probably never did exist in the first place.
Polling data from Britain shows that the Leave vote skewed older, meaning the older folk basically screwed over the young’uns and fanciful notions of Britain’s glorious place in World Orders of old were still dancing through people’s heads. The anti-immigrant tone of the campaign, meanwhile, struck me as misguided, seeing as how immigrants do two types of jobs in Britain: the kind of job that’s beneath you and you don’t want to do, and the kinds of jobs so far over your head that you can’t possibly get. On this side of the pond, meanwhile, I was intrigued by several political studies which suggested that, for a good number of people residing on the political right of the spectrum, the 1950s is viewed as a “great” time in America, possibly the “greatest.” In attempting to turn back the clock and party like it’s 1959, I suspect we’ve more likely landed somewhere in the 1960s, meaning we’ll have to do things like fight the whole civil rights movement all over again.
Now, the Brits seemed to think that they could have their cake and eat it too, dropping out of the E.U. but still having a right to the sorts of economic benefits that come from being a member. Unsurprisingly, the rest of the continent is showing them two fingers and telling them to get the fuck out and fuck right off while they are at it. Meanwhile, over here, I have no idea what’s going to happen, since I have no idea what his policies are going to be. The most apt comparison I can find historically is Berlusconi in Italy, who wasn’t necessarily abjectly terrible in office, but the biggest problem with Berlusconi was that he spent far too much of his time as the Italian prime minister going about attempting to write and rewrite laws which would enrich and benefit himself personally and also shield himself from all of the assortment of pending legal issues. People have asked me if I’m worried about Trump having his finger on the button, and I’ve replied by saying I’m more worried about him constantly having his hand in the cookie jar.
We live in strange times. I don’t really know what to make of any of this. As an absurdist my nature, I suspect it’s going to be a mess, but I’m not sure to what extent. As someone who has always been a keen observer of elections simply from a game theory and policy perspective, these two elections really boggled my mind.
Now, you can probably guess from my place of residence what my political perspective is. (According to election returns released by the California Secretary of State’s office, Trump got 13 votes in my precinct.) Having said that, I should also point out that I’ve voted for Republican elected officials in the past, and that I understand, first and foremost, that politics is elections + governance, and I happen to value the latter far more. And one of the things I’ve already come to terms with is the fact that there are people who I know, and know well, and consider to be friends and colleagues, who voted for Trump – and unlike some of my Democratic friends, who I had to talk off ledges, these people do not consider Trump winning just enough votes in just enough places to become the president to be the worst thing ever. I do suspect, however, that there is a very good possibility that they will wind up being disappointed by him, just as there were quite a few Democrats out there who were disappointed in their party’s nominee and chose not to vote at all. Clearly, there seems to be a sense of disconnect and discontent prevalent in the electorate of the U.S., of Britain, and of quite a few other places in the world. Politics is a drag and authoritarianism has suddenly become hip and trendy. One of the reasons why the far right does so well in elections is because they’re the only ones bringing a whole lot of energy to the cause.
And I really wasn’t going to say all of what follows in this next paragraph, but I can’t hold it in any longer, and it’s going to be completely opinionated and full of perceptions and not sourced or fact-checked or anything so fucking deal with it and we regret the errors: can the largest political party in America, the one I happen to vote for most of the time, actually start acting like it? Jesus fucking christ. I’m now going to piss off a lot of people and I don’t give a shit. The Democratic Party fucking gagged. Goddamnit, you idiots. You just lost a presidential election to a guy who checked all the boxes of everything you shouldn’t ever do if you want to be elected president and still got elected. Hillary Clinton was a lousy candidate. Sorry, she was. Go back to 2008, an election the Democrats couldn’t have lost if they’d taken a cheese sandwich and stuck a pin in it with a donkey on it and called it a nominee. Bush was SO BAD that members of his own party were begging him not to show up and campaign for them. And what happened in 2008? Hillary – the anointed one, the chosen one ever since Bill had left office and she’d become a senator – couldn’t beat a guy in the primary who hadn’t even been in the Senate for two years. Just think about that. She couldn’t win the presidency in the most slam dunk, no-brainer of elections, so how was she going to do it now? And sure, there were lots of trumped up charges and accusations and the like over 24 years she was in the public eye, and a lot of false news and fixed noise and everything else, but she wound up underperforming in every single significant segment of the Democratic party’s electorate. You can argue that the reasons people didn’t like her were bogus or not or whatnot, but the fact of the matter is that they didn’t, and not just on the other side of the aisle, either. And it doesn’t really matter to me how qualified she was for the office. For starters, being qualified doesn’t mean you’re going to be any good. (See Richard Nixon.) Secondly, you have to get the job in order to be good at it. And since I’m on a rant here and I’m letting it out, how fucking stupid was that campaign? How did you not know you might lose Michigan and Wisconsin? It’s your campaign’s goddamn job to know that! That no one in Brooklyn ever stopped patting themselves on the back long enough to actually take the goddamn temperature in those states and figure this shit out and try to keep it from happening is so goddamn arrogant as to leave me incredulous.
I feel better now. Well no, not really. Wait for it … yeah, now I’m better. Do I sound a little annoyed? Just remember that before he was making the Democrats look like idiots in the fall by winning the presidency, Trump was making Republicans look like idiots in the spring and the summer by getting the nomination in the first place. Everyone wound up looking like a fool, and because of it, everyone probably wound up getting the president they deserved.
England v. U.S.A., Soccer Edition
Quick point here: I labelled the previous section “England v. U.S.A.” while being fully aware that Brexit was a vote across all of Britain – but that the English were the ones who most fervently drove the Leave vote. I am labeling this next bit “England v. U.S.A.” while being fully aware that among the things I’m going to mention are the actions of a Welsh club, since that club adheres to the rules of Premiere League and the English FA. I used to live in Great Britain and I understand the divides, so don’t you get all nitpicky with me. And something else that England and the U.S. have in common at the moment, and another realm where you can see some parallels, is that both countries are bad at soccer. At least when it comes to the men, anyway. Both nation’s women’s teams? Kinda badass. But the men? Trash. Absolute trash, or shall we be all British about it and say rubbish instead?
I am not much of a betting man (as I have previously explained this year) but if I were, I would have been quite a bit richer in June, because had I been at a Las Vegas casino in June with a chance to wager on the England v. Iceland Quarter Final at Euro 2016, I would’ve bet on Iceland. And I’d be richer because Iceland won 2:1 in Nice in a match that was hailed in some camps and corners as one of the game’s greatest upsets. Hmmm, let’s do the math here … Iceland were 13/2 to win going into this game, so if I’d plunked down $100 at +650, minus the vig, of course, that would be … oh god, my Washington State math skills are failing me here … something like $638 in my pocket, which would’ve been well spent at that new José Andrés restaurant that looked so enticing the last time I was there. And I would’ve been quite confident about that wager, much more so than I would’ve been wagering on the Italy-Spain game which also went off that morning (although had I done so, I’d be even richer, since I would have tapped the Italians to upset that, old, slow, disinterested team dressed like a spilled plate of nachos.) I would have been confident in an Iceland win for a very, very simple reason: Iceland are a better team than England.
Indeed, what was most surprising about this result to me is that it wasn’t a surprise at all. What I find fascinating, in fact, is the reaction in the overwhelmingly UK-centric world of football media who want to speak to what a shocking upset this is. Not long after England began exporting the game of football all over the world, it also began exporting the way it talks about the game of football. English media and pundits dominate the conversation worldwide, particularly here in the U.S., where networks have imported a slough of English commentators to narrate the game for us, and to teach it to us uneducated Americans. The whole of English soccer is full of itself, and has been full of itself for decades, despite the fact that England haven’t won anything for 50 years, and have done little more since 1966 than master the art of losing in the most disparaging and heartbreaking of manners.
And we here in America have been importing bad English ideas about soccer – how to play it, how to watch it, and how to talk about it – for years now, and that includes importing washed-up, overrated has-beens like Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard and giving them millions to take up space in MLS and be utterly useless. We’ve started to return the favor, however, as this year Bob Bradley became the first American manager in the EPL – and lasted all of 11 games with Swansea City before being rather unceremoniously dumped. And this has led to an assortment of dimwitted British footballing journalists writing up this sort of dumb drivel, talking about how an American guy who managed in probably the most difficult situation imaginable – the Egyptians during a coup – is somehow unqualified to manage in the EPL but Ryan Giggs is, even though the only think Giggs has done as an assistant at Man U is stand there and look clueless and watch United go about pouring $600 million down a rathole. But England is a place where don’t have to actually have any good ideas about how to play the sport in order to get a managerial position, you just have to look like you do and probably also have the words Manchester United somewhere on your résumé to somehow be considered legit, even if all you did was steal a piece of the company stationery.
The game is certainly in a strange place here in the U.S., what with Klinsy finally getting canned in a move that was several years in the making, what with World Cup qualifying now by no means assured, and what with MLS still searching for an identity after two decades in the wilderness. MLS seems to have started finally figuring out that spending money on washed up dopes like Gerrard and Lampard isn’t a good idea, and that it’s a much better idea to do what this year’s two finalists – Toronto and Seattle – went out and did in signing Sebastian Giovinco and Nicolás Lodeiro, respectively: younger players, in the prime of their career, with great talent and great vision who, for a number of reasons, can’t get a gig at a bigger club elsewhere. These types of guys are all over the place, particularly in South America, which is where the league should strive to make more inroads, instead of continuing to fawn over EPL retreads who aren’t any good any more, and probably weren’t all that good to begin with.
But England has it much worse than us on the football pitch at the moment, because Americans at least have modest expectations when it comes to soccer and aren’t a bunch of delusional weirdos about it. And at the moment, English football is trash. Well, the EPL has some of the greatest players in the world – the best Brazilians and Argentines and Chileans and Spaniards and French and Belgians and Germans, but few actual English players who are worth a damn. Assemble the “great young talent” that England has into a national side and they go about doing things like stumbling about the Euros and then getting played off the pitch by Iceland in a game which should have surprised absolutely nobody. About the only thing England are good at involving football seems to involve gaming the system just well enough to keep getting high seeds through lucking into easy qualifying groups, which enable them to win lots of games against bad European teams (of which there are a lot) and make themselves look better than they really are.
Coaching England is a poison chalice, a high-paying gig with a fan base demanding success but without any actual good players to make that success possible. They hired Sam Allardyce for the job after this Iceland debacle, mostly because no one worth their salt wanted the job, and his tenure lasted all of one game before he got fired after spouting off to undercover reporters masquerading as agents about the ways in which you go about circumventing rules for signing underage players. The overwhelmed, deer-in-the-headlights Gareth Southgate has now been promoted from coaching the U-21s to the top national job – once again owing to the fact that no one would touch this job with a 10’ pole at the moment.
England wins this head-to-head, although the Americans made a fine effort by losing to Guatemala, getting embarrassed by Costa Rica, and yielding a goal in the Copa América semifinal to Argentina in about 3 minutes after fielding an ultra defensive lineup utterly incapable of even getting off a shot, much less scoring. But England wins, and by “wins” I mean “loses.”
OK, this exercise was fun. Now let’s never speak of any of it again. Neither of you two win any awards. Now back to the TLOTYs …
The Rio Olympics
Boy oh boy, where do we begin?
First of all, let me state that I am pro-Brazil. One of the most admirable traits of the Seleção is that, through their brilliance and imagination and success on the pitch, they have become the people’s champion, the natural choice for neutrals. That footballing admiration carries over to the rest of the nation as well. I want this great nation to succeed.
But it’s also an incredibly complicated place, and Rio is one of the most complicated cities on earth. Showing off Rio to the rest of the world through the hosting of the 2016 Olympics seemed like quite an interesting idea when the games were first awarded. And the Olympics ultimately tend to take on the qualities of the host city, be it the showy top-down glossiness of Beijing or the quirky, let’s-pull-together-and-ignore-the-shit-weather of London. And the Rio games took on a unique characteristic as well, but not the one many people were thinking about at the start.
Because we’d all heard the stories in the run-up to the games about construction delays and cost overruns, about trying to hold boating events in a toxic lagoon, about heists and hold-ups and high crime rates and the threat of Zika virus and what not. And in the end, the Olympics went off about as well as you could have hoped for. Rio did OK as a host city. But what was the most striking feature of these games to me, one which spoke to the true nature of it, was the tens of thousands of empty seats.
Oh, sure, some of the venues were full along the way. Anything involving Brazilians drew a crowd, of course. The Botafogo football grounds serving as the track venue were full any time Usain Bolt took the track, of course, and also the U.S. swimmers and gymnasts and men’s basketball teams had full houses behind them. But those are all international stars we’re talking about here – the key being the word “international,” meaning that they were attractive both to the locals and, more importantly, to guests from abroad. Watch any session of track and field that didn’t involve Bolt and you’d see 10,000 people in a 58,000-seat stadium. Venues across the spectrum of sports were often mostly deserted.
The reason for this is pretty obvious: ticket prices for events, as set by organizers, were outrageous. They were outrageous by even American or European standards, but at least there are enough Americans and Europeans willing to afford them. Organizers spewed out the standard line of how “ticket sales are in line with what we were expecting,” which is bullshit. And it didn’t occur to anyone involved in organizing these games that maybe, just maybe, you’d be better off for appearance’s sake if you gave away some of those tickets to those people in your community who couldn’t afford to attend because, you know, this gathering of sport is supposed to be a community endeavor. But that would involve actually giving a damn about the community.
As I say, Rio de Janeiro is one of the most complicated cities on earth, a city of extremes with some of the richest neighborhoods in the world pressed up against some of the poorest and most dangerous. It’s a city on undrawn but assumed boundaries and assorted self-governing communes. But what was pretty clear from the get-go with the Rio Olympics was that, for the millions and millions of cariocas who aren’t a part of the higher classes, these games were not for you. They were fenced off and sheltered from the rest of Rio, they were for the rich, for the jet set, and for the tourists – a good number of whom didn’t actually attend, given that the city was essentially bankrupt and unable to supply actual services like policing by the time the games rolled around. The tourists stayed away and the stands remained empty, one venue after another scarcely populated.
And Brazilians stayed away as well, because know a con job when they see one. There is a reason why Brazilian football domestically draws scant crowds, crowds even smaller than MLS: the game has been heisted and corrupted over time, and Brazilians aren’t interesting in turning over their hard earned money. Those who organized the Olympics were cut from the same cloth as those who have poisoned Brazilian football: frauds, shysters, crooks. There are plenty of those in Brazil. Hell, the whole government appears to be filled with them. Much like the World Cup in 2014, the Olympics were a perfect way for a select few to go about enriching themselves by sticking their hands in the public coffers. It was business as usual in a country which, upon landing the Games, assured the world that it would not be business as usual.
And Brazilians took to the streets in 2013 during the Confed Cup, protesting the largesse and excess and general indifference coming from the government in preparation for these two massive sporting events on the horizon. They knew better. As I say, they know a con job when they see one. And when it came time for the Olympics, they did what most people will do when told they don’t matter, which is go about doing something else.
And this is a waste, of course. If I’d been the organizers, I’d have run up and down through the streets of Rio and given away every single unsold ticket, because the Olympics Games, at a base, are a triumph of human potential being realized.
I mean seriously here, how long have he feared water as a species? We’ve feared it ever since we were fish who developed legs and walked out of the sea. We as humans fear water almost instinctively, some forgotten home for our species, and for millennia we’ve tried to conquer water, we’ve tried to figure out how best to deal with it. So think about that when you watch Katie Ledecky or Michael Phelps swim, carving up with perfect strokes a hostile and inhospitable landscape for humans, making it seem as if it had been conquered. That right there is a million years of human potential reaching an apex. We, as a species, have actually figured out how to conquer water.
And that sort of stuff is remarkable, it’s inspirational and it’s on display every four years. You watch Simon Biles flying through the air doing twists and turns as easily as you or I scratch our noses, doing things in flight most humans in history couldn’t have even conceived of – and she even makes it look easy. Watch Usain Bolt when he gets up to full speed. Have you ever seen a human body ever do anything so beautiful?
And that needs to be passed on to people, the idea that we gather together every few years to celebrate and wow ourselves over what we are capable to doing. And hey, you kids from the favela, you should come and watch this! All of you should see, with your own eyes, what’s possible and what’s doable. You might not do that yourself, in the end, but maybe, just maybe, you’ll find a way to fulfill your own potential instead of being told, based upon your race or your class or income level, that you’re second-rate.
But to the assortment of undesirables at the IOC, the Olympics are ultimately a way to enrich themselves for doing nothing, and to steal from the common man instead of inspiring them to do more. No one involved cared about that. They just wanted to throw a party for a closed subset of people who could afford to attend. Instead of celebrating what’s best about humanity, the Olympics served, yet again, to bring out what’s worst about it.
Ryan Lochte
And speaking of the worst, it gets no worse than Ryan Lochte, who has all of the personality traits of a dumb frat boy but has managed to skate through life because of his God-given talents in the pool. Lochte created quite the international incident in Rio when, after boozing it up on the town, he wrecked a service station bathroom and wound up in a confrontation with the armed security guards at the station. Lochte’s response to this was to invent a cockamamie story in which he said he’d been held up and robbed at gunpoint, thus playing upon some of the worst stereotypes of Rio in an effort to cover up for the fact that he’d been a drunkass. And his defense for this was basically to say that he acted like a drunkass, as if that wasn’t somehow obvious to everyone. Congratulations Ryan, you’ve shown yourself to be a true Ugly American, the likes of which should never wear the U.S. colors again.
So many good candidates this year, but our TLOTY simply must go to an organization which has been a constant embarrassment for the entirety of its existence, and who has even managed to kill some of the good vibes permeating a city which has had almost no good vibes over the past 50 years.
Because in Cleveland, you see, you can never have it too good. The Cavaliers breaking through and winning an NBA title was something of a city-wide catharsis, a release of half of century of frustrations. And it looked as if the winning ways were going to continue this fall, as the Cleveland Indians surged to a 3-1 World Series lead over the heavily favored Cubs, standing on the precipice of breaking a 60-year World Series drought … and then the Indians lost to the Cubs in Game 5 … and Game 6 … and Game 7 as well, but my goodness what a game it was, one of the greatest and most memorable games in baseball history, and if you’re going to flame out like this, at least do so in a remarkable game like that. But as we say, you can never have it too good when in Cleveland. You need to yang the yin, you need to balance it back out again. With so much success this year, Cleveland was definitely feeling proud of itself, and deservedly so, but maybe this national bastion of failure got a little bit too big for itself and needed to be humbled. Fortunately, I have just the ticket …
Cleveland Browns
Whatever hope the Browns had this season pretty much went out the window on Opening Day, when reclamation project Robert Griffin III suffered a season-ending injury in a 29:10 pasting by the Iggles – RG3 being the first of six different QBs to start for the Browns, who’ve had a revolving door at the position dating back through the entire history of the franchise. They followed this up by blowing a 20-2 lead in their home opener and losing to the Ravens the following week, and the hits (misses?) just kept on coming from there. Save for a miraculous near comeback falling short in a 28:26 loss to the Titans, and a 31:28 loss to the Jets in which they blew a 13-point lead, the Browns hadn’t been close to winning another game, losing their first 14 and threatening to join Dancing Dan Orlovsky’s Detroit Lions as the only 0-16 teams in NFL history.
Alas, they were blessed with an opponent as incompetent and indifferent as the Chargers showing up for the 15th game of the season, and Cleveland managed to eke out a win to cheer up the members of the GPODAWUND for the holidays:
Quite simply, there is no worse franchise in all of American professional sports than the Cleveland Browns. (Not even the Sacramento Kings, who somehow avoided a nomination this year.) Ever since Browns 2.0 was birthed in the aftermath of the ugly move by Art Modell of the original franchise to Baltimore, the Browns have gone about stumbling through the dark in search of success to no avail. They’ve changed coaches, changed GMs, changed QBs, changed owners. Nothing has worked. (And in a another wonderful trans-Atlantic connection, former terrible Browns owner Randy Lerner also managed to be a terrible owner in the EPL, as the Aston Villa team he owned was relegated from the EPL for the first time in its history.) The Browns have drafted poorly, developed talent poorly, made bad deals galore and presently have a roster with maybe one guy – consummate pro LT Joe Thomas - out of 53 that any other team in the league would actually want, seeing as how the only other guy on the roster who knows what he’s doing – WR Josh Gordon – rightly stepped away from the game to enter an in-patient rehab facility and concentrate on getting sober.
The Browns haven’t made the postseason since 2002, haven’t had a winning season since 2007, and have lost 105 games in the past 9 years. It doesn’t really matter where they pick in the coming draft, since they’ve had the #1 overall pick several times and screwed it up. I’m not even sure where you begin to try and rebuild this team, since no one who can get a job anyplace would ever want to play there.
For their colossal incompetence, for their unimpressive historical body of work, and for single-handedly attempting to bring down the entire city of Cleveland from their Cavs-induced euphoria, I present the Cleveland Browns with The Lose Of The Year award.
And on a personal note, I would like to dedicate this entry to two big fans of The Lose. First off, my frequent creative conspirator and partner in crime Geoff lost his teenage son in an auto accident earlier this year. Geoff, I don’t know what to say, as there are no words, but I hope I can at least make you laugh from time to time. I’ve grieved for this loss in ways I never thought possible. I am so sorry for your loss and which I didn’t feel so goddamn helpless and speechless in the aftermath. Also, I would like to dedicate this entry to Derek Martinez, a good friend from scrabble who recently passed away at age 37. Derek was a big fan of Lose, he loved to talk basketball with me and we always yukked it up at whatever bit of incompetence was out there – even if it was our own incompetence over the board. Derek, you are and will continue to be greatly missed.
So we close out 2016 and it’s on 2017, and quite honestly, 2016 can go fuck itself. This year completely sucked. I thought I would usher it out with a beautiful piece of music which has resonated with me and filtered into some of the creative work I’m presently doing, as I’ve begun to write yet another novel. It’s a soft and lovely song, and as Sun Tzu once suggested in The Ancient Art of War, you must hit that which is hard with something that is soft.
I’ll leave it to The Official Sauerkraut Maker of In Play Lose to sum up the Chargers: “Everyone hates them, wants them to go away, no one wants to host them. The Spanos’ are awful human beings, they run an aggressively losey team that loves to snatch a loss out of the clutches of victory.”
It seemed appropriate that the Chargers would be the Browns’ only win this season – and go about losing by having one tying FG blocked and then missing another at the gun after mismanaging the clock and having to scamper the kicking team onto the field. That sums up the Bolts 2016 season – inept, disorganized, turning success into failure.
The Chargers have an option from the NFL on becoming the second team in L.A. – which seems more and more likely to happen, given that there is no support for a new facility in San Diego to replace the Roman ruins that are Qualcomm.
Los Angeles Rams
Of course, whatever fascination Angelinos may have had with pro football is rapidly being bludgeoned out of them by being subjected to the drudgery that are the Rams, who are 4-11 and possess the league’s worst offense. It took until Jeff Fisher reached the threshold of being the losingest coach in NFL history before he finally got the boot from Rams owner/snake oil salesman/douchebag Stan Kroenke. I always thought Fisher did a pretty good job with the Titans in Tennessee, where he had to do more with less, but his Rams teams were boring, undisciplined, and consisted of nothing but guys who run fast but don’t seem to do any football skill fundamentally well.
It seems sort of appropriate that, given that the league offices and owners have been using the threat of a Los Angeles relocation for decades in order to bleed more public money from municipalities, when one of the owners did finally did get around to following through on that threat, the result turned out to be a dud. And I’m sure L.A. residents are just excited as all heck for another mediocre franchise like the Chargers to move into the city and clamor for attention. No one cared about the football teams in L.A. before, which is why they all moved in the first place. League execs have pointed out for years how good the TV ratings were for the NFL in L.A. after first the Rams, and then the Raiders, vacated the city. This is precisely because neither the Rams nor Raiders were around polluting the airwaves any longer with their mandatory broadcasts, which meant people in L.A. could actually watch a full NFL doubleheader slate every weekend featuring teams that actually knew what they were doing. Better games = better product = better ratings. To be successful in L.A. (and most places, for that matter), you either have to winners or be entertaining, and the Rams and Chargers, as presently constructed and operated, are neither of those things.
San Francisco 49ers
As seen by dozens:
The official attendance for the game referenced in that .gif file above, a loss to the Tampa Bay Bucs that was part of a club record 13-game losing streak, was listed at 71,000, which is about 50,000 more than who were actually present. But the 49ers can claim 71,000 showed because, when they relocated from The Stick to Levi’s Stadium, they sold PSLs for all 71,000 seats – licenses which 49er fans are now trying to dump as quickly as possible. After 50 years of enduring Candlestick, the organization has somehow contrived to make the football-going experience even worse.
Colin Kaepernick made himself a lightning rod for all sorts of dimwitted commentary thanks to his choosing to protest the national anthem being played by taking a knee. It’s about the only thing of any note that’s happened to this franchise all season and, in fact, Kaepernick is still probably the team’s best player and certainly the most notable. Don’t believe me? Tell me who the leading rusher is? How about the leading receiver? The leading tackler? In the Jim Harbaugh days, you could name those things, because the 49ers had All-Pro players filling those roles. They had talent at every position, they had depth, they had an identity as a team and also a creative approach to winning games when needed (remember, Harbaugh benched Alex Smith in favor of Kaepernick late in a season, saying it was his best chance to win playoff games, and he was proved correct).
Now? They have Chip Kelley, who was a bad coach with a good collection of players in Philadelphia and simply looks worse now; they have a perpetual power struggle behind the scenes between factionalized owners; they have Trent Baalke as a GM, who won the power struggle with Harbaugh and hasn’t made a single good personnel decision since; they have an empty stadium and now they have the city of Santa Clara, who spent $1.5 billion on Levi’s Stadium, asking for the 49ers to turn in their receipts and prove they’re keeping up their end of the bargain on the new building.
And remember, this team was in the Super Bowl just four seasons ago! Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, they get worse. The 49ers have mustered only a Rams and 13 record this season, the team is so bereft of talent and ideas that it’s going to take years to rebuild, and in the meantime, they’ve fostered ill will with the local press, the fans, the city of Santa Clara and just about everyone else. It’s appropriate the 49ers play in a place called Levi’s Stadium, because this franchise is absolute pants.
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| This fake punt earns BYU the TLOTY award for dumbest designed play of the year |
Rutgers
The worst major college athletic program picked up this fall right where it had left off. The Scarlet Knights put in arguably the worst single performance by a college football team in years when it managed to get blasted 78:0 by Michigan at home. The stats are appalling: Rutgers has 39 yards of total offense in the game, while Michigan had 600, and the Rutgers didn’t pick up a first down until midway through the 4th Quarter. The biggest winners in this game were all of the hungry people in Ann Arbor who went in to the Ruth’s Chris Ann Arbor to cash in on the game-related promotion. And there was no doubt who the biggest losers were.
As if you needed any further proof of how inept Rutgers was in 2016, they also got beat 58:0 by Ohio State, 49:0 by Michigan State, and 39:0 by Penn State as they staggered to a 2-10 record and a last-place finish in the Big Ten. The Big Ten added Rutgers as part of an expansion plan intended to attract television viewers in the greater New York area, but it’s pretty hard to attract viewers when the regional angle on those broadcasts is a program that is six kinds of crap.
Wake Forest
The Demon Deacons earn a shout out here for a unique sort of scandal. Far and away the most amusing scandal of the year has been recently uncovered and pertains to the Wake Forest football team, whose color commentator on their radio broadcasts – Tommy Elrod, who was a former defensive coordinator that had been “reassigned” to the broadcasts after a head coaching change – had apparently been clandestinely giving away some of the Demon Deacons’ offensive plays to their opposition. The Demon Deacons figured something was up after a game in Louisville, when they found copies of their playbook strewn about the confines of Bad Pizza Stadium.
This nutso radio announcer apparently offered the same information to the coaching staff at Army before their game, who rejected it and said something along the lines of, “we’re West Point and we don’t cheat.” It’s appropriate that it was Louisville who got caught partaking in espionage, since this university is that bastion of ethics and virtue which employs sleazbags like Bobby Petrino and Rick Pitino, sanctioned it’s own basketball program for allegations that recruiting trips included strippers and prostitutes, and somehow feels justified in paying a baseball coach $1 million a year while offering up only about a third as many scholarships as there players to fill out a team. Louisville is precisely the sort of American university which has gone about using athletics to raise its profile while selling its soul in the process. Wake, on the other hand, fell prey to an ex-employee who had an axe to grind, and wound up looking pretty stupid. It didn’t wind up hurting the Deacs too much, as they reached a bowl game for the first team since head coach Jim Grobe left the program in 2013. And speaking of Jim Grobe …
Baylor
I’m not exactly sure why Grobe was willing to sully his reputation – which had generally been considered quite good – by agreeing to be the interim coach for a season at Baylor, which is the ultimate college football cesspool. Grobe hastily took the job when head coach Art Briles was fired amid the endless, constant, and continuously damning allegations at the school: allegations of a culture in which football players repeatedly committed sexual assaults against female Baylor students and the administrators of the football program, the athletics department and, indeed, the entire administration turned and looked the other way.
I talk about fun and games on this blog, but fun and games have their place. At Baylor, that place was at the center of the school’s capital campaigns to raise it’s profile from being a pleasant, backwater baptist university to being a major institution. It was win-at-all-costs at Baylor, morals be damned.
This is disgusting. This is utterly reprehensible. Baylor so far has gotten off easy in all of this. OK, so Briles lost his job, which he should have, and Ken Starr got ousted from the presidency of the university, which he should have been, and the AD got canned as well, but that’s just scratching the surface here. In the aftermath of this scandal, which came to light in the summer, every single person involved in this program should have been fired, and every single person responsible for permitting this sort of rape culture to fester should have been fired. Every single one of them.
“Oh no! You can’t do that! We won’t be able to get a staff together for football season!”
Exactly. Football season can fuck off. Frankly, they should have had to cancel it and suffer the financial blowback from doing so. I hope everyone drowns in the lawsuits. Baylor needs to get its priorities straight, priorities which include something as basic as ensuring that young people who attend that school do so in a safe environment.
And to all of you Baylor boosters and alumni who still want to support Art Briles, what the hell is wrong with you? I know he made you feel good on Saturday afternoon because you could finally beat Texas and Oklahoma, but big fucking deal. Stop pretending you’re still in college.
And how about everyone involved at that school stop going around in the public eye and touting what good Christian values you have while you’re at it, since it’s been pretty apparent with the way you’ve let the football program run rampant at the expense of everything else that no one involved in that supposed institution of higher Christian learning has a soul.
Arizona Diamondbacks
The Snakes set out last winter to win the offseason. They’re a generally irrelevant franchise which hasn’t done of anything of note since winning the World Series in 2001. About all they’ve been known for of late, in fact, was being the single-most annoying team in all of baseball to watch, thanks to a strategy filled with throws to first, step offs and mound conferences intended to slow to a crawl, and thanks to an unchecked culture of machismo instituted by former skipper Kirk Gibson which meant that every single perceived slight on the diamond resulted in a bean brawl.
But the Snakes wanted to make a splash in 2016, beginning with their flashy new uniforms. They were determined to become relevant again in the NL West and compete with the Giants and the Dodgers, so they went out and signed 30-something starting pitcher Zack Grienke to a $206 million contract, the numbers of which were so absurd that not even the Dodgers would match it, and then they made quite possibly the worst trade in baseball in the past two decades which didn’t involve the Seattle Mariners, giving up a haul that included former #1 overall pick Dansby Swanson to the Atlanta Braves in exchange for Shelby Miller. Miller has been a solid mid-rotation starter in his career, but nothing he’s ever done would indicate that he’s worth a king’s ransom.
And this ended predictably, as the Diamondbacks were not very good. Grienke toiled through an uninteresting, injury-laden season while Miller was one of the worst starting pitchers in all of baseball. Investing in power pitching didn’t really help a whole lot in what is, on balance, one of the worst pitcher’s parks in baseball. You don’t need good pitching to win in Arizona, you need superstar pitching. You need some of the best pitching the game has ever seen. You need Hall of Fame-caliber pitching like Randy Johnson and Mr. Ketchup on the Sock. You don’t need Shelby Miller and, for heaven’s sake, you don’t need to be giving up a mint to get him. Arizona sold off most of it’s best assets to get him, and now also lack payroll flexibility to retool since they’ve attached the anchor that is Grienke’s contract to its budget. Throw in a spate of injuries all over the starting lineup, most notably in the outfield, and 2016 was nothing short of an unmitigated disaster in Arizona.
It’s amazing how many teams that set out to win the offseason wind up looking like buffoons. Arizona went out at the start of this offseason and hired a new GM, Mike Hazen, who is one of the guys that went about building up the impressive young talent base in Boston. The Snakes do have a history of drafting pretty well over the years, so all is not lost. And for god’s sake, please get rid of those uniforms already.
San Diego Padres
Word on the street is that the San Diego Padres are going to be tanking in 2017. Which begs the question: how is this different than any other season?
The Padres are still trying to dig out from ‘winning the offseason’ in 2015, and Padres GM A.J. Preller continues to confound all of us by still having a job after he got fleeced left and right in 2015 and then got suspended after failing to provide medical information about players to other teams involved in trade talks. Highlights form the Padres free fall to the bottom of the NL West in 2016 also included the owner ripping the team on talk radio and the Padres losing the single-most absurd baseball game of the season, blowing a 10-run lead against the Mariners including giving up 9 runs in an inning after there were two outs. The Padres have now gone about cost-cutting and shedding vets, which means they’re likely to be even more dreadful in 2017, with the lovely Dog Food Park continuing to serve as the ideal baseball getaway for opposing fans. Now that the Chargers seem set to leave, the Padres will rule the roost in San Diego and likely have the market all to themselves – a market so disinterested that the club’s only really good draws at the gate involve the Giants and the Dodgers coming to town and filling the stands with their own faithful. This can’t get much worse, can it? I probably shouldn’t ask.
And now for a special compare and contrast segment of this Lose post. Which is worse?
England v. U.S.A., Politics Edition
The Lose doesn’t normally talk about politics, even though politics may be the ultimate of bloodsports. It’s hard to ignore in 2016, however, given the two votes which took place, one on either side of the pond, which were eerily similar. In both cases, a charismatic and orangey con artist from New York managed to persuade just enough people to buy into his vision of a nation which can’t exist, probably won’t exist, and probably never did exist in the first place.
Polling data from Britain shows that the Leave vote skewed older, meaning the older folk basically screwed over the young’uns and fanciful notions of Britain’s glorious place in World Orders of old were still dancing through people’s heads. The anti-immigrant tone of the campaign, meanwhile, struck me as misguided, seeing as how immigrants do two types of jobs in Britain: the kind of job that’s beneath you and you don’t want to do, and the kinds of jobs so far over your head that you can’t possibly get. On this side of the pond, meanwhile, I was intrigued by several political studies which suggested that, for a good number of people residing on the political right of the spectrum, the 1950s is viewed as a “great” time in America, possibly the “greatest.” In attempting to turn back the clock and party like it’s 1959, I suspect we’ve more likely landed somewhere in the 1960s, meaning we’ll have to do things like fight the whole civil rights movement all over again.
Now, the Brits seemed to think that they could have their cake and eat it too, dropping out of the E.U. but still having a right to the sorts of economic benefits that come from being a member. Unsurprisingly, the rest of the continent is showing them two fingers and telling them to get the fuck out and fuck right off while they are at it. Meanwhile, over here, I have no idea what’s going to happen, since I have no idea what his policies are going to be. The most apt comparison I can find historically is Berlusconi in Italy, who wasn’t necessarily abjectly terrible in office, but the biggest problem with Berlusconi was that he spent far too much of his time as the Italian prime minister going about attempting to write and rewrite laws which would enrich and benefit himself personally and also shield himself from all of the assortment of pending legal issues. People have asked me if I’m worried about Trump having his finger on the button, and I’ve replied by saying I’m more worried about him constantly having his hand in the cookie jar.
We live in strange times. I don’t really know what to make of any of this. As an absurdist my nature, I suspect it’s going to be a mess, but I’m not sure to what extent. As someone who has always been a keen observer of elections simply from a game theory and policy perspective, these two elections really boggled my mind.
Now, you can probably guess from my place of residence what my political perspective is. (According to election returns released by the California Secretary of State’s office, Trump got 13 votes in my precinct.) Having said that, I should also point out that I’ve voted for Republican elected officials in the past, and that I understand, first and foremost, that politics is elections + governance, and I happen to value the latter far more. And one of the things I’ve already come to terms with is the fact that there are people who I know, and know well, and consider to be friends and colleagues, who voted for Trump – and unlike some of my Democratic friends, who I had to talk off ledges, these people do not consider Trump winning just enough votes in just enough places to become the president to be the worst thing ever. I do suspect, however, that there is a very good possibility that they will wind up being disappointed by him, just as there were quite a few Democrats out there who were disappointed in their party’s nominee and chose not to vote at all. Clearly, there seems to be a sense of disconnect and discontent prevalent in the electorate of the U.S., of Britain, and of quite a few other places in the world. Politics is a drag and authoritarianism has suddenly become hip and trendy. One of the reasons why the far right does so well in elections is because they’re the only ones bringing a whole lot of energy to the cause.
And I really wasn’t going to say all of what follows in this next paragraph, but I can’t hold it in any longer, and it’s going to be completely opinionated and full of perceptions and not sourced or fact-checked or anything so fucking deal with it and we regret the errors: can the largest political party in America, the one I happen to vote for most of the time, actually start acting like it? Jesus fucking christ. I’m now going to piss off a lot of people and I don’t give a shit. The Democratic Party fucking gagged. Goddamnit, you idiots. You just lost a presidential election to a guy who checked all the boxes of everything you shouldn’t ever do if you want to be elected president and still got elected. Hillary Clinton was a lousy candidate. Sorry, she was. Go back to 2008, an election the Democrats couldn’t have lost if they’d taken a cheese sandwich and stuck a pin in it with a donkey on it and called it a nominee. Bush was SO BAD that members of his own party were begging him not to show up and campaign for them. And what happened in 2008? Hillary – the anointed one, the chosen one ever since Bill had left office and she’d become a senator – couldn’t beat a guy in the primary who hadn’t even been in the Senate for two years. Just think about that. She couldn’t win the presidency in the most slam dunk, no-brainer of elections, so how was she going to do it now? And sure, there were lots of trumped up charges and accusations and the like over 24 years she was in the public eye, and a lot of false news and fixed noise and everything else, but she wound up underperforming in every single significant segment of the Democratic party’s electorate. You can argue that the reasons people didn’t like her were bogus or not or whatnot, but the fact of the matter is that they didn’t, and not just on the other side of the aisle, either. And it doesn’t really matter to me how qualified she was for the office. For starters, being qualified doesn’t mean you’re going to be any good. (See Richard Nixon.) Secondly, you have to get the job in order to be good at it. And since I’m on a rant here and I’m letting it out, how fucking stupid was that campaign? How did you not know you might lose Michigan and Wisconsin? It’s your campaign’s goddamn job to know that! That no one in Brooklyn ever stopped patting themselves on the back long enough to actually take the goddamn temperature in those states and figure this shit out and try to keep it from happening is so goddamn arrogant as to leave me incredulous.
I feel better now. Well no, not really. Wait for it … yeah, now I’m better. Do I sound a little annoyed? Just remember that before he was making the Democrats look like idiots in the fall by winning the presidency, Trump was making Republicans look like idiots in the spring and the summer by getting the nomination in the first place. Everyone wound up looking like a fool, and because of it, everyone probably wound up getting the president they deserved.
England v. U.S.A., Soccer Edition
Quick point here: I labelled the previous section “England v. U.S.A.” while being fully aware that Brexit was a vote across all of Britain – but that the English were the ones who most fervently drove the Leave vote. I am labeling this next bit “England v. U.S.A.” while being fully aware that among the things I’m going to mention are the actions of a Welsh club, since that club adheres to the rules of Premiere League and the English FA. I used to live in Great Britain and I understand the divides, so don’t you get all nitpicky with me. And something else that England and the U.S. have in common at the moment, and another realm where you can see some parallels, is that both countries are bad at soccer. At least when it comes to the men, anyway. Both nation’s women’s teams? Kinda badass. But the men? Trash. Absolute trash, or shall we be all British about it and say rubbish instead?
I am not much of a betting man (as I have previously explained this year) but if I were, I would have been quite a bit richer in June, because had I been at a Las Vegas casino in June with a chance to wager on the England v. Iceland Quarter Final at Euro 2016, I would’ve bet on Iceland. And I’d be richer because Iceland won 2:1 in Nice in a match that was hailed in some camps and corners as one of the game’s greatest upsets. Hmmm, let’s do the math here … Iceland were 13/2 to win going into this game, so if I’d plunked down $100 at +650, minus the vig, of course, that would be … oh god, my Washington State math skills are failing me here … something like $638 in my pocket, which would’ve been well spent at that new José Andrés restaurant that looked so enticing the last time I was there. And I would’ve been quite confident about that wager, much more so than I would’ve been wagering on the Italy-Spain game which also went off that morning (although had I done so, I’d be even richer, since I would have tapped the Italians to upset that, old, slow, disinterested team dressed like a spilled plate of nachos.) I would have been confident in an Iceland win for a very, very simple reason: Iceland are a better team than England.
Indeed, what was most surprising about this result to me is that it wasn’t a surprise at all. What I find fascinating, in fact, is the reaction in the overwhelmingly UK-centric world of football media who want to speak to what a shocking upset this is. Not long after England began exporting the game of football all over the world, it also began exporting the way it talks about the game of football. English media and pundits dominate the conversation worldwide, particularly here in the U.S., where networks have imported a slough of English commentators to narrate the game for us, and to teach it to us uneducated Americans. The whole of English soccer is full of itself, and has been full of itself for decades, despite the fact that England haven’t won anything for 50 years, and have done little more since 1966 than master the art of losing in the most disparaging and heartbreaking of manners.
And we here in America have been importing bad English ideas about soccer – how to play it, how to watch it, and how to talk about it – for years now, and that includes importing washed-up, overrated has-beens like Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard and giving them millions to take up space in MLS and be utterly useless. We’ve started to return the favor, however, as this year Bob Bradley became the first American manager in the EPL – and lasted all of 11 games with Swansea City before being rather unceremoniously dumped. And this has led to an assortment of dimwitted British footballing journalists writing up this sort of dumb drivel, talking about how an American guy who managed in probably the most difficult situation imaginable – the Egyptians during a coup – is somehow unqualified to manage in the EPL but Ryan Giggs is, even though the only think Giggs has done as an assistant at Man U is stand there and look clueless and watch United go about pouring $600 million down a rathole. But England is a place where don’t have to actually have any good ideas about how to play the sport in order to get a managerial position, you just have to look like you do and probably also have the words Manchester United somewhere on your résumé to somehow be considered legit, even if all you did was steal a piece of the company stationery.
The game is certainly in a strange place here in the U.S., what with Klinsy finally getting canned in a move that was several years in the making, what with World Cup qualifying now by no means assured, and what with MLS still searching for an identity after two decades in the wilderness. MLS seems to have started finally figuring out that spending money on washed up dopes like Gerrard and Lampard isn’t a good idea, and that it’s a much better idea to do what this year’s two finalists – Toronto and Seattle – went out and did in signing Sebastian Giovinco and Nicolás Lodeiro, respectively: younger players, in the prime of their career, with great talent and great vision who, for a number of reasons, can’t get a gig at a bigger club elsewhere. These types of guys are all over the place, particularly in South America, which is where the league should strive to make more inroads, instead of continuing to fawn over EPL retreads who aren’t any good any more, and probably weren’t all that good to begin with.
But England has it much worse than us on the football pitch at the moment, because Americans at least have modest expectations when it comes to soccer and aren’t a bunch of delusional weirdos about it. And at the moment, English football is trash. Well, the EPL has some of the greatest players in the world – the best Brazilians and Argentines and Chileans and Spaniards and French and Belgians and Germans, but few actual English players who are worth a damn. Assemble the “great young talent” that England has into a national side and they go about doing things like stumbling about the Euros and then getting played off the pitch by Iceland in a game which should have surprised absolutely nobody. About the only thing England are good at involving football seems to involve gaming the system just well enough to keep getting high seeds through lucking into easy qualifying groups, which enable them to win lots of games against bad European teams (of which there are a lot) and make themselves look better than they really are.
Coaching England is a poison chalice, a high-paying gig with a fan base demanding success but without any actual good players to make that success possible. They hired Sam Allardyce for the job after this Iceland debacle, mostly because no one worth their salt wanted the job, and his tenure lasted all of one game before he got fired after spouting off to undercover reporters masquerading as agents about the ways in which you go about circumventing rules for signing underage players. The overwhelmed, deer-in-the-headlights Gareth Southgate has now been promoted from coaching the U-21s to the top national job – once again owing to the fact that no one would touch this job with a 10’ pole at the moment.
England wins this head-to-head, although the Americans made a fine effort by losing to Guatemala, getting embarrassed by Costa Rica, and yielding a goal in the Copa América semifinal to Argentina in about 3 minutes after fielding an ultra defensive lineup utterly incapable of even getting off a shot, much less scoring. But England wins, and by “wins” I mean “loses.”
OK, this exercise was fun. Now let’s never speak of any of it again. Neither of you two win any awards. Now back to the TLOTYs …
The Rio Olympics
Boy oh boy, where do we begin?
First of all, let me state that I am pro-Brazil. One of the most admirable traits of the Seleção is that, through their brilliance and imagination and success on the pitch, they have become the people’s champion, the natural choice for neutrals. That footballing admiration carries over to the rest of the nation as well. I want this great nation to succeed.
But it’s also an incredibly complicated place, and Rio is one of the most complicated cities on earth. Showing off Rio to the rest of the world through the hosting of the 2016 Olympics seemed like quite an interesting idea when the games were first awarded. And the Olympics ultimately tend to take on the qualities of the host city, be it the showy top-down glossiness of Beijing or the quirky, let’s-pull-together-and-ignore-the-shit-weather of London. And the Rio games took on a unique characteristic as well, but not the one many people were thinking about at the start.
Because we’d all heard the stories in the run-up to the games about construction delays and cost overruns, about trying to hold boating events in a toxic lagoon, about heists and hold-ups and high crime rates and the threat of Zika virus and what not. And in the end, the Olympics went off about as well as you could have hoped for. Rio did OK as a host city. But what was the most striking feature of these games to me, one which spoke to the true nature of it, was the tens of thousands of empty seats.
Oh, sure, some of the venues were full along the way. Anything involving Brazilians drew a crowd, of course. The Botafogo football grounds serving as the track venue were full any time Usain Bolt took the track, of course, and also the U.S. swimmers and gymnasts and men’s basketball teams had full houses behind them. But those are all international stars we’re talking about here – the key being the word “international,” meaning that they were attractive both to the locals and, more importantly, to guests from abroad. Watch any session of track and field that didn’t involve Bolt and you’d see 10,000 people in a 58,000-seat stadium. Venues across the spectrum of sports were often mostly deserted.
The reason for this is pretty obvious: ticket prices for events, as set by organizers, were outrageous. They were outrageous by even American or European standards, but at least there are enough Americans and Europeans willing to afford them. Organizers spewed out the standard line of how “ticket sales are in line with what we were expecting,” which is bullshit. And it didn’t occur to anyone involved in organizing these games that maybe, just maybe, you’d be better off for appearance’s sake if you gave away some of those tickets to those people in your community who couldn’t afford to attend because, you know, this gathering of sport is supposed to be a community endeavor. But that would involve actually giving a damn about the community.
As I say, Rio de Janeiro is one of the most complicated cities on earth, a city of extremes with some of the richest neighborhoods in the world pressed up against some of the poorest and most dangerous. It’s a city on undrawn but assumed boundaries and assorted self-governing communes. But what was pretty clear from the get-go with the Rio Olympics was that, for the millions and millions of cariocas who aren’t a part of the higher classes, these games were not for you. They were fenced off and sheltered from the rest of Rio, they were for the rich, for the jet set, and for the tourists – a good number of whom didn’t actually attend, given that the city was essentially bankrupt and unable to supply actual services like policing by the time the games rolled around. The tourists stayed away and the stands remained empty, one venue after another scarcely populated.
And Brazilians stayed away as well, because know a con job when they see one. There is a reason why Brazilian football domestically draws scant crowds, crowds even smaller than MLS: the game has been heisted and corrupted over time, and Brazilians aren’t interesting in turning over their hard earned money. Those who organized the Olympics were cut from the same cloth as those who have poisoned Brazilian football: frauds, shysters, crooks. There are plenty of those in Brazil. Hell, the whole government appears to be filled with them. Much like the World Cup in 2014, the Olympics were a perfect way for a select few to go about enriching themselves by sticking their hands in the public coffers. It was business as usual in a country which, upon landing the Games, assured the world that it would not be business as usual.
And Brazilians took to the streets in 2013 during the Confed Cup, protesting the largesse and excess and general indifference coming from the government in preparation for these two massive sporting events on the horizon. They knew better. As I say, they know a con job when they see one. And when it came time for the Olympics, they did what most people will do when told they don’t matter, which is go about doing something else.
And this is a waste, of course. If I’d been the organizers, I’d have run up and down through the streets of Rio and given away every single unsold ticket, because the Olympics Games, at a base, are a triumph of human potential being realized.
I mean seriously here, how long have he feared water as a species? We’ve feared it ever since we were fish who developed legs and walked out of the sea. We as humans fear water almost instinctively, some forgotten home for our species, and for millennia we’ve tried to conquer water, we’ve tried to figure out how best to deal with it. So think about that when you watch Katie Ledecky or Michael Phelps swim, carving up with perfect strokes a hostile and inhospitable landscape for humans, making it seem as if it had been conquered. That right there is a million years of human potential reaching an apex. We, as a species, have actually figured out how to conquer water.
And that sort of stuff is remarkable, it’s inspirational and it’s on display every four years. You watch Simon Biles flying through the air doing twists and turns as easily as you or I scratch our noses, doing things in flight most humans in history couldn’t have even conceived of – and she even makes it look easy. Watch Usain Bolt when he gets up to full speed. Have you ever seen a human body ever do anything so beautiful?
And that needs to be passed on to people, the idea that we gather together every few years to celebrate and wow ourselves over what we are capable to doing. And hey, you kids from the favela, you should come and watch this! All of you should see, with your own eyes, what’s possible and what’s doable. You might not do that yourself, in the end, but maybe, just maybe, you’ll find a way to fulfill your own potential instead of being told, based upon your race or your class or income level, that you’re second-rate.
But to the assortment of undesirables at the IOC, the Olympics are ultimately a way to enrich themselves for doing nothing, and to steal from the common man instead of inspiring them to do more. No one involved cared about that. They just wanted to throw a party for a closed subset of people who could afford to attend. Instead of celebrating what’s best about humanity, the Olympics served, yet again, to bring out what’s worst about it.
Ryan Lochte
And speaking of the worst, it gets no worse than Ryan Lochte, who has all of the personality traits of a dumb frat boy but has managed to skate through life because of his God-given talents in the pool. Lochte created quite the international incident in Rio when, after boozing it up on the town, he wrecked a service station bathroom and wound up in a confrontation with the armed security guards at the station. Lochte’s response to this was to invent a cockamamie story in which he said he’d been held up and robbed at gunpoint, thus playing upon some of the worst stereotypes of Rio in an effort to cover up for the fact that he’d been a drunkass. And his defense for this was basically to say that he acted like a drunkass, as if that wasn’t somehow obvious to everyone. Congratulations Ryan, you’ve shown yourself to be a true Ugly American, the likes of which should never wear the U.S. colors again.
So many good candidates this year, but our TLOTY simply must go to an organization which has been a constant embarrassment for the entirety of its existence, and who has even managed to kill some of the good vibes permeating a city which has had almost no good vibes over the past 50 years.
Because in Cleveland, you see, you can never have it too good. The Cavaliers breaking through and winning an NBA title was something of a city-wide catharsis, a release of half of century of frustrations. And it looked as if the winning ways were going to continue this fall, as the Cleveland Indians surged to a 3-1 World Series lead over the heavily favored Cubs, standing on the precipice of breaking a 60-year World Series drought … and then the Indians lost to the Cubs in Game 5 … and Game 6 … and Game 7 as well, but my goodness what a game it was, one of the greatest and most memorable games in baseball history, and if you’re going to flame out like this, at least do so in a remarkable game like that. But as we say, you can never have it too good when in Cleveland. You need to yang the yin, you need to balance it back out again. With so much success this year, Cleveland was definitely feeling proud of itself, and deservedly so, but maybe this national bastion of failure got a little bit too big for itself and needed to be humbled. Fortunately, I have just the ticket …
Cleveland Browns
Whatever hope the Browns had this season pretty much went out the window on Opening Day, when reclamation project Robert Griffin III suffered a season-ending injury in a 29:10 pasting by the Iggles – RG3 being the first of six different QBs to start for the Browns, who’ve had a revolving door at the position dating back through the entire history of the franchise. They followed this up by blowing a 20-2 lead in their home opener and losing to the Ravens the following week, and the hits (misses?) just kept on coming from there. Save for a miraculous near comeback falling short in a 28:26 loss to the Titans, and a 31:28 loss to the Jets in which they blew a 13-point lead, the Browns hadn’t been close to winning another game, losing their first 14 and threatening to join Dancing Dan Orlovsky’s Detroit Lions as the only 0-16 teams in NFL history.
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| Still the dumbest play in NFL history |
Quite simply, there is no worse franchise in all of American professional sports than the Cleveland Browns. (Not even the Sacramento Kings, who somehow avoided a nomination this year.) Ever since Browns 2.0 was birthed in the aftermath of the ugly move by Art Modell of the original franchise to Baltimore, the Browns have gone about stumbling through the dark in search of success to no avail. They’ve changed coaches, changed GMs, changed QBs, changed owners. Nothing has worked. (And in a another wonderful trans-Atlantic connection, former terrible Browns owner Randy Lerner also managed to be a terrible owner in the EPL, as the Aston Villa team he owned was relegated from the EPL for the first time in its history.) The Browns have drafted poorly, developed talent poorly, made bad deals galore and presently have a roster with maybe one guy – consummate pro LT Joe Thomas - out of 53 that any other team in the league would actually want, seeing as how the only other guy on the roster who knows what he’s doing – WR Josh Gordon – rightly stepped away from the game to enter an in-patient rehab facility and concentrate on getting sober.
The Browns haven’t made the postseason since 2002, haven’t had a winning season since 2007, and have lost 105 games in the past 9 years. It doesn’t really matter where they pick in the coming draft, since they’ve had the #1 overall pick several times and screwed it up. I’m not even sure where you begin to try and rebuild this team, since no one who can get a job anyplace would ever want to play there.
For their colossal incompetence, for their unimpressive historical body of work, and for single-handedly attempting to bring down the entire city of Cleveland from their Cavs-induced euphoria, I present the Cleveland Browns with The Lose Of The Year award.
And on a personal note, I would like to dedicate this entry to two big fans of The Lose. First off, my frequent creative conspirator and partner in crime Geoff lost his teenage son in an auto accident earlier this year. Geoff, I don’t know what to say, as there are no words, but I hope I can at least make you laugh from time to time. I’ve grieved for this loss in ways I never thought possible. I am so sorry for your loss and which I didn’t feel so goddamn helpless and speechless in the aftermath. Also, I would like to dedicate this entry to Derek Martinez, a good friend from scrabble who recently passed away at age 37. Derek was a big fan of Lose, he loved to talk basketball with me and we always yukked it up at whatever bit of incompetence was out there – even if it was our own incompetence over the board. Derek, you are and will continue to be greatly missed.
So we close out 2016 and it’s on 2017, and quite honestly, 2016 can go fuck itself. This year completely sucked. I thought I would usher it out with a beautiful piece of music which has resonated with me and filtered into some of the creative work I’m presently doing, as I’ve begun to write yet another novel. It’s a soft and lovely song, and as Sun Tzu once suggested in The Ancient Art of War, you must hit that which is hard with something that is soft.
