WHAT better way to kick off our recap of the bad, the worse, and the ugly for 2017 than with the worst play of the season: Louisiana Tech contriving to lose 87 yards on a single play against Mississippi State. Suffice to say, there aren’t too many plays for 3rd-and-93 drawn up in the playbook. Mad props to the Tech wide receiver who went out on a pass pattern into the end zone, turned around to discover the mayhem, and then sprinted 100 yards to recover the fumble. That’s the kind of grit and determination which … well, which will get you 3rd-and-93, in this case. I’ll spare you the coach speak. That was just inept.
This was an outstanding year in Lose, with failures running the gamut from incompetent to contemptible. The year in Lose kicked off spectacularly on the first day of 2017, when the Buffalo Bills completely forgot the rules of football:
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| Um, that’s a live ball, guys |
It’s simply carried on from there. I wasn’t sure I’d see a dumber play than that for the rest of the year – but then the Techsters from Ruston, Louisiana managed to pull off an 87-yard loss on 2nd and goal. Kudos should also go to the supposed smart kids from Vanderbilt, who lost their first round game in the NCAA tournament against other supposedly smart kids from Northwestern by forgetting the score and fouling the ’Cats best foul shooter deliberately with :16 left while holding a 1-point lead. That was a dumbass play as well, but don’t just take my word for it. Ask the guy who did it:
But claiming the coveted TLOTY award requires more than simply a single moment of madness. We have a diverse collection of candidates this year, all of whom failed and did so rather spectacularly – the definition of “failure” being somewhat fluid, of course. Some of our candidates fell short at the worst possible time, some failed to meet expectations, while some had no expectations to begin with and managed to still be even worse than that. Sometimes it comes down to poor execution, and sometimes it’s a situation where success is impossible, because the ideas behind it are so bad to begin with.
The Lose is particularly disdainful of bluster and bombast which is then not backed up on the court or the field. The current worst offender along these lines is that basketball team in the nation’s capital. Every time somebody on the Buzzards opens their mouth, they say something stupid and wind up looking stupid when they get blown out by some lame team like the Atlanta Hawks. Seriously, guys, just stop talking.
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| John Wall goes undercover for the post-game interview |
Many thanks to the readers and the disciples of Lose, from whom I solicited nominations for 2017’s The Lose Of The Year Award. I’ve considered a wide range of candidates across a range of sports and, indeed, across the globe. I regret to inform the Official Spouse of In Play Lose that her beloved Swansea City – whose collection of American investors masquerading as an ownership group have run through three coaches in a calendar year, managed to antagonize their wonderful Welsh fan base, and generally shown no idea in hell what they’re doing – have failed to capture the award despite their best efforts. And a quick reminder here that another household favorite of ours, the Cougars of Washington State University, have had their number retired and are ineligible for the award – although The Lose should probably earn a nomination for foolishly continuing to bet on W.S.U., which cost me in Las Vegas and has now cost me again, as I wagered on the Holiday Bowl with Lose disciple and Michigan State alum Steve Grob, which ended predictably badly:
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| At least this dumb bet only cost me an autographed copy of a novel |
With no further ado, let’s get to this year’s excellent crop of nominees for The Lose Of The Year. On with the circus! Send in the clowns!
Cleveland Browns
“I don’t think anybody else could have done this job.”
– Cleveland Browns head coach Hue Jackson
This is the opposite of true. Literally anyone on earth could coach a football team to zero wins. A potted plant could coach a team to zero wins. But Hue Jackson had to throw in what just might be the line of the year, and do so on Dec. 31, right before we turn over the calendar.
Last year’s winners went out and proved that earning the TLOTY in 2016 was no fluke by managing to have a season that’s even worse. Today’s 28-24 loss to the Pittsburgh Steelers means that the Browns join the 2008 Detroit Lions as the only 0-16 teams in NFL history. The 1-31 run over two years is even worse than the gold standard of NFL failure, the 1976-77 Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who were 2-26, but at least the Tangerine Dreamers had the excuse of being an expansion team playing their first two seasons. The Browns’ run of failure is mind-numbing: not only has Cleveland lost 31 of their past 32 and 41 of their past 43, but if you go back to 2014, when a five-game skid to close the season cost a 7-4 team a chance at a playoff spot, the Browns have now lost 49 of their past 53 games.
It isn’t hard to see where the problem lies: the quarterback position, which is an industrial slag heap. Can this team please get a QB? Seriously. Get a QB already. You’ve seen here, at the end of the season, with the sudden ascension of the 49ers thanks to new Bay Area heartthrob Jimmy Garoppolo, that if you have a QB who knows what he’s doing, you can win a bunch of games in the NFL simply by playing hard and letting your QB make plays. The Browns have had 28 starting quarterbacks since Browns 2.0 was launched in 1999. To the surprise of absolutely no one, the rudderless ship that is the Cleveland offense is the worst in football. About the only thing the Browns do well is turn the ball over in the red zone, which they did a record number of times in 2017. At no point in any Browns game this year did you have the slightest belief that they would win, even on the handful of occasions where they had the lead.
Those ’08 Lions were still worse than this year’s Browns team, in that they combined a punchless offense with an aversion to tackling, whereas Cleveland’s defense can occasionally be decent. As bad as those Lions were, they actually improved pretty quickly after taking a bagel in 2008. Curiously, this began when they drafted a competent QB, Matthew Stafford, and moved on from the likes of Dancin’ Dan Orlovksy. Hint hint.
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| I’ll take any opportunity to relive the single dumbest play in the history of football |
Los Angeles Chargers
The last team the Browns beat was the San Diego Chargers, who no longer exist. Instead, we now have the Los Angeles Chargers. The Spanos family decided to go all-in on the La-La-Land fantasy and relocate two hours up the freeway, but don’t worry folks, they’re still the same old choking Chargers who screw up at least three winnable games a season. NFL action, it’s FAN-tastic … except that the Chargers don’t really have any fans, because they did such a shitty job of outreach and burned all the bridges with their former home.
As they wait for that asswipe who owns the Rams to build the magical, fantasyland stadium atop the old remains of Hollywood Park, the Chargers are playing their home games at the 27,000-seat Stub Hub Center, which is a soccer stadium, and it seemed like a cool idea – and it has been a cool idea for fans of their opponents, who’ve outnumbered Charger faithful 2-1 or even 3-1.
I find it absolutely comical that the NFL spent two decades dangling L.A. as they went about holding cities hostage for sweetheart stadium deals, and then the league completely assed it up and came to discover that no one in L.A. cares a whit about the league’s assortment of bad franchises.
Baltimore Ravens
It is also quite fitting that the final game of the NFL season still taking place, after the other 255 had been completed, wound up also being a big-time choke by a team that was, at the start of the day, listed as a 96.4% favorite to make the playoffs. Well done Ravens! You slipped in under the deadline! And hey, for the Bills, 2017 obviously ended a whole lot better than it started.
New York Giants
We will let Dave Koenig, a loyal and frustrated Jints fan, do the talking regarding the dismal 3-13 season for the New York football team: “Even if you’re not a Giants fan or hater, Ben McAdoo’s table-turning performance is the kind of stuff legends are made of. He went from leading an 11-5 playoff team in his inaugural head coaching season, while still under the age of 40, to lasting only three quarters of the next season and still ending up with a career head coaching record of 13-15, and in the process benching experienced veteran leaders like Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie for multiple games for alleged insubordination and ending the streak of the NFL’s ironman Eli Manning, allegedly to start planning for the future, even though he put Geno Smith in for Eli and had a newly drafted rookie QB in Davis Webb WHOM HE NEVER EVEN PUT ON THE ACTIVE ROSTER.” Whoa, all you had to say was “Geno Smith” and it made me start to cringe.
San Francisco Giants
Giants were felled on both coasts in 2017. The baseball variety completely cratered, going from a playoff team in 2016 to 98 losses and the second-worst record in baseball. A season this bad usually has to do with injuries, of course, and the Giants had plenty of those: over the course of the season, their entire opening day lineup, their #1 and #2 starters, their closer, and the top two prospects called up from the minors all wound up on the DL, some more than once. So you can chalk it up to injuries, and also some aging players from the glory days of yesteryear who are past their prime, but the bigger issue for the 3-time World Series champs going forward is that the game has drastically changed, and they simply don’t have the right type of personnel to compete.
As much as I hate Three True Outcomes baseball and think that it’s about the most boring way imaginable to play and watch the sport, the fact is that it’s the way the game is played now, and if you don’t have power in the lineup, or lack power pitching which can strike everybody out, it’s hard to keep up. And the Giants can’t keep up, as they lack both of those things at the moment.
There isn’t much reason for panic, however, since the Giants generally know what they’re doing, and their perpetually poorly-rated farm system always seems to produce guys who know how to play. They also made a nice trade here in the offseason for Evan Longoria from America’s favorite farm team, the Tampa Bay Rays, having struck out on their attempt to land Giancarlo Stanton from …
Miami Marlins
What are you thinking, Derek Jeter? You had a storied career with the Yankees, you kicked off retirement by founding the respectable Players Tribune, you married a Sports Illustrated cover model. Life is good here, Derek. So why on earth did you agree to be the mouthpiece and stooge for the new ownership group in Miami, a group which seems hell-bent on making Marlins fans long for the glory days of Jeffrey Loria?
Jeter put his own money into this mess as well, but the primary mover and shaker in the new Marlins ownership group is Bruce Sherman, who is hell bent on eliminating the Marlins’ $400 million in debt. Word came down from on high to cut the payroll, and Jeter, being the new face of the Marlins franchise, has wound up with his sterling reputation tarnished and with egg on his face.
Saying the trade of Giancarlo Stanton to the Yankees was one-sided would be an understatement. The Marlins basically gave away their suprstar for spare parts after engaging in a continuous, pointless, very public display of brinksmanship with Stanton, who had a no-trade clause and vetoed several trades – first to the Cardinals and then to the Giants – which would have netted the Marlins far more useful assets in return. And Stanton wasn’t dissing those teams so much as using his leverage and flexing his muscle. The Marlins gave him the NTC, after all, and went about doing a bunch of stupid things he didn’t like, so Stanton called their bluff and left the Marlins with no leverage whatsoever. The whole escapade was amateurish on the part of Jeter & Co., who wound up caught over a barrel and ended up selling Stanton for scrap.
The Marlins have given up on next season already, trading Marcell Ozuna and Dee Gordon as well as Stanton and turning a team that was arguably close to being a contender into what will almost certainly be among the ranks of the worst in baseball in 2018. For every team that goes into the tank and lucks out and ultimately becomes successful, far more simply stink or become no better than mediocre. And what in the hell is there for anyone in South Florida to care about with this team? Oh, right, the Marlins don’t give a shit about the fans in Miami. They never did when Loria was running things, and they certainly don’t now.
And along the way, the always classy Derek Jeter has embarrassed himself and made himself look like a big tool. If you’re going to buy in and allow yourself to be a figurehead, you’d best learn from what Magic Johnson did with the Dodgers. Magic was more than willing to be out front and act as the face of the group that ponied up 10 figures to buy the Dodgers, but would only do so if they backed him with money and, more importantly, backed him with both confidence and competence. Nothing about what’s transpired in the past three months in Miami would indicate Jeter is going to have either to work with, and in the process, he’s managed to roust the ire of Marlins fans and Yankees haters everywhere.
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| Nick Pivetta with the most useless pickoff attempt of all time. Well-done by the Phils 1B to play it straight. |
Colorado Avalanche
It’s pretty impressive for a non-expansion team to finish 21 points worse than every other team in the NHL. I mean, even the teams that try to tank aren’t that bad. The Canucks basically wrote off the last three months of the season and still wound up with 69 points – which was 21 more than the 48 of Colorado, who posted the worst record since the
Los Angeles Lakers
As a long-time Laker hater, I’m loving the fact that the gold-and-no-don’t-call-it-purple-call-it-Forum-blue are trash. The Lakers did quite a number last season, starting 10-10 and then proceeding to go 10-40 and devolve from a fun bad team with good minutes and bad quarters of an hour into a truly horrible basketball team that was making no bones about the fact that they were tanking. They had some survivalist reasons for doing so, of course – the deals with the devil that were the Dwight Howard and Steve Nash trades were going to come back and bite them in the ass if they didn’t make the Top 3 in the draft lottery, as they would wind up forfeiting two first round draft picks if that occurred – and so the Lakers raced for the bottom, only to then rather comically nearly screw all of that tanking up by winning five straight to close out the season.
And it was truly absurd stuff to watch. If you had a good first half, you’d almost certainly find yourself benched in the second. Their big free agent signings from the summer vanished into the witness protection program. Between the Lakers and the pathetic Phoenix Suns – who benched their best player, Eric Bledsoe, for the season in March, even though he was healthy, and then went on a 13-game losing skid – they managed to bring the entire league into disrepute. This was a complete disgrace, one which the league has attempted to dissuade by modifying the NBA lottery rules to discourage tanking and encourage competence.
But the Lakers had the lucky ping pong balls bounce their way at the expense of the Suns (because the Suns always get screwed in the lottery) and landed the second pick in the draft, thus giving them the chance to draft the Second Coming himself, Lonzo Ball.
Who hasn’t been any good at all this season, and who, quite bluntly, strikes me as nothing more than a slightly above average athlete who can’t shoot. He’s a terrific passer, of course, and has excellent court vision, but in the modern NBA, if you can’t shoot, you’re useless, unless you are a freak of nature like Giannis or Ben Simmons, and this is especially true at the point guard position.
Lonzo Ball is the product of one of the greatest hype machines that basketball has ever seen: his father, LaVar Ball, who I barely remember as being a not-very-good player on a not-very-good team at Washington State. (My memory has not failed me, although the best thing in that article is David Sanders saying W.S.U. was full of melancholy existentialists.) LaVar is, frankly, full of shit. Then again, while being full of shit, there is also some truth to what he says: he wanted Lonzo to play one year at UCLA, and one year only, because why should some university be profiting off the free labor of his sons? He’s absolutely right about that. There are kernels of truth in most everything he says and does, but it still doesn’t change the fact that LaVar Ball is full of shit.
And I don’t begrudge a father for wanting the best for his sons, but LaVar is the equivalent of the endless and insufferable parents who have meddled and interfered and ruined countless careers of prodigies in women’s tennis. Amazingly, quite a few people bought into this nonsense – witness the BBB shoe line and the large crowds turning out to watch AAU games where LaVar coaches his high school kid and storms around the sidelines and yells at refs and pulls his team from the court in a big sideshow. His middle son then sparked an international incident with two of his UCLA teammates by shoplifting in Shanghai, and LaVar’s response to all of this was to pull his kids out of school and exile them to playing pro ball in Lithuania, since neither of them are remotely of NBA calibre and he needs to recoup.
And everyone – and I mean everyone – bought into the Ball family hype machine when it came to Lonzo. Most notably the Lakers, who are star-driven by nature and basically anointed him the savior of the franchise, which is totally unfair to the kid, who seems like a modest and hard-working guy and who seems clearly burdened by the unfair expectations placed upon him. He’s getting better, but he’s still not good, and while I hope he has a nice career, I’m wary of his star potential. Like most everything about the Lakers right now, it’s all hype and wishful thinking in lieu of an actual good product.
The Lakers are still bad – a fun bad, but bad nonetheless – and they are continuing in their longstanding tradition of acting from a position of divine right and exceptionalism when, in fact, the team is one step removed from the dumpster. They’re still holding onto the notion that, come a year from now, LeBron James will be a Laker and Paul George will be a Laker and everyone will be a Laker because it’s the Lakers. Never mind the fact that they don’t have the salary cap space available to do that, and have to find a team out there dumb enough to take some of their bad contracts off their hands in order to do so. Who knows, maybe LeBron will still want to take his talents to SoCal, but I can’t see why he’d willingly subject himself to even more annual beatdowns by the Warriors.
I love it. I love that the Lakers are awful. I love it all. Sorry, I’m not sorry.
Memphis Grizzlies
The Griz are in a bad way, plagued by injuries and having sunk to the worst record in the Western Conference at 11-25. The Griz played probably their best game of the season on Saturday night, making almost everything they threw in the general direction of the rim against the Warriors, and they still got blown out. Memphis earned my ire and a wag of the finger for their foolish decision to fire head coach David “Take That for Data” Fizdale, who wins an award for the rant of the year and who did a helluva job coaxing 43 wins out of that team a year ago. It was a classic case where the coach got crosswise with his star player – Marc Gasol – who then went about getting the coach fired. It’s a players game, sure, but in the bigger picture, what exactly has Marc Gasol done in his career to earn that kind of clout? A good player, to be sure, and sometimes even a great one, but why is ownership catering to the whims of a 30-something who is past his prime?
Well, you see, it’s because Gasol is one of their own in Memphis. He went to high school there and loves it there and didn’t leave for greener pastures when he had the chance. And when you play in a second-tier market like Memphis, that sort of thing comes to matter. The Grizzlies, to their credit, have built an entire identity and kinship with the city around the concept of “Grit & Grind,” one which has seen the franchise excel far more than I ever thought it would. The Grizzlies are big into rescues and reclamation projects, they play tough and hard-nosed basketball, and they’ve consistently punched above their weight.
Behind the scenes, however, the Grizzlies have quietly been one of the more dysfunctional franchises in the NBA. They’ve had to rely on rescues and reclamation projects because they’ve drafted absolutely terribly – Mike Conley is the last Grizzlies draft pick to sign a second contract, and he was drafted more than a decade ago. Drafting poorly means having to take some risks with signing players, which can go pretty disastrously wrong. (Insert a reminder here that Chandler Parsons is still owed $50 million.) They’ve run through coaches and antagonized others to the point where they’ll willingly get themselves fired and take a job in Sacramento and consider it an upgrade. In a league awash in money, the Grizzlies reportedly lost $40 million last year, and now the two out-of-town owners are engaged in a bizarre game of chicken which could determine the fate of the franchise.
The Grizzlies moved from Vancouver to Memphis because the Little Napoleon himself, David Stern, was perfectly happy moving franchises into lesser markets which would bend over backwards and feed the league’s addiction to public money. But market forces still make Memphis a second sister, no matter how well they’ve been built and how successful they’ve been. Unless you wildly succeed and establish a long culture of excellence, like the Spurs have done, you’re swimming upstream in a place like Memphis, New Orleans, or Oklahoma City, where they can look forward to five more years of Russell Westbrook padding his stat lines before descending into the complete and utter irrelevance that they deserve. I used to think that it would be the Pelicans who wound up becoming Sonics 2.0 in Seattle, but given how messed up things are in Memphis, it might wind up being the Grizzlies. Which sucks for the fans, of course, but guess what? The fans don’t matter and they haven’t mattered in a long time.
And there isn’t going to be much that will matter to fans in Memphis in the meantime, because this team is in terrible trouble.
Sacramento Kings
Speaking of small-time thinking … one of the things that’s funny about the smaller market teams in the NBA is the ways their fans seem to take every single thing you say negative about their beloved team as a personal affront. No one is more techy than OKC fans, of course, but when you steal a team, your owner is a crook, you luck your way into success through the draft, choke that success away, find yourself mired in the center of every CBA and league-related mess, actively work to thwart lottery reform, and then your best player makes a personal decision to take a better job as is his right per the terms of the CBA, I guess you get a little defensive about the nature of your beloved franchise and how it conducts business.
I get into it with Sacramento Kings fans as well, mostly because I dared to suggest that the Kings would’ve been better off being relocated to Seattle. I’ll freely admit that I’m biased towards Seattle, as a former Sonics season ticket holder. And that would’ve sucked for Kings fans in Sacto, whom I’d previously felt some kinship with, because when I first showed up in Northern California in 2000, and the Warriors were godfuckingterrible, watching the great Kings teams with C-Webb, Peja, Vlade et. al was a delight. They were great. They deserved better than how it all turned out.
My point about the Kings, in their current state, is that in doing everything humanly possible to avoid being trumped by a group from Seattle, David Stern set Sacramento fans up for even more perpetual disappointment. The owner is a whackadoodle, the GM doesn’t know what he’s doing, and the team still sucks. The Boogie Cousins trade at the All-Star break was one of the dumbest deals imaginable, and the terrible trade with the 76ers from several years back came back to bite them in the ass when they finished 3rd in the lottry and had to hand the spot over to Philly. The Kings have now gone super young – 10 of their players are on rookie scale contracts – and the kids play hard but none of them really know what they’re doing, and they negated any financial flexibility they have going forward by signing Vince Carter and Zac Randolph, both of whom are ancient and no longer good, and spending way too much money on George Hill to play the point, who hasn’t been any good and who they didn’t need in the first place. Hey, look, the Kings have the worst offense in the NBA and one of the worst records. Color me shocked.
Kings fans deserved better than this. It’s cool that you got to keep your team, but your team is crap, and has been crap, and will continue to be crap. The Kings won’t ever win The Lose of the Year because they’re basically The Lose of Every Year.
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| No Speights |
I could go easy on the Bulls, because they’ve mysteriously started winning of late, and because Lauri Markkanen can actually play (which doesn’t surprise me, since he was great for Finland in the Eurobasket), and since Bobby Portis and Nikola Mirotic have apparently done some fence-mending after trying to beat the shit out of each on the practice court the day before the season starts.
But I won’t, because the Bulls are still garbage.
It’s the same dumb team run by a tag-team duo of clownshoes, Gar Forman and John Paxson, who somehow thought that signing Wade and Rondo meshed with an up-tempo, modern game, and who wound up using approximately 67 point guards last season, and traded away some useful pieces for backup OKC point guard Cam Payne, who couldn’t play, and then traded Jimmy Butler to Minnesota for a pair of shoes and bunch of other stuff, and sold a draft pick, which turned into the future starting center for the Warriors, for cash considerations – cash they stashed in order to then buy out Wade, whom they never should have signed in the first place. Last season’s Bulls were, quite possibly, the most joyless playoff basketball team that I have ever seen. They all pretty much hated each other and didn’t want to be there. The Bulls are still joyless, and now they’re also terrible. Even with this recent run of good play, I still wouldn’t be surprised if they wind up with the worst record in the NBA. And they’re still coached by Fred Hoiberg:
See you in the lottery, Bulls.
University of North Carolina
UNC wriggled off of the hook with the NCAA, after a long and exhausting academic fraud scandal, on a dubious sort of technicality: since the bogus classes that so many of the football and basketball players were taking in the school’s African and Afro-American Studies department were also offered to the student body at large, it was therefore an issue that fell outside the scope and scale of the NCAA. Essentially, it was an academic issue and not an athletic one, and therefore the NCAA had no jurisdiction.
This is complete rubbish, of course, much like people who argued that Penn State didn’t deserve sanctions and punishment from the NCAA for what was a criminal case. That is complete and utter nonsense. The NCAA can, and should, be able to do what it wants. It’s set itself up to be able to do whatever it wants, at least as it pertains to dictating the free labour they get from student athletes, but it somehow can’t sanction an institution where kids playing sports were taking fake classes, and were thus even more of fake students than the usual fake students playing football and basketball at Div. I institutions.
And at first, of course, North Carolina tried to defend the fake AFAM courses as being legit:
University of Louisville
The big problem with college sports in America is that so many schools use sports as a means to create an identity for themselves, thus making themselves appear to be relevant when, in the world of academia, they wouldn’t otherwise be. And the money in big-time athletics – not just from the games themselves, but from the sorts of donations and grants and funding opportunities that will come from having a high profile – is so great that it’s very, very easy to sell your souls and decide you need to win at all costs. As I’ve said before, the old line about how Joe Paterno built Penn State isn’t entirely fanciful. All of the slime oozing out from Baylor stems from the administration having bought into the idea that winning was all that mattered, and to hell with the well-being of young people – many of whom were, in fact, also Baylor students, but obviously not as important students, since they didn’t play football. In this sort of set-up, greed and corruption can come oh, so easily.
And when the Adidas bribery scandal began to unfold this past fall, it didn’t surprise me in the least that it involved the University of Louisville, which has been trying to use athletics to make itself into something other than a mediocre institution for years, and cared very little about the ethics of it all. This is the school that employed Bobby Petrino and Rick Pitino, after all. They also built extravagant facilities at taxpayer expense and lavished huge salaries on coaches, including being the first school to pay a college baseball coach over $1 million annually – which sounds all fine and good until you realize that there aren’t enough scholarships in the baseball program to field an actual team, meaning players in that sport are getting even more screwed than they are in the revenue sports. The idea that you are forking over $1 million for a coach while some kids are basically paying their own way to play is just preposterous.
The whole house of cards at Louisville is coming crashing down now in the wake of the bribery scandal, as everyone involved in what was essentially the making of the University of Adidas is being shown the door. The scandal is evolving slowly elsewhere in the country, with a number of assistant coaches at major college basketball programs inevitably being thrown under the bus as head coaches and ADs scurry to cover their asses, but at Louisville, they acted so smug and arrogant, and believed so strongly that they were above reproach, that they didn’t even do a good job of trying to conceal what they were doing.
University of Tennessee
How not to do a coaching search. Tennessee decided to fire head football coach Butch Jones – an understandable decision, since Tennessee has become terrible while being coached by Butch Jones, and 110,000 people don’t turn up at Neyland Stadium on autumn Saturdays in order to watch a team that’s terrible. Word leaked out that Ohio State defensive coordinator Greg Schiano had agreed to become their new coach. Schiano gets high marks because he somehow made Rutgers into a good team many years ago. He gets less than high marks because he was a horrible coach in the NFL who got run out of Tampa. Schiano also was on JoePa’s staff at Penn State during the Jerry Sandusky days, and it was this fact which got the ire up of the Tennessee students and alumni, as there have been suggestions in testimony that Schiano may have known what Sandusky was doing to underage boys. Mere allegations, of course, none of which have been proven, but in the court of public opinion, none of that matters. So people raised hell, Tennessee cancelled the agreement to hire Schiano, Schiano is now contemplating legal action, and it’s all one hell of a mess.
The cynic in me suspects that, given the usual SEC and NCAA ways of overlooking any sort of issue right up until the point where you can’t win any games, the folks at Tennessee might not have raised any issues about Schiano if they actually thought he was a good coach. That being the case, I have no problem with blackballing everyone associated with the Penn State mess. I’m not at all keen on the court of public opinion, but I’m also of the mindset that pretty much no one involved, even peripherally, with Penn State during the time Sandusky was employed there should ever be allowed to coach or teach or administrate or have anything to do with an educational institution ever again. All of them were either complicit, or contributed to, a bogus culture that cared about winning football games far more than the well-being of young people. So I have no sympathy for Schiano whatsoever. None.
In the meantime, Tennessee still needed a coach, and now that this embarrassing fiasco had all come to light, they couldn’t give the job away. They offered it to about half a dozen people, all of whom turned it down, at which point the AD resigned because he’d messed up the process so badly, and the people at Tennessee were okay with this because that AD “wasn’t a Tennessee man,” making the sort of lame excuse that losers who dabble in nostalgia make about how you need someone who understands the culture and the traditions in charge. Actually, no, you don’t need that. What helps, instead is having people who know what the hell they are doing! Eventually, Vols football legend Phil Fulmer, who a national title at Tennessee, stepped in to run the athletics department and they hired Alabama’s defensive coordinator, Jeremy Pruitt, to coach the team, but only after the entire university made itself look stupid.
USA Gymnastics
The United States has the greatest women’s gymnastics team in the history of the sport, and I don’t give a shit. This is because USA Gymnastics willingly employed serial sex offender Larry Nassar for years, and did little to nothing about the allegations that Nassar was sexually assaulting female athletes. The reason they did nothing, of course, is that the athletes knew full well that saying anything potentially jeopardized their future on the team. It’s a similar sort of slimy dynamic that you see in college athletics, whereby the athlete has no say or power whatsoever because they are fundamentally expendable. If someone speaks up, they are a troublemaker, and it’s easy enough at that point to just get rid of them, since a spot on the U.S. women’s team is the most cherished position in the sport, and the U.S. is so deep in talent that you’ll easily replace the bad apples. The whole scandal is absolutely disgusting, and speaks to an organization that completely lost its way in pursuit of glory. I applaud the women who have spoken out against Nassar, some of whom are among the brightest stars in the sport. I know it’s incredibly difficult to do, and I hope that ultimately being on the right side of history will, at the very least, bring them some peace.
The Winter Olympics
This one is a first, a Lose of the Year nomination for an event that hasn’t even happened yet. But the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea are shaping up to be a world class dud. It doesn’t help that the Russians, having had their entire Summer Olympics team thrown out of Rio for 2016 for systematic and state-supported doping, have now had their entire Winter team thrown out as well. But there is absolutely no buzz at all about this event. There is no real star power. Quick, name me a star winter athlete. Name one. You can’t, unless you are a keen devotee of a particular sport. The star quality has been further lowered by the NHL dumbly deciding not to participate, meaning that instead of seeing the best hockey tournament on the planet, we’ll have to make do with whatever each country can cobble together. There is no real drama or tension to speak of, there is nothing worth watching. I’ve never been less enthused about an Olympics before.
The Winter Olympics are already in trouble as it is, since no sane nation wants to foot the bill for them. They’ve rapidly grown from being the domain of sleepy mountain hamlets into this giant megaplex event only big cities can host, but they don’t build that many big cities in mountain ranges. The idea of the 2022 Winter Olympics being held in Beijing is absolutely ridiculous. And after 2022, who knows? Who wants to organize this mess? Who wants the hassle? Given that the Winter Olympics is almost going to have to downsize in order to continue exist, we’re not likely to see many more winter olympiads of this scope and scale in the future.
Instant Replay
It’s bad in pretty much every sport except tennis. Get rid of it. I hate it. I hate it in football and in basketball and in hockey, and I really hate VAR in soccer. Sure, we want calls to be right, but games are played by human beings and they are officiated by human beings, and human beings are going to make mistakes. The problems with instant replay are three-fold:
1) games happen in real time and should be officiated in real time. Slowing down and replaying a play at thousands of frames per second actually changes the way you see the play. In super slo-mo, everything looks like a reckless challenge or a flagrant foul or a fumble or whatnot, but the game doesn’t happen in super slo-mo, it happens in real time. And were you to go back and look at every single play of a game in super slo-mo, and not just the ones under official review, you’d probably find scores of other reckless challenges and flagrant fouls and fumbles and whatnot, as well;
2) In attempting to define what is or isn’t a catch, what is or isn’t a fumble, etc., instead of clarifying the issue, we’ve just made the rules murkier and harder to enforce;
3) it slows the games down, and I have a short enough attention span as it is.
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| Worst officiating of the year: Adrian Beltre actually got ejected for this |
Paris Saint Germain
Few clubs in sports elicit less sympathy than Paris St. Germain, a traditionally bland and undistinguished soccer club that was bought, in 2011, by Qatar Sports Investments, who then poured so much money into the club that PSG were easily able to overwhelm any other French opposition in Ligue 1. There is no greater cautionary tale, in fact, about the extent to which you can rely upon sports analytics than in Ligue 1, where Olympique Lyonnais won seven straight titles using analytics and savvy buying-and-selling of players, only to ultimately be rendered irrelevant in France by the sheer buying power of PSG – a buying power on display yet again this past summer, when PSG spent €266 million to trigger the buyout clause in Neymar’s contract at F.C. Barcelona.
It’s virtually impossible to ignore the political and P.R. aspect of this – Qatar has got themselves into something of a mess by engaging in a political spat with their neighbours, and the questionable ways in which they went about obtaining the 2022 World Cup has brought many things about the way the nation does business into question. Some would argue that PSG is a de facto extension of the Qatari government and, as such, they deemed it necessary to spend that sort of money on Neymar in order to remain in public prominence and retain their stature. What’s weird about it, though, is that PSG don’t need Neymar to win Ligue 1. They could win Ligue 1 without him. (In fact, it was something of a shock that PSG failed to do so in 2017.) What they do need him for, however, is to win the Champions League, which is at most a 13-game campaign. So, in essence, they paid €266 million for 13 games a season, because the only thing PSG cares about, at this point, is winning Champions League.
They might have more luck winning Champions League if they didn’t choke. This past spring, PSG was drawn against F.C. Barcelona in the Round of 16. In the aller portion of the aller-retour, which took place at Parc des Princes, PSG dominated and hammered and completely humiliated Barca, winning 4:0. It was a massive and seemingly insurmountable margin as they headed to the Camp Nou – a margin made even insurmountable when PSG scored a goal at the Camp Nou, meaning that, because of the away-goals rule, Barca needed to score six in order to advance.
What proceeded to occur was, arguably, the greatest choke in the history of the sport of soccer. Go on, here, have a look for yourself. Three goals allowed in the seven minutes? What the actual fuck, PSG? And sure, that fifth goal was crap because Suarez flopped like a flounder on a dock and it shouldn’t have been a penalty, but PSG shouldn’t have ever got themselves into that position in the first place. They played not to lose and, in the end, deserved to lose. Just because you can’t use your hands, it doesn’t mean you should play with your hands around your own throat.
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| Behold the single worst tackle by a professional footballer that I have ever seen |
Italy
This was quite a year in World Cup Qualifying, as many regional powers slumped and wound up missing out on a trip to Russia in 2018. Chile seemed gassed, their short squad out of energy after so many summers of football. The Algerians were the highest rated team in Africa at the start of the campaign, but the Fennec Foxes didn’t turn up. They didn’t win a game. (Well, they did after the fact, because Nigeria fielded an ineligible player. Why does this keep happening?) African champion Cameroon and powerhouse Ghana also failed to make it – the exit of the former being not that much of a surprise, as they are rebuilding and their African title was somewhat fluky (but still well-deserved), while the latter fell into dysfunction in Brazil in 2014 and still haven’t found their way out of the weeds. I knew that Côte d’Ivoire were sunk when I saw they had tethered to fortunes to bumbling ex-Belgium manager Marc Wilmots, whose Belgian team had probably more talent than any team in the world but couldn’t get out of the quarters at the Euros and got run in circles by Wales. Speaking of Wales, they would probably have had made it to Russia were it not for the fact that their talisman, Gareth Bale, appears to be made of glass.
Then, of course, there are the Dutch:
But the true shock in Europe came when Italy, the 4-time World Cup champions, failed to qualify for Russia, failing to score over a two-legged playoff and losing 0:1 to a so-so Sweden team. This will be the first time since 1958 that the Italians have missed the World Cup, but for all of their pedigree, this was a failure that was a long time in coming.
Oh, the Italians have teased us in the past couple of Euros, reaching the final in 2010, and then losing on penalties to the Germans in 2014, but the fact is that those successes owed a great deal to coaching acumen and tactical prowess – first under the guise of Cesare Prandelli, and then Antonio Conte, who jumped at the Chelsea gig after the Euros in 2016 and left the Italians in the lerch. The Italians somewhat strangely decided to hand the keys over to Gian Piero Ventura, a journeyman manager who’d had 20 previous jobs over 40 years and never been particularly distinguished. Ventura was in over his head – he had no solid tactical plan and no one took him seriously, not the least the team’s senior players.
Oh yeah, and about those players. Italian soccer has been in a bit of a down cycle the past decade, and they were still dependent upon a core of guys who played for the Italian side that won the World Cup in 2006 – a side which, to be blunt, is probably the worst team that ever won a World Cup. By all accounts, the old guard from 2006 had the run of the place, and there have been reports that they were as much as picking the lineups for the games behind the scenes. Ventura had that little sway and say over the proceedings.
Not that he did anything while in charge that gave you much confidence. Being manager of the Azzurri can be pretty thankless, as you get criticized from all sides, but Ventura would respond to criticism by simply doubling down and being stubborn – going so far as to leave his best attacker, Lorenzo Insigne, on the bench as the clock ticked down against the Swedes, which made no sense to anyone, least of all the players. Ventura had said previously that Insigne was not playing because he didn’t fit into the Italian system – which is dumb. This is international football. These are basically all-star teams and sometimes, you don’t have ideal groups to work with. You can’t go out and buy a player. You have to go with what you have. What the Italians have, at the moment, is a mess, with young players who are too green and old vets living off of past glory who should have been put out to pasture years ago.
It should not be forgotten that Italy winning the 2006 World Cup came amid a match-fixing scandal in Serie A, but winning papers over a lot of cracks. Structurally, the game had been on the decline in Italy, and Serie A had long ago lost its status as the best league in Europe, but that 4th World Cup win meant any sort of reform was hard to justify. As such, those needed reforms were slow in coming, and this year, it finally caught up to them. None of the Italian journos I follow seemed all that surprised that Italy failed to qualify, since they weren’t very good and haven’t been for a while. The surprise was doing well in all of those Euros, as it turns out. As good as they looked in Euro 2012, the team that went to Brazil in 2014 seemed shockingly unprepared for the conditions and completely wilted in the heat. There is now some good young talent in Italy, talent which deserves to be on the field instead of the bored old guard. Now, there is no reason not to let them have a run.
A World Cup without Italy just won’t be as good. You can say the same about the Dutch and the Chileans and the Fennec Foxes, Black Stars, and Elephants as well, but in the end, the table doesn’t lie, and if the table says you didn’t earn enough points to qualify, then tough shit.
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Outstanding nominees, all, but there are two in particular who stood out in 2017, and I have to admit that I was torn in picking between the two. But wait a minute, why do I have to choose? These two nominees are so good (or so bad, as the case may be), that trying to decide which one was better/worse was impossible for me to do. It was essentially splitting hairs, because in any other year, these two would be slam dunk, case closed winners. I simply could not decide. I even flipped a coin, and it fell off the desk and rolled behind the bookcase.
The hell with it. This is my blog, and I can do what I want.
So I have decided that, given the uniqueness of the situation, it would be best if I award The Lose of The Year award in 2017 to both of these worthy nominees. Yes, that’s correct, we have co-winners of this year’s TLOTY. But don’t get used to it. I don’t intend on this ever happening again:
The Lose of the Year Award Co-Winner:
Atlanta Falcons
In general, when thinking about The Lose of The Year, I’m inclined to reward sustained incompetence rather than the result of a single game. After all, single games are inherently small sample sizes and, thus, inherently fluky. Weird stuff can happen, whereas showing systematic incompetence, over a prolonged period of time, speaks to a foundation that is most likely rotten to the core and some seriously screwed-up thinking. So it seems a little strange to be giving the TLOTY entirely on the basis of one game.
But in writing this blog entry, and doing research for it, I went back and reread my recap from February, and then I rewatched the final 10 minutes of the 4th Quarter of the Super Bowl, in which the Atlanta Falcons committed what is, given the stage and the circumstance, the biggest choke in the history of sports, and I just can’t ignore that accomplishment. I’ll be surprised if I see another choke that colossal in my lifetime.
I also couldn’t believe what I was watching, even though I had seen it before and knew what was coming, because it’s a complete train wreck. My goodness, the Falcons do SO MUCH DUMB STUFF in the final 10 minutes of that game, and seriously, had they not done any one of those stupid things, they still would have won the game. Every single one of those bad plays was necessary in order for New England to come back and win that game. The margin of error, at that point, was that great for the Falcons, yet they still screwed it up and lost.
You just can’t lose this game, Falcons. You can’t. And yet, somehow, you did. I watched it a second time, and I still cannot believe that happened.
The Lose of the Year Award Co-Winner:
USA FC
If the Falcons represent Lose in its purest, one-off form, then the U.S. Men’s National Team represents it for its body of work over the past three years, which culminated in one of the most embarrassing losses of all time, against a second-rate Trinidad & Tobago with nothing to play for, and failing to qualify for the 2018 World Cup. Along with rewatching the Super Bowl, I also combed the video archives and looked through all of the terrible performances this team put up in the past three years in the build-up to their own demise. I watched them lose to Guatemala. I watched them lose to Jamaica at home in the Gold Cup. I watched them try three in the back for the first time against Mexico and try what looked like a 10-0-0 formation against Argentina. I watched Costa Rican attackers running through acres of space in their central defense. I watched them get pinched and played by the most basic of Mexican ploys at the Rose Bowl and not be able to figure it out. And what I saw, time and again, was a team that seemed poorly coached, disjointed, lackadaisical, and occasionally downright clueless.
There was no excuse for missing the World Cup. None. And everyone involved in this team seemed to think they’d actually accomplished something, and acted as if they did. No, losing in the round of 16 in the World Cup isn’t accomplishing anything. No, finishing 4th in the Copa América isn’t accomplishing anything. Everyone involved in USA FC thought they were doing something great, rather than going about doing it.
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So that’s all for 2017. Thank you for reading, and I’ll try to do better in 2018. Hopefully, I won’t have some major life crisis interrupt me and get in the way and take up all my time. More Lose in 2018! I think this needs to happen. And I didn’t even bother to get into the political and social aspects of 2017 in this blog. This is because I easily become depressed when I think about that stuff. I’d rather that I go out of 2017 on an up note, a humorous note, and continue doing what I can to treat all that comes before me with humor and a heightened sense of absurdity.
Let’s go out with some music here. I need some music. One of the things which people find unusual about me is that my personal loathing of nostalgia means I don’t make many sentimental attachments to songs. I’m always interested in what’s new. As such, my musical tastes tend to always be tilted towards what’s contemporary. Even as I age, I want to hear new sounds. I like old sounds and old songs too, of course, but I don’t feel attached to them to the extent that I want to be listening to them all the time. I don’t need to listen to the music of my youth. My youth sucked. Why be reminded of it? So let’s go out with a nice groove here from a record released in 2017 that I enjoyed. I love these guys, and member Rob Garza also has produced records for The House Band of In Play Lose in the past, so he is clearly awesome. Peace out and I’ll catch all of you in 2018.
Do you have any questions you’d like to ask? Would you like to commiserate because your team sucks? Drop me a line! You can email me at inplaylose@gmail.com, and when we get enough questions and comments gathered up, I’ll do another Hate Mail edition of In Play Lose.
