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| Graphic by @effinbirds. Always good to be back after a long break ... |
THE LOSE is back, there are a few things on my mind and I have a short attention span, so quick, let’s get to the buzzard points!
• It’s hard to imagine someone having a worse start to their NFL career than Nathan Peterman has had. You may recall that, last year, he was thrust into the starting QB role midseason for the Buffalo Bills in a game against the
Putting up a 0.0 QB rating is impressively terrible. The last person to do that was in 2014, and it was Geno Smith for the Jets who, strangely enough, also managed to put up a perfect 158.3 QB rating later in the same season – which may be a sign of hope for Peterman and the Bills, because if Geno Smith can do that, then anyone surely can. (Though I suspect there was some some indifferent Miami defending going on that day.) Peterman’s day against the Ravens was so bad that, at one point, he threw an incompletion and his in-game QB rating actually increased. I have not encountered such absurd sports math since the time the time the Pacers were 103% favorites against the Sam Hinkie Sixers. It was 40-0 Ravens two minutes into the 3rd Quarter when Peterman was finally pulled by McDermott, who said afterwards that he would have to “look at the film” before determining the starting QB for this week’s game, as if there was going to be some sort of magical insight discerned besides that the QB is not very good. Bad QB play is nearly impossible to overcome in the NFL, and it’s the QB play which makes Buffalo one of the front runners for being the worst team in the league a season after a playoff berth which, in hindsight, feels almost like it was accident.
• There were two wholly predicable disasters in NFL Week 1, with the Bills being one of them and the second one taking place at Ford Field in Detroit, where the Lions got blasted by the Jets in an error-strewn mess of a game, after which the Jets players said they’d figured out the Lions play calls and hand signals before the game, which speaks to a lack of preparation and organization. Now, disorganization is nothing new to the Detroit Lions, of course, but they decided to take dysfunction to yet another level this past off-season when, after a few decent-but-unsuccessful seasons (which is about the best the Lions can hope for), they fired Jim Caldwell and promptly hired Matt Patricia who, when we last saw his handiwork, was the defensive coordinator for a New England Patriots team that allowed the Philadelphia Eagles to score eight times in the Super Bowl. Literally no one I know who follows the Pats was sad to seem him go, and no one I follows the Pats thinks he’s any good as a coach, as whatever defensive success has happened in New England in recent years owes to the fact that the best defense is a good offense – the Pats hold the ball a long time, gain a lot of yards and score a lot of points, so the defense doesn’t have to rise to any level above mediocrity in order for the team to be successful. And this is yet another one of those bizarre “coaching tree” hires where a team assumes that everyone on that other team that wins all the time must really know what they’re doing. Quick, name me a Bill Belichick protege who has ever had any success whatsoever outside of Foxboro. This was a classic dumb hire by a dumb organization, one that seems hell-bent on wasting the prime years of their franchise QB’s career. The Lions do not appear to have any idea what they are doing, which is something we have all come to count on over the years.
• We can no longer speak of the Cleveland Browns losing streak after their 21-21 tie with Pittsburgh. Now we must speak of their winless streak. In Cleveland, this constitutes progress.
• I generally don’t care about tennis, in part because, in my experience dealing with athletes over the years, tennis players and their people were probably some of the least pleasant and most difficult to deal with. That, and the game is a bore to watch. But disciples of The Lose have specifically requested that I comment on the incident which took place in the Women’s final of the U.S. Open, which I did not watch but have now done so, during which Serena Williams was penalized three times – first for “receiving coaching” from the stands, which was iffy and is a dumb rule, then a second time for smashing her racket, and then a third time late in the match for continuing to argue with the umpire about what happened when she was penalized the first time.
Oh boy.
Now, admittedly here, I don’t know much about tennis – but I do know that Serena is boss. She’s probably the best women’s tennis player of all time, given her résumé. Of this, I think I know. But I’ve found the backlash to this incident rather curious, since people seem to want to pick-and-choose in going about spinning whatever narrative suits them. There is sexism, there is racism, there is a double standard because so-and-so did such-and-such in a such-and-such a match and didn’t get penalized to the extent Serena did. Now, sexism and racism and double standards may well exist and probably do. That would not surprise me, but that’s not for me to say. But there is a basic principle here about officiating which applies to literally every sport and game on the planet, one which people would do well to remember.
Officiating is necessarily the subjective application by human beings of objective criteria. It is inherently interpretive, because human beings are doing it, and human beings are inherently affected by biases, whims, past histories, what time they woke up that morning and so on and so on and so on. And every single individual game or match is, ultimately, a self-contained affair. It is in the present and in the moment, and officials react in real time to what they see taking place before them. This is why comparing what Serena did in the U.S. Open Final to what “so-and-so did such-and-such in a such-and-such a match” is, ultimately, irrelevant. We heard this same sort of line time and again during the World Cup this summer: “that shouldn’t have been a penalty because it wasn’t in this other game,” and so forth. Well, officials aren’t watching that other game. They’re watching the game unfold in front of them right now and reacting to what they see.
Another good footballing analogy here is a serious foul where the official has to determine if it’s worthy of a yellow or a red card. Footballing fans everywhere have seen fouls where guys, or gals, should have been sent off and weren’t, or vice versa. It’s ultimately a judgment call by the official – but, in the case of something like the issuing of a yellow or a red, there is little doubt that the player is in some hot water.
And see, Serena got herself in hot water. I think the coaching thing is dumb. It’s dumb and pointless – but it is a rule. All three times that Serena was penalized, she was deemed, in my less-than-expert opinion, to be in violation of rules, no matter how dumb or inane those rules may be. And when you do that, you put yourself at the mercy of the officials. Whether or not they choose to enforce those codes is not up to you. By the letter of the law, the officials in that match acted in a manner afforded them in the rules of the game. If you get yourself into that situation it is, first and foremost, your own damn fault. This is a basic, universal principle of sport here: if you don’t want to have a foul called against you, the best way to go about doing so is not to commit a foul.
And think about this for a moment here: what if the officials in that match don’t penalize Serena? I can guarangoddamnty you that there would be a rumbling of “Serena gets all the breaks” in the aftermath, because we do that sort of thing all the time. It’s mostly sour grapes, of course, to whine about “stars get all the calls” and such. The rookie pitcher doesn’t get the pitch on the black, LeBron and Harden always travel, blah blah blah. Given the petty nature of this sort of thing, I can say with almost 100% certainty that there are women’s tennis players who are annoyed with what they perceive Serena can get away with, simply because she’s a star. And she is a star. She is arguably the biggest star the sport has ever known. She’s such a star that her losing this match in such a manner rendered her victorious opponent’s triumph irrelevant in the public consciousness. Quick, how many of you knew Naomi Osaka’s name without having to go and google it?
Now, in the greater context, if this incident does, in fact, point out issues pertaining to sexism and double standards in tennis officiating and those issues get addressed, some good may come of it. But on a fundamental level, I can’t really have much sympathy for Serena here. Ultimately, you don’t get to behave in a manner that runs afoul of the rules and then complain when those rules are enforced, even if you think there are shitty or dubious motives involved in that enforcement.
• The WNBA is badass, people. Watch that sport. Given the women’s basketball players in this country some love. They’re among the most dominant of athletes we’ll ever see in our lifetime. The U.S. women’s national team has won six straight Olympic golds and lost one game in the last 19 years. It is the pinnacle of performance in the sport of women’s basketball. The WNBA season which just concluded with the Seattle Storm winning their third championship was great, interest was up, and I appreciate that ESPN dedicated more attention and more resources to the league. Now we need to get more money in the league, so these players aren’t breaking their bodies playing year-round all across the globe in order to make a living. And I’m happy that in Seattle, they’ll get to close out the era (error?) of Key Arena with a championship. I’ve sent many, many, many, many, many days in that building, which is due to be razed here this fall as a new arena is going to be built.
• I’ve spent the whole goddamn summer drafting blog after blog after blog about how bored I am with the game of baseball. In short: Three True Outcomes baseball sucks. But I was so bored watching it that I also got bored writing about it, and there’d be a very good possibility that all of you would be bored reading about it.
• When you’re football team is condemned to the swirling, sucking eddy of despair that is life in the second division, you’d best find ways to have fun with it. Norwich are, well, not very good, owing mostly to the fact that, after not being very last year while nonetheless being blessed with several élite young talents, the club promptly sold those élite young talents for large numbers of quid – one of whom, James Maddison, has looked mighty fine so far for Leicester City – while maintaining the same roster full of mediocre players who were mediocre a season ago. It does bring me joy that Ipswich Town are garbage, and that the 1:1 with Norwich two weeks ago means those clowns still haven’t beaten us since 2009, but that’s about all to be happy about so far. Bleah, Div. 2 sucks. We do, however, have the Taco League going amongst myself, The Official Spouse of In Play Lose – a loyal Swansea City fan – and local Stoke City fan Mike “Words With” Frentz. Fan of the losingest team buys the tacos at the end of the season. If your team gets relegated, you buy twice. If your team gets promoted, you eat twice. Spouse is currently four points ahead of me after seven games, while Words With is two points in back of me. The first full-on, no-holds-barred, double-or-nothing grudge match occurs this Tuesday when Stoke host the Swans. If all our teams get relegated – not impossible, since all of our teams are varying degrees of trash – then we’ll, well, I don’t know what the others will be doing but I’ll be pouring some stiff ones:
• It’s good to be back. Drop me a line at inplaylose@gmail.com if you have comments or suggestions. At some point we will do another mailbag edition here soon. And even though I’m still very down on American football, I’m sure there is some bad football happening somewhere on one of the many dozens of sports channels at the moment so I’d better get busy. (Go, Rutgers, go.) I already know there will be bad baseball today, since I’m going to the Giants game, although the Giants are undefeated in my trips to Phone Co. Park this season. We’ll see is the winning streak is sturdy enough to withstand the collective ennui and malaise.
