Quick Misses

WE WILL start with some roundball today. It's been pointed out to me on several occasions that we don't talk enough roundball here at In Play Lose. The Lose loves me some roundball, of course, and the local club is certainly making it easy to love the NBA again. The Golden State Warriors are 29-5, possess the league's best offense and the league's best defense, to boot. They are dynamic and exciting and the O-rena has become the sort of electric madhouse of a home court everyone knew it could.

The Dubs have been good the last couple of seasons, of course, and their only significant change in the offseason was, of all things, to replace the head coach, which didn't seem to make much sense when it happened. But new head coach Steve Kerr came in, looked at the talent amassed, thanked his lucky stars, and then said something along the lines of, "um, hey, guys, here's an idea: let's pass the basketball." For all of his motivational prowess, deposed head coach Mark Jackson ran a prehistoric, isolation-heavy offense which negated one the W's greatest strengths – they have excellent passers at every position on the floor. With Kerr's more open flow offense, the Warriors are a terror. They're a matchup nightmare because they can adapt to seemingly any situation – they have the best backcourt in the NBA, they have slashers and transition players, they have role players, they have instant offense on the bench, they have shutdown 1-on-1 defenders. The challenge will be to keep their big men, David Lee and Andrew Bogut, healthy for the entire season, because those two can clean the glass and because Bogut is an elite defender, and Kerr has to balance the need to grab homecourt advantage in the loaded West with the need to ration minutes.

But it's interesting to note how a change in coaching and a simple philosophical shift catapulted this team into the stratosphere. The team flirted with trades and the like in the offseason, but then came to realize it wasn't necessary. The end result is a team that's pretty dazzling to watch, and has the look of being special – a term, in sports, which has enormous connotations.

Anyway, let's lace up the sneakers here and hit the hardwood first. To the buzzard points!

• I think they have reached the threshold of misery at Madison Square Garden after Saturday, when the Knicks lost their 15th in a row, getting blown out by 28 by a bad Charlotte Bobcats Hornets team. I don't think any more losses, at this point, really matter. It can't any worse than that, can it?

The Knicks are 5-35 and possess the worst record in the NBA, and new Knicks president Phil Jackson (sort of) had to fall on his sword after this one:

"This is a mea culpa. I take responsibility for it."

The reason he only sort of falls on the sword is that he then says this:

"Obviously I didn't do the right thing in picking the group of guys that were here. A lot of it was etched in stone, we had guys with guaranteed contracts... There was something going on there that didn't click toward making winning necessary or a possibility for us."

So, in other words, the players suck, and the previous administration was stupid for signing them. This is classic coach speak, of course, whereby you shift the blame at the same time you admit your culpability.

Carmelo Anthony missing 10 games with a bad knee certainly hasn't helped, nor the absence for 12 games by what remains of Amar'e Stoudemire, but the Knicks were already awful with them in the lineup, and I don't think there is much point in having them hurry back from the injuries. In trading away two players and getting nothing in return of value last week, the Knicks signaled they had given up on the season. The lineup for Saturday's 28-point debacle v. Charlotte was maybe as bad as I've ever seen in the NBA. The Knicks will hope to rebuild through the draft and also free agency in the offseason, but the Zen Master did, in fact, offer up a nugget of truth in that regard which almost no pro sports execs will care to admit:

"We're all worried about the fact that money is not going to just be able to buy you necessary talent. You're going to have to have places where people want to come and play ... "

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2015/01/10/4465550/jackson-now-its-up-to-me-to-build.html#storylink=cpy

In other words, there is a legit danger of Edmonton Disease creeping in. And see, it's that kind of stuff which I've always appreciated from Phil Jackson. He's someone who generally isn't afraid to speak to broader issues in a team or the game as a whole. He also then ripped the silly, bright-shiny-object mentality which has hindered the franchise for decades:

"We're going through this period of time and for some of the people that have been fans of this team have told me many times that there's been this impression that maybe the team should blow it up and should start over again and it's never happened. It's always been going after the next big star. We kept searching for the big star to change our fortunes which has never happened in the last 45 years or so, so reality is that this is probably the best way to go about the business and to begin and to restart and do it the right way and put it together in a way that really makes sense."

So even though I dock him for some coach speak there earlier, I gotta give him some props for this. He needs all the props he can get right about now, since that team is even worse than the 76ers at the moment – and speaking of which, they must be really aggravated at the Philly nerve center, since this is the second year in a row where their concerted efforts at being the worst team in the NBA are being actively thwarted. Last year's awful team was done in by the Milwaukee Bucks and their refusal to play together in any sort of an arrangement looking like a team. This year, it's the Knicks. The 76ers will have to try harder, or try easier, as the case may be, and it won't matter anyway, since Cleveland will win the draft lottery again even if they make the playoffs, since it's the only thing Cleveland ever wins.

• Speaking of the Cavs, their attempt at creating an instant championship contender hasn't gone very well so far. In spite of signing LeBron, and trading those two top NBA draft picks they've had to Minnesota for Kevin Love, the Cavs are only 19-19 and can't seem to figure out how to play together. This has led to a certain amount of disquiet in Cleveland, of course, who are desperate for a winner. But the Cavs made a couple of decent trades last week, acquiring some pieces without giving up much of anything, and they basically have the whole season to use as a chemistry experiment, because the East stinks and .500 ball will work just fine for getting into the playoffs. And come April, they still have the best player on the planet on their team.

• The Knicks have now filled out their depleted roster with a couple of guys signed to 10-day contracts. The Lose is a big fan of the 10-day, which is the sports world's equivalent of being a temp. I always enjoyed being a temp, actually. I liked it far more than most of my fulltime jobs. You don't get paid as much, sure, but you're also genuinely appreciated because the organization you're working for desperately needs some stuff done, so you're helping them out in a bind. Likewise, NBA clubs don't bother signing guys to 10-day contracts for the purposes of sitting them at the end of the bench. There are plenty of 7'0" stiffs who can do that. In fact, I've never understand what value the Chuck Nevitts of the world offered in the first place, since you wouldn't be caught dead with them on the floor at a meaningful time. (At least those guys have a sense of humour about it, the funniest of which was Scott Hastings, who once said he was always spoken of in the same sentence as Michael Jordan – "that Scott Hastings, he's no Michael Jordan" – and who responded to his usual box score line of 1 minute of play, 0-0 from the floor, 0-0 from three, 0-0 from the FT line, 0 offensive rebounds, 0 total rebounds, 0 assists, 0 blocked shots, 0 turnovers, and 0 fouls, by saying such a statline was called a "trillion" and that he led the league in trillions.) When you sign a 10-day contract, they usually actually need you to play. (One of the Knicks temps got 18 minutes the other night.) You can sign two 10-days in a season with the same club, but after that, they have to sign you for the whole season. It's kind of a cool audition, and a few guys have managed to stick going this route over the years. And as an inherent fan of the underdogs, I always want to see these kinds of guys do well.

• One other bit of Knicks news here, which actually segues nicely into talking about the NFL playoffs. This is what Phil Jackson said about Knicks head coach Derek Fisher:

"The fans, I want them to leave Derek alone in this regard. He's doing the best job possible. It's not his fault."

Now, Phil Jackson and Derek Fisher have brought to New York with them the famous triangle offense which was a staple of Jackson's teams in Chicago and L.A. What they've come to discover, of course, is that it was a whole lot easier to run a triangle offense with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen and Shaq and Kobe and Pau Gasol. (In New York, the natives are skeptical.) It's been a belief among many, in fact, that Jackson's genius as a coach actually involved little more than having some of the best players in the history of the game be on his teams, and that this foray into management with New York is an attempt, on his part, to prove the naysayers wrong. Frankly, you can probably run any offense with Shaq and be successful, so long as "throw the ball to the huge guy" is the first option. It's also been insinuated that the Knicks, as constructed this season, don't have 'the right kind of players' to run the triangle effectively, to which I say, "THEN WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO RUN IT?!?!?!" As a coach, you have to give your players the best chance to win the game. Stubbornly sticking with something that doesn't work is absolutely stupid.

Juxtapose that attitude with what we saw in Foxboro on Saturday, where the New England Patriots were in a tough matchup with the Ravens. I said to Phonerz J. Magratheazaphod, the Official Sad Broncos Fan of In Play Lose, that New England would probably have to throw for 450 yards in order to win this game, because the Ravens were decimated by injuries in the secondary this season but were strong at every other position. They threw for 418, so I wasn't too far off. In fact, Tom Brady didn't hand the ball off once the entire second half. The Pats ran the ball only 13 times for 14 yards, with a QB sneak being the only designed running play of the second half. The Pats have striven for more balance in the offense recently, of course, but sometimes you have to stop trying to establish the run, and start trying to win the game. The best coaches adapt and adjust to the situation.
And New England has maybe the best of all time in that regard with Bill Belichick at the helm. Belichick pulled out all the stops in the Pats' 35:31 win, including one of the most ingenious things I've ever seen on a football field when down 14 pts. in the 3rd Quarter:

OK, so at first glance, that doesn't look like much. That's just a seam route to the tight end, right? Well, no. Take a look at the five guys in the offense line again in that gif and you'll see #47 Michael Hoomanawanui, who caught the pass, lined up at the usual left tackle position:

The rules require seven men on the line – five linemen, who are ineligible to catch a pass, and two guys on the end who can. You generally bunch up the five linemen together in a tight row ... but you don't have to. The rules also stipulate that players with numbers 51-79 on offense are designated as lineman by default, but you can use them as receivers if you report to the referee, which is what you see all the time in short yardage, when a lineman will come in and line up as a tight end or blocking back. But the reverse case is true as well: you can take a receiver and declare him to be a lineman, which is what the Patriots did with a running back, #34 Shane Vereen, lined up in the slot:

The referee announced that #34 was 'ineligible' and can't go out for a pass, but the Ravens didn't pay attention. They just looked at the formation, saw five guys bunched together and assumed they were linemen, assumed #34 was a receiver, and then promptly let the #47 masquerading as a left tackle run uncovered down the center of the field for a big gain. The Patriots then ran this same sort of formation twice more before the Ravens staff finally figured out what the hell was going on, but by that point the Pats were down at the 10-yard line, and New England promptly scored to make it 28-21 and get back in the game.
In keeping with being the whiniest franchise in all of sports, the Ravens bitched about it afterwards, but the fact is that it was a legal play. It was within the rules. If anything, I wondered why no one had thought of this before. (Apparently, Alabama ran something like this against L.S.U., but I'd never seen it in the pros.) And this is maybe one of the ballsiest moves ever, if you think about it. You're down 2 TDs in the 3rd Quarter of a playoff game, you desperately need to score this drive, and you go with a gimmick formation to save your season? Absolutely brilliant. The Pats then tied the score at 28-28 on another trick play – a backward pass across the field from Tom Brady to WR Julian Edelman – a former college QB – who then threw a 51-yard TD pass over top of a befuddled Ravens defense. A play the Pats have never run, and no amount of film study of an opponent can prepare you for a play they've never run before.
Now, football has lots more leeway than most any other sport when it comes to the creative sorts of things you can do on the field, of course. But the point is that, in any sport, you need other ideas sometimes. The Royals were so far behind the A's in the AL wild card playoff that they abandoned all conventionality and just start stealing bases in any situation imaginable, which helped turn the tide. Going by the book makes no sense when you have to win now. And going back to the Knicks, if your team can't make sense of the book, then throw the damn thing away and try something else.

• Dez Bryant didn't make the catch:

OK, well, in my opinion, he did make the catch. But by the letter of the rule, this was an incomplete pass. Is it a dumb rule? Yes, very much so, but that's not the referees' problem. Much like the infamous tuck rule of snowy NFL days of lore and yore, the rules were properly applied in the case of this pass, a spectacular play on 4th down by Dez Bryant of the Dallas Cowboys which was overturned on review, giving the Packers the ball back, after which they ran out the clock.
This particular rule about catching the football is referred to as the 'Calvin Johnson rule' in the NFL, since the Lions lost a TD, and a game, due to a catch their super receiver made being determined to be an incomplete pass. And the Lions, of course, who lost in controversial fashion to Dallas a week ago, couldn't help but troll the Cowboys a bit:

But that's a stupid rule. Seriously, that's a stupid, stupid rule that never needed to be written. Common sense dictates that Bryant caught the football against Green Bay – he has the ball, he comes down with both feet down and in bounds, he lunges for the goal line and loses it then. In attempting to write the rules as airtight as possible, it simply has made the whole scenario more murky and taken common sense out of the equation. You don't need more rules most of the time. You need less rules and competent persons doing the officiating empowered to make decisions. This is true in football, in baseball, and most every game. *cough cough scrabble cough cough*

• On a happy note, this guy is a new hero of mine, because that is hard core. That is about the most terrifyingly awesome thing I have ever heard of.

• And as a final note, I will be curious to watch the NCAA Championship Game tonight. Personally, I think Oregon wins, and probably not by a small margin, but let's hope the first go at this sort of game turns out to be a good one. And one great piece of Lose related trivia: Ezekiel Elliott, the Buckeyes' star running back, is the son of Stacy Elliott, who played football at Missouri and was on the field for the worst piece of officiating in sports history. Remember Hanlon's razor, folks, and always assume incompetence. You're usually right in doing so, and sometimes depressingly so.

Quick Misses

Always a fan of the work of David Maiki !     http://wondermark.com/1k67/

LOTS to talk about. To the buzzard points!

• It was somewhat fitting, in the season we can christen The Year The NFL Couldn’t Do Anything Right, that the only thing anyone talked about after the first week of the playoffs was an officiating controversy in Dallas. Instead of talking about the games themselves, and the players making plays on the field, everyone was talking about how the arbiters and administrators of the game should’ve all been fitted with clown shoes.
To be fair here, after the play in question, which came with about 8½ remaining in the game, with the Lions leading 20-17 and possessing the ball on Dallas' 46 yard line, it wasn’t the officials’ fault that a) the Lions wimped out and didn’t go for it 4th-and-1; b) their punter shanked a 10-yard punt; c) they aided and abetted the Cowboys scoring drive with two defensive penalties, both of which were obvious infractions; d) the defense couldn't get a stop on 4th-and-6 when every single person who has watched a Dallas Cowboys game in the past decade knew that Jason Witten would be the primary target of the pass [miss of the blatant holding penalty aside since, you know, it was only right in the middle of field where everyone was looking, and thus was hard to see]; and e) Matt Stafford fumbled twice on the Lions’ final possession after Dallas had taken the lead. That right there is enough mistakes for two games, let alone 6½ minutes. The Lions still had their chances, and basically beat themselves down the stretch.
Having said all of that:

Picking up the flag on this play is terrible. Absolutely terrible. The defender makes contact and makes no effort to play the ball. That’s a penalty. Tack on another 15 for Dez Bryant screaming on the field of play (which should’ve been called, but the dysfunctional group of zeebs were too busy making a mess of things and didn’t throw a flag), and the Lions would’ve had the ball inside the Dallas 20, primed to score again and possibly put the game out of reach. Now, given that it’s the Detroit Lions we’re talking about here, the potential for them to screw it up was still there, but this play very much changed the tone of the game. It definitely shifted momentum (well, the shank punt did probably more so). Dallas caught a break and, given a second life, made the most of it, which is what good teams do.
 Which is saying something, because Dallas looked comically awful in their first game of the year against the 49ers, and somehow have figured it out on the fly this season and become a pretty good team. This particular game was the best of the playoff weekend in terms of on-field talent, and The Lose was curious to see whether the 2013 TLOTY Award Winners or the 1st ballot inductee into the Hall of Lose be the one(s) to mess it up. Turns out, everyone involved had help in messing it up for them from the guys in the stripes.

• The Lions and their fans were livid about this, of course, and the frustration led to an abundant number of clever memes online, which I approve of, but enough with the conspiracy theories already. The game wasn’t fixed. That mess in Dallas doesn’t even come close to seeming malicious, unlike this debacle, where the fix was clearly in, nor this, nor this, nor this curious run, nor the granddaddy of them all. The Lose inherently subscribes to the theory of Hanlons razor when it comes to officials, and I never assume malice if incompetence is in the neighbourhood. (And my faith in this concept has already been tested to the extreme, but I still believe it to be true.) The NFL has a ways to go when it comes to on-field corruption. This is certainly one area they could use some work on.

• The NFL is planning on floating a proposal at their upcoming league meetings to add two playoff teams in 2015, but the game last Saturday in Charlotte was an advertisement for playoff contraction if there ever was one. The 7-8-1 Carolina Panthers, who were counted among this sad lot before ‘miraculously’ winning their last four games and the NFC South title (‘miraculously’ meaning they beat four really terrible teams and won an awful division), won 27:16 over an Arizona Cardinals team QB’d by Ryan Lindley, who put up a 6.1 QBR in the game, but what can you expect from what is basically their 4th-string QB? The Cardinals gained 78 yards in the game, which is a playoff record low. The Panthers, dominating the stats and outgaining the Cardinals by over 300 yards, negated these advantages by turning the ball over routinely. Had the Cardinals not coughed it up twice in the 2nd half – a half where they gained all of 13 total yards – they actually stood a chance to win the game. The two teams combined for six turnovers and any aspect in the game involving kicking the football was fraught with disaster on either side. It was an astonishingly bad football game which made you wonder if it was really the best the league had to offer.
What a strange end to the season for the Cardinals, who started the season 9-1 and finished the season losing to a sub-.500 team in the first round of the playoffs. It was a shell of the team that had started the season 9-1 and had a 3-game lead in the NFC West. (A team which, truth be told, was pretty fortunate to be 9-1). Between using a QB who they had cut and then resigned off the Chargers practice squad, and having a revolving door at the running back position due to injuries, the Cardinals essentially attempted to try and play the game without a functioning offense. Their defense then wore out and started getting gashed at season’s end. They looked more like a 5-11 team than an 11-5 one, and there were almost certainly a few homebound teams in the NFC watching that performance by the Cardinals, who looked truly terrible, and wondering why it was that the Cardinals were in the playoffs instead of them.

• One such team would have to be the 49ers, who fired ‘mutually agreed to part ways’ with head coach Jim Harbaugh. All Harbaugh did in four seasons was compile a 49-22-1 record and take the 49ers to three straight NFC Championship Games and a Super Bowl two seasons ago. The 49ers had gone almost a decade without being relevant, then Harbaugh rises and they suddenly become a power, and now he’s gone and why, you ask? Well, he was ‘fired’ for one of the most common of reasons in the workplace: his bosses thought he was a pain in the ass.
There were rumblings about this last off-season, of course, when weird reports started surfacing about the possibility of Harbaugh winding up coaching the Cleveland Browns. Which, on the surface, made no sense, given that the 49ers were less than 10 yards away from winning the Super Bowl two seasons ago, and the length of Richard Sherman’s fingertips away from going back to the Super Bowl a season ago. They were on a terrific run of success. Why fix what ain’t broke?
Well, what was broke, obviously, was the working relationship between Harbaugh and the 49ers front office. We forget, sometimes, amid the flurry of statistics and the immediacy of the results, that sports are, like any other enterprise on earth, about people. People have to find a way to work together. (Viewing the game exclusively as a bunch of numbers, and forgetting that these are actual human beings prone to mistakes and irrationality, is one of the reasons why rotisserie league sports are stupid.) In the case of the 49ers, that apparently was no longer possible.
But shouldn’t it matter that Harbaugh was such a successful coach and the team thrived spectacularly? Of course it should. This is some proof that the business of sports isn’t much different from businesses of every other sort, many of which are run badly and a good number of which fail to live up to their potential, often times for the stupidest of reasons. Reading the financial news these days is a lot like reading a Hollywood gossip column. It’s all about corporate politics and in-fighting and bickering and everything else. A couple truths I’ve come to discover in business, however, are that 1) if you’re boss thinks your a pain in the ass, (s)he will find a way to get rid of you; and 2) that (s)he will do that in spite of how well things may or may not be going in the organization as a whole. Bosses willingly make bad decisions if, in the immediate, it gets rid of the pain in the ass. Foolish? Of course it is, but we’re talking about petty personality conflicts here, and no one – no one – seems to be above them.
There were rumblings for months about ‘friction’ and ‘tension’ among the 49ers collective inner circle, and that sort of stuff gets reflected in the on-field performance. The 49ers always seemed distracted out there. They were constantly doing things – taking delay penalties, burning timeouts needlessly, jumping offsides – that indicated a lack of focus. The 49ers played a great first half in Dallas, and then proceeded to play about 15½ games of mediocre football. Toss in a few bad injuries, and they never looked like a serious contender this year.
Now, Harbaugh made out of this deal pretty well – receiving a 7-year, $40 million contract to coach at Michigan, his alma mater – and the 49ers, meanwhile, have now contined their yearlong trend of looking stupid. Their new stadium in Santa Clara hasn’t exactly garnered great reviews, the team grossly underperformed at 8-8, there were off-field conduct issues and an abundance of self-created drama. Now they have to find a coach who will be willing to take over a team that isn’t aging terribly well, that lacks speed on the outsides, lacked continuity in the trenches, and whose $126m QB, Colin Kaepernick, horribly regressed during the season. Oh yeah, and he has to replace a guy who was wildly successful, and also genuinely popular with players and fans alike. Good luck with that.

• And I wondered, at the time, just how much the 49ers would come to rue losing the Super Bowl two seasons ago to the Ravens. The 49ers had a better team than the Ravens, in my opinion, but they were nervous and fidgety and made mistakes, had defensive breakdowns and let it get away from them. This after essentially fumbling away, to the New York Giants, the NFC Championship Game the season before. Those are the sorts of games that really get to you, after a while. It’s one thing to be terrible at something. It’s quite another to be really, really good at it, but never be quite good enough.

32,000 pts. means the guy should go 1-on-5. Of course it should.

• Having lost 14 in a row, plummeting to an overall record of 5-34, and actually supplanting the 76ers in the dog house of the Atlantic Division, the New York Knicks have now signaled their intent to throw in the towel, as they made a trade this week which sent J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert packing in exchange for three guys they promptly waived. The trade done simply to make people go away is a telltale sign your NBA team is tanking ... no, don’t call it tanking, it’s clearing cap space so as to pave the way for a brighter future! Pfft. Whatever. NBA trades are always astoundingly, hilariously and deliberately lopsided, the idea behind them being that if you’re losing with a guy on your team, you can go on losing without him. Easily the most hilarious trade of the year is the continuing Andrei Kirilenko saga in Philadelphia – or not in Philadelphia, as the case may be, since he has refused to report and has now been suspended, which isn’t any big deal to him since he doesn’t want to be in Philly to begin with. He was acquired by the Sixers to prop up the salary cap numbers and be dealt at the trade deadline, and for no other reason than that. They couldn’t give a shit whether he can actually still play or not. Being well aware of what the Sixers think of him, he doesn’t want to go there. He’s on a personal leave from the Nets, hasn’t reported to Philly and has no intention of doing so. So now the Sixers have no trade piece to dangle, in their ever widening attempts to create so much cap space that they can then foolishly throw at free agents who wouldn’t want to be caught dead with that team. Other teams who might want Kirilenko can simply wait it out. Why make a deal? Why give up anything for a player whose trade value is now essentially nothing? It’s dumb moves like this make me question the though process of the entire 76ers organization. The whole “be bad until you’re good” line of NBA reasoning, in the end, rarely pans out. Far more often, you’re just bad ad infinitum. About the only business that’s good for is the business of writing this blog.

• Finally this week, this thought: If you do not like the way that you are being portrayed, and your response to it is to promptly behave in that very way, all you have managed to do is prove their point. The joke is on you.

Duck, Duck, Lose

THE ADVENT of a college playoff has already paid dividends, in that the championship game will now pit two teams – Oregon and Ohio State – who actually somewhat played their way into it as opposed to winning a beauty contest. Given the dog-and-pony show of tradition and self-interest which passed before it, I have no doubt that Alabama and Florida State would’ve been christened the two best teams in the country a year ago while the Ducks and the Buckeyes pled their cases from the sidelines. The new system has detractors (most of whom currently reside in the state of Texas), but it’s pretty hard to argue after the two games on Jan. 1 that Oregon and Ohio State are unworthy finalists.

It took until well into football season to find the worst play of the year for 2014, and all it took was about 16 hours to find a worthy candidate for 2015. Behold the exploits of Florida State QB Jameis Winston in the Rose Bowl against the Oregon, a comical 8 seconds of folly resulting in a gift-wrapped TD for the Ducks:

Psst ... yer doin' it wrong ...

The Seminoles completely melted down in the 3rd Quarter of the National Semifinal, turning the ball over five times en route to getting destroyed 59:20 by the Quacks, which ended FSU’s 29-game winning streak and, most likely, the collegiate career of their QB, who was defiant in defeat, if not in complete denial:

“If everybody in this room just want to be real with themselves, this game could have went either way. We turned the ball over a lot. We beat ourself. Just be real with yourself right now. We beat ourself.”
– Jameis Winston

I’m not exactly sure in what sport a 39-pt. defeat could be considered to have been close – 5-day Test cricket, perhaps – but football sure ain’t it. And I cannot recall an athlete – and, by proxy, a team – more worthy of being rooted against than Winston and the Seminoles in recent memory.

Winston, of course, has had a seemingly endless series of legal and off-field troubles, the majority of them stemming from an alleged sexual assault. Now, it’s not The Lose’s place to cast judgment in such a case, but the broader narrative which has come to pass through all of that is of an athlete feeling a sense of entitlement and that they can get away with anything – a notion fortified by the behaviours of those involved in the program, the university, and the town where the university is located. All of the flawed processes involved in that particular case – from the investigation by the Tallahassee P.D. to the FSU disciplinary hearings – gave off the impression that it was far more important to make sure the Heisman Trophy-winning QB would be out on the field the following Saturday than it was to make sure actual justice and due process were followed.

I have no doubt that Florida State is a serviceable university where you can get a decent education, but the fact of the matter is that success on the football field has given the school a stature and national profile it could never otherwise hope to attain. In attempting to explain the bizarro culture of college athletics to The Official Wife of In Play Lose, I’ve found the best way to do so is liken the athletic department to an arm of the marketing wing. When the football team wins, the alumni are happy and the donations go up. As such, no one should ever be surprised if/when athletes and, more notably, coaches wind up being treated like BMOCs who feel free to run about the place and do whatever they like with little or no consequences attached.

And Florida State is such a place, to be sure. It’s instances like the Winston caper which leads to the term “football school” being thrown about with particular disdain. The Seminoles have been named national champions three times, and everyone even peripherally involved in the program has obviously gotten too big for their britches. F.S.U. football has a largesse to it that makes Tallahassee’s other notable residents – the politicos who govern the weirdest state in America – pale in comparison. By giving off the impression through all of this that criminal behaviour is somehow condoned, it makes it pretty clear that the university has lost its way. No place was this more evident in recent years than at Penn State, where a series of unspeakable crimes occurred on the watch of iconic football coach Joe Paterno. It was a common refrain that JoPa had ‘built Penn State,’ and it wasn’t necessarily hyperbole, as the Nittany Lions’ success on the gridiron over JoPa’s 50 years gave the university a profile and a stamp of legitimacy from which it grew to be a major research institution. But at what cost? No one should ever be above the law, and no one whomever enabled such disgusting acts should ever be above reproach – not even an icon. Especially not an icon, in fact. I have always found the virulent support for Paterno in the aftermath of that scandal, which took him and much of his legacy down with it, to be completely misguided and somewhat disturbing.  Because for all the good that may have come to the university over the years, if a school reaches a point where it cannot even guarantee the safety of young people, it has fundamentally failed as an institution.

And in the case of the Rose Bowl, most everyone wanted to see Florida State fail. Now, to be fair, Oregon has ‘employed’ its share of knuckleheads at times as well during its 20-year ascent to the peak of college athletics. No school has a greater sense of entitlement attached to it these days than one whose growth has been almost entirely funded by Phil Knight, the founder of Nike and college athletics’ single greatest sugar daddy. And anyone well versed in Pac-12 history, and the ways fans would get on players at the dubious Mac Court, knows that the Oregons are not always well-versed in the ways of good taste. But the Ducks definitely took on the role of the guys in the white hats in Pasadena. Florida State won a national championship and 27 games in a row with Jameis Winston as a starting QB, many of them were games where the Seminoles had to rally late to pull off improbable wins. Both on the field and off, he’s always found a way to wriggle off the hook. (Or, occasionally, had one found for him.) With a teflon-coated leader and a propensity for pulling the great escape, Florida State’s aura and mystique (along with its opinion of itself) got bigger and bigger. The impression their play gave off was that they weren’t that good, but no one could seem to prove otherwise on the field.

Until the Rose Bowl, that is, when the bubble finally burst and did so in the most comical, most embarrassing, and most emphatic of ways.

“No one likes to lose, man. I mean, losing is really not in my vocabulary, to be honest with you.”
– Jameis Winston

Given where he’s going to wind up next season, it probably should be. Winston will now duck out of town (pun intended) and likely find himself a top draft pick come April, placed upon a terrible team with terrible talent that is desperate for any sort of good news. He certainly has the talent to play at that level, but if you’re the Bucs or the Titans or some other downtrodden franchise, do you really want to give the keys to a guy who’s shown so little maturity? And I’m not just talking about kids-doing-stupid-things-that-kids-do kind of stuff here when I talk about immaturity. I’m talking about deviant behaviour verging on criminality. Being an NFL QB is the single toughest job in all of sports, and along with it comes an inevitable leadership role both on the field and off of it as well. You are, in fact, a role model and you are, in fact, something of a civic leader when you go under center on Sundays for a living, whether you like it or not. You have to grow up in a hurry, because no one is going to hold your hand anymore. If you can’t hack it, they get rid of you and find someone who can. Such is the nature of such a competitive business.

As for Florida State, well, universities are inherently transitory. The student body turns over completely on a regular basis, it shifts and moves on. Given how much sweeping under the rug went on the past couple of years in Tallahassee, there will probably be a palpable sense of relief if and when it all just goes away.

And somehow, I just managed to get through an entire article about Florida State without mentioning that stupid tomahawk chop … d’oh! …

The Lose of the Year

“It’s a stupid game, anyway.”

THERE are no shortage of worthy candidates for The Lose of the Year award. There will be no repeat winner this year, as 2013’s TLOTY recipients, the Detroit Lions, got their shit together and have finally started playing to their considerable potential.

Their in-town feline counterparts, the Tigers, certainly merited some consideration for the award in 2014 as they continued their act of squandering a collection of talent often referred to in soccer annals as a ‘golden generation.’ Plan A at Comerica Park has always been to have Miguel Cabrera et. al hit lots of home runs and have their seemingly endlessly deep starting pitching rotation strike everyone out, but even Plan A isn’t foolproof in a game like baseball, where the margins are so small between success and failure. They were swept out of the World Series in 2012 by a San Francisco Giants team which could shift shapes and adapt, which is what you have to do in baseball’s playoffs. You need Plan B. The Tigers didn’t have a plan B back then, and they still don’t have it. They don’t catch the ball, they have no speed, and their bullpen continues to be frightful. The solution to a 2013 playoff failure was to run Prince Fielder out of town, since his $214,000,000 contract and sub-Mendoza line playoff batting average made him an easy scapegoat, and while acquiring Tampa Bay ace David Price for the stretch drive was certainly a nice addition to the arsenal of arms taking the hill every fifth day, they negated this acquisition in 2014 with no viable defenders in the outfield and a revolving door at shortstop worthy of scorn. The Tigers still don’t catch the ball, they still can’t close out a game, and they still have no speed (although their solution to this last quandary was certainly amusing, as the Fielder trade to Texas netted them Ian Kinsler, who’s been picked off more times than any other player during the course of his career). Unsurprisingly, this club flopped yet again in the playoffs, and now the bills have started coming due. Free agency has come a-calling and it will be impossible to keep this team together.

So the Tigers earn TLOTY consideration for missing out on a golden opportunity yet again, which really is an unpardonable sin in sports. You have to make the most of your chances, because it’s so damn hard to ultimately be successful. Professional athletics are the single-most competitive endeavour on the planet, and as I’ve said before, failure is the default.

But unlike sporting endeavours in the rest of the world, where being awful will get you a one-way ticket to the 2nd Division, the North American system entitles clubs to simply continue being awful for decades or, in the case of the Cubs, for centuries. What’s more, with concepts like salary caps and luxury taxes and revenue sharing in place, it’s never been a better time to be terrible, as doing so appears to result in no significant sorts of financial losses. So long as the value of the franchises continue to rise, yearly profit-and-loss statements are immaterial. And forget what Forbes publishes every year in terms of value. There is no telling what the true market values of franchises are when the perpetually pathetic Sacramento Kings fetched $534,000,000 after this mess was finally figured out (the owners may change but the incompetence has apparently remained), while the L.A. Clippers – the Clippers! – went for $2,000,000,000. That’s a lot of zeroes – zero being about all the Clippers have ever amounted to, being about the 7th-most relevant L.A. pro sports franchise during their existence and languishing far behind the Lakers and the Dodgers and the Angels and the Kings and the Ducks and USC football … sorry, couldn’t resist a shot at Troy there … but at least the NBA finally got rid of this troglodyte during the course of that Clippers sale, which counts as a win in any year.

Actual testimony by former Clippers owner Donald Sterling, under oath, in 2003

So, um, where were we … oh yes, right, we were talking about losing. Given that failure is the default setting, The Lose isn’t inclined to award the TLOTY Award to those perpetually lame and irrelevant franchises like the Cubs, the Edmonton Oilers or the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Any hack can be terrible, when you get right down to it. Nor am I particularly impressed by clubs that actively try to be terrible (but don’t call it tanking, whatever you do) for the purposes of trying to strike it rich in the draft. We’re also going to give some mulligans to teams that were ravaged by injuries, such as the Texas Rangers. They may have been trending downward talentwise at the start of the year, but the Rangers were reduced to running out retreads and guys barely adapted to playing for the Round Rock Express, their AAA affiliate, much less at the major league level. In general, The Lose considers health to be a skill – a guy who can’t stay healthy is not an asset to a team – and injuries hurt bad teams more, as their depth is lacking and they’re unable to compensate, but a run like the Rangers had last year was unprecedented. That one doesn’t count. And while the Philadelphia Eagles’ late-season collapse had definitely been inglourious, what were you expecting from Mark Sanchez?

“Not much, to be honest. He’s still the same dude.”
– Seahawks DT Michael Bennett, asked what the Seahawks were expecting from Mark Sanchez after Seattle’s 24:14 win in Philly

There are many worthy candidates across the wide spectrum of sports this year – and with the Olympics and the World Cup in 2014, we truly have a deep field from which to choose – but each of this year’s TLOTY nominees displayed incompetence, both on the field and off, that was both impressive and, at times, downright disturbing. For a few of the long-suffering, there has been some signs of life here in 2014. The Houston Astros are making some incremental steps towards respectability after a historically bad run in baseball. They still can’t pitch, but some of their young prospects should be ready to excel. On the football front, the Raiders are playing hard, have beaten three straight playoff contenders at home and appear to have actually found themselves a QB to build around, while there are some signs of hope for the Jacksonville Jaguars as well, who have also put some good pieces in place but need to work on some fundamental concepts like protecting the QB:

Eight guys blocking five. What could possibly go wrong?

OK, well, that’s a work in progress.

And by the way, I lump the NCAA in with the pros for the purposes of this discussion, since the NCAA is a professional, moneymaking organization and the whole notion of the student athlete is a sham. They should be paid, period and end of story. Having said that, Washington State is ineligible for this award, despite efforts both creative and inept to be included in the discussion. Their number has been retired.

On with the nominations!

Detroit Pistons
Since we already were hanging around Detroit, we may as well pop by the Palace of Auburn Hills for a moment. The Pistons didn’t actively tank last season, but they gave up halfway through the season when it was apparent that GM Joe Dumars’ ambitious series of free agent signings, once they took to the court, were as a good a match as two left shoes. The Pistons dogged it at the end of the year both to hope to strike it rich in the lottery and protect a provisional draft pick Dumars had foolishly traded away. Dumas was understandably fired at the end of the season, the Pistons have now turned to Stan Van Gundy to attempt to reverse their fortunes and, at 5-23, it’s not really going so well. The Pistons finally bit the bullet and released Josh Smith, one of those big free agents signings from a year ago, essentially paying him $26,000,000 to go away, and the Houston Rockets waited around until he cleared waivers and signed him for cheap. The Lose has no problems with teams overpaying players, by the way. When it comes to sports, I’m a Marxist who believes the labourers should get everything, since nobody pays to watch an owner. But it’s somewhat unavoidable talking about salaries in the NBA, where a guy’s contract is far more important than whether or not they can sink the 3-ball. Understanding Italian politics is easier than understanding the NBA salary cap. And one thing that’s true across the board in sports is that, when you overpay a player and you badly miss on him, no one else is going to solve your problems for you. The Pistons had to take the hit on this one, and this once-proud franchise continues to badly misfire.

Los Angeles Dodgers
We Giants fans have referred to now former Dodgers GM Ned Colletti as ‘Agent Ned’ ever since he left the Giants’ front office in 2005 to take the Dodgers gig, since clearly all of his bad payroll and personnel decisions were proof that he was a double agent secretly working on the Giants’ behalf. And there have been a lot of them, to be sure. Most everything that you can say about the Dodgers in 2014 can be prefaced with the phrase, “for a team with a $250 million payroll.” As in, “for a team with a $250 million payroll, the Dodgers sure were dependent upon Dee Gordon to jumpstart their offense,” and “for a team with a $250 million payroll, the Dodgers sure were dependent upon Clayton Kershaw to win every time out, since if you take their 94 wins and discount the fact that the Dodgers won 21 of Kershaw’s last 22 starts, you wind up with a team that really isn’t very good,” and “for a team with a $250 million payroll, their bullpen sure is six kinds of crap.”
Now, there is no salary cap in baseball, of course, and the Dodgers can certainly afford it, given that their new owners found the $2 billion to buy the club beneath the cushions of their couches, but like I said before with the Pistons, no one is going to solve your problems for you if you grossly overpay everybody. (Except for maybe the Dodgers, of course, who bought up all of Boston’s sludge at the end of 2012, which worked out pretty well for the Bosox, now didn’t it?) The Dodgers of 2014 would up with four starting outfielders for three starting spots – Puig, Crawford, Kemp, Ethier – all of whom are regressing as players, and three of whom have monstrous contracts that basically made them untradable. And you can’t just move one over to play first, since Adrian Gonzalez and his big contract is over there. Meanwhile, the Dodgers also have another outfielder – Van Slyke – on the bench whom they’d like to have playing, and their best minor league prospect is another outfielder. So now you have six guys for three spots, and understandably, none of the six guys are terribly happy about the prospects of sitting on the bench.
In order to go about solving this mess, the Dodgers had to agree to pick up $32.5 million of Kemp’s salary when they finally unloaded him to the Padres this off-season. During the course of their offseason, their whirling dervish of a new GM, Andrew Friedman, has spent $54.5 million to make four guys go away – $32.5 million to the Padres for Kemp, $12.5 million to the Marlins to cover the salaries of Gordon and Dan Haren, and then the Dodgers DFA’d Brian Wilson to the tune of a $9.5 million hit. Even if you have all the money in the world, that sort of inefficiency and sunk cost is bad for business. Remember, this is a zero-sum game, and whatever bad moves your team make will immediately help your competition.
The Dodgers won 94 games last season and won the NL West, but promptly bombed out in the playoffs, dependent entirely upon Kershaw to win for them on the hill and having Kershaw inexplicably turn into a pumpkin in October and live up to his snide nickname of “the best 6-month pitcher in baseball.” (Nah, we don’t call him that here in San Francisco, do we?) Ownership in L.A. has made it clear that winning championships is what matters, but after their flurry of offseason moves, which netted them SS Jimmy Rollins from the Phillies and 2B Howie Kendrick from the Angels, the Dodgers are certainly older but not necessarily any better. With such high expectations, this franchise is ripe for further failure.

California Los Angeles Angels of Lawndale Anaheim
Anyone want Josh Hamilton? He’s only owed $83 million? Any takers? Anyone?

Oakland A’s
We’ve been over this already. The oddity of the winter meetings this year was that the Mariners came out of it looking like the team to beat in the AL West simply by doing nothing while the A’s and Angels went about making themselves worse. Just saying the Mariners are the team to beat sounds weird in and of itself.

Colorado Rockies
It’s always 2001 at Safeco Field in Seattle, and it’s always 2007 at Coors Field, that being the year when the Rockies caught fire and won 21 of their last 22 games at the end of the season, a hot streak which catapulted them all the way to an appearance in the World Series. And like most franchises who achieve little to nothing, 2007 nostalgia is the Rockies’ biggest selling point to their fans, and there is enough love of that nostalgia within the organization to fool themselves into thinking they know what they are doing. Take out that one good month, and the Rockies have basically been awful for the duration of their existence, but have made few changes over the years to the core staff which has permitted this club to veer so badly off-course. The Rockies completely flatlined in 2014, going 66-96 and playing about .250 ball for long stretches of the season. Seemingly unfireable GM Dan O’Dowd resigned after after the season, walking away with very little to show for 15 years on the job, so at least the club may have rid themselves of the idea that everything is copacetic, but new Jeff Bridich is going to have his hands full. The sad truth is that they’re going to continue to be awful, because they play in Denver, which has been, and always will be, where pitching careers go to die. I’m not sure how you ever overcome that disadvantage, but especially so in a deadball era of a game. And one of the many problems in Colorado is that their two best players – Carlos Gonzalez and Troy Tulowitzki – haven’t shown an ability to stay healthy, which means even if the Rockies wanted to trade them, they aren’t going to get full value on the dollar for damaged goods.

Vancouver Canucks
Sigh. My beloved hockey team deserves a post all unto themselves, as they’ve seen every sort of failure in their 44-year history. They’ve gone from the doghouse to standing outside the penthouse and being unable to find their keys. A franchise that once had 17 straight losing seasons and one which has also lost three Stanley Cup finals – one of which (1994 v. the N.Y. Rangers) is considered one of the game’s greatest moments; one of which (2011 v. Boston) ranks among the nastiest Stanley Cup Finals in history (and then there was this ... ugh ...); and one of which (1982 v. the Islanders) was the unlikeliest, nuttiest, most wonderful adventure a professional sports franchise has ever had.
Canucks GM Mike Gillis decided a change was in order after the Canucks were beaten by the Sharks in the 2013 playoffs, firing head coach Alain Vigneault, whose 7-year track record in Vancouver – 6 division titles, 2 President’s Trophies, a trip to the Stanley Cup Finals – clearly indicated that he didn’t know what he was doing. At the same time, the New York Rangers fired head coach John Tortorella, at which point the two franchises swapped coaches. Vigneault promptly took the Rangers to the Stanley Cup finals in 2014, while about the only thing Tortorella achieved in Vancouver was this bit of infamy. Egads.
Torts was always good for a soundbite in Vancouver, of course, as was his way during his regular and wildly entertaining jousts with the media, but he brought a tight, defense-first system to Vancouver and tried to apply it to a club which had been thriving for years on speed and finesse. “Hmm … so, I’ve got the Sedin brothers, who are only two of the most dynamic offensive players in the game for the past decade. I know what I’ll do! I’ll have them kill penalties and block shots!” Suffice to say, that idea caught on about as well as New Coke. The Canucks found themselves out of the playoffs this past season, at which point Torts was gone, along with Gillis for good measure – and rightfully so, as he’d overseen an ongoing soap opera with his team’s goaltenders, wound up trading both Luongo and Schneider for pennies on the Canadian loony, and given out so many no-trade clauses to other players so as to make adjusting his roster almost impossible.
But the Torts caper was a disaster from the getgo. The #1 rule of professional coaching is that you have to know what your players can do and you have to adjust, not them. I had numerous discussions on Canucks message boards about this, as commentators were blaming the players for not adapting – or not being willing to adapt – to the system. That’s not how it works in professional sports. It’s a players game. Put the players in a position to fail, and they will – and, even worse, they’ll also get you fired. Now, to the Canucks credit, they’ve regrouped rather quickly and are a pretty decent team again, but Lord’s Stanley Cup, which hasn’t resided in Vancouver in a century, continues to be elusive – and annoyingly so, given that the L.A. Kings have now won two of them in short order while seemingly doing as little as possible in the regular season, eking their way into the playoffs and then collectively channeling their inner Gretzkys come the spring.

New York Jets

Geno Smith. Need I say more?

New York Knicks
Taking the top job at Madison Square Garden is apparently Phil Jackson’s attempt at proving the naysayers wrong who insist his success as a coach was entirely due to having Jordan and Pippen and Shaq and Kobe. The Knicks are currently 5-26. The naysayers are chortling.

Los Angeles Lakers
“As far as the Lakers ... personally, I just hope they suck forever.”
– Mark Cuban
Speaking of Kobe, the Lakers are must-see TV this year if you like reveling in schadenfreude and also liked smashing your toy trains together when you were a child. The Lakers have been the most dominant, most iconic sports franchise of my lifetime. They were the franchise which everyone always wanted to play for, and thus always had its pick of the greatest players on the planet. But now they’ve completely disintegrated, and, as a Laker hater, I absolutely love it.
This less-than-flattering article painted a grim picture in Los Angeles and pointed the finger directly at Kobe Bryant, the crux of the article being that the Lakers gave him a massive contract extension, in part, because no other marquee player could stand to play with him. Kobe certainly has been an élite player and a warrior during his career, but the key to that last statement are the words ‘has been.’
In the present day, Kobe is a vortex on the floor, a swirling and sucking eddy of despair from which the ball never returns. He shoots and he shoots and he shoots some more. He is currently missing more shots per game than all but 35 players in the league are attempting. Clearly, his best days are behind him – not that he doesn’t keep trying to lead way, and not that the organization doesn’t kowtow to him when he does. When asked why they ran a play at the end of a game for Kobe down a point to OKC, even though Kobe was 3-for-14 from the field, coach Byron Scott’s answer was “32,000 points in his career.”
To which point guard Jeremy Lin responded, “I like gamewinners, too.”
Lin has been one of the guys to conveniently be fingered and take the fall for the Lakers failings, losing his starting job. Not that you can blame anyone on this team for being frustrated, given that the offense is a vortex. Kobe Bryant literally shoots his team out of games. His teammates know it and resent it. Just watch one of their games and note the Laker players’ body language. They all seem exasperated.
The Lakers’ followed up the aforementioned 1-pt. loss to OKC by traveling to Sacramento, where Kobe shot 8-for-30 in a 108:101 loss. He’s taken a few days off since then, needing to rest and recover … and lo and behold, in his absence the Lakers have seven guys hit double figures, play a creative and active offensive game and upset the Warriors, the best team in the league.
Coincidence?
It’s telling that the two best games the Lakers played this year are the game with the Warriors which I just mentioned and an OT win in San Antonio where Nick Young scored 29 off the bench and took the game winning trey in OT instead of Kobe. Otherwise, the Lakers have been awful, posting a 9-20 record and sporting a defense which is verging on being historically bad.
The Lakers got a bad break, of course, when lottery pick Julius Randle suffered a season-ending injury in the very first game of the season. But the entire Lakers apparatus seems broken at the moment. You cannot blame any player worth their salt for wanting to stay away from that mess. But as is usually the case with the Lakers, you have to enjoy them being down while it lasts, because it’s not likely to last that long.

The entire sport of college basketball
Seriously. Watch the games sometime. The games are awful. With the changes in the rules and the more systematic, mathematical approaches on the offensive end, the NBA has become interesting again. There is movement on the floor, there is motion and passing and spreading the court. The college game, meanwhile, is no longer the bastion of imagination and innovation that it used to be. All you have now is overly physical, overly defensive teams who do no phases of the game particularly well.
The simple solution to this is to fire all the coaches. Given the lack of skill on display, it’s debatable whether or not any of them are particularly good at their trade. In truth, it’s far easier to coach defense, to be conservative and risk-averse. It’s somewhat self-preservationist by nature, and college coaches are nothing if not that.
Suffice to say, The Lose is not a disciple of the Cult of the Coach that engulfs the NCAA’s two primary sports. The Lose also holds the entire collection of apologists who report upon those sports in a certain amount of contempt – many of whom were formerly coaches, of course, and who find convenient excuses like one-and-done players (a result of the age limitations imposed by the NBA) to explain why the game has deteriorated. Considering the number of one-and-dones every year is minute compared to the 4500 or so players playing Div. I NCAA basketball, you can see where the idea that it makes a huge impact on the game as a whole is nonsense. They make an impact because the most successful current program – Kentucky – takes full advantage of one-and-dones and recruits them en masse for a single-season shot of glory. I’ve never much cared for John Calipari, but he is right in doing that. The entire system is a cesspool, so why claim otherwise?
The whole game sucks at the moment. It verges on unwatchable. The NCAA tournament, long a staple of great competition and great theatre, was reduced to a dreadful snoozer this past spring. If there was ever a time when college basketball needed another Loyola Marymount to come along, it’s now.

New Orleans Saints
After doing everything right as an organization in their climb towards winning a Super Bowl, the Saints have done almost everything wrong since. There was the bounty scandal and the suspensions, there were earth-shaking upset losses in the playoffs, there was bad defense and a lot of it, there were bad drafts and bad free agent signings, and now there is salary cap armageddon looming on the horizon, as the Saints are already way, way, way over next year’s salary cap in the NFL. The Saints were thought by some to be Super Bowl contenders at the start of this season, but have completely collapsed and are going to miss the playoffs entirely – which is somewhat hard to believe, given that they play in the NFC South, which this is year is one of the worst divisions in the history of professional sports. (But not the worst.) It’s been sad to see, as the Saints have been one of the most entertaining teams in football for a decade now, but a closer look reveals that other than Drew Brees, the Saints just aren’t any good any more.

FIFA and the IOC
These two organizations lost whatever credibility they had left in 2014, which wasn’t much to begin with. These two corrupt bunches of bombasts are doing a fine job of trying to kill off all the good that their sports have accomplished over decades.
Unsurprisingly, cities across the globe are having second thoughts about hosting the Olympics after the bill for Sochi’s Games totaled over $50 billion, and with the continued problems in Rio de Janeiro’s preparations to host the Summer Games in 2016. The only bidders left for the 2022 Winter Games are Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan. Pretty much no democratic nation on earth wants anything to do with the Olympics at the moment. The costs have gotten too high, and the benefits of hosting are no longer worth that sort of investment.
FIFA, meanwhile, has been halfheartedly going through the motions of investigating itself amid accusations that there was widespread corruption and vote fraud amid the process for awarding the World Cups to Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022. Saying the investigation has lacked transparency would be an understatement. Black holes are less opaque.
The irony of this, of course, is that both the IOC and FIFA are likely going to have to turn to the United States to save them – a nation for which the two organizations hold varying degrees of contempt. The IOC has actively encouraged an American bid for the 2024 summer game – and by ‘actively encouraged,’ what I mean is that any American city that wants it bad enough can pretty much have it, at this point. As for FIFA, well, I’ve always thought the Russian bid for 2018 was with merit and attribute a lot of guffawing about the bid to English sour grapes. As for 2022, well, it was interesting that FIFA awarded the World Cup to an oil-rich nation like Qatar, because I’ve thought ever since that an oil-rich city is going to host the World Cup final that year.
Dallas. 

The Philadelphia 76ers
I know that I said before that teams who are actively trying to lose don’t impress me, but the 76ers are impossible to ignore. Haven’t I used up enough cyberink already on this lot? The Sixers followed up their misery from a season ago by starting 0-17 this year. It wasn’t clear if/when the Sixers would ever win a game, and it took a trip to Minnesota to play the beat-up and downtrodden Timberwolves in the worst game played in the NBA this season to finally notch a victory: 104 missed shots, 19% shooting from the 3-point line, and the game having to be restarted when it was realized the teams were going in the wrong direction, which the NBA has a very specific protocol about. That was definitely an appropriate opening to this game, given that it’s easy to question the direction both those clubs are headed. The Wolves continue to be one of the most useless franchises in all of professional sports, and nothing the 76ers have done the past couple of years has implied there is the slighest bit of competence involved. But 48 minutes and 100+ bricks tossed later, the 76ers had their first win. I know that I am fond of saying there are no ugly wins, but …
Philly’s now scrambled their way to mark of 4-24 (and to the 76ers’ credit, they scrambled back from 23 down to beat Miami the other night), thus making it unlikely they’ll live up to their moniker(s) by posting a 6-76 season record. That may be the only thing the 76ers manage to accomplish this season.
Gads, this team is horrible. They rank near the bottom of nearly every offensive category. The coaching staff has been employing a volume-discount sort of approach to the offensive end of the floor, and the 76ers play at one of the fastest tempos in the league, which means that they shoot a lot, they miss a lot, and they commit a lot of turnovers. The defense isn’t much to write home about either, but as you can see, they’ve been working hard on defending the pick and roll:

Uh, yeah.
The 76ers are built to be terrible. Other than Michael Carter-Williams and maybe Tony Wroten, there isn’t a single player on this team with much of an NBA future. They were built to be terrible last year, as well, but it didn’t net them the #1 pick they were coveting, and since they had so much fun having Nerlens Noel on their roster, who was hurt and couldn’t play, they decided to draft Joel Embiid, who is hurt and can’t play. Their latest soiree has been to trade with the Nets for the $11 rotting corpse of a contract belonging to Andrei Kirilenko, not because they want him to play but because they need the $11 million on the books to reach the salary floor required by the CBA. AK-47 is, understandably, unamused by this and has failed to report, thus making the situation in Philadelphia even weirder, if that was possible.
The 76ers ship is presently being helmed by GM Sam Hinkie, who learned his craft from the San Antonio Spurs. While the Spurs are certainly a model organization, it should also be pointed out that the #1 reason for the Spurs success over the years is that they got stupid dumb lucky in the lottery not once but twice. It’s a whole lot easier to make moves to improve your club when you have first David Robinson, and then Tim Duncan, to build around. Former Spurs assistant GM Sam Presti obviously learned from the best, having followed a similar course of getting stupid dumb lucky in OKC. He didn’t get the #1 pick, but had the good fortune of having Kevin Durant fall their way with the #2 when the idiot Trail Blazers, picking ahead of them, ignored all of the red flags surrounding Greg Oden. This idea of being as bad as you possibly can for a prolonged period of time, so that you can amass enough players to be good again, is an iffy notion, at best. A few teams have pulled it off in sports (the Tampa Bay Rays and the Kansas City Royals come to mind), but what’s far more likely to occur is that you’re going to continue to be terrible (how many high draft choices have been squandered by the likes of the Browns and the Cubs and the Edmonton Oilers?) It seems like wishful thinking to me, counting on the guys whose decisions lead your franchise to being awful to somehow lead you back to being good.

So many worthy nominees, so little time. But really, there is only one team which TLOTY could go to this year. There was only choice, and this team set itself apart from the competition during one particularly disgraceful evening in Belo Horizonte:

I give you Brazil. Words fail.

On a personal note, I apologize to my many loyal readers for not blogging as much as I have done in the past. I’ve been somewhat busy and, in an act decidedly out of character, I’ve been doing a lot of winning in 2014, what with the publishing of the novel and the wedding and the like. I do intend to do quite a bit more blogging here in 2015, as there is never a shortage of good material (and given that the 49ers are about to do something as stupid as firing Jim Harbaugh, I may be busier sooner than later). But I’ll just say right upfront that you shouldn’t expect much new material from me in the springtime, as myself and The Official Wife of In Play Lose are planning to be venturing to the land of some heroes of this blog’s past for a few weeks:

Have I mentioned that we win at life?

Go Bad or Go Home

Carolina Panthers special teams, brought to you by Maalox

MY LOVE of bad football is well-documented, but the Thanksgiving weekend slate in the NFL was a veritable smorgasbord of indifference and incompetence that was almost too much for even me to eat.

There are always going to be bad teams, of course, but I cannot remember a year in the NFL when so many teams seemed to be so bad. We’re three-fourths of the way through the season now, and a full one-fourth of the league – eight teams – have only managed to win one-fourth of the time they take the field. If this were the NBA, I would just assume these franchises were all tanking to try and strike it rich in the draft lottery. Given some the utter incompetence on display last weekend, you might think that anyway:

• I said not too long ago that the blocked punt returned for a touchdown was just about the worst play in football. The Carolina Panthers allowed Minnesota to do this not once, but twice in their 31:13 defeat last weekend. It’s been a lost season for Carolina, who overachieved a year ago and earned a first-round playoff bye by winning the always humorous NFC South. Remarkably, Carolina still has a playoff shot with a 3-8-1 record, because their division is so bad that the 5-7 Atlanta Falcons currently have the lead. And given the fact that Cam Newton’s been a piñata all season – the Eagles sacked him nine times a few weeks ago, and he was sacked four more times by the Vikings – the fact he’s still standing at all is somewhat remarkable.

• Also somewhat amazingly still alive in the chase for the title in the humorous NFC South are the 2-10 Tampa Bay Buccaneers, though the Pewter Pirates did themselves no favours in squandering a winnable game at home to Cincinnati. Trailing 14-13 late in the game, with no timeouts remaining as they attempted a last-ditch rally, Tampa Bay completed a long pass deep into Cincy territory which would have surely set up a game-winning FG – only to have the play called back because of a penalty. The Bucs had 12 men on the field. 12 men on the field! How does that happen? The play having been called back, the Bucs then did the classic dumb thing to do at the end of a game, which was to complete a pass in the middle of the field and allow the time to expire.

 
“This is why we’re 2-10.”
 
– Tampa Bay coach Lovie Smith


No argument here.

• The Redskin Potatoes have been quick to blame all of their woes on QB Robert Griffin III. RG3 had the look of a transcendent talent when he arrived at New Jack City FedEx Field, but injuries have slowed him and taken away much of his running ability, while a revolving door of coaches, a collection of lettuce-handed receivers and a general disdain for blocking by the O-line have contributed to the hindering of his development as a passer. And it certainly wasn’t the benched RG3’s fault that the Potatoes yielded six TDs of 30 yards or longer in their 49:27 debacle of a loss in Indianapolis, letting the Colts run up and down the field on them and playing like a group bound and determined to get (yet) another coach fired. Jay Gruden surely had an inkling of was he getting into when he took the head job there, but the extent of the dysfunctionality in the D.C. organization has probably got him wondering about his career choices right about now.

• Speaking of poor career choices, Ken Whisenhunt was the finalist for two head coaching jobs in the offseason – Detroit and Tennessee – after a successful stint running the offense in San Diego. The Lions, in fact, had a jet juiced up and sitting on the tarmac ready to fly to San Diego to pick him up. But for some inexplicable reason, Whisenhunt chose the Tennessee gig. Now, Detroit has a justly-deserved reputation as being a coaching graveyard, of course, but the Lions also have a roster which includes a 5,000-yd QB, the best WR in football, and a whoopass defensive line – which is six more good players than can be found in Nashville. The Lions may be a mess, but at least there is some talent there, which can’t be said of the Titans, who got blasted 45:21 by Houston on Sunday and who allowed journeyman Houston QB Ryan Fitzpatrick to throw six TD passes, including one to a defensive end.

• With all of these bad teams in the NFL this season, having two square off on a weekly basis seems almost inevitable. The Jacksonville Jaguars are awful and have been awful for several years now, but if you squint enough, you just might be able to see some light at the end of the tunnel. The Jags play hard and have a few pieces to build around. Their opponent last Sunday, the New York Giants, are old, slow, can’t run the ball, have 11 matadors masquerading as a defensive unit, and QB Eli Manning has regressed to being the turnover machine he was when he first came into the league. For the Jints, no lead is safe, not even their 21-0 margin at the half in Jacksonville. New York promptly conceded two TD’s on fumble returns in the second half on their way to squandering the lead and the game. Now, if you’re as bad as Jacksonville is – the 25:24 win over the Giants raised their record to 2-10 – it could be argued that you’re better off tanking and trying to get the first pick in the draft, but that logic doesn’t really hold in the NFL, where you need so many players to fill out your roster. Unless he’s a franchise QB, one position in the draft isn’t going to make much difference, and as we’ve seen with Cam Newton and RG3, even if he might turn out to be a franchise QB, you still have to keep him upright.

• Or you could just decide to go without a QB entirely, which is essentially what Rex Ryan did on Monday night vs. Miami. Give the beleaguered Jets head coach credit for realizing that his best chance to win a game with Geno Double Donut Smith at the helm was to abandon the forward pass entirely. The Jets channeled their inner Nebraska and ground out 277 rushing yards in the game, thus becoming the first team in recent memory to tally up that many rushing yards in an NFL game and lose, because the Jets always screw it up somehow, and this game was no exception. Their attempts at boring the Dolphins into submission almost worked, but the Dolphins rousted themselves out of heavy slumber to take a 16-13 lead in the last 90 seconds of game, meaning the Jets then had to pass – at which point Geno Smith was promptly intercepted, to the surprise of absolutely nobody.

• Oh yeah, and the Raiders lost 52:0 in St. Louis. Yeech.

That right there is a lot of bad football. (And I didn’t even get into the Cardinals’ tackling shadows in Atlanta, the lousy defensive efforts put forth by Chicago and Pittsburgh, or the heap of hot garbage which is the current 49ers offense.) So much lose, so little time. The standings are now getting wackily stratified – in the AFC, 12 teams are .500 or better, and the other four are 2-10 or worse – which should make for an interesting playoff chase. I’m not sure, however, if these NFL back markers are necessarily worse than bad teams of games gone by. Being someone who contemplates relative awfulness, this is an idea which intrigues me. I’m not sure teams are worse than before so much as the game has changed to the point where bad teams appear to be worse. It’s getting harder and harder to hide your weaknesses in football. Whereas, in the past, a bad team might be able to go about eking out a few 13:10 games here and there, and win a few more games than should be expected, in the modern day they’re not only less likely to win, but you’re more likely to wind up getting annihilated.

The blowouts have been everywhere in the NFL this season. The Rams putting up a half-century on Oakland was the 6th time a team has scored at least 50 this season. The Packers did it twice in a row, v. the Bears and then the Eagles. Team Cheese’s 55:14 win over Chicago came on the heels of the Bears giving up 51 in New England in their previous game, which marked the first time in the NFL since the Rochester Jeffersons of 1923 that a team gave up more than 50 in back-to-back games. It wasn’t that long ago that 40 points constituted a monstrous offensive outpouring in the NFL, but along with six 50-pt. games this year, teams have broken 40 another 21 times. NFL offenses are going crazy this year.

And this was bound to happen, at some point, since the offenses have been going crazy in football at pretty much every other level for most of the past decade. It’s most apparent at the NCAA level, where the numbers being run up are straight out of a video game. Western Kentucky and Marshall tried to break football last week. Had WKU not gone for 2 in OT (a gutsy and awesome move on the part of the Hilltoppers), there’s no telling what the final score would’ve been. As it stands, I’d be willing to wager the 67:66 final score of that football game will be higher than when then two schools square off on the basketball court. Games in the Big 12 and Pac-10 are track meets on grass. Everyone has a QB and a fleet of receivers, the ball is flying all over the place, teams are scoring tonnes of points and rendering the defenses as good as helpless.

Which is a revolution in the game that, quite honestly, should’ve happened about a century ago. It never made any rational sense to run the ball straight ahead into a pile of 14 guys, seven of which are your own. It always seemed to make more sense to run away from the defense entirely, or at least try to run around them. And no kids grow up playing sandlot football run the fullback dive. You spread everyone out and go out for a pass (except for the slow fat kid who stays in and blocks, of course). It’s obvious. Part of why it’s easy to teach, on a high school and collegiate level, is that it’s the natural way that kids grow up playing the game. It also negates size advantages and emphasizes speed, and fewer collisions around the line of scrimmage mean fewer injuries. It’s really the way the game seems like it should be played.

As is the idea of playing hurry-up and doing away entirely with the huddle. Keep the tempo up, keep the pressure on the defense, don’t let them substitute or get set. It’s an obvious idea, and one which should’ve been done decades ago. It’s sort of a no-brainer.

Throw in some sophisticated scheming and play design, and now you’ve got seemingly unstoppable offenses – spread out formations, 1-on-1 matchups against defenders and the like. The short pass becomes just as effective a tool for ball and clock possession as the run, even more so since you’ve got 1-on-1 matchups and the 7-yd pass can become a 15-yd or 20-yd gain with a single broken tackle. It’s all very logical. The revolution in the way football is played has been cerebral, first and foremost.

Now I personally don’t mind this trend in football, having found far too many sports becoming far too defensive in recent years. It’s a dead ball era in baseball with far too many strikeouts. Basketball went through about a 15-year period where nobody could shoot (and college basketball still sucks because the control-freaky coaches won’t let anybody shoot). Fewer teams are parking the bus in soccer, but everyone’s been parking the zamboni in hockey. The fact is that, in most sports, it’s easy to play defense. Overly defensive sport is a dumbing down of the game. Football has shown itself to be the most creative and imaginative of sports in recent years (although, to give it some credit, the NBA is pretty cool these days when teams, you know, aren’t trying to purposely stink).

But with all of these changes in the game of football, defenses are now under siege. At the high school and collegiate levels, the entire concept of what ‘good defense’ is has necessarily had to change. Given that your team is spread out all over the place, the offense is going to find seams and move the ball. It’s inevitable. So on the defensive side, your best bet is to play for big plays – sacks, turnovers and the like – and also try to minimize the damage along the way. Auburn gashed Alabama on Saturday for 44 pts. and over 600 yards of offense, but the Tide turned back the War Eagles repeatedly in the red zone, forcing Auburn to kick five field goals. In the modern age of football, this constituted good defense. Alabama wound up winning the game 55:44 – nothing Auburn did constituted good defense in the slightest – and Alabama head coach Darth Vader Nick Saban, long a proponent of solid defensive play, was surprisingly calm and pragmatic after the game when a reporter pussy-footed around and stated that Alabama’s defense ‘seemed’ to struggle:

“There wasn’t any ‘seemed like it.’ You’re not going to hurt my feelings. They passed for 465 yards. I’ve got it right here on paper. The way we’re headed in college football, there’s going to be games like this, and you’re going to have to be able to win games like this. There’s a lot more points being scored in this day and age of college football than ever before. I think the hurry-up offense, the advent of the zone read and the option passes that come off it that people throw make it very difficult to defend.”

And a fair amount of the tactics and techniques which have proven so successful in the high school and college ranks have begun creeping into the NFL game. This isn’t the least bit surprising – not only do the professionals have the best talent, but they ultimately will also find the best ideas for utilizing that talent. Chip Kelley brought the University of Nike Oregon offense to Philadelphia, and the Eagles are now so effective that not even retread former Jet QB Mark Sanchez can screw it up. Russell Wilson has been flirting with 1,000 rushing yards this season, and already has several 100-yd rushing games. QBs now have feet to match their arms and their brains. Modern receivers are huge and graceful and catch everything. Tight ends are former basketball players with great feet who are used to maneuvering in tight spaces and who simply post up the defenders. Spread the defense out and there’s all sorts of spaces for your speedy, agile running backs to race through. Playing defense in football these days is damn near impossible. Sometimes it seems the best idea is to just let the other team score and do so as fast as possible, get the ball back and try to score yourself.

Which is easier said than done, of course, particularly if you’re a bad football team and make the assortment of mistakes which bad football teams generally make more of, most of which occur on the offensive side of the ball. Turnovers, in particular, are more of a killer than ever, since it’s an opportunity lost to keep pace. And modern defenses which go hunting turnovers will attack the ball and look to score, which means you see quite a few pick sixes and fumble returns for TDs, as well. The whole goal of modern defense is to make big plays, so the last thing you want to do is make it easy for them to do that.

In the end, every mistake gets magnified when stopping the other team is so difficult. A good rule of thumb in sports is that the higher the score, the harder it is to spring the upset. You can luck your way into a 1-0 win in some sports, but in football you have to make 120 plays with 22 players and so many moving parts, and in this day and age, it’s very likely that you can’t stop the other team to begin with. Even the most élite of defenses in the NFL, the Seahawks, got abused by San Diego and Dallas earlier this season. It happens to everyone. If the Seahawks can’t stop anyone, how is an error-prone team going to stay within 20 pts. of a competent opponent?

So I don’t necessarily think there are more bad teams, they are simply losing more spectacularly – and more entertainingly in the process. All eight of the offenders mentioned in the buzzard points above are among the bottom-feeders in statistical categories on both sides of the ball, being neither able to score or defend with any sort of effectiveness. The 3-9 team of the modern NFL is probably closer in skill to, say, a 5-7 team of the past. (This year’s crop of 5-7’s include the Falcons, Saints, and Bears, three teams allergic to defense who have enough firepower to win from time to time.) But 5-7 is pretty boring, when you get right down to it. Mediocrity sucks. Go big or go home. If you’re going to be bad, be really bad!

And on that note, I think I’m going to check in on this 76ers game …

What the?

YOU know, it’s already hard enough to beat those pesky, annoying, green-and-yellow wearing fashionistas from the University of Nike Oregon. The Quack Attack have been consistently one of the best teams in the nation for the part of two decades now, and are perennial contenders for the national title. (They also tend to choke once they reach the big stage, but we can save that for another post.)

Oregon’s at #4 right now in the polls, and a good bet to reach the 1st ever national playoff if they can keep winning, but they were in some trouble last night in Salt Lake City against a pretty good Utah team. The Runnin’ Utes were up 7-0 after the 1st Quarter and then speed daemon Kaelin Clay got behind the Oregon defense to catch a 79-yard TD pass:

Wait, did he just, like, drop the ball in the field of play?

He did! About the only person who noticed this was the Side Judge, who didn’t rule a TD, but instead threw the bean bag, meaning it’s a fumble.

So now you’ve got three Runnin’ Utes celebrating in the back of the end zone, the band playing, the fans going nuts, 6 points going up on the scoreboard … and a live ball rolling around on the field which an Oregon DB then just sort of picks up, thinking it’s a dead ball, and then he sees the bean bag and suddenly realizes that it isn’t a dead ball at all. He promptly runs into a Utah guy and fumbles, at which point Oregon LB Joe Walker scoops up the loose ball at the Oregon 1-yard line and this happens:

99 yards later, after being escorted down the sidelines by a convoy of teammates, Walker and the Ducks have a tying TD.

What the?

So to recap, we have a play that covers 178 yards, includes two fumbles, leaves everyone confused including the broadcasters (the best part of the video is the band quitting in the middle of the fight song), takes a TD off one side of the scoreboard and hangs it on the other, and results in a lot of very tired Oregon defenders who just ran about as far as you can possibly run on a single play in a game of football.

We would do well, at this point, to remember the origins of the word touchdown, which come from rugby. The Lose is a big rugby fan, and to score the try in rugby, you not only have to cross the goal line but you have to touch the ball down on the ground. In American football, of course, it’s changed over the years and now the ball simply needs to break the plane of the goal line, but the point is that scoring points is all about what happens to the ball and not to the player. You have to complete the play. Since scoring a TD is the ultimate goal of the game of football, you would think that what actually constitutes a TD would be so ingrained in players that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to forget.

I’ve seen the exact same thing Clay did from players on several occasions over the years. People are always quick to assign dubious motives to players who make such a boneheaded mistake – guys being hot dogs who want to show off and the like – but it’s really just an honest mistake where guys are excited and get caught up in the moment. But I’ve always wanted to know why guys are in such a hurry to give up the ball. I mean, the ball is precious. You want the ball in your hands whenever possible. Damn, if I catch a 79-yard TD pass against Oregon, I’m never letting go of that ball. I’ll run with it over to the sidelines and make them pry it out of my hands. I’ll run with it all the way to Provo.

This play would be bad enough if it just resulted in a TD coming off the board, but to have the Ducks run it all the way back for a score of their own is disastrous. This sort of transition play is an absolute killer in the game of football if it goes against you, because it so quickly undoes everything positive you’ve set out to accomplish. (The single-worst play that can happen to your team in football is the blocked punt returned for a TD. I forget the exact stats, but if your team gives up a TD on a blocked punt in the NFL, you almost never win the game.) In this particular case, being down 14 pts. in a hostile environment could’ve spelled doom for the Ducks. Instead, the Ducks tie the score with what just might be a season-saving TD for them. They then do what good teams do when given a break, which is get their shit together.

Oregon goes on to win the game 51-27, although some of that margin was garbage time scoring when the Utah defense was out of gas. Quite simply, the Utes let Oregon off the hook. This right here constitutes the worst play of the season, and maybe any season. And I should just give up saying the phrase, “I thought I’d seen everything.” This year in baseball we had three Milwaukee Brewers runners score on a wild pitch and the Pittsburgh Pirates walk into a double play. I’m not even going to guess what I’ll see next on a football field. I’ll just sit back and watch and be confounded like everyone else.