The Bermuda Triangle

One big happy family

WE TALK a great deal here about coaches being fired at In Play Lose. This blog is an attempt to explicate failure, of course – why it occurs, and what we do about it – and there is a universal response to failure, across all aspects of culture and society, which has come to be something of a default setting: “throw the bums out.” Obviously, this guy’s not getting the job done, so let’s go get someone else who can. An obvious sentiment, of course, and an understandable one.

But such sentiment often conveniently ignores the fact that the job in question – be it in sports or business or politics – is often inherently a bad job to begin with, thus making success even that much harder. Without that deeper understanding of the structural deficiencies which are present, success may not be possible at all. A great number of politicians have risen to great heights of power using the basic campaign slogan of “vote for us, because we’re not the other guys.” Such sentiment is great in the moment, and may capture the essence of angst and frustration prevalent in a society, but upon riding that wave of change into power, they turn out to be just as bad as their predecessors, if not worse, when it comes to actually running things. Being angry about the present doesn’t mean you have a sound vision of the future. This is precisely was so many “revolutions,” over time and across the ideological spectrum, have failed miserably and sometimes spectacularly. Failing to address those flaws inherent to an organization often leads to making the exact same mistakes, if not worse ones.

One of the things which fascinates The Lose about the world of professional sports – a world where success and failure is put on public display on a nightly basis – is that the world is the realm of rich entrepreneurs, many of whom ventured into professional sports after being wildly successful in the business world. We’re talking billionaires here, persons ranked among the wealthiest in the world who own Fortune 500 companies and the like. Clearly, you didn’t get to be so successful in the world of business by being an idiot. You must have done something right along the way. OK, sure, there are a few people who are dabbling in daddy’s money here and there – it certainly helps Stan Kroenke with his dimwitted L.A. caper that he’s married to a Wal-Mart heiress – but for the most part, professional clubs are owned by wealthy industrialists who have either built for themselves, or carried on, massively prosperous business empires, so you’d think they’d have some idea of how to become successful, but then they step into the arena of professional sports – one of the most viciously competitive enterprises in the world – and a good number of them wind up looking like buffoons. It’s the most public of business operations, one which can easily come to define you whether you want it to or not. No one who follows the NBA thinks of Robert Sarver as one of the richest men in Arizona. Everyone who follows the NBA thinks of Robert Sarver as one of the worst owners in the league.

The most public executive position and face of management in pro sports is generally that of the head coach. This has changed somewhat in recent years – between the phenomenon of Moneyball and the endless mathematical machinations mandated by negotiated salary caps and whatnot, the General Manager’s actual duties have come under much more public scrutiny in recent years. It’s easy to suggest that the coach doesn’t have to make anyone happy other than the man who signs his paycheques, and doesn’t have to please the fans – but the owner ultimately needs to please the fans, lest they stop putting their asses in the seats at his club’s games. If things go badly in terms of on-field performance, the easiest course of action, therefore, is to fire the coach and get someone else. And since these are scarce jobs high in both salary and prestige, the positions are therefore coveted – even the bad ones.

And make no mistake, there are bad coaching jobs. Really bad coaching jobs. Just take a look at the bloodletting on the day after the NFL season concluded, which saw 10 head coaching positions open. Bad jobs everywhere. Coaching the Cleveland Browns just might be the worst job in all of professional sports. Chip Kelly bungled what should have been one of the better gigs in the NFL in Philadelphia, and then took over in San Francisco, where front office meddling and incompetence has sent the 49ers from being on the cusp of winning Super Bowls to on the cusp of picking first in the NFL draft in three years’ time. Given how far the 49ers have plummeted, Kelly could scarcely do worse.

And just in the past few weeks now, two of the worst jobs in the NBA have come open – and a third job, which is even worse than the other two that have now come available, probably should be open but isn’t … yet. These three jobs are all awful, albeit for different reasons, and while these jobs are scarce, if you’re a budding NBA coach, you have to ask yourself if you’re not better off by passing on these opportunities. These three jobs constitute an Axis of Weasel, forming a Bermuda Triangle of misery in which your professional aspirations are likely to sink.

From the moment Derek Fisher got into this mess, his days coaching the New York Knicks were probably numbered. To have your coach flying off in the middle of training camp to California, and get into a spat with your girlfriend’s ex-husband, who happens to be an NBA player, is a public relations nightmare for an organization still smarting after cleaning up the slimy mess Isiah Thomas left behind. And Fisher’s reputation has been of being something of a clubhouse lawyer and politician, which may not have jibed very well with players once he had obtained a head coaching position. Having said that, it seems a little bit strange for the New York brass to have said that Fisher was going to be permitted to develop as a coach with a developing team, only to then fire him 1½ seasons into the process. The Knicks were godawful last season, and a dreadful 1-9 stretch before the All-Star break sees them at 23-32, but there did seem to appear some progress at Madison Square Garden.

But Fisher also got in trouble with his boss, Knicks president Phil Jackson, for attempting to deviate from Phil’s One Commandment: THOU SHALT RUN THE TRIANGLE OFFENSE. Fisher did this for a pretty good reason – the offense wasn’t working. But to the Zen Master, this is an unforgivable sin. After all, he won 11 NBA Championships as a head coach with his team running the Triangle. The Triangle is the centerpiece of Phil’s entire holistic approach and ethos to the game of basketball. And when Knicks owner James Dolan gave Jackson the keys to the store, and gave him carte blanche to do with the franchise what he wished, Jackson was free to impart and impose his philosophies on the entire organization.

Of course, in none of his voluminous writings about basketball does it say anything about making sure you have Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman and Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal and Pau Gasol around to run your offense and make you look good. The Triangle consisted fresh thinking in a 1990s NBA which was generally dull and uncreative, laden with isos and boring 2-man games. The pinnacle of this success, the 72-10 Bulls team of 1996, played a 6-game NBA finals against the 64-18 Sonics that year which is, in terms of possessions, the slowest NBA finals in history. What should have been a clash for the ages between two of the better teams, win-loss wise, in NBA history saw games being played in the 70s and 80s. Even as a Sonics fan, I thought that series was tiresome.

The Knicks’ triangle offense in 2016, in an era of pace-and-space, cut-and-kick-for-the-3 basketball, looks as anomalous as a pair of Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars. The Knicks take a lot of pointless mid-range shots and rank as one of the slowest teams in the NBA. Jackson found time during his lengthy offseason, after the 17-65 Knicks campaign last year, to troll the Warriors for being a “jump shooting team,” and wound up looking like a stale old fogey come June. The game has changed and evolved. As we’ve said before here on the lose, the genius of a team like the San Antonio Spurs rests in their ability to constantly shape-shift and innovate, depending on personnel and depending on what new ideas pop into Pop’s mind. It’s hard to build a future when you’re stuck in the past.

But come hell or highwater, you’re going to run the Triangle in New York. Jackson coaching flunkie/Triangle devotee Kurt Rambis is now keeping the seat warm on the Knicks bench for a while, as the coaching search commences in earnest, but there aren’t a whole lot of guys out there who want to work in a system when you’re just instilling some guy in the front office’s ideas on how to play. Golden State assistant Luke Walton’s name has inevitably come up in connection with the New York job (which is bound to happen when you win your first 24 games while an acting NBA coach, as Walton did while filling in here for Steve Kerr), but if you’re Walton, and you’re now living on the cutting edge of basketball with the most modern of NBA offenses, why on earth would you want to take this job and have Phil Jackson tell you how to do your job? Hell, if Phil thinks it’s such a good way to do things, then he ought to go downstairs and do it himself.

As undesirable a work environment as New York is right now in NBA circles – that open Brooklyn job doesn’t look so good either, in fact – Phoenix is worse. Hey, you get to work for this guy if you take the Phoenix job:

“My whole view of the millennial culture is that they have a tough time dealing with setbacks. I’m not sure if it’s the technology of the instant gratification of being online … but the other thing is, I’m not a fan of social media. I tell my kids it’s like Fantasy Land. The only thing people put online are good things that happen to them, or things they make up. And it creates unrealistic expectations.” 
– Robert Sarver

Well, fortunately for Suns fans, Robert Sarver is there to run their basketball team into the ground, thus creating no reason to have any expectations at all. Later in that same interview, Sarver commented, “the reality is, there’s only a half-dozen championship-caliber organizations in the NBA over the last 25 years.”

Which is true – and the Suns were on the cusp of being one of those organizations in the early 2000s, playing one of the most exciting brands of basketball the league has seen and verging on being NBA finalists before Sarver decided to go cheap and went about messing everything up. Remember, this is a franchise which thrice traded 1st round draft picks for cash. He’s repeatedly forced out bright-minded GMs by lowballing them in contract negotiations, and seemingly no one leaves Phoenix having anything good to say about their time there. The Suns have had five GMs and five head coaches since Sarver first bought the team, the last of which being Jeff Hornacek, who was given something of a mercy kill. Bizarrely, the ever-impatient and impetuous Sarver & Co. somehow thought Hornacek would right the ship after his two assistant coaches were fired in December, which was about as public and humiliating a rebuke of Hornacek’s ways imaginable, and had the predictable effect of only lengthening the free fall.

The Suns have been imploding for months now, sinking to 14-40 with a never-ending string of embarrassing results: giving up an NBA-high 46 pts. to Golden State in a single quarter; being swept by the 76ers; and a remarkably inept back-to-back which saw them give up 142 to Sacramento one night, then score 22 in the first half against the Lakers the next. They’ve had no luck with injuries – their top four scorers this season are all injured – and about the best player left on the roster is Markieff Morris, who has acted like a petulant, spoiled brat and sulked most of the season after his twin brother was traded to Detroit, who threw a towel at the coach and got himself suspended, and then who got into an altercation on the bench with Archie Goodwin in the image above. (Oh yeah, and there is also that pesky assault charge hanging over his head.)

Reports are now surfacing that the Suns are holding out for a better return on Morris as the trade deadline nears, an act tantamount to asking for $1,000,000 on your house when the building’s on fire. This on the heels of last year’s trade deadline foibles, when the Suns curiously shipped out Isaiah Thomas (that would be now Celtic All-Star Isaiah Thomas, and not the asscan in New York I mentioned earlier) and Goran Dragic and a really bad Laker team’s 1st Round pick in this year’s draft and wound up with Brandon Knight, who they really didn’t need and who they then foolishly overpaid and who promptly got hurt.

Somehow, all of this must have been Hornacek’s fault. All Hornacek did was take a team two years ago that looked really awful on paper and have them playing near to a playoff level for most of that season. They have regressed since, which was probably inevitable, since the talent was not all that good to begin with, and no one entrusted with either acquiring that talent, or paying for that talent to stick around, has come through. Franchise icon Steve Nash was willing to partner with Sarver on buying a Spanish football club, but not even he wants anything to do with the operations of the Suns. The Suns are a complete mess, and nothing about this organization makes sense.

But the Suns are downright functional compared to the Sacramento Kings, whose president and acting GM Vlade Divac did an about-face last week and, after much speculation, decided to keep head coach George Karl on the payroll after all. The best way to get a sense the state of the Kings is to listen to this podcast by ESPN’s Zac Lowe with Sacramento reporter Sam Amick. The bottom line with Sacramento is this is what you get for making a deal with the devil. In his last significant act as the NBA’s emperor, the little Napoleon himself, David Stern, cobbled together this nonsensical ownership group headed by whackaloon Vivek Ranadivé, who his minority partners are now trying to unseat and whose stewardship has led the franchise into being even more of a league-wide laughingstock.

The new owners are in a particularly bad spot financially, as they await their supposed panacea of a new arena to open, in that as part of their deal for acquiring the Kings, they agreed to give up revenue sharing money. (The Seattle group was more than willing to do this, since they had more money than God.) The Kings really needed to make the playoffs this year and make themselves somehow relevant. Seriously, no team would so happily be the 8th seed and get stomped by the Warriors as much as the Kings. They’re 4½ games out of that the 8th spot in the west after basically sleepwalking their way through the past couple of weeks, during which time the players have become so indifferent that all of three players turn up for a voluntary shoot around. I love me some George Karl, of course, he being the mastermind of the great Sonics teams in the 1990s, but I always knew taking this Sacramento job was a 1-way ticket to disaster. The Kings have had eight head coaches since 2007. I suspect his age and health situation – Karl has battled with cancer recently – hastened his impulses to get back in the game, but surely he could’ve waited a little while until a better job opened up, right?

Then again, maybe not. I mean, this is the NBA here, a bizarro league where they talk contract extensions in Philadelphia, even though Brett Brown has a .226 winning percentage in 2½ seasons, yet playoff coaches got axed in New Orleans and Chicago after power struggles within their organizations. In an organization that conducts business as strangely as the NBA does, nothing is assured. The NBA is part opera and part soap opera, with enormous egos all around, be it the players, the coaches, the GMs, the referees (yes, I’m serious), the broadcasters and even the owners. In all three cases mentioned above, remarkably successful people have contrived to create NBA workplace which run the gamut from awful to hopeless.

The Knicks fans at least have a hip 7’3” Latvian kid to attach all of their hopes to for a few years, whereas the other two franchises’ most noteworthy qualities are malaise and incompetence. (Yeah, sure, the Kings have Boogie Cousins on the roster, who’s terrific, but he also falls under the “malaise” category.) And all three clubs have shown varying degrees of panic and impatience this season, when it was obvious pretty early on that the teams just simply lacked the talent to compete. Firing coaches doesn’t change that fact. You’d best be in the rental market if you take one of those three jobs, since you’re not likely to be employed for very long, and quite honestly, you’ll probably breathe a sigh of relief if and when you get canned.

Lost Wagers

There goes my money rolling away …

I ONLY cared about the Super Bowl because I bet on it.

I had no rooting interest in the game, and if anything, I have much more of a connection to the Denver Broncos than to the Carolina Panthers. I lived in Colorado at the time of the Broncos first Super Bowl victory, and that upsurge of state pride was pretty cool to be a part of. I was living in New Mexico when they won their second Lombardi Trophy, and anyone in New Mexico who is in their right mind should fancy the Broncos, given that the state’s fandom is somewhat evenly split between Denver and Dallas, and Cowboys fandom is a scourge we would all do well to stamp out. But I’ve paid comparatively little attention to the NFL this season, and what snippets I did see throughout the year failed to impress me. It seemed like a down year for the league, with a lot of the more talented teams beset by injury and a lot of the mediocre teams beset by bad QB play.

So I was basically indifferent about the game, but like many San Francisco residents, we felt a bit besieged by the NFL coming to town, setting up shop downtown for two weeks and making daily life generally inconvenient:

I do think the supposed animosity the city residents had towards the NFL imposing the Super Bowl on San Francisco was overplayed a bit in the press. I fundamentally think it’s pretty cool to be in a city that can host these sorts of events, and I enjoyed walking about downtown San Francisco last Thursday afternoon, chatting with a couple of beat writers from out of town (and pointing them to good restaurants) and also talking with a few out-of-town visitors. The traffic and transport stuff was an inconvenience and an annoyance more than anything else. But the world’s largest circus coming to town also gave us incentive to ditch for a couple of days, and what better place for The Lose to go than to the world capital of Lose, the place whose sheer existence and prosperity is predicated upon people losing, and often doing so in spectacular fashion?

And when in Rome and all that. It makes no sense to come to Las Vegas for the Super Bowl and not bet on the game. More money is wagered on this day in Las Vegas than any other. The queues for the sports books on Sunday were up to an hour long. There were well over 500 prop bets to choose from of all sorts of degrees of ridiculous (an alarmingly large number of people in the burger joint where we were hanging out cheered when the coin toss came up tails). If we just wanted to watch the game with indifference and banality, we could’ve just stayed at home.

I’m not a huge gambler in any sense, maintaining a solid life principle of never wagering any money that I feel like I can’t afford to lose. Myself and The Official Spouse of In Play Lose settled on $115 in wagers on the Super Bowl. I wasn’t emotionally attached to either team, and simply bet along the lines of how I felt the game would go, which was that the Denver offense wouldn’t be able to do shit, and Panthers QB and league MVP Cam Newton would make enough plays here and there. I figured the Panthers would win, and put $40 on Carolina -5½.

And that line held up pretty consistently for two weeks. It dropped to Carolina -5 on Saturday night and then was down to Carolina -4½ on Sunday morning. The Denver money had rolled into town. (Perhaps unsurprisingly on account of geography, there was far more blue and orange on display in Vegas than their was black and teal.) The goal of the bookmakers is to get as close to even money wagered on both sides, of course, which is why the line moves about at all, but their opening line of Carolina -5½ would indicate that their thinking about this game was similar to mine. The difference being that, in the end, they didn’t lose any money on the game by being wrong.

And from a neutral perspective, what I would say about this game was that it was six kinds of crap. The Lose loves me some great defensive line play, and that was in abundance from both teams. Both defenses lived up their billing. Both offenses, however, were horrific messes. Every pass Peyton Manning threw looked like a dying chicken best served on one of his Papa Johns pizzas. The Broncos mustered less than 200 yards of offense and were 1/14 on third down. The Panthers, meanwhile, looked spooked by the big stage and played like it. They committed four turnovers and 13 penalties, they dropped passes in crucial situations, missed a FG and also bungled a punt coverage. The great unknown in any sort of game of this magnitude is poise. It’s not just another game, no matter how many times you try to tell yourself that it is. I was not that sold on the Panthers this season, anyway, despite their gaudy 17-1 record which probably had more to do with playing in an awful division (the NFC South) and playing 8 games against two other generally awful divisions (the NFC East and the AFC South), and so from a casual perspective, the victory by a more experienced squad who also had more tough games this season isn’t that much of a surprise.

But once I put that $40 down on Carolina -5½, by God, I was a Panthers fan. Or, more to the point, I was Panthers -5½ fan. It’s amazing how just that act of wagering changed my mindset completely.

We also put down $40 on Saturday night’s game between the Warriors and the Zombies (which some would say a battle of Kevin Durant’s soon-to-be former and soon-to-be future employers). The line for that game fluctuated between GS -7½ and GS -8½ for a few days, and had settled at GS -8 by the time we got to the window on Saturday. And I’m watching the game, in which the Warriors all but run OKC out of the building in the first half and then can’t throw the ball in San Francisco Bay in the second, and I’m watching the Dubs’ lead shrink from 19 to 15 to 12, and pretty much the only thing going through my mind is that I’m worried Golden State isn’t going to cover the spread. It doesn’t even really occur to me, when the game is tied at 104-104 with a couple of minutes left, that the Dubs might, in fact, wind up losing the game. In my wager-centric view, they’ve already lost and this is a complete, utter failure all around. The Dubs wound up righting the ship, winning the game 116:108 and making my GS -8 wager a push, and what’s going through my head? “Damn, if only we’d gotten to the sports book at the Bellagio this morning, when the line was GS -7½.”

And that same mentality carried over to a Super Bowl game in which I cared little to not at all. Had I been watching this at home, I probably would’ve turned the game off because I was bored. Plunk down some bucks and suddenly, every Panthers mistake (of which there were many) is cause for outrage and scorn. I’d given myself a reason to care about the Super Bowl, but all I really cared about was the outcome and whether I wound up with money in my pocket. It was a selfish reason, one which ultimately made me feel even more detached from the game than before.

The Lose considered this quick junket to Las Vegas as something of an experiment, being someone who is fascinated with both the sociology of sport and the history of sport, and having come to understand that the history of sport, as a spectacle and pastime, is also essentially a history of gambling on sport.

Wagering has been basically driving spectator interest in sport for thousands of years, and done so across a variety of cultures. Plenty of money was changing hands over the weekends when up to 200,000 spectators would turn up for the chariot races at Circus Maximus in ancient Rome. The delays between races – oftentimes a product of collisions of humans and equines against stone walls and pillars – just gave everyone in attendance more time to get their next bet down. When the Romans and the Greeks weren’t betting on horses, they were betting on prizefighters. We, as a species, have not only been encouraging the beating of the the hell out of each other for thousands of year, we’ve actually been staking on it.

Meanwhile, in this hemisphere, some of the greatest stories I’ve come across are those pertaining to the fútbol that first took shape in Central and South America: primitive games using rubber balls in which use of the hands were not permitted. In general, a lot of the anthropological work done surrounding ancient cultures tends to deify and mystify them, which runs counter to my inherent belief that all societies in history have inherently been absurdist, dysfunctional messes. The original references to the fútbol matches portrayed them as being some ritualistic spectacle rife with sacrifices to the gods and the like, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me: I mean, if you’re going to get killed for losing a game, then why are you even playing? Well, of course, what further research uncovered was that these fútbol games were often accompanied by the most insane amounts of gambling that the planet has ever known. Chiefs were sometimes wagering their fiefdoms on the outcomes. People were literally betting the farm. Being a fútbol player in that culture was probably a perilous proposition simply because you had to face a whole lot of really angry people if you lost, and you might not be able to get past the angry mob. Because it’s your fault they’re now broke, of course, and not the fact that they were complete idiots who shouldn’t be betting everything they have on a damn game.

Wagering is a crazy sort of zero-sum game. One side wins, another loses – and often there’s someone else involved (the house) who wins no matter the outcome. The history of sport, and the history of gambling, is filled with bookies, tipsters, and a whole bunch of other dubious sorts of charlatans angling for a piece of the action. And we love this stuff. We’ve been betting on this stuff for centuries. The bloodier and messier and more vulgar the competition, the more inclined we seem to be to want to bet on it. Over time, we’ve refined our competitions and made them somewhat less revolting, but that somewhat twisted impulse to want our money where our mouth is has remained pretty constant.

And it is an impulse, because it doesn’t make much sense otherwise. The notions of luck and chance are inherently metaphorical constructs, ones dependent upon us putting importance on an outcome. We like to believe in good luck, and like to use bad luck as a ready made excuse for why things don’t work out. I remember a particular co-worker of mine when I lived in New Mexico who did the same thing for his vacation every single year: he and his wife would go to Las Vegas for a week. They’d save up for this all year, stashing every loose nickel and dime and quarter and dollar in their ‘vacation fund,’ and then they would go to Las Vegas and gamble. And gamble more. And more. They’d blow through 51 weeks’ worth of savings during a week in Las Vegas, love every minute of it and immediately want to come back for more. And, of course, an obvious question came to mind when hearing him talk proudly about these annual Vegas junkets: wouldn’t it be a good idea to, you know, actually know what you’re doing so as not to lose so much money? But they were slaves to chance, far more willing to put their trust in Lady Luck than to actually view the escapade as a money-making opportunity. They were simply hoping they would be lucky and Fortuna would smile upon them – a mindset which seems nuts among my good number of pro-level poker playing friends, but one which is far more prevalent than not. Vegas loves those sorts of people. Those bright lights everywhere aren’t paid for by a gambler’s winnings.

We gamble on a spectacle like the Super Bowl precisely because it gives us a stake in the result. It gives us something to care about. We don’t have to care about any other aspect of it – including the fact that we’re watching people essentially going through an act of systematically maiming themselves. We as an American society have done pretty well to fool ourselves into thinking that football isn’t a bloodsport. In fact, it’s the most complex and elaborate bloodsport that’s ever been created. The NFL does an interesting sort of tap dance when it comes to explaining it’s relationship with the sports books in Las Vegas, one which it’s never really had to quantify and only recently been somewhat forced to address with rumors of the Raiders looking into relocating to Las Vegas in the future. The truth is that without the massive amount of betting action that goes on surrounding the NFL – both of the legal and illegal varieties – the game would be nowhere near as popular as it is. The point spread in football is the ideal conduit for sports wagering, as it’s a game with a diverse amount of numerological outcomes (unlike baseball or soccer or hockey, where the actual line is rarely more than a run or a goal) but one that isn’t too variant (like basketball, where teams score and score and score some more). It’s a perfect little package in which to entice people to lose, and encourage those who win from time to time to think they’re smarter than they really are and then go about losing what they’ve just won.

And do not construe what I’m saying here as some sort of condemnation of gambling. Actually, it’s fun, and if you view it as recreation and nothing more, the costs don’t amount to much. We were down $41 when the game was finally over, which was about the cost of those two glasses of silky and heavenly Turley zinfandels we had at the Aria wine bar. No great loss. But there we were on Sunday night, seeing our wagers going up in smoke when Cam Newton fumbled in the gif above deep in his own territory with the Panthers trailing 16-10, feeling annoyed and aggravated and hating this stupid dumb game that the stupid dumb Panthers were choking away. The Broncos then take advantage of the short field yet again and punch it in for a TD to make it 22-10 and …

“The Broncos are going for two!” KC exclaims delightedly.

We have a prop bet of +375 on there being a successful 2-point conversion. Peyton Manning somehow noodle arms the ensuing pass into a teammate’s arms to score the deuce and we’re suddenly cheering, having covered a substantial amount of our losses, and thus confusing the hell out of the drunkass Panthers fan sitting next to us. We suddenly didn’t give two shits about the Panthers anymore. That didn’t take long, now did it? All bow to the glory that is the 2-point conversion (which the Panthers should’ve gone for in the first half, but that’s another story).

I’ve heard from quite a few people, and read quite a few articles and columns, speaking to the demise of football, simply because the same is so damn violent and the long-term physical toll the game takes upon its combatants so extreme. It was somewhat eerie to me, watching the parade and procession of Super Bowl MVPs onto the field at Pants Stadium at the game’s outset and noticing just how many of these players – some of them among the greatest players in the history of the game – walked with what was obviously a permanent limp. Rather than being a moment celebrating the glory of the game’s past, it served to remind me of the misery of an American football player’s future. But we love this stuff, and when we go to Las Vegas we love it with our pocketbooks and absent our heads. And we always have, in one form or another. It wasn’t because we wised up and realized that boxing was appalling that made it fall out of favor in the eyes of the sporting public. No, it was all of the corruption and the politics on the sidelines which ultimately turned people off. Boxing ceased to be an earnest competition in the collective sports psyche, reduced to a circus and a sideshow that seemed contrived and not quite on the up-and-up.

Which is, of course, where a sport can completely go off the rails. Pretty much the worst thing you can do in a sport is deliberately lose, and get paid to do so. We want a fair fight, after all, and not a rigged game. Through various acquaintances and such, I knew of someone working in the Las Vegas sports gambling industry at the time of the Arizona State point-shaving scandal, and he said the alarm bells were going off everywhere in the industry. Tulane’s response to a similar scandal was to disband the basketball program completely, and there has been a rather unfortunate history of this sort of thing in the sport of basketball.  There was legit concern for the future of baseball after the Black Sox scandal of 1919 (a scandal which, as was pointed out in Eight Men Out, was almost certainly not the first time this sort of match fixing had occurred). Just here in the past few months, wide allegations of match fixing have started dogging tennis, and rather than be surprised by it, I suspect it’s far-more prevalent than people realize.

While I appreciate the athleticism of tennis players, and applaud the cerebral approach required to think one’s way through a match, the sport generally bores me to watch. And having been to a professional tennis tournament before that wasn’t one of the majors, I can see just how easy it would be to fix a tennis match, simply because it seems a lot of the time like guys are dogging it when they lose. And that’s not intended as a condemnation of tennis players. Think of the situation, here. Tennis players maintain insanely tight schedules, are consistently injured, and their performance is essentially judged by how they perform in only a few select events every year. So say you’re playing a match on a Tuesday night in San Jose and it’s not going very well and all of the factors I mentioned above apply. Well, fuck it, why not just get it over with? Those are all legit, extenuating circumstances for not giving your best in a match, and the trick when throwing a match is simply to make it look like you aren’t doing so. The nature of tennis, thus, provides the ideal sort of cover. It also happens to be a pretty easy game to wager on: not just who will win, but also how many sets, and how many games within those sets, factors which don’t necessarily mean a whole lot outside the gambling realm. The casual spectator doesn’t much care if a player wins the third set 6-2 or 6-3, but for the gambler, that one measly game can mean a small fortune.

Losing on purpose is, in principle, sport’s greatest sin, even if gambling isn’t involved. My favorite recent example of this came at the London Olympics in badminton, with competitors actively trying to lose so as to avoid an unfavorable draw in the next round. The actual defenses put forth in their appeals were along the lines of, “they weren’t trying to lose, they really are just that bad,” which begs the question of what they were doing at the Olympics in the first place. In that particular instance, the organizers had created a dumb format which provided a perverse incentive for players at a particular juncture to lose: they stood to have a better chance of winning a medal if they did so. And the motivation for throwing a tennis match is pretty obvious: money. Tennis has a broad, multi-tiered professional structure spanning the globe, but it’s estimated that only about 300 players or so actually break even. Frankly, you can make some pretty easy money just by dogging a few matches here and there. We think of professional athletes as being well-paid celebrities in this era, yet it was just last season that F.C. Parma, a soccer club competing in Serie A at some of the game’s highest levels, went months without paying its players. The drop off from haves to have nots happens really quickly. The NCAA, showing it’s ever touching concern for it’s commodities’ well-being, makes it a point to emphasize the perils of gambling to student athletes (perils which, to be fair, can be legit) seeing as how a fleet of indentured servants could make easy pickings for gamblers flashing cash around. The simple solution is obvious – pay the players – but that solution dips in the pockets of those who control the game, who want it all to be on their own terms and who are often just as greedy and selfish and corrupt as the gamblers, and are generally far less honest about it.

And so long as there is an interest in betting on the outcome, people are going to bet on the outcome. We have a somewhat strange relationship with gambling in this country, confining this particular aspect of it to one small corner of the country. It’s a little different in a place like Britain, where you can wander into a bookmaker’s offices and wager on seemingly anything. Honestly, I wish we were more upfront about all of it. We all love our NCAA pools and our weekly NFL pools, even though caring about whether the Lions at +7½ against the Packers is a good pick is ultimately utter nonsense. It gives us a reason to care, which is precisely what entities like the NCAA and the NFL want us to do. More interest means more prestige and publicity, which in turns means more demands and more profits.

What’s the most striking aspect of the NFL Super Bowl circus coming to your town is the way that the NFL, as an entity, seems to have license to print money, and that they can waltz into your town and set up shop and throw an enormous party that you aren’t privy to. Oh, sure, you can addle along in the NFL Fan Zone or whatever the fuck that nonsense was that took place along the waterfront, but it isn’t really about you. The Super Bowl is essentially a 2-week long cocktail party which happens to have a game tacked onto the end of it, one which often isn’t very good and with ticket prices so stratospheric that only the über-rich can take part, creating an atmosphere as stale as that plate of nachos you bought two hours ago. (The closest thing to a ‘real’ crowd I’ve seen at a Super Bowl was ten years ago when the Seahawks played the Steelers in Detroit, a rather undesirable locale with undesirable weather in close proximity to Pittsburgh, meaning the Steelers diaspora turned up en masse.) Yet Super Bowl Sunday is also something of a de facto national holiday, at this point. They’ve been selling the brand for 50 years now, and one way or another, we keep lapping it up. We find reasons to care. And as long as millions and millions of people are willing to wager billions and billions of dollars on the Super Bowl, we’ll still find reasons to care. And I’ll freely admit that, as much as I think the NFL sucks, come this time a year from now, I’ll consider doing the same thing I did this year, because it was fun, in the end. It was stupid, mindless fun and I managed not to lose my shirt.

But … but … at the same time, I could see exactly how that sort of thing is possible. Why bet $10 on the favorite at -5½? If you’re sure they’re going to win, why not bet $100 or $1000? I was pretty sure  the Seahawks would cover two years ago and quite possibly posterize the Broncos in the process, but was I sure enough (or foolish enough) to wager that kind of coin? I ask because, as disciplined as we were when it came to wagering this past weekend, we still wound up ponying up a little bit more than we were planning to do. It’s not that hard to permit yourself to take that next step. In fact, it is alarmingly easy to let yourself get mesmerized and permit yourself to be sucked in.

And even the oddsmakers, whose job it is to be better at this stuff than you are, get it wildly and horribly wrong from time to time. Had you been perusing British bookmakers back in July, you’d have gotten 5,000/1 odds on Leicester City winning the EPL. I took a quick glance at the  EPL toteboard in the Treasure Island sportsbook yesterday, as we were laying $20 on the San Francisco Giants to win the World Series at 10/1, and Leicester City is now 12/5 to win. Then again, if you’re giving out 5,000/1, it’s not like you’re gonna get many takers. Just a few people here and there chasing a daydream. As you may notice from this photo, you can no longer even bet on the ultimate longshot at the Venetian. They love suckers in Las Vegas, and they’ll permit a few stupid Lakers fans from L.A. to hand over some easy money, but not even these guys will let you throw away your money wagering on the Philadelphia 76ers:

Note absence of #4023

And I remember my old French teacher from high school, who grew up in San Francisco, telling a story of being at the casino in Tahoe in the summer of 1981 and having $5 in hand, pondering an idle bet: laying $5 on the San Francisco 49ers to win the Super Bowl, the 49ers having gone 6-10 the year before and being listed by the bookies at 200-1 to win the Super Bowl. His buddy talked him out of the bet and they spent the $5 instead on a couple of hot dogs for lunch.

“How’d the hot dogs taste?” I asked.

“Bitter. They tasted very bitter.”

The Cleveland Carrion

LeBron checks out

IT WAS a great weekend of Lose and let us get right to it, beginning today’s Defeat tour in Cleveland, which is probably something we can do with any Lose entry. To the buzzard points!

• It really didn’t surprise me that much when David Blatt was fired by the Cleveland Cavaliers, despite having a 30-11 record this season, and despite having led the team to within two games of the NBA championship a season ago. We were excited for the game against the Golden State Warriors last Monday while we were still in New Orleans, and a bunch of us gathered at someone’s hotel room to watch – only we got there late, and the game was basically over. And by “late,” I mean just a couple of minutes into it, but Golden State was already up 12-2, and given the fact that GSDubs have won something like 55 games in a row when they’ve built a double-digit lead, and the fact that Cleveland looked as lively as guests on a Monday night at the morgue, the game – which was probably the one single home date Cleveland’s fans had circled on the calendar when the schedule came out – was never even close to being in doubt. It was about the time the Warriors’ lead reached 40 in that game that the notion of David Blatt possibly being fired after this debacle first passed through my head. I didn’t really give it much more thought, as we were all far more interested in heading out to down Sazeracs at the Polo Club, and the game being comfortably over early on afforded us an earlier drinking time.
No coach in NBA history had as good an in-season record when they got fired as David Blatt did. In the aftermath, one story after another has come out, constructing a narrative along the lines of that “the players” (meaning LeBron James) didn’t respect Blatt and didn’t give two shits about the fact he was an über-successful head coach in Russia and Israel and everywhere else, and that LeBron’s “camp” was behind this firing, in the end, and that the “players” wanted “one of them” to be their head coach – assistant coach Tyronn Lue, a former NBA player who “gets” them, and who will now essentially be LeBron’s sock puppet as he pretends to pay attention to Lue while running the team himself. Now, I summed it all up rather cynically there in that last passage, but one of the reasons why I did so is that so many people want to adopt such a cynical position themselves.
LeBron has since said he was surprised by the firing, insisting he had no direct hand in it, but even if he did, who cares? The NBA is a player’s league, first and foremost. All professional sports are player’s leagues in this day and age. And if you have a problem with that, go watch the indentured servitude that is the NCAA. If I am the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, and I’ve invested this much in my payroll – the aggregate salaries of the 14 players on the roster is almost $110 million – I’m damn sure going to want to make certain they’re happy with the head coach. Whether or not Dan Gilbert directly or indirectly consulted with LeBron on this manner, he’d seem to be something of a fool not to do so at all.

“Why, you little shit …”

Furthermore, what most people need to realize is that the Cleveland Cavaliers, as presently constructed, are not competing against 29 other NBA teams. They’re competing against two: the Warriors and the Spurs. And as should be plainly apparent, after getting completely humiliated 132:98 by the Dubs on Monday night, that Cleveland can’t compete. I forget which of the blowhards doing color commentary on the Cavs-Dubs game on Christmas said, “the Cavs have figured out how to play against Golden State.” Um, no, they haven’t. They tried to make that Christmas day affair as slow and ugly and painful a game as possible, and they still lost – just like they lost in six games in the NBA Finals. It speaks to their shortcomings that they have to at least try to play that way, which isn’t even all that natural for them given their roster, but then again, trying to play an open game against Golden State is a truly terrible idea for pretty much everyone in the NBA:

Where on earth are you going, Kevin Love?

I should point out as well that Real Madrid recently fired their head coach, Rafa Benitez, even though they were only four points out of first in La Liga at the time and had also won their Champions League group. But Benitez had his Waterloo moment, much like Blatt, at the hands of his biggest competitors – a 4-0 thrashing at home that they were subjected to by F.C. Barcelona. The Cleveland Cavaliers, much like Real, are built specifically to win everything and to do it right away. Nothing other than winning a championship will constitute success, and you don’t have any margin for error.
And it was pretty clear to me from watching the Cavs’ match-ups this season against the Spurs and the Warriors that David Blatt had no real idea how to beat those teams. I give Blatt a tremendous amount of credit for figuring out a way to keep winning playoff series last year when his team was completely decimated with injuries, but he offered no real great insight on the floor which separated him from other coaches. And it was pretty clear from the get-go that he didn’t really jibe with his “players” – LeBron and all of the others, to boot – and in this day and age, being disconnected from your team isn’t going to end well. His tenure in Cleveland is dead and the buzzards are circling …

• Speaking of not ending well, what looked like a possible dream season in Phoenix sure did end with a rude awakening, with the Cardinals getting embarrassed 49:15 by Carolina in the NFC Championship game and committing seven turnovers, six of them committed by QB Carson Palmer, who was playing at a near MVP level most of the season and wasn’t close to that effectiveness after injuring his thumb in December.
The warning signs about the Cardinals were everywhere during their regular season finale, when they got completely clobbered 36:6 by the Seahawks at home. You could say the game was meaningless for the Cardinals, but it was also meaningless to the Seahawks, and it didn’t stop them from going out and stomping all over Arizona. Palmer was terrible in that game, the defense didn’t bother to tackle and their special teams got gashed by Tyler Lockett for about 180 yards in punt returns.
Arizona looked nothing like a 14-win team in that game, and their performances simply got worse after that. The Cards’ season peaked a week earlier, when they annihilated Green Bay 38:8 – the same Green Bay that then scared the bejesus out of them in the playoffs last week. Palmer was awful on Sunday in Charlotte, but the Cardinals also didn’t block, didn’t tackle, and didn’t cover any receivers. Larry Fitzgerald dropped passes, and Patrick Peterson fumbled away a punt just at it appeared they were digging themselves out of a 17-point 1st Quarter hole. They did basically nothing right. I was thinking Carolina would win, but I thought it would at least be a better game.
And you wonder just how many chances guys like Fitzgerald and Palmer are going to get. Palmer has been around forever, but only won his first playoff game a week ago, his promising career in Cincinnati having been shortchanged due to a terrible injury he suffered in a playoff game against Pittsburgh in 2005. Without him playing well, Arizona isn’t very good. When he got hurt last season, and the Cardinals cycled through about six QBs, their potentially great season descended into folly. Even when they tried to upgrade the talent all around him, Arizona’s season still came down to Carson Palmer needing to be great, and he was abysmal.

• Even though his team was abysmal as a whole, Bruce Arians gets credit from The Lose for doing the math: down 34-7 and scoring a TD, Arians went for two, because the roadmap to evening the game down 19 points – two TD’s + two 2pts + a FG – is shorter than having to score 3 TDs when down 20. And The Lose found it interesting that a missed extra point wound up making such a big difference in the New England-Denver game: due to Stephen Goskowski’s miss in the 1st Quarter, the Pats were down eight points at the end of the game, and after a rather heroic final drive by Tom Brady, who was absolutely pounded by an onslaught of Denver pass rushers, the Pats had to go for two in the final seconds to tie. This sort of scenario hasn’t happened much this year in the NFL, but it’s precisely why the NFL moved the PAT back 15 yards: they wanted the play to matter which, given that 99% of kicks were converted a season ago, it very clearly didn’t matter. And former Seahawks beat scribe turned international correspondent Les Carpenter points out the irony: it was none other than Bill Belichick himself who advocated for the rule change two years ago.
Also, I said at the time that Belichick’s decision to kick off in O.T. against the Jets was stupid, but I also said I don’t think that game mattered very much … since I figured the Pats would still wind up clinching home field advantage in the AFC. I was wrong. After the Pats lost to the Jets, the Broncos then dug themselves out of a big hole and beat Cincinnati in O.T., and the Pats then threw up all over themselves the following week in a loss to the hapless Miami Dolphins, thus gifting home field to the Broncos. Instead of playing the Broncos in Foxboro on Sunday, they were playing a mile high in the Denver sky. It’s a short season in the NFL and all the games matter. And home field still really matters a great deal in the NFL. Super Bowl 50 will be the third straight match-up of #1 seeds.

• Super Bowl 50 is happening in my backyard, of course. The game is taking place down in Santa Clara, but many of the pre-game festivities are happening in downtown San Francisco. And, like most sane people in San Francisco, I’m responding to this by getting the hell out of town.
Myself and The Official Spouse of In Play Lose are going to Las Vegas the weekend of the Super Bowl and my plan is to take $50 over to the sports book before the Super Bowl starts. I’m going to put down $10 on the actual result of the game (the opening line has Carolina at -4½, and I’m liking those odds), and then I’ll divvy the other $40 eight ways and spend $5 each on the eight most ludicrous Super Bowl prop bets that I can find. I’ll likely spend less than a minute researching this, and I’m open to suggestions. It wouldn’t be a trip to Vegas without wagering on the most absurd things possible.

• When you root for a club in the EPL that isn’t one of the powerhouses, you learn to temper your expectations and savor the good moments when they come around, since they do not happen all that often. You have to be realistic, even if the reality is that you’re team is probably going to be relegated.
And at this point, I’d be somewhat surprised if my beloved Canaries of Norwich City manage to stay in the Premier League. They’re in 17th place, just two points above the drop zone, and they possess the second-worst defense in the league, so their goal differential is shot. They’re tenacious and resourceful, good when attacking on set pieces (they lead the EPL in goals scored from corners), but they’ve had a lot of games this year where they play some really great football, only to be done in by naïve defending and amateurish mistakes. And when you’re a fringe team that doesn’t get results when you play well, you’re far more likely to stop playing well and start losing than you are to have those results turn around.
On Saturday, Norwich City somehow contrived to lose at home to Liverpool in what was arguably the single-best game all season in the Premier League – and thus also the single-most disheartening. Norwich were down a goal after 18 minutes and then responded by scoring three, only to have their defense completely implode and give up three more (the last of which was so utterly, mind-numbingly stupid that if left me at a loss for words), only to then equalize at 4-4 two minutes into stoppage time … and then lose it in the 95th minute on basically the last kick of the game.
I happened to be awake for the 4:45 a.m. kickoff, since I’ve been sick and my sleep is a mess, and I’m both glad and distraught that I was. I was glad because it was probably the wildest, wackiest, zaniest game of top-flight soccer that I have ever seen. But in the end, the Good Guys lost, just as they’ve done all season. It’s not looking good for the Yellow Army.

• We’ll close with a hip and deep and groovily moody tune I’m grooving on at the moment, an Aussie collaboration featuring Marcus Marr and the vocal work of Chet Faker, whose work I quite like.
Now in this world where people left to tell you how to think, and say ‘Because I swear I've seen a million different angles of the same,’ we're all the same.

It Doesn’t Add Up

EVEN as a Seahawks fan, I cringed a little bit when I saw this. To the buzzard points!

• Have you ever seen a team play so scared with a 31-point lead as the Carolina Panthers did on Saturday? Carolina had a 31-0 lead on the Seahawks at the half, and when the Seahawks scored almost immediately after the break, the Panthers started looking as if they were running through a swamp. The Seahawks soon scored again and a palpable unease overtook the stadium. This is the Seahawks, after all, the 2-time Super Bowl attendees who’ve shown a penchant for the improbable comeback in recent years, mainly because they are at their best when they turn to the section of the playbook called “Russell Wilson Make Stuff Up.” The Panthers held on, in the end, winning 31:24. They did absolutely nothing in the second half, but the Seahawks simply ran out of time. The Panthers are a terrific young team, and this was certainly a good learning experience. It’s one thing to take your foot off the gas, but it’s another to go completely passive and just hope the clock runs out. Dialing back up 31 against Tampa Bay in the middle of the season is probably a good idea. Dialing it back in the playoffs? Not so much.
It would’ve helped the Seahawks cause if Pete Carroll could do the math. They trail 31-7 in the 3rd Quarter. The fastest route to 24 points is scoring on three possessions: three TDs and adding three 2-pt. conversions. The Seahawks score a TD to make it 31-13 and they then kicked the PAT, meaning they’re down 17 points and still need to score on three possessions (2 TDs, 2 PATs and a FG). If you miss it, you’re down 18, which isn’t much different than 17 and still requires three scores. Going for two here is a no-brainer. You have to follow the most direct route to even the score, even if it’s far-fetched. Is converting three straight 2-point conversions unlikely? Most certainly it is. OK, so, if you miss one, you have to wing it and make stuff up from there. That’s what happens when you’re losing the game.
WHY DO NFL COACHES DO THIS? Carroll’s done this sort of stupid thing before, mind you: last year, during this fine mess against Green Bay, the Seahawks trailed 19-0 when they scored a TD and they then kicked the extra point, meaning they were down 12 (needing two TDs) instead of possibly down 11 (needing a TD, a 2-pt., and a FG). My personal favorite act of dumbness is when a team is down by eight, score a TD and kick a PAT because “it’s too early in the game to be going for two.” It’s never too early to do the math!
NFL coaches have always seemed to consider the 2-point conversion to be some sort of annoying college gimmick imposed upon them. Most college coaches have a handy chart made up which they carry around, the margin of the game dictating whether or not to go for two, but the NFL gaffers have always eschewed this for some reason. I know that Bill Belichick did a little informal research back in his days coaching the Browns, which happened to be when the 2-point conversion came into the game. He would go for two at odd times during the game, curious as to how it impacted the outcome. (Which is how you wind up with an 11-8 game.) Going for two infrequently was something that made more sense with kickers converting 99%+ of PATs. Why give up a guaranteed point, when the 2-pt. conversion rate is less than 50%? But now that kickers are missing the longer PATs at a 10% clip, it’s not quite as safe a bet as it used to be, and teams would probably convert a higher percentage of twos if they actually bothered to practice them with some sort of frequency. Regardless, it’s about time coaches start doing more math to help their teams out. Come on guys, be a little smarter here.

• Speaking of Green Bay and fine messes, what the actual fuck was that game on Saturday night? That had to be the most confounding 5-play sequence in the history of the NFL. Up a touchdown, with the Packers facing 4th-and-forever on their own 4-yd. line while out of timeouts, the Cardinals somehow contrived to allow the Packers to go 96 yards in 55 seconds, and permitted Aaron Rodgers to complete not one, but two Hail Mary style passes to Jeff Janis. The Cardinals said after the game they were mindful of being Detroited (and their actual use of Detroit as a verb pleases me greatly), and their genius idea for defending the NFL’s Hail Mary master was to blitz – which doesn’t make any sense at all, since the QB is rolling out on a Hail Mary anyway, to buy time and let his guys get down field, so he’s likely rolling away from the blitz, and now you have fewer defenders available to knock down a pass. Granted, these are low-percentage plays we’re talking about here, but it’s probably a good idea not to somehow make it easier for the offense to pull it off.
The Packers had just cheated death, and after a bizarro double coin toss (and, seriously, how hard is it to toss a coin and make it flip?), the Packers had to play some defense. And I know that NFL defensive schemes are complex, and a game plan is a lot of information to process in a short period of time, but somehow, I suspect “cover #11 in red” was probably near to the top of it. The Cardinals protection breaks down and Palmer improvs it, winging a pass to Larry Fitzgerald … who actually pauses for a moment as he looks around, shocked that there isn’t a single Packer defender within 20 yards of him. 76 yards later, he’s tackled inside the Packers’ 5-yard line and the game is as good as over, with a nifty little shovel pass to Fitz for the TD doing the trick.
This is just the latest brutal postseason loss in a rather remarkable string of brutal postseason losses for the Packers, a model NFL franchise that’s always a title contender but has somehow become prone to the preposterous.

• Between fumbling within the last 90 seconds and the needless back-to-back 15-yard penalties on Vontaze Burfict and Adam Jones pushing the Steelers in position for a winning FG, the Cincinnati Bengals reinforced their reputation as the dumbest team in the NFL. Marvin Lewis has always had a penchant for employing players with million dollar talent and 10¢ heads, and once again it came back to bite him in the ass.
I find it interesting that with each playoff failure (this is five years in a row now) come rumblings about Lewis’ job security in Cincinnati. This is what happens when you raise the expectations. Cincinnati hasn’t been to a Super Bowl since 1989, and were atrocious most of the time between then and when Lewis came along, but being a perennial one-and-doner doesn’t mollify the masses for very long. Progress is always relative. Once you plateau, you grow stale and regress, and then you start heading in directions you don’t want to go.
I’m not sure the Bengals are to that point yet, but they aren’t on the level of the Pats nor Denver in the AFC, and it’s pretty obvious from all of the goings on in that playoff game that the Steelers are in the Bengals’ heads. Lewis is going to be under considerable pressure to have his team take the next step. But considering the job he’s done there – Cincinnati was a terrible job before his arrival, and likely will be again after his departure – he won’t be unemployed for long. As we saw with this year’s bloodletting (the number of NFL head coaching positions open pushing double digits), there are always plenty of bad jobs available. 

• When I see something like the Rams/Raiders/Chargers three-way tussle over the open L.A. market, I start wondering if the NFL is actively trying to make people hate them. The Raiders and Chargers had formed a pseudo-alliance under the guise of being joint tenants at a new football facility in Los Angeles, but the NFL owners were ultimately wooed by Rams billionaire owner/certified douchebag Stan Kroenke’s plan to build an NFL Valhalla in Inglewood.
Along the way, all three franchises have gone scorched earth with their home municipalities and fan bases, burning all of their bridges and acting as if they already had one foot out the door. Not so fast. After this latest vote by the owners in the NFL, the Rams are leaving St. Louis immediately, while the Chargers will have an “option” to relocate in another year – unless, of course, they somehow strike a deal in San Diego. Yeah, sure. I’m sure there will be hugs and kisses and a love-in for all parties involved. The Rams are gone, and the Chargers are as good as gone as well.
Who knows what the hell the Raiders do at this point? I can certainly understand that they hate the Oakland Coliseum. The Coliseum is a dump. There are Roman amphitheatres which are in better condition than the Oakland Coliseum. (Quite honestly, and scarily, Qualcomm in San Diego is worse.) But there is no incentive for anyone in Oakland government to help them out in building a new stadium, and the Raiders are steadfastly opposed to sharing Levi’s Stadium with (and thus paying rent to) the 49ers. I’m not sure what they do.
And for all of you would-be Los Angeles football franchises, I say this: good luck. L.A. hasn’t really cared much about not having football. The joke for years has been that watching football is literally the only thing you can’t do in L.A., a lot of it outdoors in that beautiful weather and a lot of it a whole lot cheaper than the season tickets and PSLs will be in Kroenkeville. You have to be entertaining in L.A., or the fans will tune you out in an instant – and this incarnation of the St. Louis Rams isn’t good at any aspect of football other than acting boorish and piling up needless personal foul penalties.
About the only thing good about this move by the Rams and, eventually, the Chargers, is an end to the L.A.-based extortions. The NFL has been milking this L.A. sow for decades now, using the vacant and massive market as leverage in hostage stadium negotiations with municipalities, and this should put a stop to that. Given that public opinion on these sorts of massive public expenditures has continued souring, the NFL may soon have to figure out another way to rip all of us off.

Dubs run a 1-on-5 fast break with two guys tying their shoes. No problem.

• It’s always seemed fitting to me that the most pretentiously poseurish franchise in sports plays it’s home games in Brooklyn. Reality has settled in for the Nets, who are now 10-28 and who fired head coach Lionel Hollins – more of a mercy killing than anything – and “reassigned” GM Billy King last week.
It was on King’s watch, under direction from owner Mikhail Prokhorov, that the Nets went on a ludicrous spend-and-trade rampage in concert with the 2012 move from the New Jersey swamplands into the opulent Barclays Center in Brooklyn: foolishly overpaying for Joe Johnson; trading for Deron Williams and Gerald Wallace and, worst of all, dealing all sorts of picks and draft conditions in exchange for acquiring Celtics graybeards Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett. In doing all of this, they also bloated their payroll obligations to $186 million, meaning they’ve had almost flexibility for modifying the roster since then, and they sold off so many futures that they don’t control any of their draft picks until 2019. Not only are the Nets terrible, but they have no young talent and very little in terms of rebuilding options. Few teams in the NBA, or all of sports, are quite as hopeless as the Brooklyn Nets.
Prokhorov wanted to make a splash when he moved the Nets to Brooklyn, hoping to assemble a team that would immediately challenge for Eastern Conference supremacy in the NBA.  The slow, old, oft-injured Nets barely stumbled their way to a #8 seed in the playoffs that debut Brooklyn season and have been generally irrelevant since. Nowadays, they make so little of a ripple on the New York sporting scene that both the New York Times and New York Daily News have actually stopped covering them on the beat. All Prokhorov managed to do was mortgage the future to pay for a house that was on fire.
Whomever inherits this mess has arguably one of the worst jobs in sports on their hands: the Nets have a few decent players, but no great ones, and certainly no one you’d consider a franchise cornerstone. You could tear the whole thing down and trade everyone, but everyone knows you’re desperate for draft picks and you’re likely to only get fractions of the dollar on the deals. There has been some suggestions that the Nets should go the other way and go shopping for some serviceable vets to try and win a few more games, if only to lift the miasma hovering over the franchise. There are no easy answers here.

“My opponent says there are no easy answers. I say he isn’t looking hard enough!”
– Bart Simpson

• Can we please do something to get the NBA to modify the rules so we don’t have to endure games like this? No NBA fan wants to plunk down $65 a ticket to watch Andre Drummond shoot 36 free throws. Honestly, I’d rather go to the dentist. I hate the Hack-a-Shaq strategy, I think it makes a complete mockery of the game, and the simple solution is just to consider such a ploy to be an intentional foul, award a team two free throws and then also give them the ball back. No one wants to watch that crap.

• The Lose has been tardy when it comes to writing the blog here in January, partially owing to real life interceding – tight deadlines this month – and partially owing to my annual pilgrimage to New Orleans for the Crescent City Open. It was a typical scrabble tournament for me, one including a mediocre finish (10-9-1, 33rd place) and a range of play running the gamut from mediocrity to periodic incompetence. The Official Spouse of In Play Lose, meanwhile, had one of her best tourneys to date and came home with a Top 10 finish, so the household is certainly happy.
I love the fact that a broken down, crumbling former athlete like myself still has a competitive outlet in scrabble, even though I’m not any good at it. What always seems to amaze me about scrabble is just how many people involved in the enterprise at the top level seem to forget that it’s actually a competition. Read the epigram of this blog. Sartre’s quote about soccer applies to scrabble, and just about everything else in life. Scrabble is a game between two players. It’s not a math problem. It’s competition. Your opponents don’t roll over and play dead for you. Sometimes, they actually make their own good plays and beat you because of it. Sometimes, they make bad plays and beat you anyway. Sometimes – gasp! – you lose!
But I’m of the opinion that in most walks of life, people don’t actually like competing – they like winning. None of us are particularly good losers, perhaps me worse than most. I used to be notoriously bad when it came to (not) handling defeat. But at least I’ve come to understand that failure in any of life’s many arenas is a source for good material, so I’ve come to approach defeat with humor and curiosity, and I’ve mellowed out. Mostly. I only broke one pen in New Orleans, so that counts as progress.

• And finally, RIP David Bowie, whose music I’ve always liked and, more importantly, who I always admired for his willingness to take artistic risks. I didn’t always like the strange art house, experimental phases he frequently went through in his music, but I appreciated the hell out of him for trying it. More musicians, and artisans, and people in general, should dare to be so bold. And I’d rather remember him fondly for his beautiful music than mourn his passing, so I’ll close with my favorite tune of his:

Missing the Mark

Oh, for fucksake.

JEEZ, I can’t even go on vacation. I gave you The Lose of the Year post, and then everyone in the sporting world seems hell bent on doing even more stupid stuff. Sigh. The Lose’s work is apparently never done.

To the buzzard points!

• “If you’re worried about being fired, you should already have been fired.” – Chip Kelly
The firing of Chip Kelly seemed inevitable after watching the Philadelphis Eagles’ comedic 38:24 loss to the Redskin Potatoes on Saturday night, dropping Philly to 6-9 and out of the playoff race. The Eagles were fraught with mistakes – eight penalties, at least 10 dropped passes, five sacks allowed. One dismal sequence in the third quarter featured, on consecutive plays, a fumbled punt, a botched handoff, a dropped pass, and then a fumble by Demarco Murray that the Taters returned for a game-clinching TD. The defense, meanwhile, made Kirk Cousins look like a Pro Bowler and couldn’t be bothered to cover a Washington receiver for the better part of the evening. The Iggles were so dysfunctional that all-pro LT Jason Peters pulled himself from the game in the 4th Quarter, saying “I don’t want to get hurt for this.”
Kelly should certainly be commended for bringing some of his approaches to sports science and injury prevention to the league – the Eagles were generally a much healthier team than most others during his 3-year tenure – and he brought some great ideas to the pro game from Oregon regarding spacing and tempo on offense which helped make the Eagles an exciting team to watch when their offense was firing on all cylinders. But Kelly brought with him some of the naïve sort of ideas too many college coaches bring with them when jumping to the pros, the most notorious being espoused in his comment, “culture is greater than scheme,” that NFL Films captured him saying on the sideline during training camp.
Kelly’s offensive scheme was actually quite simplistic in nature, his thinking being that a well-conditioned team who executed to perfection would prove to be successful, particularly in a no-huddle situation where they could simply wear down opposition. This attitude works great in college – assuming you’ve gone out and recruited all sorts of better athletes than your opponents. College football is all about recruiting, amassing enough talent so that you can simply overwhelm most of your opponents. You don’t need brilliant schemes in college. You just need to keep your bigger, faster, stronger guys from screwing up too often. But in the NFL, everyone is bigger and faster and stronger. Talent tends to generally equal out. The first 22 guys in any NFL starting lineup are pretty damn good. (It’s depth, injuries, and mistakes that make the difference.) NFL play books are huge, in part, because over the course of a 16-game season, you’re often going to have to go to Plan B or even Plan C, since whatever you were trying to do gets figured out or you’ve got too many injuries at key positions, or what have you. You never need to go to Plan B or Plan C at an enormous college football factory like the University of Nike Oregon, where the 2nd- and 3rd-string guys are probably better than most of your opposition, anyway. This is part of why a lot of great college coaches, even championship ones – Dennis Erickson and Nick Saban immediately come to mind – ultimately made terrible NFL head coaches. Gaudy college records implied they were tactical geniuses, which turned out not to be the case at all. Scheme is, in fact, more important than culture in the NFL. You have to know what you’re doing. If you don’t, your players – who, along with being bigger and stronger and faster also happen quite often to be smarter, as well – catch onto it quickly and, just as quickly, start tuning you out.
Like far too many others who come from the Cult of the Coach that is big-time American college sports, Kelly brought a messianic complex with him to Philadelphia, and also brought with him an attitude that made him seem like he was the smartest guy in the room. He also wanted the personnel powers in Philly and eventually got his wish, and spent the offseason making bad trades and illogical decisions. A team consisting of “his” players looked woefully ill-equipped, unprepared and, ultimately, bereft of ideas. If you’re going to tout yourself as being an innovator, you have to keep doing innovating, because the game catches up to you fast. The Chip Kelly Eagles played fast and furious at first, but their decline wound up happening even swifter.

• Your NFC East champions:

Kirk Cousins tears the ACL in his brain

Here are the Potatoes taking a knee at the end of the first half against the Iggles, and letting the clock run out, instead of killing the clock by spiking the ball. Uh, whoops.
A potentially amusing bit of gamesmanship arises this coming weekend, when Green Bay hosts Minnesota. The winner of the game captures the NFC North title, and also locks down the #3 seed in the playoffs. The loser, meanwhile, gets the first wild card and gets the #5 seed.
Being #3 gets you a home game, but also gets you a matchup with the Seattle Seahawks – and Vegas oddsmakers have said that the Seahawks would be favored in a neutral field matchup against pretty much any other team in the NFC. The Packers had to rally to beat Seattle early in the season at home, while the Seahawks tore Minnesota to shreds in Minneapolis a couple of weeks ago. Even without a functioning running game and offensive line, the Seahawks are probably the most undesirable postseason opponent, and beating Seattle would then slot you against the Arizona Cardinals in Phoenix – the same Cardinals who made Green Bay look stupid over the weekend.
The #5 seed, meanwhile, slots you against the aforementioned Redskin Potatoes, winners of the most comically awful NFC East, and if all games go to form, then gets you a game against the Carolina Panthers, who are 14-1 but whom everyone around the NFL thinks has wildly overachieved.
Which path through the playoffs is easier? Is playing a .500 and decidedly marginal Potatoes team on the road a better postseason bet than having a home field against an ornery 2-time Super Bowl attendee? And, as a coach for either the Vikes or the Pack, how do you approach this game? Do you go all-in and play to win? Do you rest guys who are 50-50?
Quite honestly, I think losing this game is better in the long-term: not only do I think the Taters are a weaker opponent, but finishing 2nd in your division also gets you a slightly easier schedule the following season (the schedule being the NFL’s greatest single parity-generator which no one really talks about). In the here and the now, however, I suspect Green Bay views itself as desperately needing a home playoff game, since the Pack’s season has come off the rails, and if I’m the Vikes, I probably give it a go but ease off the throttle pretty early if it isn’t going my way. I don’t think Minnesota minds losing this game.

• Bill Belichick’s decision to kickoff at the beginning of overtime against the New York Jets was nonsense. It was complete nonsense, and if that was the head coach of the Cleveland Browns or the Jacksonville Jaguars doing something like that, we’d all be talking today about what an idiot he is. Hell, Marty Morninweg doing the same thing in Detroit was the straw that broke the camel’s back and ultimately got him fired. But since Belichick has won four Super Bowls, there must obviously be some higher, sensible rationale for what he did.
Which there isn’t. It was dumb of the Pats to kickoff and don’t bother trying to argue otherwise. Such a ploy makes some sense on a day where the conditions dictate it (as was the case when the Pats got away with this before a couple of years ago, when the direction of gusty winds put a premium on having those winds at your back), but on a 60° day in New York with the wind not a factor, it’s dumb. The numbers don’t back that strategy up, and I personally have far more faith in Tom Brady winning me a game than a defensive unit that’s been decent, at best, for most of the season.
But Belichick has never been one to shy away from thinking outside the box. I personally thought his game-theory approach at the end of the Super Bowl, while unorthodox, also put the Seahawks in a position to fail – which is precisely what they did. In that game, I think Pete Carroll got it wrong in that Super Bowl. Well, sometimes even the best coaches in the NFL get stuff wrong. And in the end, this game didn’t mean that much to the Pats, who’ve clinched the decision and are well on their way to a #1 seed in the playoffs. There’s nothing wrong, in the bigger picture, with taking a shot here to see if your defense is good enough to win you a game. In the end, he has enough cred built up – an indisputably so – to withstand a strange coaching decision here and there.

• Speaking of Detroit ...

“False start … offense … nine guys moving before the snap …”

• The Philadelphia 76ers are so bad, and losing to them so inconceivable, that doing so results in a full-on crisis unfolding. The Sixers notched their second victory of the season over the weekend, winning 111:104 at Phoenix, after which the Suns went into near supernova, firing two of Jeff Hornacek’s assistant coaches over the weekend and holding meetings between players and management. Along the way, leading scorer Eric Bledsoe hurt his knee and is out for the season, disgruntled forward Markief Morris threw a towel at Hornacek and got himself suspended. The Suns are 12-21 and have lost 7 of their past 8 games. It’s crisis management mode once again in Phoenix as everyone tries to figure out what went wrong.
What actually went wrong, in my opinion, is that Phoenix were supposed to be lousy two seasons ago, but first-year coach Hornacek found a winning formula with the players on hand and wildly exceeded expectations, very nearly making the playoffs that season when thought by most experts to be a 25-win team, at most, at the start of the season. Quite honestly, that team was somewhat designed to tank, but the coaching staff and the players refused to play along. But with those unexpected results came greater expectations, and what’s transpired since is regression to the mean. The Suns are still owned by Robert Sarver, who has been a genuinely lousy owner in his time since taking over from new Philly “consultant” Jerry Colangelo. They still make dumb trades and bad personnel decisions, and now they have a misfit side of malcontents which also doesn’t make any sense as a unit. PHX was marginally successful in spite of their front office, but you can only overachieve in pro sports for so long.

• “Steph Curry’s great. Steph Curry’s the MVP. He’s a champion. Understand what I’m saying when I say this. To a degree, he’s hurting the game. And what I mean by that is that I go into these high school gyms, I watch these kids, and the first thing they do is they run to the 3-point line. You are not Steph Curry. Work on the other aspects of the game. People think that he’s just a knock-down shooter.” – Marc Jackson
This is yet another example of why Marc Jackson needs to stop talking. Unfortunately, in his role as lead color commentator for ESPN’s NBA telecasts, he won’t. Between he and blowhard cohort Jeff Van Gundy, they make the telecasts verge on being insufferable.
Jackson says a lot of weird stuff about the Warriors, of course, who went from garbage to being a playoff team during his reign as head coach – and who promptly launched into the stratosphere once he left. I get that he has an axe to grind, even though the evidence would indicate the Warriors made the right decision. The idea that Steph Curry is “hurting the game,” however, is ridiculous. That kids aspire to shoot like Steph is, logical. We all wanted to “be like Mike” in my day, even though it was impossible to do what Jordan did. It’s hard to aspire to be LeBron James or Kevin Durant if you’re not a 6’10” freak of nature. The idea of a kid patterning himself/herself after a modest, regular-sized guy who perfected the art and craft of shooting a basketball doesn’t really seem like a bad idea to me. That kids can’t shoot like Steph Curry is unsurprising, since no one ever has shot the ball like Steph Curry. But eventually, someone will, and the game of basketball will be better because of it.

• My Hero of the Qeek is Derris Devon McQuaig, a San Diego transient who legally owns the title to Petco Park in San Diego. This is one of the nuttiest stories I’ve seen all year. Everyone involved with the Padres insists this isn't a big deal, and that they can conduct business around this, but their attempts to wrest the title away from McQuaig, who filed a claim on the title and slipped through a legal loophole in the process, have proven to be unsuccessful. For a bumbling franchise like the Pads, being mired in such a ridiculous situation seems oddly appropriate.

We’ve not offered up enough music here of late, so I thought I would send the year out with this selection from Afrolicious, the Official House Band of In Play Lose, who recorded this groovy tune this past summer at Bottle Rock Napa and who are ringing in 2016 at the Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco. Happy New Year to everyone.