The Choke

Tom Pennington/Getty Images

TEXAS A&M’S Alex Caruso missed a 3-point shot with 36 seconds remaining in the NCAA second round game between Northern Iowa and Texas A&M on Sunday in Oklahoma City. Northern Iowa was leading 69-57 at the time, and Caruso’s missed trey seemed to be their last faint gasp, as Northern Iowa’s win percentage was calculated to be 99.99% in that moment. A&M’s Admon Gilder rebounded the miss, however, and scored a put-back bucket with :34 on the clock, cutting the lead to 69-59, but the needle barely moved. UNI was still 99.96% to win at that moment.

And then this happened:

What the actual fuck?

Texas A&M wound up winning the game 92:88 in 2OT. Improbable? Impossible? A miracle? There really are no words to describe this. You have to see it to believe it. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the greatest choke we may ever see in our lifetimes.

To give you some idea of the magnitude of this collapse, let’s use another recent shocking late-game turn – Super Bowl XLIX between the Patriots and the Seahawks. When Seattle found themselves with 2nd down on the Patriots 1-yard line in the closing minute, the Seahawks possessed an 87.4% chance of winning the game. The Hawks’ chances plummeted to 0.4% when they didn’t run the damn ball, and Malcolm Butler picked off the pass at the goal line. (About the only way you could have a bigger swing in an NFL game would be a chip shot FG blocked and run back for a TD on the last play of the game.) Somewhat of an apples-to-oranges comparison, of course, given that we’re talking about different games with different variables, but the point is that, percentage wise, UNI’s collapse is even more unthinkable. 538.com suggests A&M was about a 3000-1 bet to win the game at that point, having not found a comeback of the sort anywhere in college basketball in at least the past four seasons. (If I put a $100 on A&M to rally last weekend, and another $100 on 5000-1 Leicester to win the EPL last summer, I’d be retired and living in Tahiti already.)

This game capped off four days of utter NCAA nuttiness the likes of which we’ve scarcely seen. I’d basically given up on college basketball after last season, since the on-court look of the game was so bad. The new rule changes shortening the shot clock and adjusting the geometry of the court to create more space have had a positive impact on the quality of play.

One of the comments I heard quite a bit about the new rules was that, come tournament time, you’d be less likely to see the sorts of big upsets you’ve seen in the past, the theory being that most of those upsets occur through smaller schools with lesser talent playing entirely half-court games consisting of holding the ball for longer and reducing the number of possessions in the game.

This year’s NCAA tourney showed that to be utter nonsense. Upsets were everywhere in the first two days. Friday saw a 15-seed, 14-seed, and 13-seed all win – the first time that’s ever occurred on a single day of the tourney – including the most humdinging, bracket-busting upset of all time: 15-seed Middle Tennessee State’s 90:81 win over Michigan State. There’ve been eight 15-over-2’s in the history of the tourney, but this one was different: Michigan State was, in essence, the fifth #1 seed in this tourney, and were shocked to find themselves slated as a #2 going in. The Spartans, at 11-2 odds, were second favorites in Vegas to win the whole thing behind Kansas. Sparty was a 17½-point favorite going into this game, and the Blue Raiders from Murfreesboro were getting as much as +$2200 straight up from the Vegas sports books.

And all it took was watching the Blue Raiders jump out to an apropos 15-2 lead at the outset of the game to make you realize that the NCAA Selection Committee had gotten it horribly wrong. Middle Tennessee was clearly underrated. Upsets of the 15-over-2 variety in the tourney tend to be the product of the committee bumbling the selections, either placing an overrated team at #2 or an underrated team at #15, or it’s the case where the #15 team has some great player on their team who goes off: I very much remember 1993, when 2-seed Arizona got ousted by Santa Clara, a game I had interest in since I knew one of the Santa Clara players, and Santa Clara had a freshman point guard by the name of Steve Nash who was kinda good. Another example of this is Lehigh’s C.J. McCollum, now of the Portland Trail Blazers, going off for 30 against Duke in 2012.

And this year’s rule changes may have, in fact, contributed to leveling the playing field more than first thought, simply because everyone is trying to adjust to new rules and trying to figure out how to play. You can play neither offense nor defense in the quite the same way as before. Indeed, the field was the losingest in the tournament’s history, with more combined losses among the 68 entrants than ever before, thus suggesting a far more level playing field. The committee took more heat than the norm for the field they selected for this year’s tourney, but given how parity appears to be reigning and everyone seems to be about equal, how in the hell are you supposed to differentiate? And though a fair number of blue bloods from power conferences wound up reaching the Sweet 16, teams like Kentucky and Michigan State did not, and many more of them had the bejeezus scared out of them. Across the first week of the NCAA tourney, the overall quality of play was generally better than what I’d seen a year ago, and more importantly, the drama was better than ever. And that’s what’s most important in the end. We love the drama and absurdist theatre of the NCAA tournament. The kids don’t always play well, but they play their hearts out. Inspired comebacks, clutch shots, overtimes, buzzer beaters (or, in the case of Cincinnati, beater buzzers), weird schools you’ve never heard us from places like Nacogdoches, Texas, seemingly doing the impossible, strange twists and turns and unpredictable results. It’s all great stuff. It’s why we watch the tournament, and why we watch sports at all. Sports are life’s original reality TV.

And then Northern Iowa had to go and make us basically forget all of what we’d just seen by pulling off the most incomprehensible of chokes. The Panthers from Cedar Falls had already had a pretty memorable couple of weeks. That they were in the tourney at all was due to this wild and bouncy buzzer beater in the MVC championship game in St. Louis against the Orange Purple Aces of Evansville (who were wearing orange, for some reason). UNI then pulled off the most miraculous of results against Texas in the first round, as the Panthers’ Paul Jesperson did some Steph things at the buzzer, sinking a 50-footer to give them an improbable 75:72 win. But UNI is known as a “mid-major” program in NCAA-speak: not one of the élite, but certainly not a nobody. The Missouri Valley Conference is a highly competitive and well-respected league, and Northern Iowa has made four trips to the NCAA tourney in the past six years, first coming into the collective sports consciousness six years ago when they went about torching and torturing #1 Kansas in the second round of the tournament. This is a team that knows what they’re doing – or should’ve known what they were doing, I should say. Indeed, as was pointed out in The Washington Post, had Northern Iowa done any of these 14 13 things instead of what they did on Sunday, they likely would’ve won the game. What you have instead is an absolute disaster.

 Oh, I’m sorry, I meant to say that what you have is an act of God.

“Glory be to God … they were blessed the other night, and we were blessed tonight.”
– Texas A&M coach Billy Kennedy, when asked right after the game the Aggies’ victory.

Oh, fuck right off.

Let me just get this off my chest here. I don’t give a shit what religion you are. I don’t. Believe whatever you want to believe, and permit me to do the same. But don’t give me this bullshit about how you won because you were ‘blessed.’ I hate it when athletes say that sort of stuff. Fuck that shit. Quite honestly, I wouldn’t know why God would give a damn about a basketball game. The outcome is not divinely determined. It’s determined by human beings making plays – and also making mistakes. Also, to say that UNI were ‘blessed’ the other night also implies that they were just lucky and is disrespectful. Sure, they were fortunate a 50-footer went in the basket, but they were good enough to be in a position to win that game. Saying stuff like this just makes me want to hate you for being completely ignorant. Here’s to hoping you have to go and pray over why it is Oklahoma thumps your ass this coming Thursday in Anaheim.

But I digress. In the 100 years or so that I’ve been watching college basketball, I cannot ever recall seeing a comeback like this. Certainly, the game has changed over that time – but a lot of those changes didn’t really come into play in this instance, save for the fact that the clock stops after a made bucket in the final 2:00 of the game, which wasn’t always the case. The 3-point shot aids your attempt at a comeback, of course – but Texas A&M only made one such shot in this rally. The advent of the double-bonus on college hoops took away one path to a rally, in that in the past, when every foul in the bonus was a 1-and-1, the strategy you employed during a rally was simply to force the other team to throw it to their worst foul shooter, at which point you fouled the hell out of him and hoped he’d miss the front end of the 1-and-1. But again, free throws didn’t matter here – UNI shot no free throws at all in the final :30 of this game, their only points coming on a breakaway dunk after a long in-bounds pass, which was about the only thing the Panthers did right. Otherwise, it was mistake after mistake after mistake:

And here, we also have to give some praise to Texas A&M for a bit of creative strategy and some out-of-the-box thinking, which is the sort of thing you need in times of desperation. If you remember back to Super Bowl XLIX (and how I can ever forget?), you may recall the endgame situation: Pats up four, Seahawks on the Pats 5-yard line, and both teams have one timeout left, final few moments of the game. The Seahawks carry the ball to the Pats 1-yard line on first down, and conventional wisdom dictates that New England should call timeout to save some seconds for their offense in case Seattle scores. Even so, this is a completely dire situation for New England. So what does Belichick do? He doesn’t call the timeout, because a stopped clock would be an ally of the Seahawks, who are still losing the game. So now what do the Seahawks do? By not calling the timeout, and putting the onus on the Seahawks to manage the clock, the Pats are then able to take an educated guess as to what will happen: the Seahawks will likely have to pass on 2nd down, since an incompletion would stop the clock and it would save the timeout. Sure enough, the Seahawks do exactly that, the Pats play pass defense and recognize the formation, Butler jumps the pass route and makes the interception. It’s still somewhat miraculous, but Belichick had at least positioned his team for the possibility of a miracle to occur.

OK, so let’s apply some game theory here to the final moments in Oklahoma City. Texas A&M is down 10 points after Gilder’s layup with :34 left, but the clock is now stopped. Conventional basketball wisdom here is that you deny like hell the inbounds pass and try to force a 5-second call or a bad inbounds pass (which did happen once in this sequence), and if that doesn’t work, then you immediately foul and concede two free throws in exchange for stopping the clock. But there is a second school of thought about this, which is that rather than immediately fouling whomever receives the first pass, you immediately trap him and then foul on the second pass. You want to try to steal the inbounds pass, of course, but failing that, the goal is to force them into a bad area of the floor – the corner, along the baseline – double-team the ball and use the boundary of the court as a third defender. Now, there is nothing all that unremarkable about this strategy in and of itself, and teams are well-drilled in learning how to break the press. And it doesn’t make much sense, in a predicament such as A&M found themselves in, to be letting the seconds tick away when time is of the essence.

Except that it really doesn’t make a difference whether the time is ticking away as you trap in the backcourt or if you’re bringing the ball up the floor after the free throws, the most likely result of which being that you’re even further behind. You’re fighting on multiple fronts here. You’re fighting the clock, but you’re also fighting the score. You have to score as quickly as possible when you get the ball, and in this instance, that time is better spent trying to get the ball back nearer to the opponent’s basket than it is taking it out of bounds 94 feet away.

But more importantly, in choosing not to immediately foul, you have the element of surprise on your side, because the other team’s players expect to be fouled. Not doing so increases volatility and can also increase the potential for unusual or unlikely to occur.

In fact, this very scenario unfolded in Oklahoma City two weeks previously during the NBA game between the Zombies and the Golden State Warriors, a 121:118 OT win for Golden State that was the best game of this season, and just about any other season for that matter. Golden State trails by four points with :14 remaining in regulation, Klay Thompson drives for a layup to cut it to two with :10 left, OKC then immediately inbounds to Kevin Durant like they want to do since he’s an 89% free throw shooter – but the Warriors don’t foul. They trap Durant along the baseline and catch the Zombies by surprise. Durant & Co. stop moving, stop trying to get open, and even forget they have a timeout left. Durant tries a crazy diagonal cross-court pass which the Warriors knock free and steal, and now it’s a scramble drill and the Zombies are in a mess. They’re all over the place and commit a foul, and two Warrior free throws force the OT. And this is Kevin Durant we’re talking about here, one of the best and smartest basketball players on the planet. An unexpected approach by the Warriors leads to a moment of madness, an unexpected rush of blood to the head.

And indeed, part of the problem for Northern Iowa in this instance is that when the expected foul doesn’t come, they forget what to do. Go back and watch this again. They stop moving, the guy with the ball panics, they’re trapped in terrible areas of the floor and twice they resort of trying to throw the ball off defender’s legs and out of bounds, but the alert Aggies step away from the trouble and make the steal. And with each successive turnover, the A&M belief grows, the UNI panic further settles in, the frenzy builds and then it snowballs into a full-blown avalanche.

Even so, this is all low-percentage stuff – but if you’re A&M, you’re looking at the no-percentage stuff of not playing any more games, so you may as well try everything. And even with all of this effort from A&M, it got them no better than being tied. They still had to play the overtime, but Northern Iowa messed that up as well, screwing up their final possession in the first OT with the game tied and settling for yet another Jesperson heave-ho from mid-court. Foul trouble attrition then settled in during the second extra session, as it often does in such extended games, and the Aggies were able to wear UNI out with their superior depth. But even though the outcome was still somewhat in doubt well into the second OT, you just sort of knew that the Panthers had blown it and they would eventually succumb. All the announcers could say during the 2nd OT, again and again, were words along the lines of, “I can’t believe what we witnessed at the end of regulation.”

It’s an appalling meltdown, and you feel bad for the kids involved, all of whom had played great to get their team in that position in the first place. We take life lessons from losing, of course, but losing in the NCAAs is particularly bitter in that the losses aren’t necessarily applied again to playing the game: graduating seniors move into other life phases, don’t necessary continue to play, and the vast majority of them certainly never play at this high of a level again.

The biggest takeaway from that, as it turns out, is that most of us are going to lose the last game we play. Winning championships is rare. Going out on top is almost nonexistent. And when you’re an underdog in the NCAA tournament, I think you’d almost rather be blown out by 30. Being blown out by 30 sucks in the immediate aftermath, of course, but you’re able to divorce yourself from it over time and look at the bigger picture: losing in the NCAA tourney was, in fact, a reward for doing so many other things right. And the humor of it all sets in at that point. You got blown out by 30 and you probably deserved it, but at least you had a helluva good time along the way.

But what do you pull from a loss like this one? Don’t choke? Well, yeah, no shit. But is there a lesson or a moral victory to be found in this anywhere? Anywhere? I don’t know what to say. I got nothin’ on this one. Words are completely failing me.

Fleet Foxes

Sweet!

THANKS to Shinji Okazaki’s brilliant overhead kick, Leicester City defeated Newcastle United 1:0 on Monday evening. The win brought the Foxes to 63 points with eight games remaining in the EPL season, five points clear of 2nd-place Tottenham Hotspur and 11 ahead of 3rd-place Arsenal and ESPN’s SPI now lists the Foxes as being 73% favorites to win the title.

To put that into some perspective, at this time a season ago, Leicester City were dead last in the EPL and staring at relegation. Only a seemingly miraculous late season run salvaged the club, as the Foxes won seven of their last nine matches to save themselves in 2015. Even so, the Foxes were assumed to be a relegation candidate this season. They were picked to finish dead last, or near to it, by virtually every single pundit and sports journalist in the U.K., and had the longest odds of any of the 20 league clubs at the start of the year, with the bookies offering 5000-1 on Leicester to win the title. (Even the Philadelphia 76ers had better odds on winning the NBA title.)

And it isn’t as if they had a whole lot of takers. The British press has now put in considerable effort beating the bushes in search of people who willingly tossed £5 or £10 down on Leicester back in the summer. It’s one of those dumb sorts of bets you might make just for the hell of it with the loose change jangling about in your pockets. Bookies love those sorts of bets. It’s easy money. If the Foxes can hang on for eight more games, and win the championship in the most popular sports league on earth, it will go down as probably the biggest upset in the history of sport.

Oh sure, there has been a one-off prizefight here and there where the underdog channeled their inner Rocky Balboa and sprung a big upset, but you’re talking about the EPL here, the longest and one of the most rigorous campaigns in sport. The EPL season is 10 months long, and unlike other European leagues, they take no winter break. Most countries have one domestic cup competition, but in England they have two, so if you’re progressing in the tourneys, the fixture backlog can get completely ridiculous. (Liverpool was playing two games a week for the better part of two months, as they juggled three different tournaments.) With injuries and depth issues and mid-season transfers, a squad can come to look and play, by the end of the season, absolutely nothing like they looked and played at the beginning. To win, therefore, takes sustained excellence, which makes a scrub club like Leicester’s achievements truly impressive.

And this is good for the game. It’s good for a sport which has become predictable to the point of being stale. This past weekend, Paris St.-Germain defeated Troyes 9:0 – yes, that’s 9:0 – to clinch the French Ligue 1 championship with eight games to go. Barcelona has a 30+ game unbeaten streak going, and are now well on their way to winning in Spain, while Bayern Munich and Juventus went on their inevitable long winning streaks to win their inevitable championships yet again in Germany and Italy, respectively. After a bit of early season upheaval, the old guard have reestablished themselves and the season is playing out like it usually does. Big money rules the roost in soccer, where great talent doesn’t come cheap. As the season has progressed, all of the big clubs, with their big wage bills and big financial backing, have taken their rightful and predictable places at the tops of the tables.

Except in England, where apparently everyone showed up drunk, and everything has gone mad.  Manchester City fielded the first £300 million side in history earlier this season, but you’d think that for £300 million you could afford more than one quality center back. The Citizens sleepwalked their way through a goalless draw with Norwich this past weekend that pretty much killed whatever chances remained of winning the title. Meanwhile, Manchester United salvaged a scrappy 1:1 draw in the FA Cup with West Ham United over the weekend, but since when does Man U have to be scrappy? Manchester United has a £200 million wage bill, and the club made £190 million in jersey sales alone in 2015. Two other big spenders were taking part in the FA cup over the weekend as well, with perpetually flaky Arsenal getting beat by Watford (who was trawling in Div. 2 a year ago), while Chelsea was busy getting whomped by Everton, which was newsworthy insofar as that it wasn’t really an upset at all. Everton aren’t a small club by any means, but they’re probably a better team than Chelsea at the moment and are constructed for about half of the cost, and they’re spearheaded by striker Romelu Lukaku, who Chelsea gave up on. EPL clubs spent over £1 billion this year acquiring players, and a whole lot of that is looking like it was money very badly spent.

But Leicester City just keeps on winning and it’s awesome. It’s totally awesome. And you should root for Leicester City. Everyone should root for Leicester City. The Foxes are, quite simply, turning the sport on its head. And as a purveyor of Lose, and a regular fan of a similar sort of club, I simply have no choice but to wholeheartedly back the Foxes for the remainder of the season. Not only is Leicester City’s potential triumph in the EPL a chance to stick it to the man, but there is a possibility that business as usual in the EPL may never be usual again.

There is essentially a caste system in the sport, one which has been established over 100+ years. There is a hierarchy and a pecking order. There are 92 clubs in the four professional leagues in England, with hundreds of more clubs in the levels below that, and every club comes to find some sort of a comfort zone for itself. As much as the local fans of some collection of Division 4 duffers would like to see their club somehow rise to greatness, it doesn’t wind up working that way. I recommend everyone read The Miracle of Castel di Sangro, Joe McGinniss’ wonderful book chronicling a backwater Italian club rising to the second division. The club is completely out of its depth once it reaches Serie B – and, in fact, no one involved in the operation of the club has any real interest in seeing them succeed at that level, since doing so would require a substantial financial investment. The ownership is perfectly content with Serie C mediocrity, and trying to compete at the Serie B level is a burden and also something of an annoyance. Being successful on the pitch gets in the way of being profitable off of it.

Leicester are one of the great yo-yo clubs of British football. They’ve won the second division seven times in their 130-year history, more than any other club – which means, of course, that they also get relegated a lot. They go up, they go down, they go up again. There is a whole group of clubs who do this sort of thing (with my beloved Norwich City being one of them) Some simply rise to the top level, cash the big EPL cheques, spend very little money and drop back down to The Championship (aka Div. 2), using a year or two of EPL windfall as a nice budget for the club. (The current Div. 2 leaders, Burnley, employed precisely that strategy a season ago.) Some clubs, meanwhile, go all gung-ho when they arrive in the EPL, rife with delusions of grandeur and glory, deciding that they need to pony up and spend like the big clubs – which can be disastrous if you do it wrong. Fairly regular EPL yo-yos Bolton Wanderers went all-in and got it all wrong: they are now saddled with £180 million in debt, verging on bankruptcy and sitting dead last in the second division, having been forced to sell players and having had no money to buy quality replacements. The yo-yo clubs like Leicester and Norwich, like Wolves and Hull City and the sort, have generally placed their emphasis on talent development over the years, and have maintained policies of zero sentimentality when it comes to selling off players. There have been quite a few great players over the years who’ve donned the Foxes’ blue jerseys, but usually they were simply passing through on their way to bigger and better things.

And with modest means and modest results come modest expectations. A 50-point EPL season and maybe a nice cup run constitutes a successful season. You temper your hopes and you redefine success. Winning seven second divisions at Leicester, while definitely a step down from the big time, has still contributed to a creation of culture and tradition at the club. Some of the game’s best and most ardent fan support lies within those loyal to the yo-yos, be it Leicester or Norwich or Crystal Palace or what have you. You learn to take the good with the bad, celebrate the successes and not let the defeats – of which there are many – get to you too much. It’s an unfair game, after all. In this day and age, the disparity in finances between the big clubs and the yo-yos is so vast that you cannot hope to win.

Or can you?

We all love the Moneyball idea, of course, but as has been pointed out on this blog countless times before, Billy Beane’s approach to building the Oakland A’s into a perennial MLB playoff contender, in spite of budget constraints, only went so far. Theo Epstein then took many of Beane’s ideas and instilled them in the Boston Red Sox, with the financial wherewithal of the Red Sox organization to back him up, and it was Boston who wound up pinning three World Series championship banners up on the clothesline and not the A’s. Perhaps the most successful “moneyball” devotee in the game of soccer was the French club Lyon, who parlayed savvy buying and selling into an incredible seven straight Ligue 1 titles – and Lyon also happens to be the only domestic club to defeat Paris St.-Germain this season, the Paris club having been purchased by a Qatari sovereign wealth fund several years ago and infused with so much money to spend on players that the scales have now been seemingly impossibly tipped. It seems simply unimaginable that anyone other than PSG could win the French league anymore. It’s unthinkable.

But Leicester winning the EPL seemed unthinkable as well, yet here they are on the cusp of doing just that. Leicester City are a triumph of scouting and player development, and of employing creative solutions. Not only are they winning the league, but they’re playing the game in ways like no other club does. For most of the season, Leicester have been near the bottom of the EPL in several statistical categories. They possess the ball less than almost every other club, and are near the bottom in terms of the number of passes completed. Indeed, for most of the season, they seemed perfectly content not to have the ball at all. Rather than play out from the back, the Foxes are perfectly happy to lump the ball forward into wide open spaces and chase down the opposition. They are a high-pressing, high-tempo team and they hunt the ball in swarms and in packs, counterattacking in numbers and at speed when they turn over the opposition.

This is a style of play built somewhat out of necessity. It’s been the time-tested strategy of lesser clubs to try and be well-organized against superior foes and then try and hit them on the counter. Yet this approach has been somewhat tailored and customized at Leicester to fit the particular skill sets of their players – an approach which has yielded a whole far greater than the sum of the parts. About the only name of note on the club at the season’s dawn was that of the goalkeeper, Kasper Schmeichel – not for anything he has done but because his goalkeeper father, Peter Schmeichel, was a Manchester United legend who also spearheaded Denmark’s unlikely European championship in 1992. Leicester City’s squad are a mix of journeymen and cast-offs, a lot of whom couldn’t have gotten a game at any other EPL side.

And they play as if they’re never going to have this chance again. The Foxes run like hell. They generally play at 100 miles an hour. They are tenacious and resilient. It doesn’t bother them if they concede a goal – they simply go about scoring another one. No team has more 1-goal wins than Leicester, and no team has more comeback wins.

But simply to speak of effort sells the Foxes’ tactics short. There is method to the madness. It’s a scheme built around the strengths of their players, and one which aims to hide their deficiencies. For example, the two center halves are both terrific at attacking the ball, but neither is a great man-marker and neither is all that fleet of foot. To compensate, the right back tends to hang back instead of overlapping on the offense, thus giving them a more solid three in the back. The front pairing of Okazaki and Jamie Vardy tend to stack one behind the other, with Okazaki clogging defensive space and freeing the speedy Vardy to serve as an upfront outlet – any sort of danger situation that arises can be solved simply by clearing the ball into vast open spaces and letting Vardy go chasing it down. The Foxes like to pinch the wings and force everything into the middle, where rangy defensive midfielder N’Golo Kanté breaks up the plays and springs the counterattack, at which point the Foxes pour forward at pace.

Kanté has been one of the breakthrough players in the EPL this year. The Foxes acquired him this past season from France’s SM Caen for £5.6 million. Defensive midfield is one of the most rugged and difficult positions on the pitch, and it didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense to be employing the 5’6” Kanté in that position, yet here he is ranging touchline to touchline and box to box, breaking up all the opposing rushes and making all the plays. Kanté is the leading tackler in the EPL, and it’s hard to find another player in the world playing the position any better.

And this is precisely the sort of bargain buy and barn find that the Foxes have thrived upon. The striker Vardy is a classic late bloomer, 29 years of age and having been playing in England’s 5th Division four years ago. (Vardy was sitting on the Leicester bench, in fact, when this bit of madness occurred in the Division 2 playoffs in 2013. Ironically, he was sitting alongside Harry Kane, the two of them now likely to be spearheading the England attack at this summer’s Euros.) Algerian midfielder Riyad Mahrez, meanwhile, was found in the scrap heap that is the French Ligue 2, purchased from Le Havre for £400,000. Mahrez has 15 goals and 11 assists this season, and is one of the leading candidates for EPL Player of the Year. The entire roster is filled with guys who’ve bounced from club to club, some of whom toiled in Div. 2 obscurity or generally flew under the radar, and together they’ve bought into the system and played as a team, first and foremost.

The mastermind of the Foxes success this year, Claudio Ranieri, is a journeyman in his own right, having gone through about 8 managerial jobs in the past decade, the most recent being a disastrous spell in charge of the Greek national team, during which time they lost twice to the Faeroe Islands in European qualifying. Ranieri was the betting favorite, at the start of the season, to be the first EPL manager sacked. When faced with what appeared to be the worst job in all of the Premier League, Ranieri has responded with positivity, creativity, and clearly he’s tried to keep the game fun. The defense was so bad at the start of the season that Ranieri finally promised pizza for everyone if they could actually keep a clean sheet. And his mantra from the beginning of the season was “40 points” – that being the theoretical number Leicester would need to see them safe from relegation. In every post-match interview during the first half of the season, Ranieri and his players would say the same thing: Leicester’s goal was 40 points, and that’s all that mattered. Leicester had 40 points by Christmas – the first team ever in England to be in last place one Christmas and atop the table the next – and then the mantra changed: now that the Foxes had 40 points, everything else was gravy.

And that may sound trite, but think of the motivation at play here. Relegation is a professional humiliation, one which can affect the trajectory of your career – and also affect your wallet, as many players’ contracts contain clauses allowing for wage cuts if relegation occurs, and your value on the transfer market sinks like a stone. Part of what makes the last two months of a soccer season fascinating is that moribund clubs seemingly rise from the dead. They fight like hell to stay up, and weird results start happening all over the place. The last team you want to face towards the end of a season is a team that’s desperate to avoid relegation. The Foxes carried that mentality from last season over to this one, fighting for every point from the outset, oftentimes rallying from 2-goal deficits and leaving it late. Avoiding being put to the sword was their only team goal – and having done that, they’ve played with freedom and relief ever since. Pundits keep wondering at what point Leicester City will start to feel the pressure. But there is no pressure! The Foxes have been playing with house money for months, and that sense of joy and belief is palpable when you watch them play.

The irony of being so successful is that now everyone in the EPL is giving them respect. Teams sit in deep against Leicester now, attempting to prevent the furious counterattacks and trying to force the Foxes to unlock the defenses. Norwich basically published the blueprint on how to play against Leicester City a few weeks ago, fielding three center backs who collectivity rendered Vardy irrelevant while the rest of the team went about gumming up the works. Nonetheless, Leicester managed to sneak an 89th minute goal to win 1:0. The Foxes have taken 10 of 12 points from their last four games, all of them games which were rather ugly and methodical in nature. Strangely, this spate of ugly wins constitutes further progress for the Foxes. Having run and gunned their way to the top of the table, they’re now showing the guile and moxie necessary to stay there.

The Foxes’ rise to the top has been met constantly with skepticism from the British media, of course, all of whom feast upon the daily soap opera afforded by the divas from Manchester and Greater London. Even now, I’m still finding mildly idiotic predictions online of Leicester somehow winding up finishing third. Leicester is bad for the punditry business, of course, because Leicester are a modest club from a modest city who are drama-free and don’t do anything other than win all the time. Have they been lucky at times this season? Of course, particularly on the injury front, where they’ve skated by all season with a very thin bench (although you could also argue that a team which plays with that tempo and a thin bench is also a product of superior conditioning and preparation). And they took some points here and there which they probably didn’t deserve. They were dreadful in that Norwich game I mentioned before, and could’ve and probably should’ve lost. (Sigh.) But after 30 games of this, it’s no longer a fluke. Plucky little Leicester is no longer plucky. The British press have run out of condescending diminutives to describe this team by now.

And quite honestly, Leicester isn’t so small any more, either. No one in the EPL is. Of the 30 biggest clubs in the world in terms of revenue in 2015, 17 of them were in the EPL. As I’ve said before,  middle-class members of the EPL may not have as much money to spend as the Arsenals and the Man Uniteds and the Chelseas, but they now have more money than just about everyone else on the planet! And all of those non-glamourous clubs have been making up for their lack of resources over the years by being smart. Leicester and Stoke and West Ham and the like spend wisely, since they have less margin for error, but now the quality of player available to them is much greater than in the past. This is why what Leicester’s doing in the EPL this year shouldn’t be labeled as just a one-off or a fluke. And it’s also why it’s an outdated notion to assume that their players, now all of whom have enormous pricetags, are suddenly all going to want to jump ship and go elsewhere. Leicester can afford the players they have, and afford new players, and guess what? WINNING IS FUN! (Or so I’ve been told, anyway.) Ranieri was asked about this possibility in his press conference on Monday, and he shrugged and asked, “why would they want to leave?” You know, that’s a good question. Unless Real or Barca come around throwing £50 million at you, how does it get any better? You’re making good money, and you’re also making history.

And if you’re a fan of one of the bigger clubs in the EPL, you should be outraged by what you’re seeing. Arsenal is flaking their way to another failed season, Man City folds up like a house of cards, Man United has provided nothing but boring dross, and we’ve already been over the tire fire that is Chelsea. You have all the money on the planet, you can buy almost any player you want, and you’re getting beat to the finish line by Leicester? By LEICESTER? Really? Business as usual clearly isn’t cutting it any longer, not when you have smart teams like Leicester and, to a lesser extent, Spurs leading the way. Spurs have spent stupidly over the years themselves, but finally decided to put an end to that nonsense and actually trust in the development of young talent. That team has potential to be terrifying in the future if they keep the core together, and still just might overhaul the Foxes just yet.

“But lads, it’s Tottenham.”  
        
– Sir Alex Ferguson

OK, so maybe not.

And for us Norwich fans and Stoke fans and Crystal Palace fans and Newcastle fans and the like, Leicester up top is the greatest thing we’ve ever seen. The good guys can and do, in fact, win every now and then. Not that often, but it doesn’t have to happen that often to rekindle your faith. Money can’t buy you heart, it can’t buy you guts, it can’t buy you steel, and it can’t you buy you brains – and in the modern EPL, it clearly can’t always buy you a championship.

There have been cases in the past, most recently Nottingham Forest in the 1970s, where a club has been promoted to a higher division and then promptly won the title. But that was back before the big money of the EPL and the Champions League came into play, when the finances were less dissimilar and the gap between divisions wasn’t nearly as severe. Probably the closest thing you can find to this in America would be the worst-to-first Twins and the worst-to-first Braves playing in the 1991 World Series, or the case mentioned previously of San Francisco 49ers starting out the 1981 season at 200-1 odds on the Tahoe books and winding up winning the Super Bowl. But that doesn’t even come close to a 5000-1 shot. 5000-1!

And this is March, which means March Madness here in the U.S., a chance for the underdogs in college basketball to take their place center stage and take their shots at the blue bloods. But in the end, the underdogs never win out. They might pull a stunning upset, but rarely do they go further. The biggest longshots in the NCAAs to win out in my lifetime were, in fact, pretty well-established basketball schools – NC State in 1983, Villanova in 1986, Kansas in 1988 – who reached the role of underdogs by underachieving during the regular season. Butler was a true underdog, a team you knew nothing about but who were scrappy and who punched above their weight and who you could get behind and root for, but then they had to go and lose the final to Duke, who hate fun, and then lose the final to Connecticut in a game so bad that it set college basketball back about 20 years. This year’s NCAA bracket sucks precisely because it has far too few interesting fringe teams and far too many boring big conference schools laden with athletes who can’t shoot and do no particular phase of the game well, thus making a boring sport become even more boring. But I digress.

We need the romance and the excitement of the underdogs. We need the unexpected to happen from time to time to keep our interest. What Leicester is doing this year it wonderful and exciting, and we should all hope they ultimately win the title. Will they be able to defend it? Will they do well in European play next season? Who gives a shit? Live in the moment, and learn to love the Foxes. What they’re doing is unprecedented in sports, and deserving of admiration and support.

And since I referenced a band I really liked in the title of this blog post, the music maven in me feels compelled to throw in one of their songs. This video includes a great interchange between the band and a fan at a concert recorded in Essen, Germany. “We want rock!” Rock on Leicester City:

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.