Why The Lose? Your One Sentence MLB Preview

Baseball season is upon us, but it’s an odd-numbered year, so I don’t care as much as I should. We have an thing for even-numbered years around these parts, as you know:

A coveted San Francisco address

ODD years tend to be years in which the Giants don’t hit, get a whole bunch of people hurt, and generally go about retooling after the roster has been picked at by the other 29 teams in the majors. Winners are always a hot commodity, of course, which is one of the reasons why it’s so difficult to repeat as champions in any sport. Guys who win championships and then become free agents have a way of winding up being grossly overpaid the following seasons and, when you win the title, your club is immediately the target of everybody else, so pilfering players takes you down a peg. The Giants lost 3B Pablo Sandoval to free agency, Hunter Pence broke his arm in spring training, and I have no idea how this team is going to score any runs. Who cares? There is yet another brand new flag flying over at Phone Co. Park which we can admire all season long. Flags fly forever. And if there are consequences for winning down the line, so be it.

Baseball is the losingest of all games, of course, which is why it’s a favourite subject matter here at IN PLAY LOSE. Even élite teams lose two months’ worth of games over the course of a summer. And the game has something of a clockwork element about it even though the game doesn’t have a clock. Your team sucks today? Try again tomorrow! If you enjoy the pace and the rhythm of the game, you can find something to like about it on a daily basis, even if your team sucks. And trust me when I say that. I grew up watching the Seattle Mariners in the 1980s. If that team didn’t kill your love for the game, nothing will.

With the start of the season comes prediction time, of course – but since this is IN PLAY LOSE, we have to do things a little bit differently. Today we present our 1-sentence preview in which I explain why it is that, come Dec. 31, I might actually be writing about your favourite team in the context of winning The Lose of the Year award. This is not a prediction of who will be the best team, although I will probably mention that. This is also not necessarily a prediction of who will be the worst team. Certainly, bad teams are more likely to be blogged about than good ones, but failure encompasses more than just day-to-day failure. The epic chokes, the woeful underachieving, the poorly constructed roster – all of that is great stuff. Predicting the epic choke is impossible, of course, but we can look at some clubs and get the sense that, if/when the moment comes where they could rise above it all, they still would be more likely to fall on their faces than not. As such, a team is just as likely to be LOSE fodder if they are good as they are if they are bad.

And since I have a short attention span, I’m going to keep this quick. One sentence and one sentence only. Here is your IN PLAY LOSE baseball preview, ranked in order from least likely to most likely to be fodder for the blog. Do these things, and some hack in San Francisco will make fun of you:

30. Baltimore Orioles: because I’m generally high on the O’s, probably more than I should be but it’s served me well the past few years, yet also realistic about their chances and, thus, not really surprised by anything they do, good or bad.

29. New York Mets: because the Mets aren’t going anywhere, are likely to be improved, but whatever inevitable Big Apple-centric drama unfolds around them isn’t going to do anything to make them particularly relevant.

28. Houston Astros: because they’ve graduated from being historically awful to just being bad – improving, but still bad – and just being a run-of-the-mill bad team isn’t going to get you much press.

27. Milwaukee Brewers: because, well, there isn’t really that much of note about this team, according to IN PLAY LOSE official Wisconsin correspondent, Steve ‘Team Cheese’ Drumwright: “the good thing is that they didn’t really lose anyone in the off-season, but the bad thing is that they didn’t really lose anyone in the off-season.”

26. Arizona Diamondbacks: because hating on the Snakes was so much easier when GM Kevin Towers was making dumb trades and mouthing off about his players in the press and Kirk Gibson was inciting beanball wars, but now that Tony Larussa has come in and ‘analyzed’ every aspect of the organization – and promptly fired everybody – the Snakes will still likely be really, really bad this year but maybe one of the most inexcusably poorly managed franchises in sports finally has some hope.

25. Kansas City Royals: because getting red hot and playing really well for a couple of weeks in the playoffs, while commendable, doesn’t change the fact that this was a pretty average team who lived on a very thin margin last year, and the law of averages would suggest your bullpen isn’t going to be perfect and having no power in the lineup will come back to get you, meaning some regression from the World Series appearance is likely in order.

24. St. Louis Cardinals: because while I wonder if this team’s reputation preceeds it, as I’m not particularly crazy about their offense, the Cardinals do have a seemingly endless supply of good young arms and a culture of winning and they will probably find their way into the playoffs like they do every year, but not be particularly flashy and/or noteworthy about it.

23. Texas Rangers: because while they deserve a mulligan for last year’s injury-ridden disaster of a season in which Dr. James Andrews should’ve been put on the payroll, all of the injuries masked the fact that the Rangers were due for a serious slide to begin with, and Yu Darvish’s injury this spring might mask that fact a bit more, but I do think that lack of talent is going to be more of a problem than lack of healthy bodies this year in Arlington.

22. San Francisco Giants: because odd year bullshit.

21. Cleveland Indians: because I don’t think I’m going to need to say much about this team, which is going to be really good.

20. Cincinnati Reds: because how can you explain the fact that, over the course of three years, this team has gone from being so good to not very good at all, other than to think that Buster Posey killed the franchise’s collective will to live back in 2012, from which they have not ever really recovered:

Greatest gif in baseball history

19. Minnesota Twins: because the Twins have to go somewhere on this list, and any time you’re #19 on one of these you’re neither good nor notable, but if the Twins are the 19th-best team in baseball at the end of the year it will constitute a damn miracle.

18. Toronto Blue Jays: because they are entering the 18th year of the 5-year rebuilding plan in Toronto, during which the good ideas haven’t worked, and the bad ideas haven’t worked, and this year’s plan involved improving the pitching staff by trading for more hitters, which means nothing the Blue Jays do when they inevitably underachieve will be a surprise, but it will likely be somewhat entertaining nonetheless.

17. Pittsburgh Pirates: because I wonder, if the Pirates make another quick exit from the playoffs, if amnesia starts to settle in among Bucs’ faithfuls, who will start being annoyed at their team not winning championships and forget how godfuckingterrible this team was for two decades.

15/16. Seattle Mariners/Washington Nationals: because quite honestly, I don’t expect to be writing at all about either of these teams unless it’s in the context of doing something stupid which costs them the World Series, which is where I think both of them will be at the end of the year, as the two franchises who have never been to the biggest of shows both finally get there, and do so in the same season. But I get two sentences here because this is two teams we’re talking about at once, so I will say that Nats were done in by their own sloppy play last year, along with Matt Williams having Bruce Bochy run circles around him, and I would hope they’ve learned from their mistakes while, in the case of the Mariners, well,  haven’t I already written enough about the Mariners already?

14. San Diego Padres: because going on a ‘bright shiny object’ buying spree, where you grab every good-looking player available and ignore their ample downsides, rarely pays off.

13. Chicago White Sox: because see #14.

12. Miami Marlins: because the Fish rot from the head, and you should never take anything seriously that Jeffrey Loria says or does.

11. Colorado Rockies: because I really do think this is the most hopeless franchise in all of sports, and doubt they will ever be able to develop a functioning pitching staff – even if they were to bottom out with the worst record and get the top pick of the draft and draft a stud pitcher, her would be spooked to the point of being ineffective after two seasons at Coors Field – and because they look to be almost as dreadful as last year, when they played .200 ball for about three months, and because you wonder at what point Tulo and Cargo just say “trade me, damn it,” in an attempt to salvage their careers before advancing age and injuries finally do them in.

10. Tampa Bay Devil Rays: because they’re still the Devil Rays in my book, damn it, which was a cool nickname, and because I look at a team with a new front office, new manager, one good player, and no offense, and see the worst team in the majors, even worse than #9 …

9. Philadelphia Phillies: because at some point this year, The Lose should write up a piece about the long-term costs of success and whether or not they are worth it if/when you happen to win a championship, which I believe that they are, and it will almost certainly be in the context of the Phillies enduring a 100-loss season featuring a lack of talent and players from their championship heyday who are now old, slow, and injury prone and whose contracts make them immovable.

8. Detroit Tigers: because The Lose is quick to scold those who waste opportunities, and the Tigers’ formula for success – 1-dimensional power offense and great starting pitching – hasn’t been as successful as you think and just doesn’t translate in the playoffs in this bullpen-speed-defense-and-details era of modern baseball, and yet the organization refuses to address its greatest needs and, as a result, the Tigers’ collective star is starting to lose its luster.

7. Boston Red Sox: because I’m not sure what’s more comical, the idea of having Hanley Ramirez in the outfield or signing Hanley Ramirez in the first place, and because I’m not sure why Panda’s running his mouth and bad mouthing his former employer after seven years of both adoration and patience by the bay – neither of which is going to be prevalent in Boston if he doesn’t perform – and because this team, as constructed, has an air akin to a great big, bloated balloon which is due for a popping.

6. California Los Angeles Angels of Oxnard Anaheim: because this team has bats, but has question marks with arms, gloves, feet, and between the ears, and have probably spent worse than any team in baseball in recent years, if not all of sports, setting them up for an even greater sense of disappointment.

5. New York Yankees: because A-Rod heading back to the Bronx promises to be as awkward as a blind date at the Jr. Prom.

4. Chicago Cubs: because it’s the Cubs, of course, and because I suspect the expectations are too great and patience and perspective in too short a supply for a promising team that needs a little time to jell.

3. Oakland A’s: because ridiculing the Moneyballers for their feel good, indie sort of failures is sort of like shooting fish in a barrel, and while there is a possibility that this latest reinvention of the A’s by Billy Beane turns out to be OK – it is the A’s, after all – this club looks to have far more downside than up.

2. Atlanta Braves: because this team hasn’t looked to be this bad since the 1980s, and while I am not an advocate of schadenfreude, if there is ever a club that deserves it, it’s this self-important franchise with its fair weather fans and obnoxious tomahawk chop.

1. Los Angeles Dodgers: because as I said on Dec. 31, 2014, if you took out Clayton Kershaw from that team last year, it really wasn’t very good, and while they made a flurry of moves in the offseason, I think that those moves are lateral in nature if not a step back and have made them slower, older, and more brittle, and given the enormous expectations that come with the enormous payroll, this cannot possibly end well and it will be wildly entertaining if and when it doesn’t.

This Game Sucks. That, and Go Kentucky.

IT SHOULDN’T be a surprise that reports are now surfacing about Kentucky head coach John Calipari 'desperately wanting' to return to the NBA. He really does have nothing to prove any more at the NCAA level, having mastered the arts of both fully understanding the absurdity of the college game and then applying that knowledge to its most absurd ends – the application which, the way things are going, is likely to result in Calipari winning his 2nd national championship at Kentucky in 4 years, and seeing his team put up a 40-0 record in the process, which is the best in the history of the sport.

Calipari has, of course, mastered the art of recruiting in the so-called ‘one and done’ era. For those who don’t understand this, the NBA decided a few years ago that it no longer wanted to be drafting kids straight out of high school. The reasons for this most likely have to do with quite a few of those kids – *cough cough Kwame Brown cough cough* – not working out so well after much was expected (and invested). While some élite teenage talents have opted to join the D-League, or maybe play abroad for a year, the vast majority of them venture off to play college basketball for a year, or maybe two, before heading off to the NBA.

Now, this makes a mockery of the whole naïve idea that players are actually playing college basketball for the purposes of going to college. A lot of them are, of course. The vast majority of them, in fact – a fact the NCAA is happy to point out in its continued insistence that it is little more than a corrupt cartel of an organization. But if you’re considered a can’t miss, über-prospect, about all you need to do is maintain a barely passing average for a semester of meaningless freshman classes without ever declaring a major. Then you play out your season, declare for the draft, and who really gives a shit how you do in that English 101 class at that point? It’s ridiculous to think these guys give two shits about going to class – and that’s not to blame the kids either, because if you were in the same boat, isn’t that exactly what you would do as well? I know that I would. What’s the point of going to a school if the school isn’t going to help you in your chosen profession? Why even make the pretense?

Now, since these kids are going to check out as quickly as they possibly can, a good number of the control freaky coaches in the world don’t really want to recruit them. But not John Calipari. Like I say, John Calipari pushes everything to the extreme. He’s taken two previous schools – UMass and Memphis –to the verge of national championships, and had the Final Four appearances of both of them vacated for improprieties which, while not directly attributable to him, speak to a rather casual regard for rules of eligibility put forth by the NCAA. And you can decry the rules and think they’re dumb – heaven knows that I do – but you should at least attempt to follow them. But with one-and-done players in college basketball’s midsts, how can anyone take any sort of enforcement seriously. We all know those kids are only there for a year and then they’re out. Again, why even make the pretense?

So, instead of shying away from uncoachable, unapproachable, one-and-done kids who’ve checked out from the beginning and are counting down the days before they can leave (a nonsensical stereotype, by the way, but one put forth by any number of college basketball apologists in the media, most of them former coaches), John Calipari goes the other way and, essentially, recruits a whole team’s worth of one-and-dones every single year. It makes sense, actually, if you want to win in college basketball – it stands to reason that guys ticketed for NBA stardom have the best talent, so why not just gather up all the best talent available? Which is precisely what he’s gone about attempting to do. Not always successfully, of course – the year after he won his first NCAA title, his next one-and-done iteration was being one-and-doned in the NIT by Robert Morris. Great talent often has great egos, and it can be quite a challenge to get said talent to play together as a team, imploring upon them the idea that success of the team will pay off greater dividends down the road in their individual, professional careers. Even though his reputation proceeds him, and his is a problem most coaches would die to have – having what seems to be too much talent to actually manage – Calipari deserves some credit as a coach for being somewhat able to convince these guys of the value of being selfless on the court.

Great coaches also anticipate the trends of the game, and this year’s iteration of the mercenary army from the Bluegrass State is perfectly suited to go 40-0 because they are so big, and so athletic, that they completely swallow up the defensive end of the floor. Kentucky’s guards are in the 6’5”-6’7” range, and the frontcourt starters all verge on 7’0” in height. And this is another area of the game where Calipari has pushed it to the ad absurdum. To beat Kentucky, you have to shoot over them. But this is college basketball in 2015, a game in which nobody can shoot.

If you tuned into the last 2:00 of the games in the first four days of the NCAA tournament, you got some fantastic finishes and, in the case of LSU and Baylor, some truly stunning collapses. Five games were decided by a single point, two games went to OT, and eight games were decided by four points or less – and that was just the first day. It was pretty gripping and dramatic stuff. The first two days of the tourney are full of wild upsets involving weird teams from weird schools in weird cities you’ve never heard of, which makes for great viewing. But as The Lose has said before, the NCAA tournament offers far more in terms of theatre than it does in terms of actual quality basketball. Some of this is owing to stage fright, of course. Nerves take over, and players respond to stepping onto the game’s greatest stage by becoming tentative, playing not to lose somewhat instinctively. This is always going to be the case. These are just kids, after all, and the pressure of the moment turns out to be far greater than what they were expecting. The quality of play somewhat naturally tends to regress.

Problem is, the quality of play in 2015 is regressing from a level that was already lousy to begin with. Tune in for the last 2:00 of a game on Thursday and you got high drama. Tune in during any of the other 38:00, and what you got to watch was abysmal. But this is simply more of the same, as the entire game of college basketball was abysmal the past season. This article from Seth Davis of SI back in February outlines the games many problems. Not only do I agree with the proposed solutions in that article – a shorter shot clock, a widening of the lanes and broadening of the arcs to create more space – that article also accomplishes two things I’m wholly in favour of: 1) putting the blame solely where it belongs for this mess, which is on the coaches; and 2) debunking myths about the quality of today’s players. The second ‘problem’ often being spread by the perpetrators of the first problem, of course, since coaches are self-preservationist by nature and quick to blame the kids, albeit often in vague and veiled terms.

The game of college basketball is slow, overly physical, dull, and decidedly unimaginative. In the past, it has always been the breeding ground for radical innovation, as creative coaches have used ideas to attempt to one-up each other and overcome disadvantages in recruiting. Now we have cookie cutter CEOs in pinstripes patrolling the sidelines, none of whom dare be the least bit imaginative in their trade. There are far too many teams with lots of unrefined athletes that seem to do no phase of the game well except for playing defense, albeit through the most physical and cynical means possible. Hey, coaches, here’s a good idea – you have some talented guys here, so how about if you, oh, you know, teach them how to shoot and run a functioning offense?

I mean, seriously here, can anybody shoot? UAB shot .347 from the floor in the first round of the NCAA tourney, while Butler shot .333 from the floor – and both those teams won. Teams shot 32% from the 3-point line on the first day of the tourney – which means that, at that low of percentage, it’s basically no longer worth it to attempt the shot for the sake of trying to get that extra point. Yet 30% of all shots attempted that day were from beyond the 3-point arc, which means that 20% of the shots taken that day were fundamentally terrible ideas.

And see, that right there is bad coaching. Bad coaching means assembling a team that cannot adjust and go to Plan B when Plan A isn’t working. Why are so many teams so stubbornly sticking to plans that don’t fundamentally work? It is the equivalent of bashing your head against a brick wall – and there were certainly of loose bricks being tossed around, enough to build entire new gymnasia. Because in this day and age, with the defenses the way they are, and with the rules the way they are, attempting to win a game entirely through half court play is, mathematically, a losing proposition. If you’re shooting 42% from the floor and 32% from three – the totals from the first day of the tourney – you’re making it really hard to win. Here’s another novel idea – RUN! Why doesn’t anyone run a fast break? Seems to me a good way to change some of those horrible numbers would be to get some buckets in transition and, come to think of it, isn’t a good way to combat a stingy defense to beat it down the court and score before they have a chance to set up? But that would require actual imagination and encouraging players to take some risks. We can’t have that, now can we? Next thing you know, the kids might actually be having fun on the floor.

This is why I say you should fire all the coaches. Their tactics are unsound, their approaches illogical, and their players certainly don’t seem to improve, which is a waste. I think there is an enormous segment of the college coaching fraternity that is actually disinterested in their teams trying to run an offense – because teaching offense is actually hard, and requires thought and technique, whereas coaching defense is all about dogging your players to give it that old college try.

But the old college try ain’t gonna work against Kentucky. One of the prototypical contemporary college basketball teams – Cincinnati – took on Kentucky in the 2nd round and decided to try and beat them basically by being physical and tenacious and overly aggressive at every turn. The one problem with that was that they forgot to put the ball in the basket. They shot 31% and threw up some of the single 3-point attempts more likely to land in the front row than in the basket. You need to be able to SHOOT to beat Kentucky.

The game has been trending this way for years now, and the sharpest coaches in the game – guys like Louisville’s Rick Pitino, Florida’s Billy Donovan, and Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim – have come to realize that the best way to win is just squelch the life out of the other side with a stifling defense. Offense? Meh, they’ll figure it out. Just figure out how to score 40 and hold the other guys to 38. And this year’s Kentucky squad takes defense to the ludicrous end. Their opponents shoot .355 from the floor for the season. The Wildcats are a flat-out mismatch for contemporary college basketball offenses. They’re likely to go 40-0 this year by simply suffocating their opponents and running just enough of a function offense on the other end of the floor. They’ll go down in history as a bastion of perfection during a period of time when the game was as imperfect as it’s ever been. Their offense is, well, enough. That’s really all it needs to be. Given that teams are so terrified to try and play a transition game against Kentucky’s collection of thoroughbreds, the games turn into these slow, dull, insufferable marches into futility. It’s boring and it’s bad, and Kentucky is seeming almost unbeatable.

And you know what? Good. Let them go 40-0. I think this team, as constructed by Kentucky, is genius. It’s cynically, perfectly constructed to take advantage of the sorry state of the game of college basketball. Hell, I hope Calipari comes back with a whole new team of one-and-dones and goes 40-0 next year. Let him win 100 in a row. The NCAA, as currently constructed, is a travesty to begin with and verges on being an illegal operation, but people love their college sports, by gosh – including me, or I used to, anyway. I didn’t even bother filling out a bracket this year, which is the first time that’s happened in 30 years. I’m completely disgusted with the shamateurism of the “student athlete” as defined by the NCAA, and also completely disgusted with The Cult of the Coach that goes right along with it. But what ultimately leads to change in sports is not anyone questioning the morality or legality of the enterprise. No, it happens when people get bored. And watching Kentucky win all the time, and do so in the most boring fashion imaginable like they are doing now, would ultimately turn into must-miss TV.

Next up for Kentucky is West Virginia on Thursday night in the Sweet 16. Go Kentucky. Win and win and win some more, and make a mess and a mockery of this whole stupid enterprise. I doubt I’ll watch. If I want to see bricklaying and guys moving at half speed in disorganized patterns, I’ll go out to California Avenue during the work day and watch the construction.

Quick Misses

Robert Indiana was off by a letter

NO time for an intro. To the buzzard points!

• Think your team is having a bad year? Parma F.C. is have a worse one. The club currently sit bottom of the table of Italian Serie A with only 10 points from 23 matches, and have had to postpone their past two matches because they are broke. Their home match with Udinese was scrapped because the club couldn’t afford to pay for the electricity and security at their home football grounds. Faced with playing a game behind closed doors in a browned-out stadium, players from both clubs balked. This past Friday’s match with Genoa was postponed as well – there was no money available to pay for the travel and lodging. The players were planning, at first, to drive to Genoa in their own cars, or hitch a ride on a coach hired by some traveling club supporters, and a $22,000 advance from a sponsor appeared to have been hastily arranged to cover the costs. But the players finally decided they’d had enough, and threatened to strike in protest of the failure to have the club’s tenuous, and quite ludicrous, financial situation resolved.

Parma F.C. are Friends of The Lose. These guys are awesome. These guys need some love.
That, and a paycheque. Pay them, for heaven’s sake!

Parma F.C. are on their third ownership group already this season. They qualified for European play last season, only to be denied their place (and the accompanying revenue such games generate) because the owner had failed to turn over payroll taxes in a timely fashion. The club was sold to a Russian-Cypriot conglomerate, which then flipped it to an Italian businessman who purchased the club for €1 after he agreed to pay off €100 million in club debt – which, of course, hasn’t happened. Yes, somehow the Italian FA allowed a guy to waltz in and buy a club for €1. To the surprise of absolutely no one, whatever money was  supposed to be there hasn’t turned up. An administration hearing is set for Mar. 19, club property has been seized for auction by local authorities, and the players haven’t been paid all season.
Read that again. The players haven’t been paid all season. The Italian Players Association are, suffice to say, not amused. All Serie A games are starting 15 minutes late this weekend in protest. One of the golden rules of The Lose states that in any dispute involving soccer players and wages, the players are always right. The game is a bastion of shysters and would-be kingpins and tycoons. Far too many owners have far too many delusions of grandeur while being wofully undercapitalized as they attempt to compete in an arena where the cost of doing business is often determined for you by the actions of other clubs. There are megaclubs which serve as idle playthings for the preposterously rich, for whom money is no object, and even some of the game’s most storied clubs have wound up drowning themselves in red ink while vainly attempting to keep pace – the most notable in that category being Rangers, who have spent the past three seasons working their way back up through the Scottish league system after going bankrupt and being relegated to the fourth division.
It’s all an utterly impossible mess which can’t possibly end well – although sadly, for Parma F.C., there is precedent in this, as they were under administration from Italian authorities from 2003-2007. The club was a beacon of attractive play in the otherwise defensive and grey Serie A of the 1990s, winning several European trophies at the time, but their fate was inexorably tied to their parent company Parmalat, the Italian dairy conglomerate that decided to try their hand at derivates trading and other fraudulent acts and wound up becoming the largest bankruptcy in European history.
Amazingly, the club’s players have tried to maintain some sort of professionalism and dignity through all of this. Given all they’ve had to put up with this year, it’s somewhat remarkable Parma has taken any points at all, much less 10. Actually, they took 11, but the club was docked a point for not paying the players. Pretty stiff penalty, that one. No wonder the players blamed the Italian FA’s “lack of interest” in refusing to play this weekend. Pay the players! Seriously. Pay these guys already, and/or let them find work elsewhere. They’ve more than fulfilled their contractual obligations. The FA says they can’t do anything until the club enters administration. In the meantime, other Serie A clubs have contemplated trying to find a way to run the club for the rest of the season, in part because having a club go out of business in the middle of the season makes a mess of the standings and the schedule. Pay the players! Free Parma F.C.! Enough of this nonsense.

• And now for something completely different, I give you the New York Knicks:

The actual ESPN play-by-play of this was “Alexey Shved misses 6-foot.” Note absence of the words ‘shot’ and ‘pass.’ I’m not sure what this was, but the likes of it has never been seen in an NBA arena before.

• I’ve never seen so many confounding, head-scratching trades all at once as I saw at the NBA’s trading deadline. I would have better luck explaining Quantum Physics than I would trying to explaining all of those deals. The Warriors wisely made no changes at the deadline, as their front office brass likely got on the phone with some other NBA GMs, decided that everyone on the other end of the line was cuckoo bananas, and promptly put down the phone and sent all the ensuing calls straight to voicemail. Deals in the NBA are almost all inherently, laughably lopsided in this day and age, given that the considerations are almost entirely driven by cap and contract considerations, and thus deals are being made from a position of significant weakness. It was pretty apparent that a good number of franchises involved in the wheeling and dealing were doing so for the purposes of essentially giving up on the season. It speaks to just how cool the game of basketball is that so many fans will still actually turn up to watch games even though their team has basically decided to throw in the towel.
From a financial standpoint, I know that the league is doing fine, and the product on the floor this year has been pretty good (and from a San Francisco viewpoint, it’s been remarkable), but from a competitive balance standpoint, the NBA model is broken and has been for years. But I don’t know what the answer is. History has shown us, time and again, that the coveted #1 pick in the draft is really, if ever, a panacea, and so many of the league’s franchises seem interminably mired in this “Wait ’Til Next Year” mentality which is never proven out. But being an 8-seed in the playoffs isn’t much better than being a 25-win team. Unlike their winter counterpart, the NHL, where you can seemingly luck your way into winning the Stanley Cup, you can’t do that in the NBA. Remember another Rule of The Lose: the lower the score, the easier to pull the upset. You can’t park the bus in front of the rim. Your fatal flaws get exposed mercilessly in the NBA on a minute-to-minute basis. If you’re bad in the NBA, you’ll lose and lose and lose some more.
In the end, as much as I’m enjoying watching the Warriors pound people into submission on a regular basis, I just find it impossible to invest that much of myself in a product where so many of the entities seem to have little interest in succeeding. (Not the players, mind you, but the organizations who employ them.) Not merely attempting to assemble a winning club and failing at it, mind you – Warrior fans endured about 30 years of that – but not even attempting to put forth a legitimately competitive product. There is this air of artificiality to it. Fake fun. As fake as all of the bells and whistles which go off constantly in an NBA arena in an effort to keep you entertained. Hey, I have an idea. WIN THE DAMN GAME! I think winning is pretty entertaining, don’t you?

• Read this article. The Lose believes analytics are an important part of the business of sports, and using data and a logical approach can pay long-term dividends. The Lose also believes that most of the amateur stat nerds who dominate the conversation on sports message boards don’t understand that you cannot take the laptop with you out onto the field. You can put players in positions to better succeed through analytics, but those players better have some fucking talent to begin with. The Philadelphia 26ers can be branded analytics darlings all they want, but all Sam Hinkie has done in his tenure as GM is create a sub-replacement level roster with a sub-salary floor payroll which only does one aspect of basketball well, which is lose at it.
And I never quite understand what stat nerds think the point of the sport is that they actually follow. The objective is to win. I came across an amusing argument on a Seattle Mariners fansite the other day, where they were revisiting an off-season trade where fan favourite/WAR darling/constantly injured OF Michael Saunders was shipped to Toronto. (The impetus for this discussion being that Saunders had just torn up his knee at spring training by stepping on a sprinkler head in the outfield.) A stats disciple made a point on there where he said the process involved in trading Saunders to the Blue Jays for pitcher J.A. Happ was a bad one – even though the trade is presently slanted heavily in the Mariners favour with Saunders hurt, and that he “would rather have GOOD PROCESS = BAD RESULTS instead of BAD PROCESS = GOOD RESULTS.”
Bullshit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit. I want good results regardless of good process, bad process, dumb luck, miracles, acts of God or anything else. The objective is to win the game, and ultimately win the last one of the season after which they give you a shiny trophy and you get to have parades. If all we cared about was assembling a team on paper with the biggest WAR, we wouldn’t care a whole lot about watching the actual game, now would we?

• As I mentioned previously, The Lose is a worldly individual and I find the ICC World Cup of Cricket to be quite entertaining. Most of the excitement in the 14-team tourney so far has been generated by the ‘associate’ nations participating – Ireland, Afghanistan, UAE, and Scotland – winning a few games and scaring the dickens out of some of the established nations in the process. The minnows should enjoy it while it lasts, since the International Cricket Council, in a move laced with greed and protectionist interests, is actually contracting the tournament the next time it occurs four years from now. This doesn’t make any sense from a competitive standpoint – the minnows have been entertaining and mostly competitive, whereas a lot of the games between established sides have been awful blowouts.
But this excellent New York Times article explains what’s going on: it’s far more important to keep Indian viewership, and Indian sponsorship dollars, flowing in than actually attempting to grow the game worldwide. I’ve labeled this similar phenomenon in the soccer world The Zusi Effect. When Graham Zusi’s headed goal against Panama saved El Tri’s ass a few years ago, he also saved League MX and the Mexican FA literally millions of dollars in sponsorships and broadcast rights which would’ve been lost by El Tri failing to qualify for the World Cup. From a financial standpoint, it would’ve been somewhat disastrous for Mexican soccer. They owe Graham Zusi more than he probably realizes.
Cricket is suffering from a Zusi Effect – depending entirely on the well-being of one particular team, and having them do well – and that’s the sort of loser thinking which ultimately dooms you. Even in a small group of nations like the 10 in the highest ranks of cricket, there is bound to be some ebb and flow, some give and take, and sometimes you’re just not going to win because others will be better. It’s the nature of most competitions. Not even the American basketball team has been immune to that over the years. And not even a self-contained entity like the NFL is content with having only a small marketplace – hence their constantly having games in London. (Which folks across the pond keep attending, even though they’ve been fed a steady diet of the Jacksonville Jaguars.) Sure, India’s cricket market is massive, but India’s market for everything is potentially massive. If they could ever develop some good footballers there – and with 1.2 billion people, the odds surely are in their favour – the place seems like a potential gold mine. And the beautiful game has always had a curious way of chip-chip-chipping away at a nation’s collective sporting psyche. It may take a few years, or even a few decades, but if FIFA wants it, eventually football starts to take hold.
For as many shots as I’ve taken at FIFA, they knew years ago that developing untapped markets was the key to further growth. The more good players there are, and the more good footballing nations there are, the better the game is as a whole. Their efforts at development included holding their most sacred event in a trio of baseballing nations – the U.S., Japan, South Korea – all of whom have now asserted themselves as legit footballing nations with strong domestic leagues that have produced a few world-class players. Rugby’s gotten in on the act as well, planning on holding their World Cup in Japan in 2019 and looking to grow the game in places such as the U.S., a huge nation where there is room for almost any sort of sport or pastime to thrive on some level or another. Given that the U.S. lost to New Zealand’s All Blacks 74:6 last fall in Chicago, the rugby folks clearly have a ways to go, but 61,000 turning up at Soldier Field for that match shows the potential interest to be there.
There is a big difference between being self-interested and short-sighted, with the foundations of failure very often rooted in the latter. And while there is and has been an abundance of graft, corruption and political in-fighting in institutions such as FIFA and the IOC, such behaviours are often far, far worse in smaller institutions, where there is a smaller pie and thus more incentive to be crooked. It’s best that the I.C.C., and entities in general, to continue striving for expanse, rather than simply turning inward and trying to protect that which (they think) they still have.

• Non sporting note here to close: RIP Leonard Nimoy. On the booze cruise that was the original Starship Enterprise, Spock provided the Shakespeare. His was the eye and the voice of the poet, the soul of the philosopher. It was the ethos of Spock which was at the heart of the rebirth of the Star Trek franchise many decades later, for it was that character – with his honorable characteristics of reason, humility, and grace – which truly resonated with people. Leonard Nimoy’s on-screen creation – a character founded within his own background and life experience – was proving it was cool to be smart half a century ago, and for that, we should all be grateful. He lived long and prospered. He has been, and shall always be, our friend.

Quick Misses

Wait a minute, something is missing here ...

IT GETS no worse than this – being forced to play with only four players. This fate befell Southern Mississippi on Thursday night in their 73:71 OT loss to Florida International. The Golden Eagles only dressed seven players for the game on account of injuries, disciplinary actions and having had two players ruled ineligible back in January. Three players fouled out during the game, leaving the Eagles to play the last :45 of the game with only four players on the floor. The Eagles are going through a death march of a season – this loss dropped them to 6-17 on the year. To make matters worse, the school is subject to an ongoing NCAA investigation into potential recruiting violations by previous head coach Donnie Tyndall, who bolted for Tennessee and appears to have left something of a mess behind him. If so, then he fits right in over in Knoxville, where the Vols previously had to fire coach Bruce Pearl in 2011 after he lied to the NCAA and turned a minor rules violation into a full-on tire fire. Pearl was served with show cause (the NCAA equivalent of a blackballing) for three years and now has turned up at Auburn. If you are charming and you win, you seem to get an abundant number of chances.

The Lose has played 4-on-5 before. It is not pretty. You can do OK on defense, as you sink into something of a rhombus or a square and try to get them to shoot outside. Offense is where the problem comes – they can mark you up and leave a 5th guy free, either a little guy to scamper around and pickpocket you or, more commonly, a big guy to roam about the key and try to swat your shot to jesus. Fortunately, it usually does not last for very long, since it is likely near the end of the game when this occurs. And at first, it is something of a challenge that you embrace, but reality sets in pretty quickly. Credit to the Golden Eagles here, who very nearly sent the game to double OT. Kids will play hard under any circumstance. Never believe any college coach who claims the effort is not there. Kids will play hard under even the most hopeless of circumstances.

To the buzzard points!

• We all want Sepp Blatter gone. He is up for reëlection as head of FIFA this spring, and we fans of the beautiful game can all agree that the organization is bloated, corrupt, and in desperate need for reform. Unfortunately, we are not the ones doing the voting. It’s the heads of the FAs from the 210 members who do the voting. Three candidates have come forth to challenge Blatter in the election – Portuguese footballing great Luis Figo, Dutch FA bigwig Michael van Praag, and Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan, who appears to be the most viable opposition candidate. The Americans want Blatter gone, the Brits want him gone, and the Europeans want him gone as well – but that is only about 55 votes. So where are the other votes going to come from?
To get some insight into this predicament, consider the two recent confederation championships which took place. First up was the Asian championship, taking place in Australia and won by the home side in a 2:1 victory over South Korea after extra time which certainly was entertaining and thrilling for the home fans, if not necessarily all that well played. Well-played football seems to have gone missing on the continent of late – Asian sides took 3/36 available points at the last World Cup, and there was not a single team ranked in the Top 50 in the world at the start of the tourney in Australia. Asian federations have been a big benificiary of FIFA's global initiatives to grow the game. FIFA is awash with cash, and Uncle Sepp has been a big proponent of grants and other financial incentives to help the rest of the world catch up to the Europeans and South Americans. This has made him many friends, of course, but if there has been any major improvement on the field, it sure was not evident in Australia. (The prime exception being the Chinese, who have decided to make a concerted effort to get corruption and other nonsense out of the game, and promptly won their group in Australia.) FIFA has kept the euros flowing, but who knows where they have gone. So, even with an Asian representative up for election, he is unlikely to mine many votes out of his own confederation.
And then there is Africa. Welcome back to the mess. A quick summary of the CAF's African Cup of Nations:
– The tourney was originally scheduled for Morocco, but the hosts wanted to delay the tourney due to concerns about Ebola – a somewhat odd request, since one of the quarantined nations, Guinea, was playing their home qualifiers in Morocco.
– CAF refuses the reschedule, yanks the tourney away from Morocco, fines them a total of $10 million and throws the Moroccans out of the 2015 tourney and the next two AFCONs after that.
– Needing to find a new host in a hurry, CAF settles on Equatorial Guinea, who have plenty of time on their hands because they have been thrown out of qualifying for fielding ineligible players. (Stop me if you think that you have heard this one before.)
– The host nation, ranked 118th in the world, rises up and reaches the quarterfinals, where they face a Tunisia side rated 90 places higher. Tunisia has a 1-0 lead late in stoppage time, an Equatoguinean flops in the box and a penalty is given. Calling it a soft penalty would be an affront to softness. The hosts convert, leveling the score and sending it on to extra time, at which point an Equatoguinean player flops again and a free kick is awarded – which is expertly taken, I must admit, and which gives the hosts the lead. The Tunisians are incensed, and a fight ensues between the two benches which has to be broken up by security forces. At the close of the game, a 2:1 upset win for the hosts, the Tunisian players promptly chase the Mauritian referee off the field and down the tunnel as he is hurried away by security forces.
– CAF fines the referee $50,000, suspends him six months and, probably more importantly, delists him, meaning he will likely never work in international football. They also fine the Tunisians $50,000 for nearly starting a riot. The Tunisian FA's response is to have their head guy resign from the CAF board and openly state that the match was fixed. CAF then threatens to kick the Tunisians out of the next AFCON in 2017 unless they apologize.
– In the semifinals, the hosts are playing Ghana in Malabo and the referee isn't having any nonsense. He awards a penalty to the Black Stars late in the first half after denying endless foolish appeals from the home side for fouls. This outrages everyone, even though he was kind in not sending off the Equatoguinean keeper, who probably deserved it. Ghana scores twice in quick succession, taking a 2-0 lead at half, at which point the fans start throwing water bottles onto the pitch. The players have to be escorted off the pitch under cover of riot police shields. In the second half, Ghana scores again to make it 3-0, at which point all hell breaks loose. The Ghanaian fans leave the stands and take refuge on the athletics track encircling the pitch. There are water bottles, stones, pieces of shattered mirrors, pieces of stair and all sorts of other debris being flinged out of the stands. The players are all standing in the center of the pitch, that being the only place safe in the whole building, as riot police charge into the stands and police helicopters buzz the stadium, chasing away spectators.
– For this chaotic mess, CAF fines Equatorial Guinea only $100,000. They should, by all rights, not be allowed to play a home match before spectators, but CAF allows the 3rd-place game in Malabo to go ahead anyway. It's a slap on the wrist. (To make matters worse, I now read that the president of Equatorial Guinea has pardoned all 150 or so people who were arrested during the mayhem.) It's a disgraceful scene all around.
– The final of this tourney was appropriately daffy, a 0:0 draw between Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire which went to penalties. Many African Cup of Nations finals go that route, since after six games with quick turnarounds in 95° heat, the players have almost nothing left in the tank. This penalty shootout went 11 rounds before Côte d'Ivoire won on a goal from their goalkeeper – and their backup goalkeeper, no less, who had been pressed into service when their regular #1 suffered an injury. It was a terrific win for the Elephants, but the whole tournament was an exercise in Theatre of the Absurd.

CAF president Issa Hayatou put forth this gem of a response when asked about the Malabo upheaval during a press conference:

"The press always dramatise, particularly the western press. When something bad happens in Europe, they say it's an error. When something happens in Africa, they begin talking about corruption. What happened in that [abondoned 2012] match between Serbia and Italy? It's the same as what happened here, but when it's Africa it's different. It's irrelevant that it's a semifinal. It's a football match. The western media are simply here to perpetuate colonisation."

Uh ... huh?
And what does Uncle Sepp think? He being on hand for the final in Bata, he offered up this rambling response:

"Good news is no news, bad news is news. We only talk about the bad. Football – which is such a good thing – let it live, leave it in peace, it's well organised, let them do it. I don't see the negative side of African football that the media presents. It's normal, we criticise what's good, never what's bad. The unhappy role of the media is to assume and to forecast. In the past, the government made a decision and the media passed it on. Today, we make decisions and the media have already presented it. We become slaves to the media who have already given an opinion. The media can play a role, must play a role, but they must play a role where the notions of respect and fair play are the basics. Today the world opens the newspapers, watches television, and sees only murders and killing. We never talk about princesses marrying any more."

Welcome to Uncle Sepp's Fantasyland.
And as you may have guessed, CAF members are among Blatter's biggest supporters. He wasn't about to bad mouth them, even though the greatest showcase of the continent had turned into an ungodly mess. Nope, you're not going to find any no votes on that continent.
So good luck getting rid of Sepp Blatter. That is two giant federations who will likely bloc vote to keep him in power. We appear to be stuck with him for the forseeable future. It will be interesting to see what comes about in 2017, when FIFA awards the 2026 World Cup. The Americans are the logical choice as hosts, but the Americans are also leading the charge to get rid of Sepp, and he is known to have a bit of a vindictive streak in him. Then again, there is still the possibility that FIFA is keeping the Americans in reserve if/when the Qatar thing fizzles. The politics of football seem to be growing even more murky.

• Speaking of Qatar, Friend of The Lose journalist Stefan Fatsis wrote this piece for Slate about the recently-concluded world championships of team handball which touch place in the country. The article is not exactly a ringing endorsement of the home nation, who went out and bought a team for the event, and even bought some spectators as well. (Nor is the piece a ringing endorsement of handball, whose internal politics make FIFA look angelic.) It paints a less-than-rosy picture of the nation's ability to host an international event as massive as the World Cup. Now, The Lose has no axe to grind with Qatar, which is a small country that has achieved a remarkable amount of prosperity and success in a short period of time. It's just that this World Cup proposal makes no sense, and never has made any sense. The original plans called for building stadia in cities that don't even exist yet. Where are they going to put a million visitors, or more? And doing this in June, when temperatures reach 125° in the nation, is nuts. They insist they can air condition the stadia, but what fan zones? That is where the real danger from the heat actually lies. In order to believe this proposal, you must first suspend disbelief. Organizers insist they are going to pull this off, and insist the constant allegations of corruption are merely sour grapes. I cannot help but be skeptical.

• Why is George Karl coaching the Sacramento Kings? George has always been at his best working on the fringes of the NBA – he was a huge success in Seattle, Milwaukee, and Denver – but taking this job is a head-scratcher. Now, for the purposes of full-disclosure, The Lose made no bones about the belief that this franchise would be better suited being relocated to Seattle, and also admitted that I used to be a former season ticket holder in Seattle. That being said, I believed it was the right move for the long-term benefit of the franchise. A healthy franchise in a rich market, backed by the richest ownership group in the history of sports, would have a far more likely chance to thrive and grow and succeed over the long term.
Instead, the Kings are still in Sacramento and now owned by Vivek Ranadivé, who has acted like something of a nutjob. He fired coach Mike Malone after an 11-13 start, saying that he wasn't playing an attractive enough style of basketball, then replaced him with NBA lifer/retread coach Tyrone Corbin, at which point the Kings started playing much flashier and attractive ball – if your definition of 'attractive' involves losing all the time. Now they've fired Corbin and hired Karl.
The Lose giggled a bit when I was reading some of the local press, back in 2013, talking about how great it would be to have new ownership of the Kings. They would have a tricked out building, they would be able to spend money on free agents, yadda yadda yadda. Anyone who thinks that Sacramento is ever going to be an attractive destination for free agents is a fool. (I have written about this before as well.) The Kings rose to relevance and prominence early this millennium through keen draft research and savvy trades. They have consistently whiffed on both fronts since then, are now laden with strange, unfitting pieces and bad contracts and a superstar, DeMarcus Cousins, who is toiling away in obscurity and counting down the days until he can leave. The franchise may have a new arena coming in a few years, but so what? Everyone has gotten a new arena recently, even the most awful franchises in sports. That revenue, in and of itself, is not going to make you any better, and is not going to bring a franchise back to life.
The Lose resists engaging in schadenfreude whenever possible, but it's going to be really difficult to do that in a few years, when the Cousins-less Sacramento Kings are still terrible, and when the Kevin Durant-less OKC Blunder are losing 55 games and drawing 10,000 people. At that point, the NBA will have two dead franchises on their hands. Franchises can change course, of course, but the former continues to be incompetent and the latter continues to be cheap and not particularly bright, having squandered their chance to win an NBA championship and then made the horrible James Harden trade.
And I cannot for the life of me understand why George Karl would want to get back into coaching bad enough to take a job coaching the Kings. At least his previous stops had some talent and creativity in their midsts, very little of which is apparent over in the Central Valley. Now, if anyone can pull the rabbit out of the hat in Sacto, it would be Karl, but this seems like to much for even his ample magical abilities to pull off.

• Basketball lost a couple of its greatest minds this past week with the deaths of Dean Smith and Jerry Tarkanian. The Lose's dislike of the notion of the college basketball coach is well-documented, but these are two guys who I always admired. The former was professorial, the latter more of a used car salesman. The two of them plied their trades mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, when college basketball was somewhat crazy – the buildings were weird, the coaches were out of their minds, the strategies were wildly variant, and the games could be 42-40 one day and 100-98 the next.
The best compliment that I could ever give Dean Smith is that his players always made great pros, because they were so well-prepared and fundamentally sound that the transition to the next level often seemed seamless. They could play so slow as to sufficate the clock and drive you crazy – remember, it was after N.C. froze out Virginia 47-45 in a #1-#2 matchup that the NCAA moved to add a shot clock – but then his teams could also run and gun, and they could motion offense you to death if they wanted. Whatever game you wanted to play, North Carolina was better at it than you were.
As for Jerry Tarkanian, I met him once at a speaking engagement, and he was hysterically funny. How could you not want to play for that guy? He coached the greatest team I've ever seen which didn't win a championship, the 1991 team that went undefeated during the regular season and lost to Duke in the national semifinals, and his first truly great team – a 1977 unit that reached the Final Four and averaged 110 pts. a game – completely changed the way the game was played from then on. Tarkanian also fought the NCAA for years – and won – and called them out for being selfish hypocrites long before it was fashionable to do so.
The game of college basketball, which is mired in sluggish play and manned by cookie cutter CEO coaches on the sidelines, could use both Dean Smith and Jerry Tarkanian right now – one to actually make individual players better in all phases, and the other to make the game fun again.

• Finally, The Lose is a worldly sort who likes all sorts of sports, and certainly likes seeing them done well, and so I'll definitely be paying attention here to the ICC World Cup 2015 taking place in Australia and New Zealand. Yes, cricket. I have played cricket before and rather enjoyed it. I find Test matches dry as tea in the Sahara, but the 1-day format of the ICC World Cup suits my short attention span ... wait, what was I talking about? Lest you sneer at cricket, keep in mind that the grudge match on Saturday ... or was it Sunday, what the hell time is it in Australia? ... between India and Pakistan was thought to be the most watched cricket match in history, with over 1,000,000,000 people tuning in. That's a lot of zeroes. This is serious business. (India won, by the way, continuing their World Cup mastery of their rivals.) The host Aussies are the favourites, and England got thrashed by the hosts in a sorry display certain to draw the ire back home. The Lose needs to find some appropriate rooting interests. I always have a soft spot for Bangladesh, of course, and I will root for Ireland in almost any sport. The up-and-comers in the sport are apparently from Afghanistan, who are thought to be quite talented and wildly inconsistent. Yep, there is my team to root for right there.

RUN THE DAMN BALL!

I WILL have some thoughts about the recently-concluded NFL season here (aka The Year The NFL Couldn’t Do Anything Right) in a few days. There has been a abundant amount of naysaying and critique going on about at the way the league conducts its business, pretty much all of it well-deserved, but after all of the chaos and tumult and all of bureaucratic idiocy the NFL has displayed, the best thing possible for the league took place on Sunday night in Phoenix – a great Super Bowl. A legendary Super Bowl. An instant classic. Arguably the best of the 49 Super Bowls ever played, and certainly the one with the most confounding ending. And this game also allows the league brass to wriggle off the hook for at least a little while, in that while most critiques of Goodell & Co. focus upon a negligence in regards to handling CTE and off-field issues, the immediate critique of this game goes instead to pure, old fashioned incompetence on the part of the Seattle Seahawks brass.

In short, RUN THE DAMN BALL!

A Super Bowl eerily similar to this was the infamous ‘Wide Right’ of Super Bowl XXV, when the New York Giants defeated the Buffalo Bills 20:19. In that game, the Giants held the ball for over 40 minutes. The Patriots’ Bill Belichick was the defensive coordinator for the Giants at that time. Now, I happen to think Belichick is the best coach in NFL history, and I’ve never had any animosity whatsoever towards the Patriots, but this suck up to Belichick article on Grantland featured a wondrous case of historical revisionism. That game, 24 years ago, had pretty much nothing to do with the Giants defense and everything to do with an offensive strategy in which the Giants milked every second possible off the clock to keep the Bills record-setting offense off the field. The Bills gained 20 yards a minute when they had the ball. They simply ran out of minutes, and they still could’ve won the game with a last ditch FG.

Fast forward 24 years, and the Patriots’ patient, relentless strategy of ball control through the short passing game was brilliantly conceived and exquisitely executed by Tom Brady – and the Pats needed every second of their more than 33 minutes of possession, as it turned out, because their defense got gashed. The Seahawks averaged 5.6 yards per rush and 11.8 yards per pass. Had the outcome been different, most of the second guessing would’ve been heaped Belichick’s way for his choosing not to use his timeouts in the final minute, thus saving more time for Brady to work after the Seahawks scored. Trusting his defense in that spot – a defense which had absolutely imploded in the 2-minute drill in both halves – was something of a curious move, if not out-and-out foolish.

But Belichick doesn’t have to face up to any scrutiny today, because the Seahawks didn’t RUN THE DAMN BALL. Instead, with :30 to go in the game, on the Pats 1 yard line, with a power-rushing offensive line, with the best RB in football and the best running QB in football in the backfield, the Seahawks inexplicably decided to throw a slant pass to the goal line to Ricardo Lockette, their 4th WR, and Pats backup DB Malcolm Butler jumped the route:

Behold the worst play call in NFL history.

And calling it anything short of that does it a disservice. So much on the line, so many things going for the Seahawks, the Patriots seemingly being complicit by not stopping the clock, and the Seahawks run that play? WHAT? You’re going to run a double stack on the goal line and try to pick Brandon Browner, the most physical CB in the NFL (who promptly blows the play up by standing his ground, giving Butler time and space to jump the route), and throw the ball into the defense to a backup WR? Are you serious? To hell with that. RUN THE DAMN BALL!

And before we go any further here, let me introduce a new feature that I was already planning here at In Play Lose, the Tool of the Week, which this week goes to Seahawks offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell.

Bevell not only called this terrible play, but then threw Lockette under the bus, saying repeatedly to the press that the Seahawks WR “should’ve been stronger to the ball.” Hmm, methinks Bevell should’ve been stronger in his decision making. Bevell obviously has the makings of a college head coach, since he’s already speaking like one. One of the fortes of college coaches is finding ways to blame the players when you fuck up on the sidelines. In college, the coach has total control, of course, and dissent is pretty much nonexistent. That doesn’t work so well in the NFL, however, which is a players game, and the Seahawks players were less than pleased:

“I don’t understand how you don’t give it to the best back in the league on not even the 1-yard line … We were on the half-yard line, and we throw a slant. I don’t know what the offense had going on, what they saw. I just don’t understand.” – LB Bruce Irvin
“Um, yeah. I mean, I really don’t know. I still haven’t figured it out yet.” – WR Doug Baldwin, when asked if he was surprised by the call.

The reporters stationed near the tunnels said many of the Seahawks players were echoing these sentiments when they left the field. The Seahawks true leaders manned up in the aftermath, with Carroll saying the blame was on him, Wilson saying he felt like he lost the game for his team, and Lynch refusing to point fingers by saying “it’s a team game.” Players make mistakes on the field all the time, but they also bust their asses and their bodies trying to make plays. The last thing they need is some smug guy with a headset and a clipboard trying to cover his ass after the fact. That pisses players off.

Damn you Auto Correct!

And they should be pissed off, because this play call was absolutely stupid. Pete Carroll did try to explain the logic that went into this play after the game. And I’m going to give him some leeway here, since this was right after what was, without question, the most soul-killing defeat anyone involved had ever experienced. Trying to come up with sound explanations in the aftermath of defeat can be difficult, especially when you know that you just blew it. Logic doesn’t always work so well in that instance. (The bizarre comment by Mike McCarthy about 20 second-half rushing attempts in the aftermath of this disaster falls in that category.) But here is the logic Carroll put forth:

The Seahawks wanted to try and kill out the clock completely, give Brady as little time as possible after they score. (To be honest, I think they were surprised Belichick didn’t call a timeout, since there was all sorts of uncertainty as they lined up on 2nd down.) They have one timeout left. If they throw a pass on 2nd down and it falls incomplete, the clock stops. If they run, and they don’t get it, they have to burn the timeout, which cuts down the options for what to do on the next play. The Seahawks plan was to throw a pass on 2nd down, run on 3rd, call a timeout if they don’t make it, and run on 4th. Furthermore, Carroll said the New England went ‘heavy’ with a goal line defense, which made running the ball more of a challenge, and the Seahawks felt they had a bad matchup with the Patriots defense, which is why they switched it up.

OK, there’s the logic. And my answer to that is RUN THE DAMN BALL.

And full marks to Butler, the Pats DB on the play, for sniffing it out. It was pointed out in a fave Seattle media outlet of mine that Butler got torched by the Patriots scout team on that exact play, and got lit up by Belichick for doing so, so when he saw the formation, he was looking for the play which the Seahawks ran. This speaks to excellent preparation on the Pats part, of course. While it’s a stretch, in my opinion, to say the Pats ‘knew’ the play was coming, film study and preparation suggested to the Patriots that this play might happen.

Which just makes the play call even worse. Not only were the Seahawks stupid, but it turns out they were also somewhat predictable.

But let’s go back to that logic Carroll was using for a moment. First of all, running the ball on 2nd down and not getting a TD and being forced to use a timeout isn’t that big of a deal. You’re still a yard from the end zone. You have the most mobile, agile QB in football, one who is very likely to score himself if you spread the field on 3rd down and give him a host of run/pass options. 3rd and 1 takes away the Lynch power run, but there are, in fact, even more options available and the Patriots have to account for even more possibilities. Wilson can roll out, can run a QB draw, all of that sort of stuff. The Patriots have spent the entire game trying to minimize Wilson’s edge game for a reason: Russell Wilson, on the move, in open space, is a mismatch for every single member of the Patriots defense. Instead, the Seahawks essentially made it easy for the Pats to defend Wilson by giving him a play call, on 2nd down, where there is ONLY ONE OPTION, which is to throw the slant. There is no Plan B there. There is no check down.

And as for the defensive alignment, well, the Seahawks kind of got it wrong. Sure, there are eight in the box playing the run, but the Pats also have 3 CBs in the game. There is no reason to have three corners in the game if you think you’re getting nothing but power run. That defensive alignment suggests the Patriots are, in fact, hedging their bets – if not out-and-out selling out – by looking for a pass play. So, whatever logic being used based by the Seahawks, based upon was the Pats defense was doing, was faulty from the get-go.

Science, bitches! Now run the damn ball!

And this is where some nifty Game Theory comes into play, which gets complicated by the clock. If the Pats use 3 corners on 2nd-and-goal, and the Seahawks go with a power run formation, New England probably has to take a timeout, because they’re outmatched. This is good for the Seahawks, who are dealing with under a minute of game time. Any clock stoppage while they have the ball is good for them. The clock is the Pats’ ally, but only until Seattle scores, when it becomes an enemy. As it stands, the Pats’ 3 CB look is the right defense on the field for what they think Seattle is going to do (which the Seahawks then did). Now, probably the right move here for Seattle is for Wilson to audible out of the play call, but doing so takes time off the clock Seattle cannot afford to waste.

It’s triumphing in situations like this which makes Belichick the best coach in NFL history. Pete Carroll is a terrific football coach, but he got beat by the best. I’m reminded of a conversation I had several years ago after the Louisville-Michigan NCAA basketball championship final, a game which turned when Louisville put their best player, Russ Smith, 30 feet from the basket in the second half, which took him out of the game but also created good 1-on-1 matchups and opened up the Michigan defense, who had to have a guy chase Russ Smith around as he acted as a decoy, stand 30 feet away and take themselves out of the play as a consequence. The person I was explaining this to then said, “so Michigan got outcoached,” and I said, “well, Rick Pitino’s in the Hall of Fame for a reason.”

But to hell with all of that game theory stuff. RUN THE DAMN BALL! The Seahawks rushed for more yards this season than had been seen in the NFL since 2006. Marshawn Lynch is arguably the best all-purpose back in the sport, and the team is based upon a power run game, which keys Wilson’s fleet feet and sleight of hand in the passing game. Everything the Seahawks do is predicated on the idea that they just line up and flatten you and run over you. So do it, damn it! IT’S WHAT YOU DO BEST! The Pats didn’t stop the run worth a damn the whole game, whereas the Seahawks had been unable to get anyone open in the passing game, which consisted mostly of throwing the ball up for grabs and having it work out from time to time. Where was Chris Matthews all season for the Seahawks? Wow, that kid was terrific. (Conversely, New England DB Kyle Arrington was absolutely horrible on the coverage. He got repeatedly toasted and got promptly benched by Belichick at halftime.) I was somewhat shocked the Seahawks didn’t use Lynch as a receiver more, and they didn’t use the tight end for anything more than being a 6th lineman. The Seahawks gained a helluva lot of yards with a passing game that didn’t really work very well. Given two drives with chances to salt the game away on two separate drives, the Seahawks either missed open receivers or dropped the ball. Hell, the fact that Seattle was at the goal line with a minute to go was miraculous to begin with:

Yes, that actually happened

But how do you not trust your best guys to do what you do best when you’re a yard away from the end zone? What the hell is that? What the hell are you thinking? WHERE IS YOUR BRAIN?

We were having some good-spirited banter at the start of the game, and the Pats fan said “they’re gonna run the ball,” and I said, “Brady’s going to throw the ball 50 times in this game.” You’re playing the best defense in the NFL, and you’re telling me you expect LaGarette Blount to win the game for you? Bullshit. This ain’t the Colts toreador run defense you’re facing. And you have Tom Brady, one of the best QBs in the history of the game. I’m taking my chances with that guy, especially with three DBs for the Seahawks already playing hurt, and two more injuries during the course of the game hindering the Seahawk defense even further. Sure enough, Brady was 37-50 for 328 yards, and Blount was watching the game from the bench. The Pats put the ball in the hands of their best player. The Seahawks, meanwhile, tried to be clever and outsmarted themselves.

RUN THE DAMN BALL! Have Russell Wilson shake hands with Lynch, and then have Lynch shake everyone’s hand after he scores. RUN THE DAMN BALL! It’s really not that complicated, so don’t make it complicated. Hell, if they’ve got three corners, audible out of it, and spread the field. And don’t throw a slant! The Seahawks suck at running the slant. They botched the slant repeatedly against Green Bay, who basically dared them to throw it and caught more of those passes than the Seahawks did. The defense is probably going to guess slant, since you only need a yard, they have no safety help, and they have to pick their poison. For fucksake, don’t give the defense a chance to make a play. Throw the damn thing to the pylon if you have to. Throw it way up high to Matthews or the big tight end. No, forget the pass entirely. RUN THE DAMN BALL!

And what the fuck was this? That Nationwide ad was the worst Super Bowl ad that I ever seen. Who is the nimrod in the Nationwide marketing department said, “Hmm, I don’t know, I think we need more dead kids in this ad, because dead kids are always a wonderful way to sell a product.”

And now I’m completely exasperated, so I’m going to run a gif of a dancing shark while I regain some composure:

The dancing shark who doesn’t know the steps, and who gives no fucks, is my new hero.

And now that I’ve thought about it some more, I think my opinion is RUN THE DAMN BALL!

And this is not to discount the Patriots’ performance in any way. They were terrific. Honestly, the whole game was terrific, featuring an amazing ebb and flow as the Pats held the ball and held the ball and held the ball and then BAM! Seattle would make some big plays. It was an incredible football game to watch. But people who try to minimize the impact of this goal line gaffe by saying that there is a bunch of stuff that goes wrong here and there over the course of the game completely miss the point. In a game that comes down to who has the ball last, you can’t make the last mistake. And for the Seahawks coaching staff to go completely brain dead at the end like this is unconscionable.

And this is a tough one for the Seahawks to overcome, but if there is a team that could do it quickly and reestablish dominance, it is them. They’ve got a loaded team. They’re younger than almost every other team in the NFL. They’ve got a Whiz of a GM, salary cap flexibility, and not a whole lot of contract issues to work out. Indeed, the Vegas oddsmakers already fancy their chances for winning it all a year from now. But jeez, this one is a doozy. Last year’s title cushions the blow somewhat, but for a franchise that’s often seemed star-crossed, this defeat is an extraordinary tough and bitter pill to swallow.

And what a baffling, stunning, remarkable series of playoff games involving the NFC. Every successive game featured an ending more confounding than the previous one. First the Lions, then the Cowboys, and then the Pack, and then this. Wow. Words fail me at this point.

Well, I can think of four more words. RUN THE DAMN BALL!

The Agony of Deflate

Cartoon by Gary Varvel, Indianapolis Star

SO the complete insanity in Seattle was followed up by a boring game in Foxboro that wasn’t particularly noteworthy. The New England Patriots throttled the Indianapolis Colts 45:7 and, quite honestly, there isn’t much to write about it, since the result really wasn’t that much of a surprise. The Patriots have been kryptonite to the Colts for the better part of 15 years. This result was hardly a shock. And The Lose was preparing to settle in for two weeks of anticipation – one of the juicier Super Bowl matchups since … since … well, since last year – and two weeks of irritating hype which promised to verge on silly, as players from two of the more dominant and respected NFL organizations would inevitably prattle on about how they get no respect from anyone. The most intriguing aspect to the Super Bowl buildup was going to be hearing what Marshawn Lynch has to say at Media Day, but it would otherwise be rather humdrum and nondescript.

But then a Colts beat writer broke a story that the league was looking into some irregularities with game balls supplied by the Patriots, and all hell breaks loose. Welcome to Deflategate, or Deflateghazi, or find some other ironic idiom to describe it. The most needless and ridiculous scandal imaginable breaks, and Super Bowl hype week suddenly becomes interesting.

And let me point out something here, lest you think the Colts scribe breaking this was some act of sour grapes: NFL beat writers generally don’t report on standard NFL operating procedures. They aren’t really news. For example, it’s standard practice after an NFL game for a team to submit what is essentially a list of grievances from the week before – plays where officials, in their minds, got the calls wrong. This happens all the time, and it’s actually part of quality control operations, and it’s rarely a big deal. But it becomes a big deal, for example, when the Lions appear to get jobbed, after which it is then reported, in the media, of the NFL officers going through the game tape and finding all of the instances throughout the game where the Cowboys appeared to get jobbed. All of a sudden, the machinations of the league are back under the microscope. But those sorts of reviews happen all the time, and it’s not newsworthy when one team wins 52:0 or some such thing. And it’s not necessarily anything out of the ordinary that a football has to be taken out of play, or has to be reinflated at the half, or something of that sort. Stuff happens during the game. You see all the time, in baseball, a pitcher who doesn’t like a baseball tossing it back to be taken out of play. A couple of footballs losing some air wouldn’t have been a big deal. The Colts beat writer almost certainly had something more important to write about on his deadline, something along the lines of how the Colts played like the suckiest bunch of sucks who ever sucked. He wouldn’t have followed the smoke if he didn’t think there was fire.

Sure enough, it’s been discovered that 11 of 12 New England footballs were underinflated in the range of 2 lbs. per square inch. And now all of us are attempting to dabble the black magic arts of sport science to understand this. I’m not a physicist, nor do I play one on TV, but here goes. Each team supplies a dozen footballs for their offense to use during the game. The football has to be inflated to 12.5-13.5 PSI and weigh 14-15 oz. (A third set of footballs, to be used exclusively by the placekickers, are provided by the league.) The referees inspect the footballs 2 hours before the game and approve them for play, after which they are given back to the equipment staff for each team. They are then not to be altered in any way. Now, like I say, if 1-2 footballs come back underinflated or warped or what have you during the game, it isn’t that big of a deal. But 11 of 12 is unlikely to be a coincidence. What’s far more likely the case, in fact, is that someone on the New England side of the field is doctoring the footballs during the game.

So why does this matter? Well, a football with less air in it is going to be easier to grip. It will be easier to throw and catch. It will also be easier for the running back to clutch. This effect is magnified in cold and wet weather – two prevailing conditions on Sunday night in Foxboro. NFL QBs are notoriously finicky when it comes to the football. Some like the footballs inflated to the lower end of the allowable PSI, affording them “more leather” on the ball. Aaron Rogers, meanwhile, has come out and said he likes a harder, more inflated football, since he has bigger hands and it affords him more control. All QBs agree that brand new footballs suck, since they’re slick and have no good surface area to grip. Equipment managers will massage the footballs ahead of time, rub dirt on them, bounce them against brick walls, do anything to break them in to their QB’s specs.

And yes, you can tell the difference. You can tell immediately. A lot was made of the new soccer balls used in the World Cup in South Africa, which players had a hard time making dip and spin, and which goalkeepers had a hell of a time judging the flight of. The ball is the extension of the hand (or, in the case of soccer, the foot). All it would take for me to size up a basketball was a couple of dribbles – I could see the way it bounced, hear the sound, feel the surface with my fingers and a palm – and I would then know how I needed to compensate for it, making a slight adjustment in the placement of the ball in my hand when taking a shot. It’s minutia we’re talking about here, tiny little adjustments, but such is the extent of the awareness of your environment. Pitchers know when the seams of a baseball are fractions of inches off, hitters can feel and hear the difference when the ball strikes the bat. When handed a 10 PSI football on set, former NFL QB turned TV analyst Mark Brunell seemed almost shocked at how it felt in his hand. With the added grip, he figured he could throw the ball an extra 10 yards. Sports are played with the senses far more than most people realize.

And one of the disputed footballs on Sunday night ended up in the hands of the one guy other than Andrew Luck on the Colts sideline who would be aware of the nuances of the actual football itself – after a Colts interception, which the player then carried to the sideline, he flipped it to the equipment manager, who noticed something was weird and then alerted the Indianapolis coaching staff. This occurred during the first half of the game, and all of the Patriots footballs were then inspected during the halftime break and reinflated. But as it turns out, the Colts apparently had suspicions about this sort of thing going on back in November when the two teams played in Indianapolis, and the reports which have come out further suggest the possibility that the Colts were tipped off by the Ravens, who suspected something was peculiar about the footballs a week earlier, but who were too busy griping about New England’s weird offensive formations to publicly gripe about the footballs. The Ravens apparently took it one step further and complained to the league behind the scenes, and so Sunday’s reinflation of the footballs at halftime in Foxboro constituted the NFL’s equivalent of a surprise inspection. And as I said before, finding 11 of 12 footballs to be noncompliant, having been deemed compliant two hours before the game, pretty much eliminates the possibility of a coincidence. It defies all logic and sense that a whole bunch of footballs would simply be losing air.

This stuff is awesome.

Now, no one is suggesting that the Patriots won the game because of deflated footballs. The Patriots would’ve won using a nerf ball, a medicine ball, a bowling ball, hell they could’ve played with a cinderblock or a stuffed Thanksgiving turkey and still beaten the Colts. But therein lies part of the problem: if you’re the Patriots, why are you doing this? You don’t need to do this! You can beat the Colts six ways to Sunday. Just play the game straight up, for the love of pete. Why do you need to cheat?

And let’s not kid ourselves, this is cheating. Doctoring the football is against the rules. It’s cheating. Pretending otherwise is both emotionally and intellectually dishonest. Now, gamesmanship is nothing new in sports, of course. Teams have been trying to get subtle advantages on the opposition for years. Back when the Dodgers were stealing bases all over teams in the 1960s and 1970s, the Giants would famously overwater the area around the first base bag at The Stick and turn it into a quaggy, sloppy mess in an attempt to slow the Dodgers’ running game. Legal? No. Effective? Well, yeah. Some of the accusations over the years of foul play have been pretty entertaining. The White Sox accused the Jays of stealing signs from the stands. The Seahawks have been accused of pumping in artificial crowd noise. Various dome teams in football and baseball have been accused of adjusting the air conditioning. Most of the accusations turns out to be nonsense, but gamesmanship and bending of the rules most definitely goes on. We joke around the office about the extent to which cheating occurs in auto racing, sometimes rather brazenly, and how auto teams employ one whole group of technicians to help them cheat and another whole group of technicians to help them avoid getting caught. The cynic would suggest that stripping Lance Armstrong of his Tour de France titles is hypocritical, since cycling, as a sport, is dirtier than my closet, and the idea that Armstrong won simply by cheating more efficiently than the others is nonsense. Take all of the drugs out of the sport, strip it down to the basic, and Armstrong would probably win, anyway. But, in the end, “everyone else is doing it” is not an acceptable defense, nor should it ever be.

And since this is the Patriots we are talking about, it rankles people even more. They are the closest thing to a dynasty the parity-happy NFL can muster, with three Super Bowl wins and now six Super Bowl appearances in this millennium. They are a model franchise in terms of preparation, on-field innovation, roster construction, and reinvention on the fly, seemingly never missing a beat and winning at more than a .700 clip over the past decade. There is a fair amount of envy and jealousy in the NFL about the continued success of the Patriots, to be sure. But there is also a constant spate of whispers and rumours suggesting the franchise is bending whatever rules they can find so as to gain a competitive advantage, one which dates all the way back to their first Super Bowl victory, where they were accused of secretly videotaping St. Louis Rams practices. The worst transgression of all, of course, was the so-called ‘Spygate’ episode from 2007, in which the Patriots were, in fact, caught and penalized by the league. Spygate was a clear violation of the league’s rules regarding use of technology during the game – which is prohibited, other than some basic radio communication and still photography, all of which has to meet league-specific guidelines. The league has always maintained the idea that the game should be determined by the human element (a notion baseball would do well to follow, I should add, since it’s fairly accepted, at this point, that pitchers and hitters are studying each others’ tendencies downloaded onto iPods during the games). And they are pretty adamant about that at the NFL offices. (Just recently, it was reported that Browns are being investigated for staffers illegally text messaging during the game, although I am not sure what besides ‘OUR QB IS TEH SUX’ they would possibly be saying.)

While paying the penalty for this Spygate violation, Bill Belichick also denied any willful wrongdoing and maintained his club gained no competitive advantage. His response to this particular transgression regarding footballs, meanwhile, was to express surprise and, to some extent, throw Tom Brady under the bus, although I am not sure that was truly his intent. “Ask the quarterback.” Well, apparently, the QB has no idea what’s going on, either, so now what?

Something doesn’t jibe here. A bagful of footballs don’t all mysteriously deflate. We can again attempt to apply the rule of Hanlon’s razor here, in which case whomever is in charge of the footballs is obviously incompetent and should summarily be fired, but Belichick and the Patriots, rightly or wrongly, are already perceived as cheaters by a good number of those in and around the league. And Belichick is notorious even among the coaching establishment for being a huge control freak. That this pesky little detail about the footballs could somehow accidentally slip past every single person on the Patriots sideline seems dubious. Their reputation precedes them in this case.

And now the NFL is in a really bad spot. Roger Goodell has been perceived as being something of a Patriots stooge in the past – Pats owner Bob Kraft has been one of his most adamant supporters throughout some of the league’s recent trials and tribulations – and you’ve already got the Seahawks pointing out the absurdity/stupidity of the league threatening to suspend Marshawn Lynch for wanting to wear gold shoes, implying a certain level of double-standard going on were the Patriots not dealt with harshly if found to be guilty. The league has to get this investigation right, and has to do it quickly, and it is unclear, if not outright doubtful, that the NFL is capable of doing that. Previous investigations do not exactly leave people brimming with confidence. But this sort of thing goes to the integrity of the game. You just can’t have this.

I don’t see how the league can avoid coming down hard on the Patriots for this. Failing to do so would be yet another blow to a league that really doesn’t need any more of those at the moment. Fines? Loss of draft picks? Suspensions for the Super Bowl and/or carrying over to next season? I think all of those are in play at the moment. It may, in fact, be the last one which finally convinces some folks in Foxboro, and elsewhere, that the league will not tolerate this kind of thing.

What a mess. What a needless, ridiculous mess. This promises to be an epic distraction, and it’s going to be hard for many to view a potential Patriots Super Bowl win as being anything short of tarnished. The league probably just wants this to go away, but that ain’t gonna happen. Not at this stage, it isn’t. You’ve got every sports reporter in America descending upon Phoenix next week, looking for something to write about and something to say before the camera. Any guesses what Topic #1 is going to be?

And for the Seahawks, a brash lot who do not mind being cast as the villains – which is odd in and of itself, since no one outside of the Pacific Northwest cared one way or another about the Seahawks until they suddenly got scary good – this is going to put them in an unusual position. Dare I say it, for the casual fans out there who are reading about this stuff, are the Seahawks now – gasp! – the good guys? Now I know this is getting weird.

The game last Sunday in Seattle ran the gamut. It was awful and brilliant, it was exasperating and confounding and bizarre and exciting and spectacular. It was the sort of game which goes a way in rehabilitating the tattered image of the NFL – we were reminded, for a few hours, why we like the game in the first place. And if the NFL fucks up this investigation, it just may be up to the Seahawks on Super Bowl Sunday to once again go about saving the league from itself.