The Absurdity of Big-time Sports - Rose Bowl Sod Edition

From Grantland's report on the Rose Bowl game:

We'd been told stories of signs in the public parking lots warning patrons who lingered more than 90 minutes past the game's end that their vehicles could be towed. Undaunted, at 7:30 in the evening, Pacific time, stray clumps of fans lingered in opposite corners of the stadium, watching the crisp semicircles and mild dancing of the Spartan band, and the ragged LSJUMB arc and Dollies kick line. Security guards maintained their rope line around the midfield logo, which disappeared long before midnight. The turf, which looked nearly untouched, was pulled up section by section. Entirely new sod will be brought in and laid down for Monday night's Florida State–Auburn BCS title game tilt. This is the Rose Bowl, and immaculate is the only standard.

Seriously?  New sod for one game when the old sod was in great shape?  Nuts.

Browns Have Paid or Owe $49 Million to Fired Coaches

Plain Dealer:

Coach	Yrs. after fired	Sum owed
Chris Palmer	3 years	$3 million
Butch Davis	3 years	$12 million
Romeo Crennel	3 years	Approx. $10 million
Eric Mangini	2 years	$7.8 million
Pat Shurmur	2 years left	About $5.6 million
Rob Chudzinski	3 years left	$10.5 million
Source: Various media reports

 ESPN’s Chris Mortensen reported Monday the Browns owed Chudzinski about $10.5 million over the next three years. Shurmur was due roughly $5.6 million at the time of his dismissal.
Since 2001, the Browns have gone through only one season (2008) without compensating a former head coach not to blow a whistle or design a game plan. By the end of 2016, they will have paid for 16 years of non-service from the pink-slipped six.
The most expensive buyout: Butch Davis, who Randy Lerner still owed $12 million at the time of his 2004 firing. The cheapest buyout: Chris Palmer, who the late Al Lerner owed $3 million over three years beginning in 2001. Remember, these figures don't include monies paid to coordinators and assistant coaches.
Since their 1999 return, the Browns have two winning seasons, one playoff appearance and no post-season victories to show for their investment.

That is the most ridiculous aspect of teams firing their coaches after a poor season.  It is bad enough that the team appears rudderless and lacking in any plan on how to improve, but then they have to shell out tons of money for guys they determined weren't good enough to keep around.  Honestly, why do teams give a new coach a 4 year contract?  No offense, but shouldn't Rob Chudzinski be pretty damn happy with getting paid $3 million for less than a year's work?  Why does he need guaranteed nearly $14 million to take the job?  That is obscene.  I guess it is nice work if you can get it.

The Cincinnati Stadium Screw Job

Another article discussing the crazy public subsidies for professional sports stadiums features Cincinnati:

When voters approved a sales-tax increase to pay $540 million toward stadiums for Cincinnati’s professional baseball and football teams almost two decades ago, city leaders promised lower property levies and a business district along the Ohio River.
The tax relief hasn’t materialized as pledged, said Todd Portune, a commissioner in Cincinnati’s Hamilton County. Instead, the county government is grappling with annual stadium expenses totaling at least $43 million this year, including debt service, county documents show. Residents have seen a public hospital sold, mass-transit investments postponed and little private development near the stadiums that didn’t involve additional public subsidies, Portune said......
In Cincinnati, Bengals owner Mike Brown took control of the team in 1991, after the death of his father, Paul Brown, a Hall of Fame founder and coach of the Cleveland Browns, who in 1967 headed an ownership group that acquired an expansion franchise in the American Football League. The Reds are owned by Robert Castellini, who led a group that bought a team after the 2005 season that was then valued at $270 million. The team is now worth $680 million, according to a data compiled by Bloomberg.
In the 1990s, each team began pushing for public funding to replace Riverfront Stadium, which opened in 1970 and was shared by both organizations. In March 1996, Hamilton County voters approved a half-percentage point increase in their sales-tax rate to fund the football and baseball venues as part of an effort to revive the area along the Ohio River.
Paul Brown Stadium opened for the Bengals in 2000 and Great American Ball Park opened for the Reds in 2003. The stadiums are about a half-mile apart......
Public costs for Cincinnati stadiums now exceed $1 billion in 2010 dollars, according to Long, the Harvard professor, who tabulated expenses for stadiums for a book titled “Public Private Partnerships for Major League Sports Facilities.”
The NFL stadium proved particularly costly, according to Long. Paul Brown Stadium was the second-most expensive public deal of any U.S. stadium, according to her data, with the public paying $706 million, including land, infrastructure, maintenance and tax breaks. It trails only Indianapolis’s Lucas Oil Stadium. Taxpayers also spent about $489 million on the Reds’ Great American Ball Park, according to Long’s data.

And not only has Mike Brown screwed Hamilton County taxpayers (and the IRS), he's been a complete asshole while doing it, and the Bengals have failed to win a playoff game since he took over the team.

Stagg Bowl Matchup Set

Mount Union squeaked by North Central, 41-40, while UW-Whitewater got by Mary Hardin-Baylor, 16-15, to advance to the Division III championship game.  This is the eighth matchup between the two schools in the championship game in the last nine years.  The only exception was last year's matchup between St. Thomas and Mount Union.  It is also Mount Union's ninth straight appearance in the championship game, their 16th appearance in the last 18, and their 17th in the last 21.  That is a pretty ridiculous run.

A Depressing Start to the New Year?

Looking over the bowl matchups, it appears that New Year's Day might be kind of ugly for the Big Ten.  While Michigan State and Stanford should be pretty evenly matched in the Rose Bowl, and Wisconsin could give South Carolina a run, Iowa vs. LSU and Nebraska-Georgia just don't appear to be fair fights to this guy.  I anticipate that the Big Ten will again struggle during the bowl season.

Not Much Defense

Here are the statistics from Mount Union's 62-59 win over Wesley:

Wesley	Statistics	Mount Union
29	FIRST DOWNS	18
25 1 3	Passing Rushing Penalty	8 9 1
25% (2 of 8)	THIRD DOWN EFFICIENCY	35% (6 of 17)
0% (0 of 0)	FOURTH DOWN EFFICIENCY	33% (1 of 3)
635	TOTAL OFFENSE	447
70 9.1	Total Offensive Plays Average gain per play	72 6.2
633	NET YARDS PASSING	280
35-52 12.2 3-32 4	Completions-Attempts Net yards per pass play Sacked: Number-Yards Had intercepted	16-27 10.4 3-20 0
2	NET YARDS RUSHING	167
18 0.1	Rushing Attempts Average gain per rush	45 3.7
6-219	PUNTS: Number-Yards	6-201
36.5	Average	33.5
97	TOTAL RETURN YARDS	239
2-9 11-88 0 0	Punt Returns: Number-Yards Kickoff Returns: Number-Yards Interception Returns: Number-Yards	2-76 6-81 4-82
11-110	PENALTIES: Number-Yards	8-85
2-2	FUMBLES: Number-Lost	0-0
3-20	SACKS: Number-Yards	3-32
0 0	INTERCEPTIONS: Number-Yards	4-82
27:33	TIME OF POSSESSION	32:27

633 passing yards and 2 rushing yards?  9.1 yards per play?  Wow.  Mount Union wasn't dominating, but they will be in the Division III semifinals next week versus North Central.  Mary Hardin-Baylor will host Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Buckeyes Stumble

Pat Forde:

If you want to know how badly the Big Ten championship loss wounded Ohio State, consider this:
After Michigan State had finished harmin' Ohio, the Buckeyes bagged "Carmen Ohio."
At a school that takes its traditions seriously, that will be considered sacrilege by some fans. Under former coach Jim Tressel, the ritual was non-negotiable: Win or lose, the team would gather postgame before the marching band and sing the song, written more than a century ago by an Ohio State student.
For 24 games under Urban Meyer, that continued. Game ended, players gathered, song was sung. Meyer, a self-proclaimed lover of Buckeye lore, was always front and center, flanked by players on either side.
Made for a nice photo op, at the very least.
Of course, for 24 games there was never a loss, never a chance to test the commitment to tradition in a time of adversity.
Saturday night, that changed. Saturday night, Meyer's Buckeyes finally lost – and did so in shocking fashion. They fell behind the Spartans 17-0, roared back for a 24-17 lead, then were hit with another 17-0 flurry in a devastating 34-24 loss.
National title aspirations vanished. The program that had dominated a diminished Big Ten finally played an opponent of consequence – and was exposed as a cut below championship mettle.

This part is brutal:

This game reinforced what many of us suspected: Ohio State's winning streak was a house of cards, built on soft competition. The non-conference schedule was awful, and the conference has been at a low ebb. For this team to have skated into the BCS championship game would have been a disservice to college football.
The Buckeyes hadn't played a single top-10 opponent since Tressel's last game as coach, the 2011 Sugar Bowl. Their victories shouldn't have impressed anyone, but poll voters are seduced by brand-name programs with perfect records.

And so, after scraping past a hugely disappointing Michigan team by one point last week, a team ranked second by the polls and BCS computers came to Indy with everything within its grasp. Just win this game – in front of a crowd that was 70 percent scarlet-and-gray – and the Buckeyes would go to Pasadena and play for the national title.

It was all right there for the taking. And they blew their chance, ceding a spot in the title game to Auburn – and giving the Southeastern Conference a shot at a great eight straight championships.

The Big Ten has not been very good for a while now.  I think the Buckeyes are lucky they weren't exposed by a non-conference opponent in the BCS Championship.  The four team playoff makes things more rational, but it probably ought to be a requirement for power conference teams to play a serious non-conference opponent each season, so you can tell who the pretenders are.

The Double Bird

Charles Pierce gives a beautiful description of Marcus Hall's two-handed salute to Michigan fans on Saturday:

In the second quarter of what already had been a carnival of a first half, Michigan had just scored to take a 21-14 lead. Ohio State's Dontre Wilson fielded the kick at his own goal line and ran it back 16 yards. However, deep in the pile, ill feelings mysteriously arose. Family relationships were disputed loudly. Within seconds, a WWE card broke out. Helmets flew, as did at least one punch. An exaltation of penalty flags took wing. By the time the game officials had finished approximating who had done what to whom, and whose mothers had been most grievously insulted, two Ohio State players and one Wolverine found themselves dismissed.
"I was disappointed in that," Ohio State coach Urban Meyer grumped afterward.
(It is devoutly to be hoped that the Buckeyes followed the direction of their governor, John Kasich, regarding the letter "m" and remembered to call people "otherfuckers" in the scrum. These are the things I worry about.)
One of the expelled, offensive lineman Marcus Hall, was particularly exercised. He slammed down his helmet. He kicked what I can only hope was the bench. And then, as he was being led off into exile up the tunnel, Hall enthusiastically flipped off the Michigan crowd with both hands. This being Thanksgiving weekend, there were a lot of people out there watching with nothing in their hands save beer, and nothing on their hands but time. Within two minutes, Hall's gesture had been GIF'ed approximately 9,678 times. This guaranteed him the kind of instant fame only the Internet can provide. It also guaranteed that Marcus Hall never will have to pay for a meal in Columbus for the rest of his life — whether he and the Buckeyes play for the national title or not. He demonstrated vividly that he don't give a damn for the whole state of Michigan. I know I'm supposed to be outraged by this, but I can't be. That would require me to be a TV drone and worry about things like The Image Of The Sport. Hell with that. Marcus Hall lived the dream of every Ohio State fan since the series began in 1897.

I love the part about otherfuckers, even though I find Kasich's recommendation to be a stupid bit of demagoguery.

Didn't See That Coming

Alabama-Auburn.  Holy Shit.

An OSU-Michigan Tradition

Bob Wojnowski's OSU slamfest:

As thousands of scarlet-nosed Ohioans truck into town, clogging the White Castles, it’s important to remind our friends of a couple rules.

■No. 1, Tasers are not toys, not even after 16 beers.

■No. 2, we strictly enforce BYOPP (Bring Your Own Porta-Potty).

Thankfully, our state gets two shots at the unbeaten Buckeyes this year, and the Wolverines could use the help. I’m not saying they’ve been playing possum, because that sounds like a jab at the second-most popular Thanksgiving dish in Ohio. But maybe the 7-4 Wolverines cleverly saved all their good plays — you know, the ones that go forward — for The Game on Saturday.

The hope is, Michigan at least can soften up Ohio State with a series of glancing body blows, and then Michigan State can finish the job next week in the Big Ten championship game. The Spartans made a horrible miscalculation and clinched early, so they’ll warm up Saturday by whacking the Gophers in front of a tidy gathering of family and friends.

If you think Michigan, a two-touchdown underdog, is afraid of Ohio State, ha, you don’t understand this great rivalry. First of all, once you’ve rushed for minus-69 yards in back-to-back games, you’re not afraid of any embarrassment. And second — and I mean this in the most-respectful way — Ohio State is in the midst of the worst 23-game winning streak in college football history.

Am I being too harsh? Not really. I’ve done investigatory work with my assistant — the talented Ms. G. Oogle — and in this 23-game stretch, Ohio State has precisely one notable road victory — in overtime against Wisconsin last year. This season’s slate includes the standard Big Ten wrecks, as well as the likes of Buffalo, California, San Diego State and Florida A&M. Cripes, why not just complete the cupcake run and schedule Florida?

Considering how bad Michigan has been recently, this is a pretty impressive effort. Of course, he ends up picking OSUto win, 24-9.

Why Did the Detroit Lions Start Playing on Thanksgiving?

They needed a crowd:

In 1934, radio executive G.A. Richards bought the Portsmouth, Ohio Spartans NFL team, moved them to Detroit, and renamed them the Lions.  Unfortunately for him, nobody in Detroit cared much for watching the Lions.  Despite winning all their games but one before Thanksgiving, having several stars of the day, and one super star in Earl “Dutch” Clark, the average turn out for each game was only around 12,000 people.
At the time, it was fairly traditional for various football programs in high schools and colleges to hold particularly significant games on Thanksgiving.  So Richards decided to try to bring this same tradition to the NFL, convincing the NFL to allow the Lions and the defending World Champion Chicago Bears to play for the Western Division championship on Thanksgiving.
Richards then used his considerable influence in radio to convince NBC that they should broadcast this game on the radio all across the United States, something that had never been done before for an NFL game.  The game ended up being a huge success, being played at the University of Detroit Stadium in front of a sold out crowd of 26,000 fans and broadcast across the nation on over 94 different radio stations.  In the end, the Bears won 19-16, but the game was such a success, as far as ratings and fan turn-out went, that Richards fought to be allowed to continue having the Lions play on Thanksgiving going forward and to continue to have that games broadcast out on the radio nationwide.

An additional bit of Thanksgiving football information:

 Football was actually traditionally played on Thanksgiving long before the NFL ever existed.  As early as 1902 it was common for such leagues as the National Football League (not to be confused with our current National Football League) to use Thanksgiving as their championship game day.  Interestingly, this league was funded by Major League Baseball.  Another league, called the Ohio League, liked to match their best teams together for Thanksgiving games.  Many other such leagues also did the same thing.  As noted, it was also common among many colleges and high schools to hold annual Thanksgiving football games.

More on the Portsmouth Spartans here.  More Thanksgiving facts here (h/t Ritholtz).  Every year, the Lions game rouses grandpa to say that back in the day, the Lions played the Packers every year.  From 1951-1963, he's right.  But in other years, not so much.  Since they are playing this year, he might or might not say it.  I'm counting on him asking what kind of cheese we're eating (Havarti), then telling us he's never had it before, even though he has, each of the last ten years or so.  Finally, I predict he'll be asleep within 25 minutes of finishing supper.  God bless grandpa and the predictability of our holidays.

Update:  I went down to mom and dad's at lunchtime, and grandpa was already there.  We had something to eat, then at 12:47, grandpa said that every year Detroit played Chicago (oops, I had the wrong longtime rival).  That was before we even turned on the game.  At 1:15, grandpa was taking a nap.  When I left to feed the cows, mom hadn't put the cheese out yet.  I'll have to head back down and partake of that holiday tradition.

Grey Cup Today

Well, since the Bengals are on their bye week, maybe I'll watch some of the Grey Cup game:

The Saskatchewan Roughriders will attempt to become the third consecutive Canadian Football League team to capture a championship on their home field when they face the Hamilton Tiger-Cats at the 101st Grey Cup at Mosaic Stadium in Regina.
TSN's pre-game coverage gets underway at 1pm et/10am pt, with kickoff at 6pm et/3pm pt. You can also follow TSN's digital platforms throughout the game with in-game highlights and TSN.ca's GameTracker.
To follow in the footsteps of the 99th Grey Cup Champion B.C. Lions and 100th Grey Cup Champion Toronto Argonauts, the Roughriders are going to have to beat a team that took an almost identical route to the title game as them in the Tiger-Cats.
Both teams finished second in their respective division and after earning home semi-final victories, were forced to go on the road as underdogs to book their places in the final.
In the West title game, the Roughriders knocked off the Calgary Stampeders 35-13, leading from the mid-point of the opening quarter right to the final whistle.
After opening the regular season by winning eight of their first nine games, the Roughriders struggled through the second half of the campaign before getting things back on track heading into the playoffs.
The Tiger-Cats, meanwhile, overturned a halftime deficit in the East Final to knock off the defending champion Argonauts and get to the Grey Cup.

In the States, the game will be on NBC Sports Network at 6 o'clock.  I'll pull for the home team, playing at Mosaic Stadium.  How many NFL stadiums are named for potash mining companies? I think zero.

Georgia Southern Runs Over Florida

ESPN:

Kevin Ellison ran for two touchdowns, Jerick McKinnon had a huge score late and four-touchdown underdog Georgia Southern stunned Florida 26-20 Saturday without completing a pass.
No lower-division team had ever beaten the Gators, who won their previous seven games against Football Championship Subdivision teams by an average of 45 points.
So this was a shocker, even though Florida (4-7) lost its sixth consecutive game and secured its first losing season since 1979.
"Very disappointed for our program, an embarrassment (to be) in this situation," Gators coach Will Muschamp said. "It's all disappointing. It's hard to measure it at this point."
Georgia Southern (7-4) ran for 429 yards -- all of the team's offense and the most against Florida since Nebraska rolled up 524 in the 1996 Fiesta Bowl. The Eagles also became the first team this season to beat an FBS team without completing a pass. They were 0 for 3.
McKinnon finished with 125 yards rushing, including a 14-yard touchdown with 2:57 remaining. Ellison added 118 yards on the ground, scoring on runs of 45 and 1. Fullback William Banks also gashed the Gators, getting 94 yards up the middle. His 53-yarder on a third-and-2 play set up the winning score.
Florida had a chance to win it, thanks partly to two missed extra points.
Skyler Mornhinweg, making his second consecutive start in place of Tyler Murphy (shoulder), got the Gators in scoring territory, but his final two throws fell incomplete. He had Quinton Dunbar open in the corner of the end zone on third down from the 17, but his pass floated high. He tried to force one to Solomon Patton on the final play, but two defenders broke it up.

Wow, a Division I-AA (soon to be I-A, I'm not going in for FCS and FBS) school comes into Gainesville and beats Florida without completing a pass.  That is amazing.  I knew Florida was bad this year, but I didn't realize they were that bad.

A Week at the Listowel Races

Charles Pierce goes to the land of his grandmother to experience an event which her stories had made so real that it was like he'd been there numerous times before he'd ever gone.  It is a wonderful story of farm life, traditional Irish life, family lines and life in general, with horse races, booze and gambling thrown in:

Up and down the round, green-quilted hillsides near Listowel in north Kerry in Ireland, the seven sisters of the Lynch family once tended their sheep. They worked in the summer sun and in the soft rain of the spring and the fall, and in the harder, snow-mixed sleet of midwinter. And every autumn, right around when the harvest came in, they would drive their sheep up the hillsides and down, and straight into Listowel, where their flock would join cows and goats and chickens and ducks, and the sheep of a hundred other families, all milling around with each other and filling the town square with an amazing cacophony of lowing, bleating, squawking, and quacking that nearly, but not quite, drowned out the increasingly lubricated haggling of the farmers and craftsmen and merchants who had come to sell enough of what they'd raised and grown and manufactured to get them through the hard winter to come, with a little left over to spend in the pubs on William Street, or to bet on the horses out at the track tucked into the bend of the river. The sisters never went to the races. Only the men went to the races. The sisters stayed in town and listened to the fiddlers and the people who played the pipes, and they danced with each other after the day's business was done.
Listowel was a farm town, a market town. It was a little less polished than Tralee to the west and the south, or Limerick to the north and east. It was louder. It was rougher. One of the Lynch sisters, Mary Ellen, would talk in her later years of a rally in support of Charles Stewart Parnell at the time of the split in the Irish Party over Parnell's affair with Kitty O'Shea. The rally turned into an all-out brawl, the clack of hurleys on skulls ringing louder than the oratory. Called "faction fights," these were come-all-ye bloodlettings, exhibitions of what the Irish called the bataireacht, a form of stick-fighting that rose to an art. These would erupt at weddings or at funerals, or at virtually any public occasion at which a longstanding grievance might detonate at the smallest provocation.

Ok, harvest fair.  Sounds about like the origins of county fairs.  Discussing with his guide how he felt like he knew the place and was a part of it because of his grandmother's stories, he gives a good insight into the importance of narrative, in this case, sports as narrative, in our lives:

I am of this place, because my grandmother was of this place, and she told me about it, and so it became part of what I am...
"When you come right down to it," Pat told me, "running a racetrack is like running a farm. That's why the races here have survived. It was the last thing the farmers had for the year. Once the races ended, there was only the long, cold winter."
What are sports, anyway, at their best, but stories played out in real time? Each of them has a distant beginning, a middle, and an end, all three connected by the slender, powerful tendrils of memories recited. They are part of the collective memory of the tribe. They are how we explain ourselves to each other, down through the generations. Once upon a time, there were five sisters on the hills around Listowel, and one of them had a son, who gave her a grandson. From her, I had imagined hearing the muffled power of the hooves pounding into the turf. I had imagined the soft-running river. I never had been to the Listowel Races, but I had been there all my life.

The whole story is wonderful, and I recommend it to anyone with an interest in Ireland or horse racing, or having fun in general.  On this day of the Bengals-Browns game, his description of his grandmother's stories and the recognition of sports as narrative, I think his story explains every western Ohio Browns fan (and there's a lot of them, way too many, actually) I have ever met.  The reason that is is because they are only Browns fans because their fathers, and most likely, their grandfathers were.  Their grandfathers told the stories about Paul Brown and Otto Graham, Lou Groza and Marion Motley.  They were told the glorious tales of the Browns when the Browns won the NFL Championship in their first year in the NFL, after winning four AAFC titles.  Their fathers probably remember the last championship in 1964, with Jim Brown running over opponents.  I understand how they became Browns fans, I just don't understand why they remained Browns fans after Art Modell packed up the Browns and moved to Baltimore.  I would have expected them to remain fans of the Ravens (ok, probably not) or to have become fans of some other team.  Why would folks in Western Ohio choose to wait 3 years to follow an expansion team almost 3 hours from where they live?  That I don't understand.

Not-Quite Border War

In the buildup to the big Chiefs-Broncos game, the Kansas City Star goes looking for the boundary between Chiefs fans and Broncos fans:

So, we ask Donnie, have we crossed the Chiefs-Broncos dividing line here in Ellis?
“I’d say a little further west.”

---

WaKeeney, Kan., is the geographic midway point between Kansas City and Denver, each about 300 miles away.
From this town and for the next 70 miles west, toward Colby, we hear people say “50/50” when asked about the breakdown of Chiefs and Broncos fans.
Granted, “50/50” is a safe, off-the-cuff estimate in a region so distant from big-time sports centers. After all, newspapers in western Kansas emphasize high school athletics. Many NFL fans back neither Denver nor Kansas City.
At Twisters II Bar & Grill in WaKeeney, customer Dick Dykema dons a Minnesota Vikings stocking cap.
“Lived here 30 years,” he said, “but I came from North Dakota. Close enough to Minnesota.”
Plenty of Dallas Cowboy fans here, too. Also Oakland fans, Pittsburgh fans.
But it’s all Chiefs versus Broncos this night at Twisters II.

---

In Goodland, Kan., 18 miles east of the Colorado border, it’s too obvious.
We’re in Mountain Standard Time. Goodlanders can get Denver’s NBC affiliate on cable TV. McDonald’s serves beverages in cups bearing the Broncos’ horse-head logo.
It’s Kansas, sure. But Jacque’s Hallmark shop hasn’t a stitch of Chiefs paraphernalia to go with the Broncos body stickers and toothbrush holders.
Hallmark clerk Mary Jane Sponsel doesn’t blink: “We have mostly Bronco fans.”

It would seem like Facebook's map is a good breakdown of where main loyalties lie:

Of course, there is a huge minority of Browns fans in SW Ohio, but I would guess that this map gives a pretty good estimate of what the majority thinks.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/11/16/4628198/across-kansas-where-broncos-country.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/11/16/4628198/across-kansas-where-broncos-country.html#storylink=cpy

A Bronze Stalk Battle

Not that I'm totally up on the Mid-American Conference. but  when it comes to the Bronze Stalk Trophy, a guy has to make a decision.  Because of the whole Dekalb seed corn tie-in, plus my hatred of all things Indiana, I'll be rooting for Northern Illinois.  Come on Huskies, win this:

You gotta love that motivation.

Pelvic Thrust Paul?

I was just watching the end of the Michigan-Michigan State game, and they showed the Michigan State players carrying the Paul Bunyan Trophy.  I hadn't noticed it before, but it looks like ol' Paul is giving a pelvic thrust:

Weird.

League of Denial

SI features an excerpt of the book highlighting the NFL's war against recognizing traumatic brain injury amongst NFL alumni:

Nowinski got McKee her first brain in February 2008. It belonged to a former linebacker, John Grimsley, who had played in the NFL from 1984 to '93, mostly with the Oilers. Grimsley had a reputation as a hard hitter with a mean streak, the archetypal linebacker. About a decade after he left the game, his wife of nearly 25 years, Virginia, started noticing changes in her husband. First came short-term memory problems: forgetting why he went to the store, renting the same movie over and over. Then came the mood swings—anger and irritability. He would lose his temper without any warning or provocation.
Grimsley died at 45. He shot himself in the chest. Police ruled it an accident. It appeared that he had been cleaning his pistol. Virginia told the Houston Chronicle that her husband had bought a new handgun with which he wasn't familiar. "Anyone could tell you that John would not take his own life," she said. "He was a happy guy." Two days later, Nowinski called and asked to examine Grimsley's brain.
When McKee peered into the microscope after staining the brain for tau, she was stunned. There was tau everywhere, "like disease on steroids," she said, but there was no trace of beta-amyloid, one of the main components of Alzheimer's. McKee would never forget that moment. "You feel like, Oh, my God!" she said. Her first call was to her brother Chuck, the doctor. Ann explained the disease she had found in Grimsley's brain. It looked just like dementia pugilistica, a brain disease first discovered in boxers in the late 1920s. Chuck's response would stick with Ann for years. "This is going to change football," he said.
On May 25, 2008, another former NFL player died young: Tom McHale, 45, who had spent nine years in the league as a 6' 4", 290-pound offensive guard before retiring after the 1995 season. He died of a drug overdose. By then the story had become familiar: At the time of his death the once thoughtful and friendly McHale "was very, very different from the guy I married," his wife, Lisa, said. "It was like he was a shell of his former self," with the often vacant and disheveled look of a man who no longer cared.
McHale's brain tissue was analyzed by McKee and, separately, by Dr. Bennet Omalu, who had discovered football-caused CTE when he analyzed Webster's brain in 2002. Both he and McKee found CTE in McHale's brain. McHale was the sixth deceased NFL player found to have CTE.
At a press conference organized by Nowinski in Tampa in January 2009, the week before Super Bowl XLIII, McKee pointed out the brown splotches of tau that had eaten away at McHale's identity. This looked like the brain of a 72-year-old former boxer. "I have never seen this disease in the general population, only in these athletes," McKee said. "It's a crisis, and anyone who doesn't recognize the severity of the problem is in tremendous denial."

Will the NFL be the premier sport in this country in 20 years, or will it be like boxing, a passion for a few diehards?  I don't really know, but I think the second outcome is more likely than we may think today.  Read the whole article.

Really Rich Welfare Queens

The NFL and NFL owners (along with other professional sports teams):

In Virginia, Republican Governor Bob McDonnell, who styles himself as a budget-slashing conservative crusader, took $4 million from taxpayers’ pockets and handed the money to the Washington Redskins, for the team to upgrade a workout facility. Hoping to avoid scrutiny, McDonnell approved the gift while the state legislature was out of session. The Redskins’ owner, Dan Snyder, has a net worth estimated by Forbes at $1 billion. But even billionaires like to receive expensive gifts.
Taxpayers in Hamilton County, Ohio, which includes Cincinnati, were hit with a bill for $26 million in debt service for the stadiums where the NFL’s Bengals and Major League Baseball’s Reds play, plus another $7 million to cover the direct operating costs for the Bengals’ field. Pro-sports subsidies exceeded the $23.6 million that the county cut from health-and-human-services spending in the current two-year budget (and represent a sizable chunk of the $119 million cut from Hamilton County schools). Press materials distributed by the Bengals declare that the team gives back about $1 million annually to Ohio community groups. Sound generous? That’s about 4 percent of the public subsidy the Bengals receive annually from Ohio taxpayers.
In Minnesota, the Vikings wanted a new stadium, and were vaguely threatening to decamp to another state if they didn’t get it. The Minnesota legislature, facing a $1.1 billion budget deficit, extracted $506 million from taxpayers as a gift to the team, covering roughly half the cost of the new facility. Some legislators argued that the Vikings should reveal their finances: privately held, the team is not required to disclose operating data, despite the public subsidies it receives. In the end, the Minnesota legislature folded, giving away public money without the Vikings’ disclosing information in return. The team’s principal owner, Zygmunt Wilf, had a 2011 net worth estimated at $322 million; with the new stadium deal, the Vikings’ value rose about $200 million, by Forbes’s estimate, further enriching Wilf and his family. They will make a token annual payment of $13 million to use the stadium, keeping the lion’s share of all NFL ticket, concession, parking, and, most important, television revenues.
After approving the $506 million handout, Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton said, “I’m not one to defend the economics of professional sports … Any deal you make in that world doesn’t make sense from the way the rest of us look at it.”

This is a pretty good example of where our priorities are.  Some of the giveaways are just ridiculous:

Though Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal claims to be an anti-spending conservative, each year the state of Louisiana forcibly extracts up to $6 million from its residents’ pockets and gives the cash to Benson as an “inducement payment”—the actual term used—to keep Benson from developing a wandering eye.

Yeah, $6 million could probably be used for, you know, educating kids, or making sure folks have health care.  And how about this:

 Many NFL teams have also cut sweetheart deals to avoid taxes. The futuristic new field where the Dallas Cowboys play, with its 80,000 seats, go-go dancers on upper decks, and built-in nightclubs, has been appraised at nearly $1 billion. At the basic property-tax rate of Arlington, Texas, where the stadium is located, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones would owe at least $6 million a year in property taxes. Instead he receives no property-tax bill, so Tarrant County taxes the property of average people more than it otherwise would.

Yeah, that makes sense.  Seriously, how do politicians give these ridiculously rich folks such crazy deals?  It is absolutely criminal.  But this is the economy of the past 30+ years writ large.  We get less in government services and infrastructure, pay more in taxes, and the folks who have more money than God pay less and less.  If the guys at the top don't come to their senses, I may have to invest in pitchfork and torch companies.

Reggie Williams Fights a Football Legacy

Paul Daugherty:

You might remember Reggie Williams. He hopes you do, but he’s cynical about such things. “The forgotten linebacker,” he calls himself. He played 14 years and 206 games, 1976 through 1989, all for the Bengals. That’s more games than any Bengal but Ken Riley, who appeared in 207.
Reggie has more career tackles than any Bengals linebacker, more sacks, more interceptions, more fumbles forced and recovered. He’d like you to know this, and is somewhere between bemused and irritated that you don’t.
“I went to Paul Brown Stadium once,” he says. “Not even a picture of me.”
He started both Bengals Super Bowls, in 1982 and 1989. He is haunted by each. The outcomes left him incomplete. The second defeat caused him to leave town, so he wouldn’t have to explain why he lost. Reggie took it personally; he told Bengals fans he’d win. It was an integrity thing.
Reggie would also like you to know that he was a good citizen, one of the best, a city councilman, an enthusiastic volunteer, a football player who lived in town and became a prominent stitch in the local fabric....
It doesn’t look like a knee. It has no cap. It has no defining, oval-like shape. It has hills and valleys, and scars like train tracks. It’s a package of dinner rolls. It’s at least twice the size of a normal knee. It bulges on the sides.
In 2008, when doctors operated on Reggie’s knee eight times in five months, he took photos of the knee, splayed open and ungodly horrid, with his cell phone. He must have 50 of them.
Picture a sweet potato, fresh baked and split down the center, awaiting butter and brown sugar. That’s what the open wound looked like. The skin on each side parted from the canyon, its dark brown-ness a ready accent to the exposed orange flesh. “I can say I know the torture of having your skin ripped off,” Reggie says.
There were patches of green in the pictures, too. “Necrotic tissue,” Reggie explains. “Dead leg.”
Even now, the knee has tiny pimples. Reggie says if he opened them, bits of stitching would appear, from his first surgery, in 1979. The knee comes with its own irony, too: Turf-burn scars from his playing days are still apparent. They survived all the incisions.

The picture in the story is just plain ugly. Reggie is one of the Bengals from the Paul Brown days, as opposed to the Mike Brown days.  You know, a good citizen and not a troublemaker.