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Earn then first!

Blogging the ‘Boys has good news from the first days of Cowboys training camp:

Also, in what is sure to be a crowd pleaser among Cowboys fans, [Cowboys HC Jason] Garrett has taken the stars off of the rookies helmets. His message to these players is simple: “Earn them first!”

No more Wade Philips Kamp Kreampuff.

die hard index

Russ Maschmeyer, a student at the School of Visual Arts in New York, created this beautiful visualization to find fans who martyr themselves to root for their team:

The Die Hard Index determines the quality of a sports team’s fans, or more specifically, the degree to which fans will continue to buy tickets, even when the economy is poor, ticket prices are sky high, and they have a losing team.

After a long night of looking at the numbers for the 2009 Major League Baseball Season, I arrived at the formula to the right, and the map below. I hope you find the results relatively congruent with your own home team experiences.

[via Information is Beautiful]

Google ads are jerks

At least to Jets fans. From the sponsored ads on an article on ESPN.com:

Eric Mangini’s IQ=138
Think you’re smarter? Try to beat his score here.
[URL redacted]
. . .
Avg NY Jets Fan IQ=102
What’s Yours? Can you beat it? Take the 3-minute Quiz Now!
[URL redacted]

And now Mangini has left for Cleveland, where he can now coach a QB younger than he is.

clay bennett has last laugh, smells of diarrhea and evil

Oklahoma businessman Clay “fecal-blended hemorrhage” Bennett, having successfully oozed out of Seattle with a stolen NBA franchise like the pus-filled sack of rectal effluence he is, has dubbed his victim “the Oklahoma City Thunder”:

“It’s hard to keep a secret,” team chairman Clay Bennett said after stepping to a podium on the ground floor of the downtown office building where the team is headquartered.

Yeah, you ought to know about poorly-kept secrets, Clay “methane-soaked bum-wipe” Bennett. What with your plain-text emails about having no intention to negotiate with Seattle or the State of Washington in good faith.

tmq: shark-jumping for a decade

Gregg Easterbrook has had a mostly entertaining column in Slate—and then in ESPN’s Page 2—for the better part of a decade. Most of the time, his fifteen-page football rants are enjoyable. But sometimes, one just wishes he’d shut up.

He’s back for the shiny new 2008 NFL season with a shiny new column. He starts off with an amusing-and-scathing bit about Brett Favre, and then dives into ten pages of political witticisms. He then has the gall to opine:

The NFL switched its season opener to a 7 p.m. Eastern start time so the game does not conflict with John McCain’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention that night. This suggests the presidency is more important than football, an idea I am not entirely comfortable with.

Really? If you’d have talked about anything even remotely related to football for the last seven fucking pages, I might believe you. If you’ve nothing to say about football—not even a snide comment about the Arizona CAUTION: MAY CONTAIN FOOTBALL-LIKE SUBSTANCE Cardinals—just shut the hell up. Shut the hell up and don’t bother showing up until mid-September. I would sooner jam Bill Simmons’s Red Sox-fellating tripe into my own alimentary canal than listen to another goddamned NASA rant.

the decline (and fall?) of the national league

The WSJ has an article on the decline of Major League Baseball’s National League in recent decades. Unlike Gibbons or Will, the author is quite straightforward:

The plight of the NL seems rooted in a chain of events that began in 1973 when the AL adopted the designated-hitter rule — which allows for the pitchers to be replaced in the batting order by a full-time hitter who doesn’t play in the field. The disparity was spurred by new ballpark construction; an unprecedented crop of young power hitters who, for various reasons, almost all fell to the AL; a series of disastrous trades and free-agent signings by NL teams; and a tradition of innovation in the AL that began in the mid-1990s with the Oakland As.

Interesting, though NL partisans (coughNies) will continue to b*tch and moan about purity, despite how little it has to do with the above conversation.

the nationals' new ballpark

the nba is dead to me

I used to defend the NBA against those who thought college basketball was the superior incarnation of the game. Fan disillusion after a major point-shaving scandal in the college game, after all, was the reason the fledgling Basketball Association of America (BAA) was able take off as a viable league. Fittingly, NBA Commissioner David Stern has taken this opportunity in the midst of March Madness to, in no uncertain terms, throw Seattle professional basketball under the bus:

While taking questions about an NBA relocation subcommittee’s recommendation to move the Sonics to Oklahoma City, Stern said, “The reason that this journey began was because KeyArena was not an adequate arena going forward and there were a lot of recommendations made for another arena … but the tax revenues and the various contributions weren’t forthcoming.”
. . .
“I think Seattle is actually a terrific market. It just doesn’t have an NBA-ready arena of the future that’s been agreed to by all parties for many years,” Stern said. “It’s a very strong market that has, in fact, supported NBA basketball well over the years. When you come to a place like Oklahoma, you look for the single-team market as opposed to, for example, a market that has three or more professional sports leagues in it.”

Thanks a lot, you schmuck. At least we now know that it’s not a case of the league standing by as an owner makes the midnight move to, say, Indianapolis. No, this is a league colluding with some backstabbing Oklahomans against even its own best interest, somehow believing that market share trumps revenues–to say nothing of loyalty.

You can take your league and shove it, Stern. Under your watch, your refs have turned crooked, your players have turned into egotistical circus acts, and now your own front office has all the warmth and tact of Stalin’s cold, dead body. I hope even the NHL buries you for defecating on what was once my favorite league.