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Blame Dick Vitale

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We’re in the middle of summer right now, with MLB’s Home Run Derby currently airing on ESPN, so naturally we’re going to focus on a truly timely matter.

Dick Vitale and the election of Donald Trump.

dick_vitaleThe Detroit Sports Czar is a huge fan of “what ifs”, so imagine my surprise when, during a conversation with a friend a few weeks back, I discovered it wasn’t that hard to draw a line between an ill-fated trade entered into by Dick Vitale and the election of our current president.  Sounds ridiculous, right?  Well follow along.

Bob McAdoo

The tale actually starts with John Y. Brown, who overruled Red Auerbach and dealt 3 first round draft picks to the Knicks for Bob McAdoo, supposedly because his wife was a fan of McAdoo when he played in New York (to be fair, his wife was a sportscaster, so this isn’t quite as ridiculous as it sounds).  Auerbach was rumored to be so livid that he almost followed McAdoo to New York, but he stuck it out to rebuild the Celtics while Brown was run out of town to become the governor of Kentucky.

Which brings us to M.L. Carr and Dick Vitale.

Detroit Pistons

After playing in Europe and the ABA until the league folded, M.L. Carr played for the Pistons until becoming a free agent after the 1979 season.  Auerbach scooped him up, which required the Celtics to offer compensation to the Pistons.  McAdoo was miserable and injury-prone during his half season in Boston and Auerbach never wanted him in the first place, so he offered him to the Pistons and their head coach, Dick Vitale.  Vitale was ecstatic, but as a negotiator he was Donald Trump to Auerbach’s Vladimir Putin, and so he gladly handed over the Pistons 2 first round draft picks in the 1980 draft.  Trouble was the Pistons sucked, one of those draft picks turned out to be the first overall pick, and Vitale was long gone by the time the draft rolled around.

This is where the tale starts to turn.

1980 NBA Draft

Let’s not fool ourselves, Red Auerbach was a basketball genius.  He built 16 NBA championship teams, so to say he wouldn’t have been able to do it again without swindling the Pistons is likely nonsense.  But for the sake of our “what if”, lets just pretend this draft swung the balance of power in the East.  Because in the 1980 draft, Auerbach took the Pistons’ 2 draft picks – again, including the #1 pick – and traded them to the Golden State Warriors for Robert Parish and the draft pick that would eventually become Kevin McHale.  And I think we can all agree that building the Celtics dynasty of the 1980s is substantially more difficult without McHale and Parish.

Here’s where our little thought experiment requires a bit of a stretch.

Gerald Henderson Trade

Now, what takes this trade off the basketball court and down the line to the Oval Office was the Celtics drafting – and subsequent death – of Len Bias.  And without the trade of Gerald Henderson to the Celtics, the Celtics don’t have the #2 pick that allows them to draft Bias.  While Henderson was with the Celtics in 1979, without his contributions to 2 championship teams, including a pivotal steal and layup that allowed the Celtics to steal a game against a superior Lakers team in a series they won in 7 games in 1984, it is unlikely he would’ve demanded the trade that found the Celtics holding the #2 draft pick in 1986.

We’ve now established that there is no Celtics dynasty in the 1980s, which means the 1986 Celtics aren’t one of the greatest teams ever.  They also don’t hold the #2 draft pick that will allow them to draft a player many expected would challenge Michael Jordan as the best player in the 1980s.

Now we start to get serious.

Death of Len Bias

As mentioned earlier, many expected Len Bias to be one of the best players in the NBA from the minute he was drafted.  That doesn’t change because he gets drafted by the SuperSonics instead of the Celtics.  Unfortunately, what also likely doesn’t change was the fact that he overdoses two days after the draft.  What does change is the political circumstances of his death.  If Bias is drafted by Seattle instead of the reigning NBA champions, he’s just another #2 draft pick, a sad footnote mentioned alongside such immortals as Sam Bowie, Hasheem Thabeet, Darko Milicic, and Steve Stipanovich (obligatory mention of such NBA immortals as Isiah Thomas, Gary Payton, Alonzo Mourning, etc.).  More importantly, his new fan base is not located in the Congressional district of a Speaker of the House who is trying to keep control of the House in the upcoming midterm elections.

 The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986

Shortly after Bias’s death, it was widely reported that he had overdosed on crack.  It wasn’t true, but that didn’t stop the story from spreading; Jesse Jackson even lamented the scourge of crack at Bias’s funeral.  Crack was becoming an epidemic in the inner cities, and Bias’s death was the final straw that saw Congress – and Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill out of Massachusetts – implement a law that required mandatory minimums that were harshly skewed against crack “dealers”.  The law required mandatory sentencing of 5 years in prison for 5 grams of crack, but 500 grams of powder cocaine.  The mandatory minimum rules decimated the black inner cities and helped contribute to the 1992 L.A. Riots, which did nothing to help the image of minorities by White America.

“Super-predators”

At a 1996 campaign speech in New Hampshire – one of the whitest states in the nation – Hillary Clinton referred to young black male criminals as “super-predators” and said that they needed to be “brought to heel”.  Clinton was defending her husband’s crime bill, which was designed to curb street crime in the black community.  Unfortunately, analysts have now determined that the bill was a major factor in the Era of Mass Incarceration, and Bill Clinton’s defense of both the crime bill and his wife’s super-predator comment during the 2016 campaign did not help the issue.  The super-predators comment was not as significant to her campaign problems as her email server was, but to say it didn’t help is an understatement.

2016 Election

Finally, we come to the 2016 election, which found a well-established racist running against the woman who uttered the super-predators comment 20 yeas before.  And how did the black community respond?  They stayed home.  While  Barack Obama’s inclusion in the 2012 election helped the black voter turnout rate reach an all-time high that year, the fact remains that 765,000 fewer black voters showed up at the polls in 2016.  Considering 88% of blacks voted for Clinton in 2016, and the election swung on roughly 80,000 votes in 3 swing states, including Pennsylvania and Michigan with their significant black populations, it’s not difficult to pin the election result on the decreased voter turnout in the black community.

So there you have it folks.  John Y. Brown overrules the greatest executive in NBA history to acquire Bob McAdoo.  Red Auerbach suckers Dick Vitale out of the #1 draft pick, which Auerbach then flips for 2 future Hall of Famers.  Those 2 Hall of Famers contribute to the Celtics dynasty of the 1980s.  Auerbach flips Gerald Henderson for the SuperSonics’ 1986 first round draft pick, which they use on Len Bias.  Bias overdoses on cocaine two days after the Celtics draft him.  Boston’s Congressman overreacts and helps push through anti-drug legislation that dis-proportionally punishes the black community.  Hillary Clinton refers to the victims of that legislation as super-predators, which the community never forgets.  And then the black community stays home on Election Day 2016, allowing Donald Trump to eke out a narrow victory.

There are any number of people to blame (or thank, depending on your point of view) for the presidency of Donald Trump.  I’m blaming Dick Vitale.

Fixing Major League Baseball

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1986

We’re a week into the Major League Baseball season (at least we are when I started writing this, with my writing prowess it could be the All-Star break before this actually gets published), and it’s time to revisit one of my favorite pieces of this blog – fixing something that really isn’t broken.

Baseball’s a phenomenal sport, and reports of its demise are greatly exaggerated.  It will never overtake the NFL – well, at least not until someone dies on the gridiron and the masses flee in droves – but it’s also never going to lose its ground to the NBA or NHL.  That said, there are still some relatively simple fixes that will make a great game even greater.  Without further ado:

Expansion/Contraction

A fair number of my suggestions will require an even number of teams in each League, so we should address the expansion/contraction of teams first.  My personal opinion is that there are 2 too many teams in baseball, and the stadium situations in Oakland and Tampa Bay prove that out.  If it were up to me, we’d contract the 2 teams that have never been to the World Series – the Seattle Mariners and the Washington Nationals – and move the Rays and A’s to those respective cities for the sake of franchise continuity (I’m a history geek like that).

But since we know that, barring a catastrophic financial situation – like, say, the bursting of the television rights fee bubble – no professional league is going to contract its teams, so let’s add teams in Montreal and Charlotte or Portland and call it good.

On Field Improvements

Universal Designated Hitter

Major League Baseball is the only sport on the planet (i.e., in the U.S., which is all that matters, amirite?) where half the league plays by one set of rules and the other half plays by another.  With year-round interleague play (we’ll get to that in a minute), that means a team built to play with the designated hitter may have to play a season-ending series with the playoffs on the line with their DH on the bench.  And anyone who’s ever seen Justin Verlander swing a bat knows that you’d much rather have Victor Martinez batting in a big situation.

So we’re changing the rules and either eliminating the DH or making it universal.  And while we can all marvel at Madison Bumgarner’s home run hitting ability, we tend to ignore the fact that he’s a career .186 hitter, and he’s the best hitting pitcher.  The simple fact is that watching a pitcher swing the bat is generally boring and painful (Bartolo Colon notwithstanding), and it leads to ridiculous managerial decisions where a guy throwing a shutout is pulled for a pinch hitter after 73 pitches because the offense can’t put up any runs.  No, it’s time for the NL’s antiquated rules to go by the wayside and MLB to adopt the DH permanently.  The fans will love it, the players will love it (more money for aging veterans to finish out their careers), and the owners…well, screw the owners.

Pitch Clock

I’ll get push back here – and I know this because I got plenty of push back from a buddy of mine when we were discussing it on Opening Day – but for a league that’s attempting to cut the length of their games so Millennials with attention spans measuring in nanoseconds can stay engaged, the pitch clock makes too much sense not to happen.

You can’t implement the pitch clock with men on base, because there are too many variables with that baserunner to force the pitcher to stick to a clock without disrupting his rhythm or making a stupid mistake.  But when there’s no one on base, there’s no reason a pitcher (or a batter) needs more than 20 seconds to make the next pitch.  Start the clock when the catcher receives the pitch, and if the umpire determines that the batter or pitcher is stalling, they’re punished with a ball or a strike against them.

Automated Balls/Strikes

In 2017, when anyone with a smartphone has access to PitchFX that shows exactly where every ball crosses the plate, there’s absolutely no reason for a human being to call balls and strikes.  Talk to me all you want about the human element, but I don’t want the game determined because some umpire didn’t see where the ball went across the plate.  The “human element” applies to the players; fair or not, the officiating of a game needs to be as close to perfect as possible.

With so few baseball calls being truly subjective – especially now that they’ve gotten rid of the neighborhood play on double plays – I’d argue that all officiating could be automated, but let’s start with baby steps.

Overhaul Instant Replay

Aside from Screech on Saved by the Bell, there’s not a person on Earth who has ever watched a game because of who’s officiating that game.  And yet we give the teams challenges to question when an umpire might have made an incorrect call, instead of insisting that the calls just be right.  So we’re going to remove the challenge system and put a fifth (or, in the case of postseason play, seventh) umpire in the broadcast booth, and if an umpire screws up, that extra umpire is going to correct him.  We’re not going to continue to allow the umpires’ egos to determine whether or not a game gets called correctly.

Drastically Reduce Ejections

Some ejections are deserved – I’m looking at you Bryce Harper.  But in a lot of cases a batter will question a call just a little bit more emphatically than the umpire likes (although not at all egregiously), and he’s gone.  The problem is that it drastically reduces the flexibility of the manager, and if someone like Miguel Cabrera gets ejected and has to be replaced by Andrew Romine, the strategy for the remainder of the game is changed immensely.  So unless someone is risking physical harm to another player or an umpire, or truly making an ass out of himself, we’re going to keep the Umpshow to a minimum.

Scheduling

154-Game Schedule

The owners will never go for it.  The players will love it.  Eliminate 8 games from the season to return to what was standard prior to expansion in 1961.  If you want to placate the owners, increase the cost of everything by 5%.  Well, everything except my beer.

Eliminate Interleague Play

Interleague play is over.  It’s played out.  It was never particularly interesting to start, and it ruined the truly novel approach that only MLB had – namely, that the two teams that met in the World Series had not met in the regular season.  MLB loved the “natural” rivalries in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Florida, and a few other places, but they didn’t account for truly dreadful games like Padres-Mariners.  And because the interleague games all took place on designated summer weekends when the weather was nice and the rivalry games were naturally more appealing to the local fans, MLB could proclaim that interleague games were more popular than your average American League or National League games.  It’s worth pointing out that since they’ve gone to year-round interleague play, we haven’t seen proclamations about the popularity of the games, likely because that April Marlins-Orioles game is dragging down the average.

Balanced Schedule

With 16 teams in each league, a 154-game schedule, and the elimination of interleague play, you can play 10 games against each team with 4 games left over.  The remaining 4 games can be rotated among the teams on an annual basis, or you could add a series based upon where the teams finished the previous season (for example, the best team plays the second best team, third place plays fourth place, etc.).  Either way, it’s better than 19 Royals-White Sox games a year.

Holiday Doubleheaders

There are 5 “major” holidays throughout the baseball season: Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Father’s Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day.  We’ll throw out Mother’s Day and Father’s Day since those are Sundays by rule and thus travel days.  But every team is required to play doubleheaders on 2 of the remaining 3 holidays – one at home, and one on the road.  If that holiday falls on a Sunday, the doubleheader will revert to the previous Saturday.  The players hate doubleheaders, but we’ve just cut 8 games out of the schedule, so they’ll get used to it.

Beginning/End of Season

Every season begins on the first Monday in April.  If you want to cater to ESPN and have them air a Sunday night game the night before, fine.  But this year there were 3 Sunday games to start the season, and that’s just insane.  One’s enough as a showcase for the game.

And since we’ve cut 8 games, plus 2 additional days of game play via the new doubleheader rule, there’s no excuse to be playing games in November.

Playoff Scheduling

Major League Baseball has deduced that playing 4 straight Division Series games on a Thursday will garner more television viewers than running 2 games simultaneously.  This seems dubious to me, but I’ve tended to default to the position of, “Someone smarter than me is making that determination.”  I mean, they have to be, right?

Still, it sucks for the fans with tickets.  Because the playoff schedule isn’t set until a day or two before the games start, you could wind up buying a ticket to a noon playoff game that you can’t use because you can’t get off work.  So either show the fans that there truly are more viewers for a Thursday noon game than there are for 2 games airing simultaneously, or cut out the weekday afternoon games.

Also, while I understand that games involving teams from New York and Chicago are going to garner more viewers than Oakland or Tampa Bay games will, it’s kind of crappy when all of the Oakland League Championship Series games get relegated to the 4pm games.  So alternate the LCS games so that both teams get prime time treatment.

Playoff Determinations

Realignment

In 2015, the three best teams in all of baseball all played in the National League Central.  The St. Louis Cardinals won the division with 100 wins, while the Cubs (97 wins) and Pirates (98) were subjected to a 1-game playoff to determine who moved on.  The Pirates and Cubs were punished because they were geographically close to the Cardinals.  And just to add insult to injury, because the team with the best regular season record automatically plays the winner of the Wild Card game in the Division Series, the Cardinals were punished by having to play the a 97-win team instead of the 92-win Dodgers or 90-win Mets.  This is asinine.  The best teams should be rewarded for having a superior regular season.  So we’re eliminating divisions.  Two Leagues, 16 teams each, with a balanced schedule.

Oh, and the Brewers and Astros are going back where they belong.

Playoff Seeding

Playoff seeding is simple: the top 5 teams in each League make the playoffs.  The top 3 teams get a bye to the Division Series while the 4th and 5th place teams play the Wild Card game to move on.  There’s no reason to reward a team for being located in a geographically advantageous location.

Conclusion

I’ll admit that a lot of these rule changes seek to fix some of the quirks that make baseball “great”.  Fans love to see pitchers hit dingers and the Wild Card situation I discussed isn’t particularly common.  But the Giants can still refuse the DH to let Bumgarner hit (which they’ve already done in interleague games), and no one’s going to weep because we close a loophole to give an advantage to a better team.

And I’m not going to stop watching because these rule changes aren’t made (because, let’s face it, most of them won’t be), but we could definitely make the game better.

 

My Life as a Spartan

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I’ve been a Spartan for 21 years.

That’s not enough for some people.

I don’t hate Michigan as much as most Spartans.

That’s not enough for other people.

When a kid is growing up, it’s a pretty simple process for him to pick his sports teams – you go with the local team.  There are outliers.  Sometimes a guy likes a quarterback from another team, or a 40/40 guy from another.  Perhaps it’s as simple as they like a team’s colors or the team was good enough to be on the nationally televised game more times than others (hence the widespread fandom of teams like the Packers and Steelers).  But for the most part, if you’re born in Michigan you’re pulling for the Lions, and if you’re born in Philly your favorite team is the Flyers.

It’s a little more complicated when it comes to college sports.

College rivalries are what make sports great.  Pro sports have the occasional huge rivalries – Red Sox/Yankees, Bears/Packers, any combination of teams in the NHL’s old Adams division (Rangers, Bruins, Canadians, Flyers, etc.) – but none of these compare to such regional college rivalries such as Michigan/Ohio State, Duke/North Carolina, or Oklahoma/Texas.  Add in the fact that these teams play once or twice a year instead of 19 or 6, and in a lot of cases the games have national significance, and you’ll find that a lot of fans take far greater pride in their college teams than their pro ones.

The challenge comes in picking which team to pull for.  Typically, loyalties are passed down in families for generations, so if your dad grew up an Alabama fan, you’re not going to pull for Auburn.  But if you have no such loyalties (I imagine this is much more common in the north than in the south), you have to pick your own team.  And in picking that team, you’re essentially answering a simple question.

Which team is better?

It’s generally an easy answer.  Kansas has more fans than Kansas State, Texas over Texas A&M or Texas Tech, Oklahoma over Oklahoma State, etc.  And in Michigan, it’s a simple answer: Michigan trumps Michigan State.  Up until a recent string of success by the Spartans and struggles by the Wolverines, if your family didn’t have ties to Michigan State (typically because someone in that family went there), you were a Michigan fan.

So it was that I found myself pulling for Michigan from the time I was 11 until I went off to college at Michigan State.

During my first week at Michigan State, Michigan beat Virginia on a last-second touchdown.  Surprisingly, the dorm room where I and several of my dorm mates were watching the game erupted in celebration.  Clearly, some of us who had grown up as Michigan fans found ourselves going to school in East Lansing.  Personally, I went into the first Michigan-Michigan State fan as an MSU fan having no clue who I was going to be rooting for.  My mind was made up the minute Michigan came through that tunnel.  I was a Spartan.

That was in 1995, which means that I’m currently in my 22nd year of Michigan State fandom.  I’ve seen ups and downs.  I have stuck with them through thick and thin, and never questioned my loyalty to the school or its teams.

But to some, all that matters was that I started out a Michigan fan.

I don’t know how it works in other states, but I imagine it’s not much different than here.  Michigan fans spend the majority of their lives being the better team, and, as such, they spend a fair amount of time reminding Michigan State fans that they’re inferior.  Recently, Michigan State has had a run of success that coincided with a downturn at Michigan, and the trash talk script was flipped.  Now, when Michigan is back to “normal” and Michigan State is struggling, Michigan fans point out that Michigan State fans have stopped talking shit, as if our shit talk was somehow different than what we put up when Michigan was on top.

While the trash talk is fair – you don’t have much of a defense when your team is worse – Michigan State fans can and do respond with a simple question: when did you graduate?

And that’s where the problem lies.  In the vast majority of situations, the answer is equally as simple: they didn’t go there.

A while back, I was at a bar, and I listened as a man went on an extended rant about the fact that, because of their recent success, Michigan State has suddenly acquired a fair amount of “bandwagon” fans, that they weren’t legitimate fans, and that Michigan would be back.  I had to cut in.  I pointed out that MSU was currently riding 8 years of “bandwagon” fans, while Michigan had previously ridden 50.  He conceded the point.  I had to ask if he went there.  He hadn’t.

The fact is that if you pull for Michigan State, you probably went there.  That’s not the case with Michigan.  I’m guessing that in most rivalries, as in this one, the people who didn’t attend the Michigan are the people who are most prone to talk.  And to take it further, the people who are most prone are those who didn’t attend college at all.

Is that elitist?  Probably.

Is it true?  Definitely.

And yet the proverbial “Wal-Mart” fans aren’t the only ones who talk.

Michigan is a world-class educational institution.  Anyone who argues otherwise – no matter where they went to school – is an idiot.  But Michigan State, while not on the same level, has some top-notch programs, several quite literally ranked first in the nation.  Despite that fact, people here believe that if you were accepted at both Michigan and Michigan State, there is absolutely no reason you would attend Michigan State.

None.

Zero.

This is not hyperbole.  I have heard it said with my own ears, I have listened to the argument.  Ignore the cost, ignore whether or not a given program might be better at Michigan State than at Michigan, ignore whether you prefer Michigan State’s campus to Michigan’s.  If you get accepted to both schools, you have no reason to go to Michigan State.

It is that mindset that has many believing that if you go to Michigan State, it’s because you couldn’t get into Michigan.  I’ve heard it, I’ve had to fight it, and I’ve had to explain that I decided I didn’t want to go to a school that kept putting me on the waitlist and chose the one that wanted me.  But every Michigan graduate believes that Michigan State grads couldn’t get into their school, and thus was deserving of their derision.

My first year out of college, I worked at an accounting firm that sponsored recruiting events at local college campuses.  It was a great way to pump up your work hours and help your standing in the firm.  One of these recruiting events took place on the Michigan campus, and we encountered a kid who made a snide comment about Michigan State and then said, “I don’t really have a reason for looking down on Michigan State, I just do.”  My buddy looked at me thinking I was going to murder the kid.  I just smiled and nodded (also, I’m pretty dumb, but I’m smart enough to murder a potential hire).

That’s a learned response.  What’s the point in arguing with someone who looks down on you?

And yet it’s said we have an inferiority complex.

We’ve watched a Hall of Fame coach walk away after coaching the team to its best record in a decade and go on to win 5 national championships.

I’ve listened as a friend asked when we’d get fed up with our basketball coach failing to deliver another national title.  He’s in the Hall of Fame.  He’s taken our school to 19 consecutive tournaments, seven Final Fours and a national championship.  Apparently that’s not enough.

We’ve listened to announcers refer to the Spartans as “Michigan” at least once in every single game the Spartans have played.

We watched as our football coach went to a full-day on-air tour of ESPN and had his name mispronounced while answering repeated questions about our rival’s new coach.  Mark Dantonio – or Mark D’Antonio if you asked the Wall Street Journal – would lead the Spartans to the Big 10 title and the College Football Playoff, but all the network wanted to talk about was Jim Harbaugh.

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We’ve seen the coach named as “Mike” Dantonio on the cover of Sports Illustrated after he’d led the team to the College Football Playoff.

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We’ve seen Tom Izzo’s name listed as “Tim” on a headline announcing he’d been elected to the Hall of Fame.

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We’ve seen Denzel Valentine credited as “Denzel Washington” on an AP tweet announcing he was their national player of the year.

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We’ve watched as our school won ESPN’s college football play of the year, and had it presented to Mark Dantonio…and the Michigan fan whose stunned reaction was immortalized shortly after the play took place.

And yet we have an inferiority complex.

It has become somewhat common for Michigan State fans to post “Still a Spartan” on Facebook after losses.  I don’t know why.  It’s as though there’s some belief that after a tough loss we’re going to abandon our school, and we need to announce that we’re going to remain loyal.  As though now that we’ve approached the mountaintop we can’t handle a little bit of adversity.

We’ve lived through Bobby Williams.

We’ve lived through John L. Smith.

We’ve had to hear about Spartan Bob for 15 years.

We’ll survive 38-0.

We’ll survive Middle Tennessee State.

We will survive if we go from the College Football Playoff to missing a bowl game.

But the thing is, I don’t hate Michigan as much as other Michigan State fans.  Maybe it’s because I started out as a Michigan fan.  Maybe it’s because I want to see teams from our state succeed.  Maybe it’s because I don’t want to be the sort of person who roots against a given team.  I make an exception for pretty much any team from Ohio (hey, if you chant “Detroit’s bankrupt” when your team is losing to the Tigers, I want a lifetime of misery for your fanbase), but generally speaking, it strikes me as small.  Or maybe it’s because I have friends who are Michigan fans and I don’t want them to think I’m being petty.

Maybe I should want Michigan to lose.

Recently, I went to McDonald’s, who’s running a promotion where their cups have various Michigan slogans or references on them.  My cup read The Big House.  I sent a pic of the cup to a fellow Spartan who knows of my lack of disdain for the Wolverines.  His response?  “I thought you rooted for UM.”

I can’t win.

I don’t hate Michigan with every fiber of my being, and that’s not good enough for some people.  And I didn’t start out as a Spartan fan, so that’s not good enough for others.

But I’m still a Spartan, and I’ll always be one.  That’s good enough for me.

Good Riddance, Kobe Bryant

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Kobe Bryant walked away from the NBA with an “epic” 60 point game on Wednesday.  And while most felt the need to comment on what an amazing farewell it was, I choose to see it as the perfect embodiment of Kobe’s me-first attitude.

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And because I’m nothing if not timely – something that on this rare occasion benefited from my laziness – I’m taking this opportunity to spell out exactly why I hate Kobe so.

1996 NBA Draft

In 1995 Kevin Garnett became the first high schooler in over 2 decades to jump from high school directly to the NBA (primarily because he was too stupid to get into any of the dozens of colleges that were recruiting him).  Kobe Bryant followed suit in 1996, although admittedly he wasn’t as dumb as Garnett.  He did so with all of the class that would follow him for his entire career.

In 2010, LeBron James held a truly tasteless press conference at a Boys & Girls Club in Connecticut to announce where he’d go in free agency (although gladly we can blame this particular farce on Jim Gray).  One of the most hated aspects of his press conference was the fact that LeBron announced his choice by tone-deafly saying, “I’m going to take my talents to South Beach.”

So why are we talking about LeBron in a post about Kobe?  Because what people seem to forget was that 14 years earlier Kobe had used the exact same phrase when announcing he was skipping college, stating, “I’m going to take my talents to the NBA.”  Why we hated on LeBron for using the same line Kobe had years earlier I’ll never know, although it’s fair to say that by 2010 everybody hated Kobe, so perhaps this would’ve just been piling on.

If this was his greatest flaw relating to the draft, he could be forgiven.  It wasn’t.  Many people remember that Kobe was traded by the Hornets to the Lakers immediately following the draft.  What they – and Kobe himself, apparently – seem to forget is that Kobe pulled a John Elway and told pretty much the entire NBA that he wanted to play for the Lakers.  His agent wouldn’t allow teams to work him out (including the Hornets) and they got him to last until the 13th pick, which allowed them to pull off the trade that sent Vlade Divac to Charlotte.  Years later, Kobe maintained that Dave Cowens didn’t want him and worked the trade to the Hornets.  I believe that like I believe the girl in Colorado consented (we’ll get to that later).

2004 NBA Finals

I’m going to be very unpopular in Detroit – and by that I mean the 4 people I know who read this will be irritated and may even comment as such – for saying this, but it’s highly likely that Kobe cost the Lakers the 2004 title.

Here’s the thing: the Pistons pulled off an impressive 5-game “sweep” of the Lakers in ’04, with Kobe hitting a buzzer beater in Game 2 to send the game to overtime, ultimately leading the Lakers to win their only game.  No Kobe shot, no buzzer beater, Pistons going home with a 2-0 lead and the Lakers are done, so Kobe kept them in the series, right?  Not so.  What people forget is that the Pistons took a 6-point lead with 47 seconds left.  Then Shaquille O’Neal took over.  He dropped a layup with 35 seconds left, got fouled, hit the free throw (never a given considering Shaq’s free throw woes), then pulled down the defensive rebound that ultimately allowed Kobe to tie the game.  Shaq then scored 6 of the Lakers’ 10 points in overtime (although to be fair Kobe scored the other 4 and the Pistons only scored 2) and the Lakers went back to Detroit tied.

Shaq was a beast in that series.  He scored 26.6 points per game and shot 63.1% from the field.  And he should’ve scored a ton more.  Kobe took 113 shots in the series to Shaq’s 84, almost 6 shots more per game.  This might have made sense if Kobe hadn’t shot at a 38.1% clip.  In game 1, Shaq was 13-16 with 34 points.  For every shot he took,  he scored 2.13 points.  Kobe was 10-27, scoring less than a point per attempt.  So why the hell did Kobe take 11 more shots than Shaq did when the Pistons couldn’t stop him inside?  As Shaq said at the time, “Beats the hell out of me.”

Kobe and Shaq were engaged in a heated battle of “Who’s Team Is It” in 2004, ultimately leading to Shaq’s trade after the 2004 season.  Kobe was fine with the Lakers’ three-peat from 2000-02 (and Shaq’s 3 Finals MVP awards), but by ’04 he wanted the Lakers to be “his” team.  Did he want it enough to effectively sabotage his team by taking the ball out of Shaq’s hands and trying to play the hero?  Knowing Kobe’s personality like we do, I say hell yes, especially since he already had 3 rings.

Let’s do a simple breakdown (and yes, this is VERY simple).  If Shaq takes 10 more shots per game in that series and Kobe takes 10 fewer, several of the games probably turn out very differently.  Take Game 1.  Ten more shots for Shaq at the previously mentioned 2.13 points per attempt comes out to 21 more points, while Kobe’s 10 fewer points costs the Lakers only 9 points.  The Lakers net an extra 12 points in a game they lose by 12.  Do the Lakers win the game in that circumstance?  Possibly/probably.  Let’s give it to the Pistons just for argument’s sake, so with the Lakers’ OT win in Game 2 it’s 1-1 going back to Detroit.  Game 3 was a 20 point win for Detroit and any change in play probably doesn’t make a difference.  But make the same change in Game 4 and the Lakers net 9 extra points in a game they lost by 8.  It’s a 2-2 series and the Lakers are guaranteed to take the series back to L.A.  Game 5 went to the Pistons and, as with Game 3, any change in shot selection by the 2 superstars probably doesn’t change the outcome.  But with the Lakers holding home court in Games 6 and 7, and winning 2 of the 3 hypothetically close games, it’s not unreasonable to think the Lakers take the series if the ball’s going to Shaq more thank Kobe.

The ’04 series is looked at as one of the biggest upsets and most unlikely titles in NBA history, although that was somewhat tempered when the Pistons took the Spurs to Game 7 in the ’05 Finals; had the best record in the league in 2006 (where they lost to Shaq’s Heat in the conference finals); and were taken down by LeBron’s coming out party in 2007.  But I have to think that if it wasn’t for Kobe’s selfishness, we may well have had a different champion that year and the Pistons would’ve joined the Buffalo Bills in terms of missed opportunities.

2006 Suns Series Game 7

By 2006 the Lakers were a shell of themselves, making the playoffs as the Western Conference’s 7-seed, facing off against the highly-favored Phoenix Suns.  They held a 3-1 series lead before the Suns won the next 2 to force Game 7 in Phoenix.  Kobe was 8-13 in the first half, scoring 23 points, but quit in the second half, taking 3 shots and scoring 1 point as the Suns blew the Lakers out of the arena.

Kobe said after the game that in order to get back in the game they needed to have everyone contributing.  That’s bullshit.  Despite the fact that he willed his team to Game 7 (and almost pulled off the upset in Game 6 before losing in OT), Kobe knew his team was crap and decided to prove it by taking the second half of Game 7 off.  You can find columns by Lakers fans that will tell you that Kobe found guys with open looks, but Kobe’s not an assist man.  Kobe quit.

On the plus side – for Kobe anyway – he was able to prove that his team was crap, which allowed the Lakers to swindle the Grizzlies (run by Lakers’ legend Jerry West) for Pau Gasol, leading the Lakers to titles in 2009 and 2010.

But still…can you picture Michael Jordan taking a quarter off to prove a point?  Or is it more realistic that he’d try to throw the team on his back and try to pull the win?

Black Mamba Nickname

Look, this is a short one.  Kobe gave himself a nickname.  It’s a decent nickname, one that fits his personality, but the fact remains he gave himself a nickname.  He didn’t have enough friends – or the respect of his teammates or the media – who would give him a nickname, so he came up with one himself.

Only sociopaths give themselves nicknames.  I’m pretty sure the Zodiac Killer gave himself that nickname.

The Rape Charges

Kobe’s a rapist.  It’s not really open to interpretation.  Hell, he admitted it when the case was settled, saying that the girl didn’t view it as consensual (here’s a hint Kobe: if you have sex with someone who doesn’t view it as consensual, that’s rape).  Lakers fans will tell you she was a whore, that she had the DNA of 3 different guys in her underwear.  That may be true, but it also doesn’t mean that she wanted to fuck Kobe.

Of course, because the defense – and Lakers fans – attacked the girl’s character (which, to be fair, is part of their job), the victim decided to take a settlement from Kobe to avoid having to take the stand.  Now, I don’t know what the settlement amount was, but it took a $4 million ring to keep his wife from divorcing him after the ordeal.  I’m guessing it took a helluva lot more to keep him out of prison.

(Also, Kobe married a whore.  If you take a $4 million ring in exchange for staying with a guy, you’re a whore.  But hey, to each their own.)

And let’s not forget he threw his teammates under the bus when he was charged.  No one pretends professional athletes are saints – Magic Johnson didn’t get HIV sitting in his hotel room reading the Bible (just ask A.C. Green).  Plenty have cheated.  In fact, Kobe’s own team had an internal crisis when DeAngelo Russell secretly videotaped Nick Young admitting he had cheated on his fiance and the video went public.  The problem was never that Young had cheated, but that Russell had violated his teammates’ trust by secretly videotaping the discussion.  But when the rape charges came out, Kobe was quoted as saying, “I should’ve just paid her, that’s what Shaq does.”  In other words, Kobe’s a snitch.  Ask Carmelo what happens to snitches.

Barry Bonds is a pariah.  So are Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Rafael Palmeiro.  None of them raped anyone.  None of them had so much as a misdemeanor on their record, as far as anyone knows.  They retired – or in Bonds’s case was blacklisted into retirement – and baseball immediately pissed on their proverbial coffins because of their links to baseball’s steroid scandal.  Kobe Bryant gets a farewell tour.  Fuck the NBA.

The Farewell

As I said before, Kobe’s farewell game was the perfect ending to his me-first career.  It was obvious his teammates were told to feed Kobe the ball as much as possible, which is fine, but it allowed a rapist to walk off a hero (and overshadowed the Warriors setting the all-time record for wins in a season).

The problem with Kobe’s farewell was not just that it lasted the entire year, but that the Lakers admitted they had sacrificed the season in deference to celebrating Kobe.  Thing is, they gave Kobe a 2-year, $48 million extension for his last 2 seasons, when he was clearly on the downside of his career.  Hell, they signed him to the extension when he was recovering from a torn Achilles, so there was no guarantee he’d provide any kind of meaningful play.  A farewell tour is nice, $24 million a year when you’re a crap player – which Kobe was – is nicer.  And allowing your team to sacrifice the development of their younger players and killing the team’s salary cap so you could get a proper send off is horse shit.

And so very Kobe.

Back to that farewell game.  Kobe scored 60 points.  Amazing, right?  I mean, even I shouldn’t crap on that.  Except I can.  Kobe took 50 shots.  You give any NBA player 50 shots and they’re going to put up points.  Kobe was 22-50, or 44%, from the field.  The league-wide average was 45.2%.  The NBA average came out to 1.21 points per attempt; Kobe was at 1.20.  In other words, for a guy who put up 50 shots, Kobe was below average.  For comparison, in his 81-point game in 2006 – truly an epic performance – Kobe put up 46 shots.

But that doesn’t even tell the whole story.  It’s not so much that Kobe put up 50 shots, it’s that he didn’t even acknowledge that he had teammates on many of those possessions.  Anytime the Lakers pulled down a rebound, they handed the ball to Kobe and got out of his way.  He didn’t try to find an open man – although, again, Kobe’s not an assist guy – he just did whatever he could to put up a shot and rack up the points.  Kobe could’ve played the game 1-on-5 and there would’ve been no noticeable difference to what he did in his farewell game.  His fans will tell you that he hit the game winning shot, and that he pulled off a full-court assist leading to a game-clinching dunk to close out his career.  His haters – myself included – will say it’s a meaningless game and the assist only came about because he didn’t have time to get down the court on his own.

Kobe Bryant’s farewell was the perfect capper to his career.  It allowed his fans to fawn over his 60 points and his critics to point out what a selfish player he was.  It was a manufactured farce that doesn’t belong in the same conversation as the final games of John Elway, Ted Williams, Derek Jeter, or even Peyton Manning.  It sure as shit wasn’t epic.

Kobe Bryant was the most selfish, me-first player of his generation, and perhaps of all time.  He was, quite literally, never the best player in the league (Don’t believe me?  Check this out…he was never better than third).  You could argue that he wouldn’t make the Lakers’ all-time starting 5 (on a team that’s had players like Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, and Shaquille O’Neal, this is far from a ridiculous statement).  He rigged the draft to suit his desires.  He never won a title without Shaquille O’Neal or Pau Gasol (compare Kobe’s supporting casts to Michael Jordan’s).  He quite possibly cost his team a title that would’ve allowed him to match Jordan’s six.  He tanked another series out of spite.  He raped a woman and snitched on his teammates when lamenting his crime.  For all that he got a heroes goodbye.

Not from me.  I say good riddance.  Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Fixing the NFL (Part 2)

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It’s Super Bowl Sunday (or, if my writing/editing/posting history is any indication, sometime around Draft Day), which means football is on the brain.  As opposed to the other 365 days – it’s a leap year, remember – where football is on the brain.  Still, it strikes me as being as good a time as anyway to take another look at how we can fix the NFL.

My devoted readers – I’m talking to you, Dad – may remember that I already did a “Fix the NFL” post a few years back, and if you don’t, you can read it here.  Despite the fact that the NFL has stupidly listened to exactly none of my ideas (ok, they fixed the extra point, but they did it in a less than satisfactory way), we’re not going to rehash many of those issues here.  Instead we’re going to look closer at the business and societal issues with the game more than what happens on the field.

Without further ado:

Fire Roger Goodell.

Fire Roger Goodell out of a cannon.

Fire Roger Goodell out of a cannon into a brick wall.

Fire Roger Goodell out of a cannon into a brick wall on the surface of the sun.

Have I mentioned firing Roger Goodell?

Look, I think Goodell has his fans.  He has at least 32 of them, because if he didn’t the owners would’ve fired him already.  Unfortunately, a drunk monkey could’ve run the NFL during Goodell’s era and there would’ve been no difference.

People will tell you that Goodell’s grown the NFL’s business by leaps and bounds during his time as commissioner.  But that growth is due to, in my eyes, four things: gambling, fantasy football, the public financing of stadiums, and the DVR.  I’ll elaborate.

Fantasy football and gambling are no-brainers.  The NFL wouldn’t exist without it.  Or if it did it would be the NBA and Major League Baseball would still be America’s pastime.  Doubt me all you want, but I’m right.  The NFL could probably exist without fantasy football, and it did so with explosive growth up through the 1980’s, despite two seasons with work stoppages.  The reason is that football is so easy to gamble on that millions of people watch the games with absolutely no interest in who actually wins the games.  And football has been gambled on since the sport began, well before Roger Goodell was able to get his grimy claws on the game.

As for public financing, if you include the forthcoming Minnesota, Atlanta, and L.A. stadiums, 9 teams will have moved into new stadiums during Goodell’s reign.  Add the renovations in Buffalo and Kansas City and the fact that the Raiders and Chargers will eventually move, and you’re up to 13 teams that will have moved into new or renovated stadiums during Goodell’s reign.  All of these stadiums have been at least partially financed with public funds, with the billionaire owners claiming that the government – and the public that pays for government – needs to pony up because a new stadium offers so much benefit to the municipalities.  (I won’t go much into the scam, but if you want more information, go look at Field of Schemes.)

The thing is, since Jacksonville and Carolina entered the League in 1995, only the Bears, Packers, Chiefs, Chargers, Raiders, Rams, Bills, Dolphins, Falcons, and Saints remain in the same facilities; we’ve discussed the Chiefs, Chargers, Raiders, Rams, Bills, and Falcons, and only the Packers haven’t taken public funds for renovations (although the Packers breed a special breed of stupidity, as they financed their stadium by suckering their idiot fans into buying stock certificates that have no actual benefit of team ownership).

My point is that teams were suckering their fan bases into paying for their stadiums well before Goodell came into power.  Hell, they’ve been doing it in every other sport, with practically every team threatening to move if they didn’t get a new stadium financed with public funds.  This isn’t new, and it surely isn’t Goodell’s doing.

Finally, we come to the DVR.  Back in 2000 TiVo introduced the first DVR, and as their use has become more and more common in American households, the networks are looking for DVR-proof programming.  And nothing is more DVR-proof than sports.  Sure, there are a decent number of people who start the game an hour late, skip the commercials, and finish when everyone else does.  But for the most part people who are watching sports are doing it live, meaning they are consuming the commercials that are so important to the networks.  As a result, TV rights fees for sports have shot through the roof.  From 2006-13, TV rights fees were $3 billion/year.  From 2014-21, they were over $5 billion.  That’s not Roger Goodell’s doing, it’s because the networks are desperate.

And for all this business that Goodell had nothing to do with, what has he given us?  Embarrassment.  League disciplinary processes that leave us sympathetic to pieces of shit like Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, and Greg Hardy.  Suspensions so heavy-handed in the Bountygate investigation that his predecessor was brought in to overturn his findings.  Discipline that was probably light in the infamous SpyGate scandal, although we’ll never know because immediately after the penalties were handed down he destroyed all the evidence to protect his buddy Robert Kraft.  And a ridiculous make-up suspension – a suspension he’s still suing to uphold despite the fact that numerous arbitrators and courts have ruled that the suspension was ridiculous – of Tom Brady over some deflated footballs (to make up for the aforementioned light SpyGate penalties) that were so important to the outcome of the game that the Patriots outscored the Colts 28-0 after the offending footballs were removed from play.

And that doesn’t even mention the concussion catastrophe, which I’ll get to later.

Fire Roger Goodell.  Hire a drunk monkey.  It’s not that hard to be a commissioner in American sports.  Hell, Gary Bettman’s been doing it for over 20 years.

Fix the Concussion Crisis

Look, I get it.  Football is a dangerous game.  We watch as much for the bone-jarring collisions as we do for the amazing catches from Antonio Brown and the amazing runs from Todd Gurley.  But it’s recently become amazingly clear that playing football at all levels kills people.  It’s simply by the grace of God that no one has died on an NFL field as a result of a violent collision.  It is coming and it will likely destroy the League.  But the NFL can get in front of it and prevent that with a couple of easy fixes.

First, have independent concussion doctors on site at every game.  Let’s make it 3 doctors at each game who will have the power to stop the game if they see a guy struggling and will review him away from team personnel to determine if he is capable of returning to the game.  Players go into concussion protocol now, but players still believe that the doctors are more concerned with the team that employs them than they are with the players’ well being.  So we’re removing the concept of team concussion doctors and replacing them with League concussion doctors.  And just so we make sure that the League can’t step in and say that Cam Newton is cleared for the Super Bowl (when we know it would be an utter disaster for the League if Derek Anderson had to start), the doctors will be hired independent of the League.  Let it be the state’s medical boards that handle it.  If the NFL doesn’t like it, threaten to pull their favorable antitrust status.

Second, lifetime medical insurance for anyone who’s ever played for, been drafted by, or signed with an NFL team.  This will prevent the League from even trying to make the argument that the problem wasn’t caused by their football history.  Make it retroactive for any living player and have an independent board review the status of any of the decedents of deceased players.  It’ll save the League on lawyers fees and it’ll gain them immeasurable public relations points.  It’ll be expensive, but the NFL’s a cash cow.  And when a player inevitably dies on the field, the NFL will be able to say, “Hey, we know it’s dangerous, but we’re taking care of it.”

How are we going to pay for it?

Expand the Season

But wait, DSC, how can you complain about the inherent dangers of the NFL and then tell us we need to expand the season?  Simple.  We’re not adding games, we’re adding weeks.

I didn’t see Concussion, mainly because the Sony email hack scandal showed that the studio pulled some punches out of fear for being sued by the League, but also because I both watched the League of Denial documentary and read the book, so I didn’t feel like paying to watch a movie that thinks Luke Wilson is a convincing Roger Goodell.  But the trailer had one interesting line, and that’s that the League owns a day of the week.  And it’s true: from September until early February, every Sunday is NFL Sunday.  So what better way to add income then by giving them more of those Sundays?

As it stands now, we get 4 crappy preseason games and 16 regular season games over 21 weeks, with each team getting one regular season bye week.  The owners have started to realize that fans don’t want to pay full price for a preseason ticket, so they drop the price of the preseason games and spread the difference over the regular season games.  And we pay it, because we’re stupid sheep.

Now imagine 2 preseason games and 16 regular season games over the same 21 weeks, but with 19 weeks in the regular season.  What’s the difference?  I’m glad you asked.  And if you didn’t ask, you should have.

As it stands now, if you’re one of the 99% of America that has cable (that’s an estimate, but it’s not far off), you get to see 5 games a week – Thursday Night Football, Sunday Night Football, Monday Night Football, and 2 on Sunday afternoon (and if you choose to skip around you can see 3 of the games on Sunday afternoon).  That’s 85 games a season, or 33% of the 256 games on the schedule, and that doesn’t include the nationally televised Thanksgiving games or the occasional late-season Saturday games.

Now, expand that 2 weeks without adding any games, and you’ll see 105 games, and you’re up to 41% of the season, all without dropping another penny.  And you do it in a way that helps player safety, and everyone loves that.

You may recall that in my prior diatribe about fixing the League I suggested that the final week of the regular season should be the final Sunday of December, with the playoffs starting the first week of January.  With this in mind, Week 1 would take place the week of August 23 and Week 19 would take place the week of December 27.  Is August 23 early?   Yes.  However, this would mean that the preseason games would start on August 9 (no sooner than normal), with the “real” games starting sooner.  And who would hate that?

(Well, Major League Baseball, but we’re not talking about them right now.)

So how will it work?  Each team plays a 16-game season with 3 bye weeks.  The players get added time to rest and recover and we likely see more players playing more games.  There will be no bye weeks from Weeks 1-4 and 17-19.  Two divisions each (one from each conference) have a bye week every fourth week from weeks 5-16, with the same divisions on the same bye weeks to eliminate any competitive advantage with teams getting longer gaps between bye weeks.

What’s the benefit?  You just gave the networks two additional weeks of DVR-free unstoppable NFL programming, which always finishes at the top of the ratings.  That’s roughly 12% more games for the people to see, and, more importantly, 12% more TV revenue.  At $5 billion a year as it currently stands, you’ve just added $600 million additional revenue without requiring the players to play another game.

If this isn’t the most brilliant and simplest fix to the game, I don’t know what is.

Lifetime Bans for Violent Criminals

Greg Hardy is a pile of shit who threw his girlfriend onto a futon full of assault weapons while she begged him to kill her, paid her off so that she wouldn’t press charges, and then promised to come out guns blazing when his suspension was up (and let’s not even discuss his comments about his opponents wives and girlfriends).

Adrian Peterson whipped the shit out of his 4-year-old son, scraping his legs and testicles, and while he was off on a league-mandated sabbatical (he was only retroactively suspended), he got caught smoking weed and threw himself an elaborate Egyptian-themed birthday party where he refused to allow anyone to discuss the charges against him.  He has shown zero remorse and seeks no redemption, despite the fact that publications such as Sports Illustrated really want to give it to him.

The NFL Players Association, because these pieces of shit are dues-paying members, are required to stick up for them, so when Goodell tries to do something good like banish these monsters in a manner that fits their crimes, he does it based on guidelines that aren’t in place and require the NFLPA to stick up for them.

So I say ban them for life.

Electrocuted a dog?  Gone.  Killed a guy while you were driving drunk?  See ya.  Knock your wife out and then dragged her out of an elevator?  Banned.  Threw your girlfriend onto a pile of assault weapons?  Outta here.  Beat the shit out of your kid?  Get out.

Playing football is a privilege.  In exchange for your considerable talents you are paid a ridiculous sum of money and expected to not be a total garbage human being.  If you fail to do so, that privilege is taken away.  And for anyone who says we’re taking away his right to earn a living, save it.  We’re not doing that.  He can go work as a janitor, or a clerk at a 7-11, or, perhaps, he could use his college education, say he made a mistake in job interviews and it’s cost him dearly, and hope he can make something of his life.

But if you’re guilty of committing a violent crime, you’re done.

And just so we don’t let the teams off the hook, they’ll be required to pay the remaining guaranteed amount of his contract to a charity of the victim’s choosing.  We won’t be total dicks though…we won’t make them take a salary cap hit.

“Fix” the Playoffs

Let’s face it, the NFL playoffs are about as good as it gets, second only to the NCAA tournament in terms of excitement and watchability.  But it can get moderately better with a few tweaks.

First, add a wild card team.  The NFL ditched one of their wild card teams when they expanded to four divisions in 2002; this corrects that issue.  It also makes securing the top seed a more important endeavor as it gives that team the only first-round bye.  And perhaps most importantly for the League, it gives them two additional playoff games, which means additional revenue.  An opening-weekend tripleheader on both Saturday and Sunday would be to everyone’s liking, I’m certain.

Second, seed the teams by record.  I’m fine with division champions being guaranteed a playoff berth (for the most part…I’ll get to that in a second), but that’s it.  In the 2015 playoffs, all four home teams lost in the Wild Card round.  If we seeded based on record, two of those teams would’ve played on the road.  The NBA is going this route, and while I hate to tell anyone to follow the NBA’s lead, in this case they’ve got it right.

Third, and definitely more controversially, a division title doesn’t guarantee you a playoff berth.  If you’re under .500 and there’s a team that has a better record than you and would otherwise be left out of the playoffs, you’re out and they’re in.  If you’re at or above .500 and a team has 2 more wins than you and would otherwise be left out, they’re in and you’re out.  Don’t like it?  Tough.  I hate rewarding teams for geography.

(If you read my first “Fix the NFL” post, you’ll notice I proposed a massive overhaul of the playoffs and the divisions.  I like that better, but this is more realistic.)

Kill the Coin Toss

There’s no such thing as home field advantage in football (same thing in basketball, but again, not my concern here).  In baseball you get the last at-bat at home, in hockey you get the second line change.  So the home team gets to determine whether to kick off or receive.  Same thing for overtime.  This eliminates any potential embarrassments such as the one we saw in the Green Bay-Arizona playoff game this year.

(And for you degenerate gamblers out there, because the Super Bowl is a neutral site, we can keep the coin toss for that game and that game only.)

Fix Overtime

I don’t have a simple fix for this one.  All I know is that the NFL’s overtime is stupid.  They changed it a few years back because the ball was taken out of Brett Favre’s hands after the Vikings lost the coin toss in the NFC Championship game (never mind the fact that Favre threw an asininely stupid interception that prevented the Vikings from kicking the game-winning field goal in regulation).  So now both teams are guaranteed a possession in overtime unless the team who wins the coin toss scores a touchdown on the first possession.  That’s just needlessly complicated.

The simplest answer is to just eliminate the sudden death nature of football’s overtime and play the full 15 minutes.  And because I’m lazy, let’s just do that.

Fix Replay

We’re instituting a couple of simple changes.  First, you have as many challenges as you have timeouts.  If that means you get 14 challenges and because the refs keep screwing up and you keep correctly pointing out that the refs keep screwing up, so be it.  Get the call right.

Second, everything is reviewable.  Some penalties are just obvious and aren’t really the judgment call that the referee’s union would like you to believe.  Illegally batting a ball out of bounds?  Reviewable.  Picking up the flag on an obvious pass interference?  Reviewable.  Thumb barely grazed the quarterback’s helmet, leading to a nonsensical facemask call?  Reviewable.

(Is it obvious I’m a Lions fan?)

Are you going to review a missed hold on 2nd-and-8 in the 2nd quarter?  No.  But you are going to review a play that would’ve given you the ball back late in the game or ended the game on the final play.

Third, institute a “Common Sense Committee”, or CSC.  The NFL refuses to fix the catch rule, which makes sense because it’s not like whether a catch is a catch should be the simplest question to answer in the NFL.  So because we’re not going to fix the rule, we’re going to institute a committee that asks for a common sense ruling when such a ruling is required.  So who’s on the CSC?  Simple.  Four drunk fans from every team (and yes, it’s football, they must be drunk).  When there’s a call that goes to replay (whether that’s by a coach’s challenge or on a turnover or touchdown), the CSC – excluding the representatives of the two teams involved – is called to review the play.  If the CSC disagrees with the outcome of the replay, the CSC’s decision wins out.  Utilizing the CSC, there’d be no such thing as the “Calvin Johnson Rule”.

Fix Officiating

The League will tell you that officiating is fine, that the percentage of incorrect calls was no different this year than it was in previous years.  This may be correct, but this year the mistakes were in particularly high-profile situations.  The NFL is a $12 billion enterprise that uses part-time officials.  I’m not the only one who finds this ridiculous.  The officials are crucial, and one needs only look back to the Fail Mary – a call so bad that it quite literally ended a strike by the officials’ union – to see how important they are.  So make them full-time paid employees and I guarantee it gets better.

(Although we may lose the greatness that is Ed Hochuli, because he’s a well-paid attorney in his “spare” time.)

We’re also allowing the League to correct the outcomes of games.  In two circumstances this season – a missed false start that would’ve led to a 10-second runoff and the end of the game prior to a game-winning field goal; and an incorrect face mask on the final play of the game that led to an untimed completed Hail Mary – bad calls resulted in outcomes different than what should have actually happened.  In these cases, the NFL is to be allowed to step in and change the outcome of the game.  It’s an extreme example and would not happen often, but it is a possibility.

Draft Pick Compensation for Incorrect Calls

This idea is so absurd that I’m completely separating it from the notion of fixing the officiating.  Will it ever happen?  No.  But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to talk about it.

Take the Week 4 game between the Seahawks and Lions.  With 1:45 left in the game, Calvin Johnson caught a pass, gained the first down at the Seattle 1, then fumbled the ball into the end zone, where Kam Chancellor illegally batted it out of bounds.  The referees incorrectly ruled it a touchback – the illegal bat should’ve given the ball back to the Lions at the spot of the fumble – and the Seahawks were able to run out the clock and win the game.  Because we don’t KNOW that this game would’ve turned out differently – and thus the NFL wouldn’t change the outcome of the game retroactively – we send the game to a committee for draft pick compensation.  After the season, teams would send egregious calls such as this to the committee for review to determine how much the bad call impacted the outcome of the game and how much that game impacted the remainder of the season.  If the committee determines that the game would have ended differently, they determine the round of draft pick compensation.  The actual winning team loses their draft pick in exchange for the next “natural” (i.e., not impacted by trades) draft pick of the actual losing team.

(In this situation, the Lions would’ve had the Packers Hail Mary game overturned on account of the incorrect face mask call, making the Lions 8-8 and the Packers 9-7.  The draft pick compensation committee would’ve then determined that with the ball on the Seahawks 1 with first down and under 2 minutes to play, the Lions likely would’ve won that game, which would’ve made them 9-7 and in a tie with – and more importantly holding the tiebreakers over – the Seahawks and Packers, which would’ve given them a playoff berth.  Loss of a playoff berth or a playoff game is an automatic first round draft pick, with the Seahawks receiving the Lions’ next draft pick, in this case their second rounder.)

(On a completely unrelated note, I’m now horribly depressed.)

Give the Lions and Browns 2 Additional Wins to Start the Season

Look, they need it.  Either they’ll screw it up themselves or the refs will do it for them.

These 2 wins will not be used for playoff seeding.

Depressing stat: Since the Browns returned to the NFL in the 1999 seasons, the Browns and Lions have made the playoffs a combined total of 4 times (out of 34 total team seasons).  If you spotted them each 2 wins to start the season, that number goes up to a total of 7 trips to the playoffs.

But seriously, fire Roger Goodell.

What If: 2013 Detroit Tigers

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Baseball history is filled with all sorts of “What Ifs”?  What if Fred Merkle touches second base?  What if the Red Sox never sell Babe Ruth?  What if Johnny Pesky doesn’t hold the ball?  What if Bill Buckner makes the play?  What if Chuck Knoblauch doesn’t fake out Lonnie Smith?  What if Grady Little pulls Pedro Martinez?

And in 2013, the Detroit Tigers had their very own “What If” alter the course of their season and in fact the future of the franchise, not to mention preventing the occurrence of something that had never happened in Major League history

What if Avi Garcia never fucked Prince Fielder’s wife?

It’s a thinly veiled rumor that has been all but confirmed in the local press without ever being reported, because in the grand scheme of things, such a betrayal by a teammate can’t be reported by the media without hard core proof.  When it’s happened in the past (LeBron James’s mom and Delonte West, the Jimmy Jackson/Jason Kidd/Toni Braxton love triangle, etc.), the stories have been left for sites like Deadspin to pick up, as opposed to being discussed by the local beat writers.  But this one is as confirmed as could possibly be imagined in today’s day and age.

An additional rumor posits that a fight between Miguel Cabrera and Garcia caused the groin/core injury that derailed Cabrera’s run at an unprecedented second consecutive Triple Crown.  I looked at the rosters and where and when Cabrera would’ve been in the same place as Garcia before he was traded away and found it to be impossible, but looking at it from another angle caused me to change my view.

The 2013 Tigers were probably the best team of their recent run, even though they failed to make the World Series.  If there’s any season that a rational Tiger fan could look at and wonder what might have been, it was that one.  So I’ll break down some of the variables and see what could have changed.

Prince Fielder’s Season

Let’s look at Fielder’s history.  In 2011 with Milwaukee and 2012 with the Tigers, he had put up offensive WAR* numbers of 5.5 and 5.3, respectively.  He finished in the top 10 in the MVP voting both years (in both seasons the guy he was protecting in the batting order won the award, meaning that Fielder likely had some votes poached from him).  In 2013, with no known injury issues, that number slipped to 3.1.  What happened?

In August of that year, Torii Hunter made remarks during a radio interview indicating that Fielder was dealing with a personal issue, leading to his struggles at the plate.  Fielder responded to the comments by saying that his personal life would stay personal, but reporters being reporters, this wasn’t going to die.  Two days later, it was reported that Fielder had filed for divorce at the end of May.

It would be easy to suspect that the affair between Fielder’s wife and Garcia had occurred sometime before that date, although it’s not known when.  At that point in the season, Fielder was hitting .273/.397/.487, and he was on pace for 30 HR and 137 RBI.  He raised his average over the course of the season, but his power and OBP numbers slipped somewhat.  Nevertheless, this wasn’t the season people expected out of Fielder, especially with Victor Martinez back in the lineup providing protection.  He was borderline atrocious in the postseason, wracking up only 10 total bases and 3 walks with no RBI in 45 plate appearances, and making some terrible plays on the basepaths that took the Tigers out of badly-needed rallies.

Something happened that caused Fielder’s dropoff, and there’s no injury to explain it.

Miguel Cabrera’s Injury

In 2012, Miguel Cabrera won the first Triple Crown in baseball in 45 years, despite putting up offensive WAR numbers that were lower than both his prior and subsequent seasons.  In 2013 Cabrera had the best offensive season of his career, despite missing 14 games to a nagging groin injury.  The rumored fight between Cabrera and Garcia seems impossible on its surface.  Garcia was sent to the minors in July and was traded to the White Sox at the deadline, and Cabrera’s performance didn’t start to lag until mid-August, so it would seem that the fight was a myth.

But another look suggests that may not be the case.  Garcia was traded to the White Sox on July 30 and shortly thereafter became an everyday outfielder for Chicago.  The White Sox played a 3-game series against the Tigers in Chicago from August 12-14.  At the start of that series, Cabrera was hitting .365/.459/.686 and was on pace for 54 home runs and 166 RBI, numbers that would’ve easily won him the Triple Crown again.  Beginning with that series, his numbers fell to .299/.392/.493 over the remainder of the season, and he only hit 8 more home runs and drove in 27 runs for the rest of the year (on a full-season basis that projects out to 33 HR and 110 RBI).  Cabrera had gone from an historically epic season to a merely good slugger.  What happened?

Sure, you can argue that Cabrera suffered an injury on the field, but considering how prevalent the rumor of this supposed fight is, let’s have some fun and imagine it happened.

Garcia/Iglesias Trade

Garcia was traded as part of a three-way deal that brought shortstop Jose Iglesias from Boston to Detroit and sent Garcia to the White Sox.  While I’m sure that the affair was a consideration in making the deal, it wasn’t the only one.  Jhonny Peralta had recently been suspended for using PED’s and would be a free agent after the season, and with Garcia unable to crack the lineup in the minors, the Tigers probably make the deal, whether or not Garcia could keep it in his pants.

In the list of What Ifs, this one doesn’t compute.  Garcia is still traded for Iglesias.

Impact on 2013 Season

Let’s get Cabrera’s feat out of the way.  The injury probably cost Cabrera a second consecutive Triple Crown, which had never happened before.  As we showed before, Cabrera was hitting .365 going into the White Sox series and was on pace for 54 HR and 166 RBI.  He ultimately led Major League Baseball with a .348 average (not to mention the slash line Triple Crown, going .348/.442/.636, and leading the Majors in OPS at 1.078), but he fell short on HR and RBI, finishing second in both categories.  It’s reasonable to expect his numbers would’ve fallen off, but you could also conclude that he might’ve played a few extra games (he missed 6 after August 12) over the remainder of the season to try to capture another Crown if he hadn’t been hurt.  My conclusion is that without the injury, Cabrera becomes the first player to win back-to-back Triple Crowns.

Looking at the Tigers’ postseason seeding, one could come to the conclusion that an injured Cabrera and depressed Fielder didn’t make a difference.  But look again.  Doing an admittedly rough estimation of Cabrera’s offensive WAR through the beginning of the White Sox series and projecting it to the remainder of the year adds roughly 1.3 offensive wins to his number.  And if Fielder stays as productive as he did the previous two seasons, one could expect an offensive WAR of roughly 5.4 instead of 3.1, an increase of 2.3 wins.  Combine those two numbers and you add an additional 3-4 wins to the Tigers’ 2013 total.  The Tigers finished 4 games behind the Red Sox (and 3 behind the A’s) for the best record in the American League – and thus home field advantage in the playoffs – despite effectively waiving the white flag going into a season-ending series against the Marlins, where they were swept.  If the Tigers get the additional 3-4 wins from Cabrera and Fielder, they don’t take those games off, and likely win the necessary games to capture home field advantage in the playoffs.

And just for good measure, they probably aren’t no-hit in the season finale.

Now we look at the playoffs.  The Tigers defeated the A’s in 5 games in the ALDS.  I won’t examine this series any further and I’ll just assume that the Tigers win it (as they have every postseason series they’ve played against Oakland since Bert Campaneris tried to murder Lerrin LaGrow in 1972).

Moving on to the Red Sox series, it’s hard for me to imagine the Tigers losing the ALCS against Boston with home field advantage and Cabrera and Fielder at full strength, whether mentally or physically.  In the first three games of the series each of the Tigers’ starters took no-hitters into the fifth inning or beyond.  The Red Sox’ pitchers were just as good; the Tigers won Game 1 at Fenway 1-0, the Red Sox won Game 3 at CoPa by the same score.  Detroit’s bullpen had an infamous meltdown in Game 2 that may well have turned the tide of the series.  Cabrera, unable to drive the ball effectively, grounded into a rally-killing double play in Game 5.  Fielder belly flopped his way into a worse rally-killer in Game 6.  An uncharacteristic error by Iglesias followed by a grand slam by Shane Victorino and the Red Sox were off to their third World Series in a decade.

With Cabrera and Fielder playing healthy, there’s a good chance the 1-run games that went in the Red Sox’ favor go the other way.  With the Tigers playing 4 games at home, we don’t see the emotional explosion that came with David Ortiz’s 8th-inning grand slam in Game 2.  Do the Red Sox get a hit before there’s 1 out in the 9th of Game 1?  Possibly, and it’s possible that those hits lead to a run (Anibal Sanchez only pitched 6 innings despite having a no-hitter going), so perhaps Game 1 goes another way.  But in my heart of hearts, I believe that the Tigers win the ALCS with home field advantage.

That brings us to the World Series, which is admittedly harder to break down.  The Tigers didn’t play the Cardinals in 2013, and even if they had, we’ve routinely found that head-to-head matchups don’t mean anything when it comes to the postseason.  As an example, the Tigers went 8-4 against the Minnesota Twins in 1987, outscoring them by 25 runs; the Twins won the ALCS in 5 games.

But despite the fact that the Cardinals won the same number of games as the Red Sox in 2013, I believe the Tigers and Red Sox were the two best teams in the game.  The Tigers would’ve held home field advantage in the Series, and both their rotation and lineups were superior to the Cardinals.

Of course, the same could be said of the Tigers’ World Series teams in 2006 and 2012, and they won a combined total of 1 game in losing both of those series, scoring only 17 runs in those 9 games.  The big difference, however, was the layoff, or lack thereof.  The Tigers had won 7 consecutive games in the 2006 postseason before being forced to take a week off while they waited for the Cardinals to finish off the Mets in 7 games.  In 2012 a 6-day layoff after sweeping the Yankees in the ALCS killed any momentum.  Such a layoff wouldn’t have happened in 2013; regardless of how good the Tigers were, they were not going to sweep the Red Sox; the series likely goes at least 6 games, which would’ve resulted in a 3-day layoff.  That’s enough to get your pitchers lined up, but not so much that it turns your team rusty.

In conclusion, I declare that barring Garcia’s indiscretion, the Tigers would’ve won the 2013 World Series.

Thanks Avi.

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The Aftermath

The story doesn’t end there.  As every Tiger fan knows, Fielder didn’t exactly take the loss in the ALCS as hard as many would’ve liked him to.  When asked if the loss would linger, Fielder responded by saying, “Nah…I got kids, man. You gotta be a man about it. I got kids. If I’m sitting around pouting, how am I going to tell them to keep their chins up if something doesn’t go their way? Definitely, it’s over.”  That interview was played over and over on local radio, and Fielder being dealt out of town was simply a matter of time (and the amount of his contract Mike Ilitch was willing to cover).  A month later, Fielder was traded to Texas for Ian Kinsler.

But Fielder’s responses weren’t particularly ridiculous for a guy who had gone through what he had gone through.  Here was a guy who had to go to work every day and look at a teammate who had slept with his wife.  It’s entirely reasonable for someone to be more concerned about raising their kids properly during their parents’ divorce than work troubles, especially if their income is not at issue.

But without the affair/divorce and with a win in the World Series, those comments aren’t made and Fielder doesn’t lose face with the fans and the front office, and there’s no particular need to trade him.  His contract is still a massive albatross, but with his expected performance that’s a question for down the road as opposed to the 2013-14 offseason.  The team was concerned about cutting payroll, and the Fielder-Kinsler deal helped that, but with a World Series victory as opposed to an ALCS loss, the Tigers bring in additional money in World Series ticket sales; additional merchandise and memorabilia sales; and a likely increase in ticket sales in 2014 (as opposed to a 5% attendance decrease).  Simply put, Fielder isn’t traded after the 2013 season.

This creates a domino effect for the Tigers’ postseason plans.  Without the trade, Fielder stays at first and Cabrera at third, which either delays Nick Castellanos’s ascension to the team, or he stays in the outfield as he had been playing in the minors.  I suspect they keep him in the minors, as the Tigers had signed Rajai Davis to serve as their left fielder.  They could have brought Castellanos up to the Majors and had Davis serve as their 4th outfielder, but Castellanos still likely needed the seasoning, both at the plate and in the outfield.

Without Kinsler being acquired, the Tigers focus on signing a second baseman.  Omar Infante ultimately signed with the Royals for 4 years and just over $30 million.  I suspect without the Fielder issues this would’ve been an easy call to re-sign him.

The big question is what becomes of the Doug Fister trade.  A few short weeks after the Fielder trade, Fister was traded for Robbie Ray, Ian Krol and Steve Lombardozzi.  A lot of fans – myself included – consider this to be the worst trade of the Dave Dombrowski era, a fact compounded by the fact that he traded Ray (the supposed centerpiece of the Tigers’ haul) just before he realized his promise for human dumpster fire Shane Greene.

The Fister trade was deemed to be a salary cutting move.  This could be true, but Fister was under team control for 2014 and 2015 and was only awarded $7.2 million in arbitration going for the 2014 season.  When you add in the financial impact of the Fielder trade on a yearly basis, trading he and Fister saved the Tigers just over $15 million.  Without the Fielder deal, the Fister trade might seem a bit less likely, especially if the Tigers are going to cite cutting payroll as an excuse.

My feeling is that a couple of trade scenarios occur if Fielder isn’t traded.  One is that, in an effort to cut payroll in one fell swoop, they deal Max Scherzer, who has only one year left with the team, was awarded $15.25 million in arbitration, and would turn down a 6-year, $144 million contract during that offseason (a decision which supposedly doomed any chances of him coming back to the team).  Scherzer may have brought a heavy haul, but his pending free agency likely caused any deal to be difficult.

The second is to trade some combination of Rick Porcello, Drew Smyly, Austin Jackson and Nick Castellanos.  Porcello would ultimately be dealt for Yoenis Cespedes with one year left on his contract (to be fair, this was a need-for-need trade, as Cespedes also only had one year left on his deal).  Smyly and Jackson (along with a prospect) ultimately brought the Tigers David Price at the 2014 trade deadline, so they had value.  Smyly was a converted starter who excelled as a reliever in 2013 because there was no room for him in the rotation.  Fister was likely traded because it was believed that it was his turn to slide into the rotation.  If true, I find it to be a mistake on the part of the Tigers, as Detroit had Smyly under team control for 5 years, he was excellent in the bullpen and the team was likely to lose one of their starters when Scherzer departed after the 2014 season, opening a spot for Smyly with plenty of time to make a name for himself as a starter before he entered his prime earning years.

The third option is to stand pat.  The Tigers paid $173 million in salary in 2014, ranking them 4th in the Majors, and keeping Fielder and Fister would’ve brought that payroll up to almost $190 million, so there would’ve been problems doing so.  But keeping a World Series champion team in tact knowing that the staff ace was likely to leave after the 2014 season isn’t a ridiculous notion, no matter the payroll impact.

Which of these things happen?  I honestly don’t know.  Nobody does, quite frankly, and choosing a given route leads one down an even greater What If investigation.  And it doesn’t consider even more issues, like what do the Tigers do when they lose Iglesias, Fielder and Bruce Rondon to season-ending injuries in 2014.  But we do know that one bad decision can create irreparable harm to a championship caliber team.

I don’t know that the ultimate outcome of the drama with the 2013 Tigers was the worst outcome of the countless circumstances where a player slept with one of his teammates’ wives/girlfriends.  But it does make you wonder why, when there are innumerable jersey chasers out there, a guy would choose to create such clubhouse drama by choosing his teammate’s wife.

Thanks Avi.

*All WAR numbers courtesy of baseball-reference.com.

Floyd Mayweather is a Pile of Shit

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I don’t know much about boxing.  Everything I know I learned from the Rocky movies, so, as you can imagine, every boxing match I watch is comparatively boring.

But I do know this:

Boxing isn’t a team sport.

Of course, this is obvious.  But what that means is when you pull for a guy in the ring, you pull for everything about him.  It’s not as simple as a Cowboy fan saying, “We need Greg Hardy so I can deal with his off-the-field issues if he helps my team.”  Rooting for a boxer is no different from buying a Greg Hardy jersey.

And so you can understand my confusion why anyone in their right mind would root for Floyd Mayweather, under any circumstances.  I don’t care if tonight’s fight against Manny Pacquiao is the latest version of the Fight of the Century.  To me, coming up with an excuse to root for Mayweather is the exact same as Chris Rock’s justification for a white person using the N-word.  In order to not root for Pacquiao tonight, he had to have beaten you up on Christmas Eve and stolen the toy you had just gotten for your kid, and then pissed on you for good measure.  Only then can someone say, “Yep, I hope Mayweather kicks his ass.”

Floyd Mayweather beats women.  He’s been convicted numerous times for his crimes, and when questioned he proclaims that there are no pictures or video and that “Only God can judge him.”  Let’s ignore the stupidity of the belief that “Only God can judge me” and point out that Mayweather has served jail time for his abuses.

If you’re rooting for Floyd Mayweather, you’re rooting for a man who (a) gets paid for his ability to fight and (b) in his free time uses that ability to beat women.  Not only that, because of the financial terms of the contract, if you spend any money for the fight (which, in the interest of full disclosure, I may well do), 60% of that money is going to Floyd Mayweather.

I don’t understand anyone who would pull for this man.  I’m genuinely troubled by this.  If you want Mayweather to win, I really want to know what the thought process is that goes through your head to allow that.  I don’t think Pacquiao is a saint – I don’t know much about the man – but I truly believe this is one of those rare situations where a sporting event is a matter of good versus evil.

I hope Pacquiao comes out at the bell and tries to knock him out.  I don’t think that will happen.  I think Mayweather will utilize his boring, methodical style, and the referee, who has been known to cater to Mayweather’s style, won’t allow a fight that allows Pacquiao to knock him out.  And the judges won’t allow a convincing decision unless that decision is so mind-bogglingly obvious as to end the judges’ careers (which simply doesn’t happen in boxing).  There’s simply too much money at stake.  We’ll see a split decision (or worse, a draw) and then we’ll see Mayweather-Pacquiao II and maybe even III.

I know that people pull for Mayweather and think it’s as simple as that.  They’re fans of the “sweet science” and think Mayweather is one of the best ever, and whatever happens outside of the ring is irrelevant.  I find this ludicrous, but it is what it is.  So to those people – and anyone else who will plunk down money on the fight – I offer you a challenge.

Take the money you spend on the fight tonight and figure out Mayweather’s take (it’s a pretty simple 60%).  If you buy the fight at home, Mayweather’s take is $60.  If you spend $25 to watch at the bar, Mayweather’s take is $15.  (See?  Simple.)  Take that money and give a matching donation to a local women’s shelter or domestic abuse charity or anything that supports women who are victimized by people like Mayweather.

And really think about why you’d support this man.

Go Manny.

The Final Four of Coaching Hatred

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A few weeks back I posted on Facebook something that is somewhat typical for me during NCAA tournament time: I asked who looked more like a rat, Bo Ryan or Mike Krzyzewski (or, as the post said, Mike Krzyzezwzszkzi).  Coming a few weeks after I expressed my happiness with the NCAA coming down hard on Syracuse and Jim Boeheim, while calling Boeheim a dick, my dad asked me why I hated so many coaches.  It’s a fair question.  And so today I provide you with that breakdown.

It should be noted that I rank college coaches on par with pro sports owners.  I don’t particularly think they’re great people, no matter who they are.  They’re making a ridiculous amount of money largely on the backs of poor minority kids who don’t get paid for their services and have almost no choice as to where to ply their trade.  I’m not going to get too deep into my philosophical issues with the college sports system, but I don’t think any of the coaches are particularly stellar individuals.

I also think most teams cheat.  The good ones are either not stupid enough to get caught, or don’t piss off any former players to the extent that he’s willing to rat out the team.

Now that that’s out of the way, if anyone reads this post and doesn’t know me (ha!), it must be stated that I’m a die-hard Michigan State Spartan, so while others would undoubtedly have the great Tom Izzo on this list, it should come as no surprise that you won’t see him here.  In the interest of fairness – which is stupid since it’s my blog – I asked if a friend wanted to write something up on why he hates Izzo.  A fairly rabid Michigan fan, he said he didn’t hate Izzo, but that he was generally annoyed with all his whining, comparing Izzo to his 3-year-old.  So while I’m sure plenty of Michigan fans loathe Izzo (jealousy is so unattractive), generally speaking Izzo’s just like everyone’s 3-year-old kid.

Honorable Mention:

Bob Knight, Indiana/Texas Tech

Look, you can’t have a list detailing all the college basketball coaches you hate and not include Bob Knight.  The guy’s an arrogant asshole who had complete contempt for everyone in the media, and then he became a member of the media (sorry guys, if you get paid to talk about sports and you’re not employed by one of the teams/schools/leagues, you’re a part of the media).  While a part of the media, he was the same arrogant asshole he always was.

The thing is, as I got older, I started to realize that Knight wasn’t really all that bad.  He ran a clean program, he graduated his players and he won.  He had a hard-nosed style that didn’t jibe with today’s standards and probably wasn’t the way John Wooden coached UCLA, but the fact is that few of his players had an issue with him.  He was ousted from Indiana because he got caught on film putting his hands on a player’s throat and then reacting like, well, an arrogant asshole when a student said, “Hey Coach!” to him on campus.

Fuck Bobby Knight, but not as much as I used to think.

Bobby Hurley, Buffalo

I know almost nothing about Bobby Hurley as a coach, aside from the fact that he coached Buffalo to the NCAA tournament this year.  Still, he’s a Krzyzewski protegé and one of the most hated players in college basketball history.

Fuck Bobby Hurley on principle alone.

Bob Huggins, Cincinnati/Kansas State/West Virginia

If Mitch Albom’s book “Fab Five” is to be believed (and there’s plenty of reason it’s not), during warm ups before the 1992 NCAA semifinal between Michigan and Huggins’s Cincinnati team, during some back-and-forth trash talking between Cincinnati’s players and Michigan’s Fab Five freshman, one of the Fab Five told a couple of Cincinnati’s players that he wanted them to go write a paper about how bad they suck.  It was a classic exchange, one that had me laughing out loud when reading it.  Damn Mitch Albom could write.  Too bad he became such an embarrassing hack.

The irony is that there’s a pretty good chance the Cincinnati players wouldn’t be able to write a paper if they weren’t allowed to use crayon.

Huggins was the first guy I remember that operated a team on a culture of lawlessness and academic inferiority.  There have been many before and since, but none that were actually fired because his teams were academically inferior.  Seriously.  Cincinnati had won 10 regular season championships, gone to two Elite 8’s and a Final Four, and all of this came after the school had not been to the NCAA tournament in the 12 years prior to Huggins’s arrival.  And still Cincinnati’s president said, “I’m tired of having players getting arrested and graduating at a 30% rate, so you’re fired.”  Good for her.

Not that Michigan State is on par with the Harvards and Stanfords – or even the Michigans and North Carolinas – of the educational world, but Huggins has chosen to coach at schools where he can get away with recruiting players who will never succeed in the classroom in the hopes of winning a few more games.  Seriously, my cat could get into West Virginia, and he can barely read.

Fuck Bob Huggins, although I’d probably have to use Hooked on Phonics for his players to understand those 3 words.

Elite 8:

John Calipari, Massachusetts/Memphis/Kentucky

I should hate Calipari as much as everyone else does.  He’s taken 2 schools – Massachusetts and Memphis – to the Final Four, only to see those accomplishments wiped out of the record books because Marcus Camby took money and Derrick Rose had someone else take his SAT’s for him.  Calipari wasn’t implicated in either situation, but this falls under the classic case of where there’s smoke there’s fire.  If Kentucky were to have to vacate some or all of their accomplishments under Calipari it would surprise exactly no one.

And today everyone hates him because he’s won one title and is likely about to win another on the backs of players who have no intention of ever graduating from school.

On that last point – a point that likely extends to the Derrick Rose case – Calipari is taking advantage of a stupid rule the NBA implemented that said no one can enter the league until they’re at least 19 and have been out of high school for at least one year (we can go into the stupidity of that at another point).  Those kids are going to go to school somewhere, Calipari just decided to round up as many of them as possible.  And he’s honest about it.  He’s winning with guys who should be in the NBA if the league weren’t borderline racist trying to keep minority kids in their place.  If it comes out that he’s been cheating with these guys at Kentucky I’ll change my tune, but I’m generally ok with what he’s doing.

Don’t fuck Calipari, fuck the stupid NBA rule that he exploits.

Rick Pitino, Kentucky/Louisville

Pitino’s a lot like Calipari.  He’s smarmy, he dresses like a gangster, he brings up 9/11 almost as much as Rudy Giuliani does (his brother-in-law was killed in the attacks) and he says things that would likely get others in more trouble.  True story: earlier this season Pitino’s Louisville team blew out an inferior opponent early in the season.  In Pitino’s post-game presser, he said that he didn’t want the game to be such a blow out, proclaiming that he had four white guys and an Egyptian in the game at the end.  If that thing is flipped on its head, Pitino’s fired in a day.

Also, including Pitino on this list allows me to tell this hysterical story.  A few years back, Pitino was involved in a nasty little affair that saw him impregnating a woman during a restaurant tryst (he’s married, so I guess that serves as a decent reason not to like the guy), paying for her abortion and then watching as his assistant coach married her.  She eventually tried to extort him and was brought up on charges.  During the trial, Pitino was asked how long he and the woman had had sex.  His response?  15 seconds.  It was the first time I could imagine a judge would’ve been ok with perjury.

Fuck Rick Pitino.  It won’t take you that long.

Bill Self, Kansas

Kansas always destroys my brackets.  If I pick them in the Final Four, they lose in the first round.  If I pick them to lose in the first round, they go to the Final Four (ironically, Michigan State is in the process of assuming that “mantle”).  I hate Kansas for that reason alone.

But lately Kansas is a team that goes out fairly routinely in the first weekend, yet they’re still treated as basketball royalty.  They’ve won 2 titles since the Wilt Chamberlain era, one of them on the backs of Danny Manning and the other because John Calipari’s Memphis team couldn’t hit free throws.  The entire program is a fraud.

Fuck Bill Self for his association with an overrated program.

Tom Crean, Marquette/Indiana

Tom Crean is the very picture of what terrifies Michigan State grads.  Unlike Dean Smith at North Carolina, who has a pretty impressive coaching tree behind him, Tom Izzo’s assistants haven’t gone on to much success as head coaches themselves.  There’s a general concern about what will happen to the program should Izzo take a better gig or retire.  Crean was seen as a worthy heir.  He took Marquette to the Final Four, making Dwyane Wade a star in the process.  He moved on to Indiana, where he was expected to bring a once-proud program back to national prominence.  Short of a buzzer-beater against a Kentucky team that would go on to win the national championship, he’s done nothing.

Plus, he looks like a serial killer.

Fuck Tom Crean.  Just try to make sure he doesn’t take your skin afterwards.

Final Four:

Bo Ryan, Wisconsin

I’ll make it clear: I don’t hate Bo Ryan (well, aside from the fact that he looks like a rodent in the mafia).  Tom Izzo’s the best coach in the Big 10 – as I said I’m biased, but if you even try to argue that you’re probably an idiot – but Ryan’s clearly the second best.  It’s not really that close.  Thad Matta at Ohio State and John Beilein at Michigan are great coaches in their own right, but Ryan’s clearly one of the best coaches in the nation.  He’s done at Wisconsin what Izzo has done at Michigan State.

No, what I hate about Bo Ryan is the myriad of Wisconsin fans who will have you believe that Bo Ryan IS the best coach in the Big 10.  They’ll trumpet his Big 10 titles – no insignificant achievement, admittedly – and his 4 national titles in Division III.  And this happened before he went to the last 2 Final Fours!  Sorry, I don’t care about conference titles and I REALLY don’t care about what anyone does in Division III.  Talk to me about national championships and Final Fours.  Ryan has no titles to Izzo’s one and 2 Final Fours to Izzo’s 7.  Sorry Wisconsin, he’s got a long way to go to be in the discussion.

Fuck Bo Ryan.  I’m sure there are plenty of people in Wisconsin who will volunteer.

Roy Williams, Kansas/North Carolina

Exhibit 1: see Bill Self

Exhibit 2: Roy Williams is riding on the coattails of Dean Smith’s legacy.  Smith built UNC into a power program whose name says it all.  Being recruited by North Carolina in basketball is like being recruited by Alabama in football.  Unlike Nick Saban though, North Carolina has never been in the shitter (no matter what you think about the Matt Doherty era) and never had to build themselves up from probation and postseason bans.  Although they should.

It’s recently come out that North Carolina engaged in one of the biggest cases of academic fraud in the history of college sports.  Academic advisers wrote papers and players were steered to no-show classes.  It’s so bad that players are suing North Carolina and the NCAA for providing an inadequate education.  When asked about the academic situation, Roy Williams said, “It’s not my job to see that my players are getting an education.  My job is to coach the basketball team.”  To be fair, the NCAA agrees; in their response to the lawsuit, they’ve indicated the NCAA has no responsibility to provide their athletes an education.  Think of that next time you year the term “student-athlete”.

But back to Williams.  We’re supposed to believe that the academic advisers to the athletic department committed massive institutional academic fraud to keep its players eligible and that the basketball coach had nothing to do with it?

Fuck Roy Williams on the bridge in Brooklyn he’s got to sell you.

Championship Game:

Jim Boeheim, Syracuse

Jim Boeheim’s a dick.  There’s not even a joke there.  He’s an epic, world-class asshole.  If he were a cop he’d be the prick who went on a tirade against an Indian Uber driver in New York this week.  Add in his college basketball dictatorship and it’s there for all to see.

In 2014 Tyler Ennis decided he was going pro after his freshman year.  Boeheim wanted Ennis to continue playing for free at Syracuse, so he said Ennis shouldn’t go pro while proclaiming that half of the first-round draft picks in the NBA are out of the league in 3 years, a blatant falsehood.  He’s already declared, he’s not coming back no matter how much shit you talk about him, so why not talk up your guy and see if he can get drafted higher?  Nope, Boeheim talked shit about how hard it would be for a point guard to transition to the NBA and negatively compared him to another Syracuse player who’d left early a few years early.

Then Syracuse gets nailed for academic misconduct, improper booster activity and failure to adhere to its own drug testing policy, and Boeheim himself was called out for a failure to promote an atmosphere of compliance.  This was after Syracuse had already voluntarily declared themselves ineligible for this year’s NCAA tournament.  Syracuse was placed on probation, lost scholarships, and Boeheim was suspended for 9 games in the 2015-16 season.  And how does this prick respond?  He holds a press conference on the morning the NCAA tournament started, acted defiant and announced he would appeal the sanctions.  Nice way to bring the attention to yourself.

Fuck Jim Boeheim.  Fuck him like a prison bitch.  That’s not even a joke.  Fuck him hard.

This was a tight championship fight.  Think of Boeheim’s press conference as Gordan Hayward’s half-court shot in the 2010 title game that would’ve upset the eventual champion.  The same champion we see here.  There’s simply no topping…

National Champion:

Mike Krzyzewski, Duke

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I hate Mike Krzyzewski.  If I were to create my Mount Rushmore of sporting hatred, it would probably consist of Roger Goodell, Krzyzewski, Matt Millen, and Patrick Roy.  God I hate Krzyzewski.

Calipari gets all the crap for his one-and-done approach.  But let me throw out a few names.  Corey Maggette.  Kyrie Irving.  Luol Deng.  Austin Rivers.  Jabari Parker.  Jahlil Okafor (trust me, he’s not staying beyond this year).  This doesn’t include William Avery (more on him in a minute), Elton Brand or Jason Williams, who didn’t go after one year, but did leave early.  And yet assistant coach Jeff Capel came out and said, “Well, we’re not recruiting an entire class of one-and-dones.”  Arrogant fucks.

Back to William Avery.  Duke had one of its best teams in the 1998-99 season, entering the tournament with one loss.  But they lost in the championship game to Connecticut.  Everyone knew Elton Brand was gone.  Maggette and Avery were more of a surprise.  How did Krzyzewski respond?  He called Avery’s mother and exclaimed that her son was ruining his team.

This wasn’t even the biggest asshole move of his career.  Early in his career, a writer for the Duke student paper wrote a column discussing how the team wasn’t living up to expectations.  Krzyzewski brought the student writer into the locker room and loudly and angrily berated him in front of the team.  Even the players thought it was over the top.

Earlier this year, Duke kicked a player off its team for the first time in history.  Rasheed Sulaimon was dismissed for unknown reasons, but more than a year prior he had been accused of sexually assaulting 2 female students.  Think that’s a problem?  It gets worse.  Duke’s athletic department was made aware of the allegations in March 2014, and they violated federal law by not reporting them.  Think that happens without Krzyzewski’s knowledge?  You probably also believe there’s nothing Joe Paterno could’ve done to help those kids.

Krzyzewski is probably the best coach in college basketball history.  You can talk about John Wooden and his 10 national titles, but the game was easier that day and I could’ve won 7 titles in a row if I had Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton on my college teams.  It doesn’t make him the saint that Dick Vitale would have you believe.  He’s also coaching for a fan base who thinks the only black people who should be on campus are the ones on the basketball team.

Fuck Mike Krzyzewski.  You and your entire racist school.

There you have it folks.  Think my reasoning is irrational?  Got any other suggestions?  That’s fine, feel free to comment below.

On Karma and Mike Ilitch

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(Before I begin, it’s important to point out that I worked for the Ilitch family for five years.  None of what I write below has anything to do with my employment with the organization.  I left of my own free will.  This observation is based solely on my sports fandom and interest in the city as a whole.)

Sports Illustrated recently ran a story about spring training in 1995.  Included in that story was a tale about Sparky Anderson taking a stand and essentially ending his managerial career.  In his autobiography he called it his proudest moment.  In taking that stand he began to expose a little-known fact about one of the most beloved individuals in Detroit sports.

Mike Ilitch is kind of a dick.

Let’s start with a little history lesson.

In 1994, MLB owners decided that the finances of the game didn’t work for them.  Less than four years after being assessed damages of $280 million for colluding against free agents, the owners unilaterally decided that they would implement a salary cap.  The players balked – naturally, because salary caps are stupid – so the owners responded by refusing to pay a required $7.8 million to the players’ pension and benefit plan.  The players responded by going on strike, eventually leading to the cancellation of the 1994 World Series.

Early in 1995 the owners abandoned their salary cap plans; announced they would use replacement players (more on that shortly); abolished salary arbitration; centralized player negotiations with the commissioner’s office – which is bothersome on a number of levels that we won’t get into here; and ended an agreement not to collude on salaries.  The players filed an unfair labor practices complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.  Future Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotmayor issued an injunction against the owners, the old agreement was put back in place, and the players returned to work.  An agreement was eventually reached in November 1996 and baseball hasn’t seen a work stoppage since.

Now back to those replacement players…

The owners announced in January that they would use replacement players for the 1995 season.  Apparently they were dumb enough to think fans were just as willing to pay to watch Kevin Millar, Pete Rose Jr. and a 48-year-old Pedro Borbon play as they were to watch Barry Bonds, Ken Griffey Jr. and Greg Maddux.  There were a few interesting side notes to the replacement player ordeal.  The Baltimore Orioles decided they wouldn’t use replacement players.  Depending on whom you ask, this was because Peter Angelos made the bulk of his money representing Baltimore labor unions and their members.  Realistically, however, it was probably because the use of replacement players would end Cal Ripken Jr.’s run at Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games streak and cost the team a significant chunk of money in ticket sales and merchandising.

The Toronto Blue Jays announced they would play their home games at their spring training facility in Dunedin, Florida, because Canadian law prohibited companies from using replacement workers during a strike or lockout.  That they were willing to play their games at a minor league stadium probably says something about their expected attendance numbers with the replacement players.

And Sparky Anderson decided he wouldn’t manage the scabs.

Tigers’ owner Mike Ilitch was livid, placing Sparky on unpaid leave.  To be fair, this was a somewhat charitable move by the team considering Ilitch wanted to fire Sparky on the spot.  After the season Sparky left the team, never to manage in the Majors again, despite the fact that he was still interested in managing and was only 61 years old.

In 2000 Sparky was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.  When deciding what hat to wear on his plaque, he chose the Cincinnati Reds, a team he had managed half as long as he had managed the Tigers and also a team that had fired him (say whatever you want about the Tigers, they never officially fired him).  People in Detroit were not happy.  The Tigers held a “Sparky Anderson Day” in 2000, though they didn’t retire his number (no one ever wore #11 after Sparky).

In 2009, the Tigers held a 25th anniversary of their last World Series championship.  Sparky appeared frail; it would be his last appearance in Detroit.  If the Tigers were going to retire his number, it would’ve been the perfect time.  They didn’t.

Sparky died in November 2010.  The Tigers retired his number in 2011.  I find it to be no small coincidence that Sparky’s number wasn’t retired until after he passed away.

And for that I blame Mike Ilitch.

I don’t think Sparky should’ve had his number retired.  But if they were going to retire his number, there was absolutely no reason not to do it when he was still alive.

I’ll explain.

Years back, very early in my love affair with baseball, I heard a tale that the Tigers did not retire numbers for the majority of their history because Ty Cobb was their best player, and he didn’t wear a number that could be retired.  That lasted until 1980, when Al Kaline’s #6 was retired shortly after his enshrinement in the Hall of Fame.  In 1983, Charlie Gehringer and Hank Greenberg had their numbers retired, with Hal Newhouser following in 1997.  Up until that time, the only Tigers who had had their numbers retired were not only Hall of Famers, but they went into the Hall of Fame as Tigers.

Willie Horton’s number was retired in 2000.  Bluntly, it was an affirmative action retirement.  It was believed that a city with a population that was over 80% black and a history of race issues should have a black player with his number retired.  Horton was a bad choice – among black players in Tigers’ history Lou Whitaker would’ve been the better choice – but he was a good enough player, he was a key member of the 1968 world champions, he was from Detroit and he supposedly walked through the Detroit riots in 1967 in his uniform trying to quell the violence.

(Incidentally, Ilitch once “unretired” the number of Larry Aurie with the Red Wings.  Save for a short time when Aurie’s cousin wore his #6 with the Wings in the 1950’s, no one has worn the number again, but Aurie is not honored with a banner in the rafters as the other Red Wings’ retired numbers are.)

Still, I’ve always lived with the notion that in order to have your number retired by the Tigers you had to go into the Hall of Fame as a Tiger.  This is likely another myth I was told by some random stranger when I was a child at Tigers games, because I can’t dig anything up to support that either.  But if you ignore Willie Horton’s number (and you should), the myth stood.  And because of that myth, and because Sparky Anderson went into the Hall of Fame as a Red, his number shouldn’t have been retired.

But retire it they did.  And they did it horribly.  And they did it because Mike Ilitch is a dick.

Sparky Anderson refused to manage replacement players when the owners were so devious in their negotiations that an unfair labor practice complaint was upheld, and Ilitch hated him for it.  I imagine deep within the recesses of the Ilitch organization, there was a decree that Anderson’s number would be retired only after he was dead.

Larry Aurie?  The Ilitches have never addressed it.  His family has repeatedly requested an answer, and the Ilitches have given them nothing.  The best explanation came from Wings’ vice president Jimmy Devellano, who said in a 1997 article that Aurie’s number wasn’t in the rafters because he wasn’t in the Hockey Hall of Fame.  If it’s really that simple, there’s no reason it should’ve taken 15 years – from the time Ilitch bought the team until Devellano gave his answer – for the family to get an explanation.  And there’s no reason it couldn’t come from someone in the family.

The Ilitch family is looked at as one of Detroit’s saviors.  To an extent they are.  They moved their corporate headquarters from the Detroit suburbs to a restored Fox Theatre in 1989.  They built a new ballpark for the Tigers downtown and encouraged the Lions to do the same.  They’re currently building a new arena for the Wings and headquarters for Little Caesars in their Foxtown district.  They have contributed a great deal of money to the Detroit economy.

They’ve also taken a great deal from it.

That ballpark was partially financed – to the tune of $115 million – by public funds, including Indian casino revenue.  Interestingly, Marian Ilitch – Mike’s wife – owns Motor City Casino in Detroit, a casino that is very much not Indian.  The new arena and downtown headquarters?  $285 million of the $650 million cost of that project will come from public financing.  That financing was requested from and approved by a lame duck state legislature at the same time Detroit was in the middle of the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.

They received 39 vacant parcels of land from the city for $1.  They paid $50 million buying out private owners in the area.

They refused to sign a community benefits agreement that would ensure a certain percentage of permanent, non-construction jobs at the arena went to Detroiters.

The Ilitches are reportedly worth $4.8 billion.

I understand this is business as usual in the sports world.  It doesn’t make it right.

The Ilitches have been working on a new arena for the Red Wings for some time now.  One of the worst kept secrets in the city was exactly where that arena would be built.  Hell, in 2000 the Ilitches opened Hockeytown Café in the Foxtown district, across the street from Comerica Park.  Hockeytown is a mile away from Joe Louis Arena.  It will be 2 blocks from the new arena.

Behind Fox Theatre and a block away from Hockeytown Café lie blocks of unpaved parking lots and abandoned unsightly buildings.

Sorry, that needs to be restated.

Behind Fox Theatre and a block away from Hockeytown Café lie blocks of Ilitch-owned unpaved parking lots and abandoned unsightly buildings.  When the new arena was announced, it was asked of the family why nothing had been done to develop those areas.  Chris Ilitch, Mike’s son and the current president and CEO of the family organization, gave a very simple answer: they couldn’t develop the area because doing so would have driven up the value of the surrounding areas that they were trying to acquire for the arena.

If it doesn’t benefit them, they’re not doing it.

There’s a building – or what’s left of a building – 2 blocks west of Comerica Park on Adams Street in Detroit.  All that’s left is the building’s façade that is supported by scaffolding that hangs over the sidewalk, a sidewalk that is travelled by hundreds of thousands of baseball fans when the Tigers are in town.  The remainder of the building was torn down because the organization would’ve lost a $2 million credit had they not pulled it down when they did.  As for the façade?  Well that’s still there because it’s still eligible for tax incentives for historical buildings.  It looks like shit and there hasn’t been work done on that building in years, but they’re keeping it just in case.

They’ll tear down their crumbling buildings, but they’re not going to pay for it.

I’ll say it again.  The Ilitches are reportedly worth $4.8 billion.

Now I’ll bet some of you are asking, “What does Sparky Anderson not getting his number retired until after he died have to do with the business dealings of the Ilitch family?”  To me, the answer is somewhat simple.

Karma.

I don’t know if karma exists.  You like to think it does, that bad people are going to get what’s coming to them.  But the more you watch the news and see that executives who play a huge rule in destroying their companies, not to mention the lives of the people who work for those companies, getting golden parachutes to leave, you start to wonder.  Personally, the greatest example of karma I’ve seen lately was when the Cowboys were screwed out of what was probably a legit catch that would’ve gone a long way toward winning their playoff game a week after they’d taken advantage of a horrendous call that helped them beat the Lions in the Wild Card game.  That’s about as simple as it gets.  Other people?  You never know.

But I look at Mike Ilitch and his family, and I wonder.

It is well known in Detroit that Mike Ilitch wants to win a title with the Tigers before he dies.  Now, if he hadn’t spent the first 14 years of his ownership basically ignoring the team, save for financing a new park and signing a couple of big name free agents when no one else would, he might have had that title by now.  But nevertheless, he wants to win.  And he spends to win.  And that spending has brought him teams that were legitimate title contenders.  His 2006 Tigers team collapsed in the World Series with a ridiculous comedy of errors and lost to a team with 83 wins.  I still contend the 2007 team was title worthy, but they collapsed in the last month of the season.  The 2009 team was done in by some horrendous decisions and at least one terrible umpire’s call in the infamous “Game 163”.  They had a chance in 2011, but the Rangers were probably better and you never know how they would’ve fared in the World Series against St. Louis.  In 2012 they got shut down in the World Series and scored a total of 6 runs in 4 games.  The 2013 team might’ve had the best chance of them all, but dumb luck, great pitching by the Red Sox and some bad fielding cost them a chance at the World Series.

Since 2006, the Tigers probably should have won at least 1 World Series, and to suggest that they could’ve won as many as 4 is not ridiculous (a bit farfetched perhaps, but not ridiculous).  And yet they have none.

The Tigers are becoming the Buffalo Bills (although in 3 of their 4 Super Bowl losses, the Bills really had no chance at kickoff).

There have been some questionable moves by Detroit management in the past few years.  Jarrod Washburn and Aubrey Huff didn’t work out, but there was no reason to think they wouldn’t, and it’s not like the Tigers gave up much.  They probably shouldn’t have cut Gary Sheffield before the 2009 season considering they were still going to pay him.  The Doug Fister traeidfhjpaetupaousljcmvajouiekjamnvas

Sorry, brief Doug Fister Trade Induced Seizure (it’s a legitimate medical diagnosis here in Detroit).

But the Tigers are not the Lions.  There have been far more good moves than bad.  When they made a bad move (Prince Fielder), they corrected it with a good one (dumping him for Ian Kinsler).  There’s no one calling for a team legend’s head because he used valuable payroll space to sign Charlie Villanueva and Ben Gordon.

So one wonders why one of these teams hasn’t been holding the trophy at the end of the year.

And I think its karma.  Mike Ilitch wants a title, and karma won’t allow it.

Pillaging the city and the state for public financing when he could’ve finance development with his own money?  Strike one.

Leaving large swaths of land that could’ve been developed dilapidated and rotting because it would’ve driven up your price to acquire other land?  Strike two.

Waiting until after Sparky Anderson died to retire his number?  Strike three.

And I’m not even bringing up the glorious managerial tenures of Buddy Bell, Larry Parrish or Luis Pujols, or the disastrous reign of GM Randy Smith.

I can’t say I don’t wish death on anyone – I have irrational hatreds toward guys like Roger Goodell and an unhealthy number of politicians – but I certainly don’t wish it upon Mike Ilitch or his family.  For as much as I don’t like what they’ve done to acquire land and finance their development, there’s no denying that his investment in the city has been a huge help.  It’s hard to imagine where Detroit would be without him.

But I do wonder if the baseball gods are looking down and seeing what’s gone on with this team and this city and said, “Nope, not while he’s around.”

Sparky Anderson dies.  The Tigers retire his number the following year.

Mike Ilitch dies.  Do the Tigers win his elusive title the following year?

Only time will tell.  I hope it doesn’t take that long.

Note: This post has been corrected to properly reflect the Ilitches’ net worth.  Forbes recently reported that they are currently worth $4.8 billion, not $3.2 billion as originally indicated.

The Perfect Ending

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Sunday was the first without football since early September, and in an effort to be somewhat timely, I feel it’s important to discuss this past season before I wait 3 months to write something else in a timely fashion.

As seasons go, 2014 will go down in history as one of the worst in the history of the NFL, if not all of American professional sports.  Sure, in the League’s history, they’d probably say the strike years of 1982 and 1987 were worse.  And it’s hard to argue that this year ranks with the 1994 MLB season, which saw the cancellation of the World Series, and only Gary Bettman and the NHL would cancel an entire season.  But eliminate work stoppages, and this year’s football season was about as bad as it gets.

And the Super Bowl provided the perfect capper.

Let’s offer a quick recap.  The season really got off to its start in February, when Ray Rice knocked out his fiancee (now wife) and was caught on camera dragging her out of an Atlantic City elevator.  In July, Dictator…sorry, Commissioner Roger Goodell decided that seeing a guy dragging his unconscious fiancee out of an elevator after he’d knocked her out was only worth a 2-game suspension.  In September, TMZ released the video of Rice actually hitting his fiancee.  Shortly thereafter (as in, later that same day), the Ravens released Rice and the NFL suspended him indefinitely.  If you think it’s problematic that the NFL suspended a guy for an offense that they’d already suspended him for, congratulations, you’ve got more common sense than the NFL commissioner and really any of his advisors in the League office.

Four days after the Rice video surfaced, Adrian Peterson was arrested for beating the shit out of his 4-year-old son.  I won’t get into the ugly details of the case, but it’s safe to say that you’d think a guy who’s 6’2″, 217 pounds and is built to handle a football in the NFL 300-400 times a year probably could’ve found a way to discipline a 4-year-old kid without ordering the kid to bring Peterson a switch.  The Vikings “deactivated” him for a game, then ownership decided they wanted him reinstated, so they sent the GM out to make that announcement (despite the fact that the GM disagreed with that decision).  Of course, the GM did it in front of a backdrop that was covered in Radisson advertisements, so Radisson decided they were going to pull their sponsorship of the team.  Ownership then stepped up and decided to “deactivate” Peterson indefinitely (never question the power of the almighty dollar) and Peterson was put on the Commissioner’s exempt list, with pay.  After he pleaded his case out, a representative of the NFL told Peterson he would get a 2-game suspension, with time on the exempt list being credited against that suspension, only to have Goodell suspend him for the remainder of the season, with no consideration for time served.

Rice and Peterson aren’t what you would consider sympathetic figures, and Peterson’s behavior after he was deactivated probably had a lot to do with his punishment.  But look at the way the NFL treated the punishment process – to say they made it up as they went along insults the people who truly are making stuff up as they go along – and left the players union out of that decision-making process paints the League in a truly unflattering light.

So as these two cases hung over the League for quite literally the entire season, the playoffs went exactly how you would expect: with no one speaking about what happened on the field and instead talking about incompetent officiating, deflated footballs and the dumbest play call perhaps in the history of the League.

In the Wild Card round of the playoffs, the Lions led by 3 at Dallas with just over 8 minutes to go in the game.  On 3rd and 1, Matthew Stafford dropped back for a pass to Brandon Pettigrew, who was both held and interfered with on the play.  The refs threw a flag, Dez Bryant ran on the field to complain, and then the refs picked up the flag without calling a penalty.  Not for the hold, not for the pass interference, not for the hothead running onto the field to complain to the refs.  It’s not quite fair to say that this one play cost the Lions the game – they scored 3 points in the second half, Jim Caldwell decided to kick the ball away on 4th and 1 instead of trusting his defense, and Sam Martin unleashed a 10-yard punt at the worst possible moment – but being in field goal range with a fresh set of downs would’ve made the Cowboys’ job a lot harder.

cowboyspi-copy

The following week, as if to prove that karma exists, the Cowboys got screwed by a bad rule (although not a bad call).  Dez Bryant made what should’ve been regarded as one of the best and most clutch catches in NFL postseason history to give the Cowboys 1st and goal inside the 2-yard line.  Instead, an idiotic rule that burned the Lions in 2010 was called – correctly – the Cowboys gave up the ball on downs, and the Cowboys lost a game that they might otherwise have won.

In the conference title game, the Packers collapsed, blowing a 12-point lead with just over 2 minutes left in the game to send Seattle to the Super Bowl.  Meanwhile, the Patriots destroyed the Colts, winning 45-7, but the big news became the fact that the Patriots were using footballs that were deflated to less than the NFL’s minimum requirements.  The fact that the NFL used properly inflated balls for the second half of the game, a half in which the Patriots outscored the Colts 28-0, seems to be irrelevant.

(I saw an interesting theory prior to the Super Bowl that the Lions’ curse contributed to the Seahawks making the Super Bowl.  The theory went that the curse transferred from the Lions to the Cowboys on the pass interference that wasn’t, then from the Cowboys to the Packers on the Dez Bryant catch that wasn’t, then from the Packers to the Seahawks on their last-minute collapse.  Considering how the Super Bowl ended, it’s somewhat difficult to disagree with this theory.)

After the Wild Card round we talked about officiating.  After the Divisional round we talked about stupid rules.  After the Conference title games we talked about deflated balls.  So it’s fitting that the Super Bowl ended with a terrible play call and a brawl.

The general discussion surrounding the NFL for the past few years has related to things happening off the field.  Concussions, domestic violence, the general incompetence of the Commissioner.  Very few discussions have included the play of the players.  The only real discussion related to the play on the field this season became whether or not Tom Brady has cemented his place as the greatest quarterback of all time.  It’s not a ridiculous discussion, but it’s interesting that we probably don’t have that discussion if Pete Carroll calls for a handoff to Marshawn Lynch instead of having his QB throw it over the middle.

It hasn’t changed since the Super Bowl.  On top of the Pete Carroll play call, we’ve heard about a texting scandal that could bring about fines and suspensions to the Cleveland Browns, not to mention the year-long suspension of their star wide receiver and the story that their supposed QB of the future is in rehab.  Oh, and four more players have been arrested this week, on charges ranging from drug and gun possession to assault to animal cruelty.  The NFL is nothing if not consistent.

There’s nothing to suggest the NFL is going anywhere.  The viewership hasn’t changed, attendance isn’t down, and no advertisers have walked away.  So as bad as this season has been, not much will change.  But if we see many seasons where the discussion isn’t about what the players did on the field but rather what they did off the field, the number of kids playing the game might continue to drop.  There was a time when boxing and horse racing were on par with baseball; now they’re niche sports.  Is it realistic to think that the NFL is headed that way?  Probably not.  But stranger things have happened.

Let’s just hope that there aren’t many more seasons like this to help advance the NFL’s demise.