Lombardi's_kid_brother

You know, what’s the worst that happens if the team trades for Watson? Goodell is not going to punish a franchise or owner for something like this without some warning. It’s not like the team’s reputation can get worse. If you are still buying tickets, you have basically announced that morality is not really a factor in your decision-making process. It’s time to raise the black flag and begin slitting throats. Get Watson. Then, I dunno, sign Lawrence Phillips.

I still want the Art Mills emails.

It’s a fun theory. But baseball viewed DC as a dangerous city they had rejected the sport twice until the 90s. At that point, The Orioles believed it was their market.

Show me the Art Mills emails, you jags!!!

I will say that starting up this retired number jersey game now after basically not doing it for decades is a complicated issue. And starting with Taylor 14 years after he died is ….. complicated. That feels like something that should have been done in the moment. He’s basically Washington’s Thurman Munson. Fans of other teams say “Oh yea, that guy was pretty good.” Anyone alive in the moment gets why it was a huge deal. But if the Yankees decided to pull out all the stops to honor Munson In 1993, it would be seen as odd. The issue is the distance makes it more about the play on the field, not the loss of his future. And that does allow 50 other guys to think “I was better” or “I did more.”

The timing of this is such that either Portis will be there and we wonder what his sentence he going to be. Or he won’t which would honestly kinda suck.

Reducing Sean Taylor to a “Look, Squirrel!” gif is just so deliciously Snyder. I am going to print the press release, grind it, and snort it.

Congratulations. You made a post so dumb that I felt compelled to pull my old yahoo account out of mothballs, reset my password to this hell site, and log in just to tell you this post is dumb. If anything, this team has wildly over invested in the QB position. During the last two Cousins seasons, they had a lack of early rounders on the roster due to RGIII and we’re using like 1/8 of the cap on Cousins. By the end of the Fat Gruden era, we had arguably the least talented roster in the league in large part because all the money and picks spent on WBs who were gone. Even now, this is a roster missing spots because if the resources spent on Smith Haskins, and Fitzpatrick- none of whom currently wear a uniform. The QB sunk costs with this team are simply extraordinary. If this team had been smart, we would be currently discussing the future QB after Cousins’ third WFT contract is up in a year or two.

I forget where I heard it, but someone pointed out that this is no longer just among active players. Kobe was not involved at all with the Lakers and went several years without going to games until his daughter apparently expressed an interest in it. But it seems like every player in the league had had a conversation with him in the last three years. In the old days, Magic and Bird had to become coaches or executives after they retired to maintain an influence. Now, it seems like there are dozens if not hundreds of informal advisors all over the place driving the culture. My theory is that this is why the NBA in the 90s got weird for a while. Bird, Magic, Jordan etc grew the game and made everyone rich. And then the Colemans, Webers, and all the 18 year olds came into this Candyland where teams still only had two or three assistants and the old guard was not interested in mentoring anyone. I imagine any young player who reached out to surly competitive psychos like Bird, Jordan, or Isiah were either told to F off or had some weird psychological game played on them. Magic was the one guy who sorta set the template, but he's Magic so he always wanted to give his advice on camera somewhere and possibly have it sponsored. I think Lebron probably carves out an hour a day simply to text "Keep Working" to 50 different guys, probably going into the high school ranks at this point. And this is why you can never really stop Super Teams and stuff like that. If you and I had played against each other in AAU, had been seated in the green room together on draft night, texted three times a day, and trained with each other in the summer. Eventually, one of us is going to say, "Hey....we should team up and take over the league."

Life is weird. As I was eating breakfast yesterday, I wasn't thinking, "Lamar Odom is going to make my wife cry in the next 24 hours." Also, has anyone checked on Meta?

By the way, the path to NBA greatness now seems to go through the Olympic team. With Kobe's death, all the stories are coming out about how Lebron, Wade, and their peers spent a summer with Kobe with realized what they had to do in practice/training. Zion will get his summer with Lebron, and if he's smart, he will show up to the next training camp in the best shape of his life. Zion has rolled out of bed and been twice as good as everyone he has ever played with his entire life. Even at Duke. That's probably still the case to some degree in New Orleans. But the cool thing about the modern NBA is that all these guys know each other and practice together in the off-season. He'll get his Oympic team experience. He'll get his summer in LA with Kawhi, And he'll learn hopefully. I honestly think that the NBA culture has evolved to a point where the Derrick Colemans of the world really don't exist any longer. Even someone as great as Barkley....you wonder...what would his career have been like if he spent a summer playing pickup against Bird and Magic instead of, I dunno, eating pork rinds and watching Mama's Family. And I think all these guys are aware of this. You know Lebron James has spent every moment of the last 12 years or so pondering his "legacy." He absolutely is picturing a moment when he hands the Finals MVP trophy to Zion in 2030, and Zion says, "That summer in Tokyo with this man is really what made all of this possible" while Lebron does the whole "Pass on what you have learned, young man" routine.

My daughter went to Harden's basketball camp a few years ago. And to his credit, he was there for every minute of it and was running drills with the kids. He would also do something insanely athletic every 15 or 20 minutes just to keep their interest. Point being, NBA players in real life are difficult to process. You look at Harden on the court, and he seems like an average-sized dude who seems slightly out of shape next to everyone else. You stand next him by a water fountain and he is one of the largest human beings you have ever encountered, seems as wide as he is tall, and even through a t-shirt seems like a fitness model.

I was thinking about this last night. What made Kobe fascinating was how legitimately odd he was. Most black NBA stars are not relatively privileged teenagers who grew up overseas and spoke multiple languages. He was weirdly uncool. Except he had a single-minded drive and focus where he decided that the culture would accept him as cool. His nickname is the great example of this. How many NBA veterans suddenly announce to the world that he has given himself a new nickname? And one stolen from a movie at that. I was way into the baskeball blogosphere when that happened, and everyone found it hysterical. And yet, slowly over time, we all not only accepted "Mamba," we embraced it. Because unlike a million other celebrities, Kobe was not going to back down to the jokes. When the news came across my phone yesterday, my first thought was "Mamba, no!!!" I have a daughter Gigi's age, and the most fun I have with her is sports tournaments. She's quirky and is now way into archery. She and I are going to College Station next weekend for a tournament. If something would happen to us on the way, my wife would mourn me, but she would never get over the loss of our daughter. I can't imagine what Vanessa Bryant is going through now.

When's Season 9?

Shoulda hired Norv.

Has no one replaced Harry Dean Stanton's head with Norv Turner's in that scene from Red Dawn? Avenge me!!!

Martial Court martial. That one drives me even more batty than people who don't know the difference between "loose" and "lose." Carry on.

Occupying Iran would be utterly impossible. It has twice the population of Iraq and like 3 and a half times the land mass. Not to mention that its leadership has probably been planning for an occupation/insurgency since 2003. The idea what we would be trying to subdue Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan simultaneously at this late date is insanity of the highest order. The fear I have with Trump is he doesn't want this and honestly can't run for re-election with this looming over him....but he's also backed himself into a corner. Watching him negotiate against himself in a military escalation is remarkable.

The scary thing is Trump's entire leadership style is doubling down and doubling down until he finally just gives up entirely. This means that in a hot war, I would assume that all options would be on the table with little thought to casualties on either side right until the moment he decides that casualties are too great and then we pull out completely and unexpectedly. My prediction is a series of escalations that leads to wide-scale destruction in Iran, escalating terrorist attacks around the world, and then a total withdrawal from Iraq which leaves it a proxy state of Iran.

Is there anything about KOC that makes us want to keep him aside from the fact that we are still feeling the shame of once having McVay on staff and if you squint really hard, you can see a resemblance? Is there anything about KOC as a play caller/human being that makes keeping him essential? Or is this literally just, "We can't lose the homecoming queen again." I say this, because the best play in our offense the last two years has been "Hand the ball to the old guy and hope something good happens."

I want to see your actual board. I don't believe you have one.

Yes, but the movies have established that Kylo Ren secretly sucks at everything. He's one of those NBA stars with unlimited potential who never practiced and never developed a jump shot. His approach to every situation has been to swing wildly and kill everyone in the room. One of the over-arching themes of all the movies - including the prequels - is that all these people have really bad teachers. Obi-wan himself doesn't seem completely trained by the end of the first prequel. Obi-wan's entire approach to Anakin is to say, "Patience, my young Padawan" fourteen times a movie. Luke gets no training. Rey has no training. Kylo is trained by a clearly alcoholic Luke and then the incredible melting man. Obi-wan is the one who really points out how little training Luke got. He's like 30 in the prequel and is still an apprentice. Luke - at best - levitated some rocks for two months with a dying old green hermit on his back. I care about Star Wars more than you do. I went to KMart in 1978 and shook hands with some dude covered in gold wrapping paper on the day the action figures were FINALLY released. Top that!!!! Also, you are wrong.

I've said this a dozen times. The Star Wars universe - on film at least - is incredibly small. Everyone in it is related to Anakin Sywalker, friends with Anakin Skywalker, or friends with his relatives. There are millions of planets and everyone is three degrees of separation from Anakin at most. And the fans both hate this and want it to be the driving theme of the new trilogy. Rey needs to be related to someone we know already, because everyone else is related to someone we know already.

Here is where all Star Wars fans (and I saw the first one in 1977 in a goddamn drive so leave me alone) are insane. We all agree that ESB is the best movie by far. In that movie, Luke trains with Yoda for maybe a week and a half. Seriously, his training his cross cut with the Falcon escaping from Hoth, going into an asteroid belt and going to Cloud City. That took three weeks tops. And the training seemed to consist entirely of running in a swamp and making **** float. Luke didn't train long enough to win a Tough Man contest. That's as far as I got into the Expanded Universe too. I quickly realized that I just didn't need books on the adventures of Wedge or whatever.

The level of baseball expertise here is why I keep coming back. All delightful repartee aside, I don't think there has ever been an era where managers do less than the one we are currently living in.