There hasn’t been much going on in sports lately but that does not mean that ALDLAND doesn’t have things to talk about. We talk peeing on graves, we talk invading countries to take their sports stars, as well as more normal sports topics like soccer and baseball. It’s all here in the ALDLAND podcast.
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In news today that was mostly (but not totally) condemned as tone-deaf and inappropriate, the NFL suspended Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice for two games, but no preseason games, practices, or training camp activities, and docked his pay for a third game, for beating his then-fiancee, Janay, until she was unconscious and dragging her out of an elevator at an Atlantic City casino this February. That the NFL has a serious domestic abuse problem became frighteningly clear at Rice’s post-beating press conference (which I unfortunately had to highlight here). Today’s mild sanction did nothing to change that nauseating narrative.
Deadspin put together a list of “other notable NFL suspensions,” which offers some context for Rice’s two-game sanction. If you want to read the list, with all of the details and circumstances, it’s available here. I’ve attempted to distill the list to the basics below. Continue reading
The Wall Street Journal (now with questionable sports bona fides!) published today, in oral-history style, a feature on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s 1974 summer stadium tour. An introductory excerpt:
On July 9, 1974, a month before President Richard Nixon resigned, with albums by Elton John and John Denver at the top of the charts, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young reunited to begin an ambitious nine-week tour of the U.S., Canada and England. Produced by Bill Graham, most of the 31 concerts were performed at stadiums and speedways with lengthy sets and clear, audible sound—firsts for an outdoor rock tour. Tickets cost about $7.50 (or $36 in today’s dollars).
Although the band hadn’t had a top-10 album since 1971, CSNY performed three-hour sets before crowds averaging 50,000 per concert, paving the way for rock stadium tours that followed.
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Graham Nash: The idea for the tour was Bill Graham’s. Bill called me in my room at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles in early ’74. Bill said a lot of money could be made, and we knew Bill was used to putting on large events and had just produced Bob Dylan’s 40-date tour. Bill also pointed out that something on this scale had never been tried before, which sounded pretty cool to us.
For our music-sports nexus, the article also sheds a little light on Stephen Stills’ well-photographed penchant for wearing football jerseys onstage and on album covers:
[Tour photographer Joel] Bernstein: Stephen started wearing football jerseys on stage that year. The jerseys had a practical purpose—they were big and loose and perfect for a guitarist on stage. But they also were a statement. Remember, there were no NFL stores back then. All of those jerseys were originals, given to him by NFL players. I think for Stephen, they symbolized being in a stadium on a great team. There probably was a certain amount of irony there, too—he was a big football fan.
Speaking of photographs, the article includes a slideshow, which is the real gem here. High-quality audio and video from the tour are due out next month, but HD sideburn images are just a click away. Continue reading
Why would she marry him?
It’s the natural question that arises after watching the video of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice dragging the unconscious body of Jenay Rice from the elevator where he knocked her out. Then his fiancée — the video was taken in mid-February before their wedding later that month — on Friday she stood by him as his wife for a stomach-flipping press conference. The disgust starts with the monstrous obliviousness of Ray Rice’s stating, “Failure is not getting knocked down, but not getting up,” and ends with Jenay Rice sharing the blame for his unconscionable crime. That so many wonder how this situation could end with Rice easily avoiding jail time and marrying the woman he battered betrays the willful ignorance of a society that enables him.
Violence is how abusers keep their victims from escaping. Wondering why Jenay Rice would stay requires a focused ignorance of a world in which roughly one third of murders against women are committed by an intimate partner. In this world, the threat of death, expressed or implied, can keep anyone captive.
Ray Rice, the Baltimore Ravens and the NFL have seemingly normalized domestic violence as a learning experience for the abuser. Apparently, the crime isn’t the crime itself, but failing to offer a mawkish homily on how the crime made you a better person. The future of domestic violence in sports is here now. … Read More
(via Sports On Earth)
No-longer-suspended-from-Twitter ESPN “Sports Business Reporter” Darren Rovell buried the lede in a story published yesterday related to the news that some leaders at Texas A&M are considering renaming the schools’ football stadium “Kyle Field: The House That Johnny Built.” Rather than a foolhardy, if historically accurate, branding exercise, the real story here is the apparent rift between former Aggie quarterback Johnny Manziel and “Uncle” Nate Fitch, Manziel’s longtime friend and manager of sorts.
The details of Fitch’s relationship with the former Heisman Trophy winner are sketchy, but the story seems to be that Fitch saw a star in his high-school friend and went all-in:
[Fitch is] a college dropout, in the entrepreneurial sense of the word, more dreamer than slacker. He’s Manziel’s assistant, media coordinator, business manager, designated driver. He goes by Uncle Nate, which is a nickname Manziel says Fitch gave himself. Fitch, 20, allegedly works for free, betting on the come, looking into the future when Manziel is an NFL star. He wears a gold rope bracelet, acting like an agent on a television show, talking with confidence about tit-for-tat horse trading and his deep knowledge of the NCAA rulebook. . . . As publicists go, he handled himself like a pro.
Now, however, the news of the possible renaming of Kyle Field has shed new light on the relationship between Fitch and Manziel, and it looks like the two aren’t on the same page. According to the Rovell story, Fitch’s family attempted to register “The House That Johnny Built” as a trademark, but the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office refused the requested registration. Manziel himself already applied for the same trademark back in January.
What’s going on between these two? I obviously don’t know, and my sources in the Houston area aren’t talking, but it sure looks like Manziel and Fitch have gone from collaborators to competitors.
About an hour after the Cleveland Browns drafted Manziel late in the first round of the NFL draft last week, Fitch posted a tweet:
There are plenty of obvious potential narratives here, but the fact that no one seems to be investigating the apparent discord between Manziel and Fitch may simply be a testament to the overwhelming scope of the NFL stage. Over the past two years, reporters couldn’t get enough of Johnny Manziel, SEC quarterback. As of last Thursday, though, he’s just another NFL rookie.
The NFL draft is as popular of a sports topic as anything that actually involves sports. Spread out over three days it might seem like an endurance event, but really it seems more like a sprint placed cleverly in the middle of offseason with football fans of both the collegiate and the professional variety hungry for action of some kind.
I recently saw an interesting graphic shown below (click for full size).
The green boxes highlight totally correct picks and the yellow boxes highlight the correct player but the wrong team (when teams traded picks). The scores at the bottom are the number of totally correct picks plus half the number of partially correct picks. No analyst listed has more than one partially correct pick.
I wanted to know how much better than “random” this representative sample was.
I’m going to throw some numbers around, correct me if you think they should be corrected. Recalculating things isn’t too hard.
Suppose that we can come up with 50 players who might go in the first round (the top 50 players on the board), but completely unordered (that is, there is no reason to believe that, say, Clowney, will get picked near the top). Suppose I randomly order 32 of those players. How many would I get correct? We’ll ignore pick trading (making every “yellow” a “green” and rounding up all the .5’s).
I feel too lazy to do the math, so I’ll roll the dice a few (million) times instead. I created two shuffled lists of numbers from 1-50 and compared how many of the first 32 numbers of each were the same. I then repeated this 1,000,000 times just to be sure. Think of this as monkeys at a typewriter spitting out drafts (of either the NFL variety or the Shakespearean).
Results: I would expect to get about 0.64 picks correct with this (random out of top 50 players) random strategy. 34% of the time I got exactly one pick correct while 47% of the time I get at least one pick correct.
Certainly everyone on this list did better than this, as one would hope. That said, those near the bottom (those scoring one and two – Shaun King and Evan Silva respectively) didn’t do that well. 14% of the time I got more than one pick correct and 3% of the time I got more than two picks correct.
Of the one million monkeys (or the one million drafts of the draft from one monkey) the maximum score I got was an eight (a score that two of the reporters shared) one time, making their predictions about one in a million out of my technique. That is, I feel fairly confident that their techniques are better than randomly shuffling the top 50 players into place. Those at the bottom, I am not so sure.
It’s time for another ALDLAND Podcast, and this one has it all. There’s NBA playoff coverage, discussion of retirement gifts for Derek Jeter, and even live NFL draft updates that won’t matter by the time you listen to this because you will know who was drafted where already. But I’m sure you would agree that it’s the thought that counts.
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He’s done. He can’t take another year. The grind of football has exhausted him, and the grind is just now starting. It’s July. He’s in the weight room of his Huntington Beach home, in a gated community only miles from the projects where he was raised. He is about to work out, because his 37-year-old body might not last 16 games otherwise, because he has played in the NFL for 16 years and knows no other way. He is a physical wonder, sculpted to the last inch, but the imperative to work out is more draining than the workout itself. His body seems to be outlasting his will, rather than the reverse.
Tony Gonzalez has convinced himself that he can find happiness without football. Of course, he’s said that before. He all but filed retirement papers the past two years only to return. He exists in a state of conflict that he hates, of not being able to live with the game or without it. Now he’s tired. The energy required to train at his future Hall of Fame level is offset only by the certitude of finality. He looks around his weight room, littered with steel plates and bars. “I can’t wait to get rid of all this next year,” he says. “Should have gotten rid of it last year.”
He pauses.
“I’ll never need this shit again.” … Read More
(via ESPN The Magazine)
Following NFL draft prospect Michael Sam’s announcement about his sexual orientation (he’s gay) last weekend, many people wrote and said many stupid things. Many more, I hope and believe, wrote and said positive things. The reality, though, is that few of us knew Sam’s name a week ago, which is a little bit baffling when we found out he was the top defensive player in the top college football conference, perhaps the truest testament to the bandied axiom that this is the football age of offense. As a result, the other reality this week is that few people’s responsive comments have been insightful or of much consequence.
Thankfully, there have been exceptions. The first was the video SB Nation/KSK’s Matt Ufford made the day after Sam’s announcement:
https://twitter.com/ALDLANDia/status/433045693540728833
The second was Jeb Lund’s intelligently written article for Sports on Earth, posted later that same day, which took aim at Sam’s critics with precision.
The other two items are the dispassionate scouting reports of SoE’s Russ Lande and MMQB’s Greg Bedard. Lande holds some optimism for Sam’s draft position, while Bedard is more cynical, even going so far as to write that Sam may not be drafted at all.
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One has to think that Sam has a better chance of playing in the NFL– whether a team takes him in the draft or offers him a chance as an undrafted free agent– than Jason Collins had of extending his NBA career following his own sexual orientation announcement. As those scouting reports imply, though, it likely will be impossible to know whether or how Sam’s announcement affects his draft outcome this May.
What an exciting time in sports! The Super Bowl has just concluded and the Olympics are kicking into gear. And that’s not even including tonight’s lead story, which is the most exciting sports thing to happen since ever. And it’s not all just sports tonight. There is also extensive discussion of Sochi bathroom hypotheticals. So plug those headphones in and press play.
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Download the ALDLAND podcast at our Podcasts Page or stream it right here:
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