I started drinking beer in 1987 and never really stopped. But I had already stopped playing basketball before then.
This is one reason why it's a really good idea to have different divisions in your sports league. No, Tranmere Rovers are not the best team in England, but that's why they're in Division Two (which is of course the fourth division). They play against other teams of more or less the same ability and have a good chance of winning matches. Much less demoralising for players and spectators.
I have been trying for a while now to put together a bunch of thoughts on college sports (basketball is the one I follow at the moment) in an era when both NIL and legalized gambling hit simultaneously, which is now also an era when college life is ending. These thoughts are very much still disassembled, but I did see this article go by.
Even if schools are freed up to spend $20.5 million on players under terms of the settlement, that money will be distributed in different ways to players in different sports - mostly football and men's and women's basketball.
While there are plans for an enforcement body to make sure everyone follows the same rules, even its role is murky with the launch only three months away.
The payments will come from the schools -- above the table -- but the general lack of transparency in college sports put a disconcerting spin on Hamilton's departure from Florida State. Late last year, six players sued the coach, claiming he did not make good on promises to pay them NIL money in a dispute seen elsewhere this past season.
The school has denied wrongdoing. Hamilton doesn't talk about the lawsuit. He is more comfortable asking questions about the world that created it.
"You can't be the president of Chrysler today and the president of Ford tomorrow. You can't play for the Lakers on Monday, then go play for the Clippers on Friday," Hamilton said. "And somebody needs to be accountable for the chaos and explain what the thought process is of how we're supposed to deal with all this. There has to be a structure. That's how you keep order in society."
3: Right, US sports have weird parity within leagues, rather than the same teams winning every year, but the flipside of that is it's enforced by giving better players to the teams that are bad. The upshot is that instead of having a disincentive to being terrible (you get relegated and hence make way less money) instead teams that aren't that good have an active incentive to be bad for a while ("tanking") to get those sweet sweet draft picks. The alternative of a "big 6" (Lakers, Knicks, Celtics, Bulls, Warriors, and Heat?) winning every year is not so popular with fans and owners.
(Celtics are Liverpool obviously, Warriors are Man City, Lakers Man U, Knicks are Tottenham obviously, Chicago I guess is Chelsea, and now the analogy breaks down because nowhere in England has good enough weather to be the Heat.)
5: I'm a victim of a poorly designed incentive structure.
7: Almost all of my cars have been made by Chrysler.
||
In the unlikely event Hunter Brothers reaches your distribution ecosystem, it will not show you a good time, but will show you all sorts of interesting stuff.
|>
Maybe we can go ahead and slot the Heat in as Arsenal since they are rather good at beating the Knicks.
||
As long as Mossy is dropping movie recommendations before these posts reach the customary 40 comments I will take the opportunity to say that if you can catch All We Imagine as Light don't miss it.
|>
As the fan of a neither good nor bad team, it isn't that easy to tank. In the Western Division, there were half a dozen teams within a game of each other for the entire middle of the season. It was plausible that we would make it to the playoffs so it was worth trying. That looks out of reach now, but so does tanking meaningfully enough to be worth the draft pick because the bottom cluster has much worse records. We also have a few guys who do care about basketball and don't want to lose on purpose, so tanking would piss them off.
There are divisions in the NBA and the G league Stockton Kings are quite good right now.
Also, just in case Ogged drops by: loved how the Bulls beat the Lakers the other night. That was great.
||
I got to see Flow on a big screen yesterday, and it was a lovely experience. Recommended, even if the cat speaks Latvian.
|>
14: I found a great Latvian wall poster this year at a big annual nonprofit-benefit sale. It was kind of abstract combining a clock and the sun with a cigarette between them, and when I translated the text, I found it said "How many hours of your day do smoke breaks take up?" Small explanatory text in both Latvian and Russian that it's an anti-smoking PSA from 1986.
They pretend to pay us, we pretend to need a smoke break.
10: We binge-watched the Chinese rice noodle documentary series My Wiggly Friend over the weekend and then started The Hot Life on hotpot last night. The latter features several restaurants in your neck of the woods and it was very interesting to me to see how people there were described for a mainland audience. (I'm not sure how accurate the subtitles were but I figure fairly since they certainly weren't trying to make it make sense for a U.S. audience. Odile was too busy looking at the food to weigh in, though she had thoughts on some of the accents and wording elsewhere.)
lear rules that govern all situations
As interpreted by a referee/umpire who is responsible to nobody on the field of play. A bit like the divine right of kings. But you get to do the fun parts.
I admit this bit was (unintentionally) hilarious:
We were losing so much [my rookie season] that by January I was drinking beer!
Good Lord! Not beer? Not the Devil's Foaming Hop-Flavoured Ichor? Surely Heaven's foundations must be a-tremble at the sight of a professional athlete falling so low!
The Devil's Foaming Hop-Flavoured Ichor I'm sick of these stunt IPAs.
As interpreted by a referee/umpire who is responsible to nobody on the field of play. A bit like the divine right of kings. But you get to do the fun parts.
American football is interesting this way because there is actually an appeal process for calls on the field, and a whole elaborate set of rules around it that become part of the game strategy for coaches.
It's because of the tiny tv screen, right?
Pro players must be highly subject to orthorexic expectations, no? Maybe a little less so if they're required to be bulky, but there's that food plan from The Rock last decade.