Tag: SPORTS

Season’s Greetings! The end of the World Series ushers in a somewhat new but already well-known season: the NFL Tank Season.

This is when mindless, repeat-nothing fans are encouraged by the mindless, repeat-nothing media to believe that four-to-eight loss teams should seriously consider “tanking” the rest of this season to secure improved playoff status. draft-choice.

How such a “tank” would work remains unexplained, so unexplained, yet its advocates annually call for a reality that is based more on fantasy than Aaron Boone’s scripted game plans.

Head Coaches: How Do They Work? Choose to diminish their reputation and future employment opportunities by conspiring to lose the remainder of their games on behalf of team owners who will fire them for losing?

Or maybe the coach could make a deal like in Mel Brooks’ “Producers,” when the profit was tied to a deliberately bad product.

How does a GM tank work? Ensure his exit and rotten legacy by eliminating or diminishing his team’s best active players?

How do front office guys convey the tanking objective to their players? Yeah, get out there and give it your all, you piles of wasted flesh. We’ll be busy in our air-conditioned suites trying to make sure we don’t miss.

Do suits that project tanking cheer when their team drops passes? Would they prefer someone to be deliberately confused? Would they reward someone with a huge bonus in their next contract if they take penalties on purpose, get a flag for their team?

Additionally, tanking—as a deliberate and planned way to keep losing—is often no longer necessary in the “modern” NFL as players who are ready to score in style deliver the ball inches from the goal line. or seek misconduct penalties after the game. as if they were invested in losses.

In fact, what rookie Jets WR Malachi Corley did Thursday night — releasing the ball before crossing the goal line in a premature celebration — should have been the first and last episode of its kind, instead of the last one.

Corley must have lost it, but something similar almost happened to Kyle Pitts last weekend. As Pitts was running for a long TD, he gave up approaching the end zone, not realizing — or caring — that Tampa Bay’s Antoine Winfield Jr. was in hot pursuit. Winfield slipped the ball from Pitts’ weak hand as they reached the goal line.

The play was reviewed, but there was no end camera to show whether the ball went before or after it crossed the plane of the end zone, so the field goal call stood. But a lesson had been taught, for anyone who was paying attention. Apparently this did not include Korlin.

Just par for the course in a league partnered with television networks that mindlessly reward and inculcate dangerously immodest behavior over winning ability. The NFL often runs backwards.

Of course, tank! Have the players gather at midfield to read aloud highlights from their exit interviews and wish the team well next season when they are cut but the team has an improved draft position.

Kostas wasn’t perfect, but his approach will be missed

All those sleazy childish “social” media and sports radio artists bashing Bob Kostas after his departure as a play-by-play national baseball player still don’t realize that in Kostas they had an honest voice, the kind that , when push comes to shove, it will be sorely missed.

At great personal and professional risk, and a sense of noble duty, Costas defied his network bosses to provide accurate first-round times, becoming among the first to publicly suggest that there is something rotten with drugs going on. occurs among MLB’s surprise hitters and even. refused to confess to gambling ads after turning down the chance to participate in an industry dependent on young fools losing their dough to fake come-ons.

Did he always get it right? No. But I sense that he hated being a “too much alive” of the NBC Olympics and that NBC Sports, under Dick Ebersol, had become a distribution center for Vince McMahon’s twisted plans and products, both leading to Costas’ phasing out from NBC.

He wanted – and still wants – to be thought of as a thoughtful and now concerned observer of what sports are, were and are becoming.

And his metronome-measured delivery, which could have created an intellectual wall between him and the audience, was ill-advised but served him as a naturally formed defense mechanism—as he was susceptible to ad hominem criticism from those that he tried to serve them the best, so he can never overcome his human condition or ours.

Despite everything and everyone, Costa was on your side. It still is.

---

The only thing worse than a guy on TV claiming we just saw something that clearly didn’t happen is when, during a replay, he claims we’re re-watching something that never happened.

Although he was never a fan of the way Juan Soto plays baseball, he drove home a run to score in the sixth inning in Game 5 of the World Series on Wednesday to make it 6-5, Yankees. However, John Smoltz took a reckless swing at it.

After Soto scored on a sacrifice fly to center, Fox’s easily overlooked Smoltz chimed in when he said Soto was lucky the runner on second wasn’t thrown out at third before Soto scored. as Soto didn’t hit him. home from the third.

A replay was then shown showing Soto running hard the entire way. However Smoltz then said that we could see him first taking his time. This is called bad faith, similar to a lie, a first cousin to a lie.

Steelers honor ‘dirty’ Porter

Monday night’s Giants-Steelers on ABC/ESPN began with a high-profile homecoming tribute to former Steelers LB Joey Porter, despite his extensive arrest record, league-wide status as “dirtiest player of all time ” and the “Joey Porter Rule.” named in his honor. As a Pittsburgh assistant coach, he took the field to aggravate a fight in the prison yard of a playoff in January 2016.

Among his NFL infractions was an ejection for spitting on an opponent. After he retired, he was also kicked out, with the help of the police, from his son’s high school football game for misconduct.

So how much of the above was heard Monday by ESPN’s Joe Buck and Troy Aikman when Porter was waved off? Not a glance. Naturally.

---

Sunday night Cowboys-49ers on NBC had an interesting, NFL-level pitch:

As Mike Tirico explained, the skill shortages forced the Cowboys to start cutting RBs Ezekiel Elliott and Dalvin Cook. Tirico did not say that Elliott and Cook have been police magnets since college, with allegations of physical abuse against women and suspensions during their NFL careers.

However, as the late TV player Billy Mays said, “But wait, there’s more!” Tiricio completed a trifecta on Sunday night. Long before joining NBC as its primary sports host, Tirico was suspended by ESPN for sexually harassing and stalking a female colleague.

Tiricio was hired by NBC at the same time that NBC fired news anchor Matt Lauer for sexually inappropriate behavior.

---

Very disappointing to see and hear a fellow as likable and attractive as former Devils and Islanders goaltender Cory Schneider on the set of the NHL Network promoting bets for an NHL partnered gambling site based on losing of fan money.

The NFL’s new “dynamic starts” are as dynamic as MLB’s automatic intentional passes. But the NFL always makes it as it goes along.

Bad teams continue to get prime times: Commanders at Giants, 1 p.m., Fox. Chris Myers, Mark Sanchez and photos of fans clapping in the lower deck near the end zones.