In Memoriam: Gale Sayers, 1943-2020

 The nickname "Kansas Comet" was entirely deserved.

My sentiments on Super Bowl LIII

I'll just leave this here.

"Big Game", big pick, big deal

People not interested in the upcoming Super Bowl can skip this, unless they're actually interested in reading my immortal prose (what? I repeat, what?) concerning the upcoming Super Bowl.

Two things are rather obvious at this point:

1) Outside of his little football world, Tom Brady is a woo-promoting jackass;

2) That's still no reason to go after his daughter in public, though, like one radio host did.

That being said, I'm under the impression that if anyone's going to upset The Belicheck Machine That Ate The AFC it might be Philly. The Eagles are every bit as capable of making life tough for opponents as the Pats are, and the fact that they mercilessly pounded the Vikings 38-7 in a game where the Vikes were favored by Vegas is proof of that. Even so, the Pats have more experience. And they have a quarterback who's incredibly skilled and pulling off last-minute wins even if he is a quack medicine-promoting idiot off the field.

So Pats by 2.

However...

I have shit luck picking Super Bowl winners since I started doing it again in 2006. Last year was a rare exception (Pittsburgh beating Arizona in 2008 was the other one, and I didn't even cover my own spread that time), but considering my lack of luck picking winners in - which years were they, now? - 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 you can at least rest assured that just because I was right about the Pats in 2016 I might not be this year considering my Monopoly money-worthless 2-9 record.

So, Pats haters? Don't give up hope.

Yet.

Nassar Gets Dropped Hard

I wasn't expecting anything other than this, really, but the man remained an utterly grating asshole throughout the trial and especially in the wake of the victims' collective impact statements:

But before delivering her sentence, Aquilina read aloud a letter Nassar wrote to the court recently in which he defended his medical care, said he was "manipulated" into pleading guilty, and accused the women of lying.

"I was a good doctor because my treatments worked, and those patients that are now speaking out are the same ones that praised and came back over and over," Nassar wrote. "The media convinced them that everything I did was wrong and bad. They feel I broke their trust. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."

The letter "tells me you still don't get it," Aquilina said, tossing the letter dismissively.

"I wouldn't send my dogs to you, sir," she added.

I would, however, send dogs at him. Attack dogs do need their practice, after all.

He needn't worry too much, though. There are some things even dogs won't eat.

In other news - and in contrast to what the not particularly bright Joel Ferguson had to say on the subject earlier - MSU President Lou Anna Simon did indeed resign from her job.

Win-win in my opinion, but that's of little consolation to Nassar's victims.

And this is what we call a special kind of Stupid...

From Deadspin, which has been covering the hell out of the Larry Nassar case and continues to turn over many large turds of muck concerning the issue:

In an interview on local radio show Staudt on Sports, Michigan State board of trustees member Joel Ferguson reinforced the university board’s stance that the majority of board members still support university president Lou Anna Simon, saying, “there’s so many more things going on at the university than just this Nassar thing.”

After brushing off the largest sexual assault scandal in American sports history, Ferguson maintained the stunning pace of arrogance by claiming that not only should Simon keep her job, but that nobody on the school’s senior leadership should be held accountable for the roles they played in abetting Larry Nassar’s years of sexual abuse. Calling Nassar a “pervert,” Ferguson posited the former Michigan State employee was “on an island by himself”—a statement that is categorically false, as Nassar was subject to annual reviews by superiors as both a team doctor within the Michigan State athletic department and as an associate professor who taught students within the university’s Division of Sports Medicine and College of Osteopathic Medicine. These same superiors were the ones made aware of numerous complaints against Nassar dating back as far as 1997 and who, at one point, allowed him to continue seeing patients one-on-one in the midst of an internal investigation.

Well, that was lovely, wasn't it?

It's all okay as long as it's in the name of college sports and raising money for the mighty university, right? I can't wait until one of these privileged mopes (and that's precisely what Ferguson is, CEO credentials and all) ends up having to defend a dean or a university president for not acting against a coach or a player who's either a serial killer or an outright child murderer.

I'm sure that'll come off as being a beautiful moment for all of us as well.

At least the U. of Arizona did the right thing, for once

...unlike either Penn State or Baylor, who seemed utterly incapable of getting rid of some of their baggage.

Ah, Rich Rodriguez. We hardly knew ye, apparently, and it's too bad that we eventually did.

Happy New Year, fellow serfs

Happy New Year, all.

I'm afraid that I may have lost my temper a bit about the situation concerning the Arizona Diamondbacks, but you may agree with me a lot more if you read this link.

Or you could just cut to the chase and read my rant from Facebook, reproduced here:

I had a rough day at work. So rough, in fact, that I fully and vehemently agree with former Maricopa County supervisor Andy Kunasek when he allegedly told Arizona Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick to “take your stupid baseball team and get out” and go back to “fucking West Virginia”.

The audacity of having yet another one of these kleptocratic, self-centered multimillionaire pukes gouge yet another local community out of money for their own personal paean to the greatness of themselves just about takes the cake for sheer chutzpah - and then shits it back out for the rest of us mere mortals to subsist on. It gets better, of course. Is Kendrick a political and financial ally of the Koch brothers? Of course he is. Does he come off as much of a whiner about how wronged his team is legally in addition to coming off as an utter greedhead? Well, he's suing Maricopa in order to get out of his current lease, isn't he?
 

I'm sick of all this shit. All. Of. It. If it wasn't for my continued interest in sports as actual sports and not glorified pro wrestling, I'd take every one of these shitbag owners, line them up against the wall at an struggling-but-succeeding inner city school (you know, the type that especially need the funds these assholes demand) and then have every single member of that school's honor roll piss on them from the roof. Because none of them deserve the dignity of being the subject of a firing squad. 

And in other baseball news, Hell freezes over...again

Yes, this finally happened. Although I'd be remiss if I didn't point out earlier endings to an 88 year-long drought in 2005, much less an 86 year-long one back in 2004.

Although to be perfectly honest, I think Deadspin's take is a bit more appropriately visceral.

Do us all a favor: melt that statue

Just when you thought the Jerry Sandusky serial molestation debacle couldn't get any worse, this particular legal tidbit get revealed and causes yet another round of "how low can you go?" on the issue all over again:
In 2014, a man testified that Penn State football coach Joe Paterno ignored his complaints of a sexual assault committed by assistant coach Jerry Sandusky in 1976 when the man was a 14-year-old boy, according to court documents unsealed Tuesday in a Philadelphia court.

Four other former assistant football coaches at the school also were aware of Sandusky acting inappropriately with boys before law enforcement was first notified in 1998, according to testimony contained in the documents.

The allegations suggest that Paterno may have been made aware of Sandusky’s actions far earlier than has previously been reported, and that knowledge of Sandusky’s behavior may have been far more widespread among the Penn State football staff than previously known.

The Post article points out that former Paterno assistants Greg Schiano and Tom Bradley denied the allegations, but those denials really might not matter all that much to Paterno's already hideously tarnished reputation:
The 1976 victim, identified in court records as John Doe 150, said that while he was attending a football camp at Penn State, Sandusky touched him as he showered. Sandusky’s finger penetrated the boy’s rectum, Doe said, and the boy asked to speak with Paterno about it. Doe testified that he specifically told Paterno that Sandusky had sexually assaulted him, and Paterno ignored it.

“Is it accurate that Coach Paterno quickly said to you, ‘I don’t want to hear about any of that kind of stuff, I have a football season to worry about?’ ” the man’s lawyer asked.

“Yes . . . I was shocked, disappointed, offended. I was insulted. . . . I said, is that all you’re going to do? You’re not going to do anything else?”

Paterno, the man testified, just walked away.

This isn't merely another dagger in Paterno's rep, though. It's also another reason to look askance at any collegiate sports program that puts its success ahead of keeping other athletes, students or even the general public safe from people like Sandusky or others who engage in criminal behavior and then get to walk away because of all the clichéd Big Man on Campus bullshit that's used to protect them even when caught red-handed. The only reason why Paterno and various other PSU functionaries allowed this to happen not merely for years but for decades is that they literally did not care about anything except winning. And that's nearly as disgusting as the actual crimes Sandusky committed.

I don't care how much money is thrown the way of NCAA programs by alumni, boosters or sports apparel companies these days; it won't save them from their worse enemy: namely, themselves. I'm now having trouble enjoying college football even when a program is apparently scandal-free, and I used to follow college sports a lot more closely than I do now. And if an AD or university president thinks that the general public is going to magically come forth and save their bacon when the next scandal erupts when even sports fans like me are getting completely sick of this shit, they're living in the same dream world where Paterno's supporters are apparently residing.

Baylor: the new word in college sports that nauseates

There's an old truism that the cover-up is far worse than the crime. That definitely fits the bill with the crisis at Baylor, where a series of assaults against women by members of the football team (and others, but mainly the football team) led to the firing of head coach Art Briles and the demotion (reassignment, really) of former Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr from his position as university President to university chancellor. He'll also continue to be a professor at the Baylor school of law, and all of this is especially ironic considering where he made his bones as a prosecutor:

Mr. Starr’s demotion delivered a twist to the biography of a man whose reputation was built on what many considered an overzealous pursuit of allegations of sexual transgressions by Mr. Clinton. Now he is being punished for leading an administration that, according to a report by an outside law firm commissioned by the university’s governing board, looked the other way when Baylor football players were accused of sex crimes, and sometimes convicted of them.

The report (link here) is horrifying enough, but it's made even worse by the fact that - as usual - there's already a squad of numbskulls lining up to support Briles because he is, after all, the coach. If this sounds at all familiar, it should. Because St. Joe Paterno (the greatest man who's ever lived, according to a group of similar-minded dolts) had a whole parcel of losers in the ethical behavior sweepstakes (for example John Ziegler; for another, Franco Harris) lining up to defend him in the wake of the Penn State scandal. The similarities are disturbing enough (again, the leadership teams of a major college sports program and university just sat there with their collective junk in their hands and did next to nothing about the scandal), but the added weight of attempts to coerce the victims into not reporting the assaults only made things that much worse.

And this brings up the following issue: I'm a sports fan. I'm also hardly deaf to the fact that university programs are now (and perhaps always have been) perfectly willing to put the success of their athletic programs above the safety of the general public. I guess I could be optimistic and hope that this, and Penn State, will finally sink in and that the NCAA and individual schools will stop this outright sociopathic behavior once and for all.

I could be optimistic about that.

But I'm not.