The Second Quarter: Is Everything OK At Home, Football?

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November 11, 2016
America, NFL, Sports
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Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

Has anyone else noticed that something seems a little off with professional football, lately? Sure, the NFL is still showing up to work on time, and credit is due, it now even shows up on three days a week instead of just two. Technically, it is still doing its job just fine, and it is definitely not disrupting anyone else’s job either. Hell, it even cracked a smile a few times last week, but… there is just something missing.

This league used to be so passionate about its job. Now it seems to be punching the clock and waiting until the end of the year to really put in the real effort. There is some noticeable sloppiness too: more penalties, a drop in primetime ratings and two ties in one year. That is just not the league everyone has learned to count on for so many years. That’s not the real NFL. Without prying too much, is it time to ask the league some tough questions about its performance?

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The Mystique of Mystic Mac

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November 10, 2016
America, Fighting, Sports
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mcgregor_conor

On Saturday, November 12th, combat sports make its return to the floor of Madison Square Garden, although this time in an octagon, not a ring. It has been 9 years, 5 months, and 3 days since the last (sanctioned) punch was thrown in the historic venue, and Saturday’s UFC 205 will be the first legal Mixed Martial Arts event in New York since a state ban in 1997.

The fight for legalization is an incredible story in its own right, full of drama, political corruption, casino employees, culinary unions and Las Vegas business quarrels. On paper, the card is quite possibly the best one ever assembled in the history of the UFC. Sporting three championship bouts, and sixteen of the twenty fighters on the main and preliminary cards are ranked in the top ten of their respective weight classes. UFC 205 is all but guaranteed to be one of the best displays of MMA the world has ever seen.

However, one man at the top of the fight card is, has been and seemingly always will be commanding the attention of the fans, fighters and media. That man is “The Notorious” Conor McGregor.

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Next Year Is Now

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November 4, 2016
America, Baseball, MLB, Sports
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Chicago History Museum

If sports are meant to be a reprieve from reality, an excuse not to talk about the infinite ills and endless hatred which plague society, then they have rarely been more important than in 2016. This calendar year has contained some of the worst displays of what mankind has ever had to offer, with more undoubtedly in store as we roll into 2017. Humanity has collectively pulled at threads, undoing the sweater before lighting it on fire. And yet – Leicester City staged the most improbable run at a championship in the history of the world’s biggest sport[1]. Villanova hit a last-second buzzer-beater in the national championship game. The Cleveland Cavaliers, well – you know.

A tricky roller along the third base line, fielded perfectly, followed by a dart to first base, all while Kris Bryant was sporting a grin as wide as the Chicago River. With that, a bitter impossibility became an undeniable reality. After all of that – “that,” of course, encompassing 108 years of the most intense and self-hating misery in North American professional sports – the Chicago Cubs are the World Series champions.

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Strictly an Oklahoma Man

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November 3, 2016
Basketball, NBA
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Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid/20th Century Fox

“Boy, I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.” – Butch Cassidy

When the final whistle sounded on Game 7 of the Western Conference Finals in May, a certain feeling of deflation accompanied the confetti which fell from the rafters of Oracle Arena in Oakland. After having been up three games to one in the series, the Oklahoma City Thunder squandered their lead to the defending champion Golden State Warriors, the 96-88 final score of Game 7 being the most painful exclamation mark of any during the Durant-Westbrook Thunder era. Even with Kevin Durant lined up to be a free agent in the offseason, it still stood to reason that he had more to lose by leaving Oklahoma City than by giving it at least one more go with his explosive comrade in arms.

Already, the rest is history, albeit of the continually developing nature that calls for perpetual scrolling lines of text alerting the viewer to the absolute latest hard truths, highlighted in red and bolded beyond reason. Durant left to sign with the Warriors, the very team that had beaten his own before going on to put together an even more spectacular collapse in the NBA Finals. Westbrook re-signed with the Thunder, finally and definitively taking the wheel after years as Durant’s foil. Tonight, back in Oracle Arena, the erstwhile brothers meet as opponents for the first time.

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“Supersonic”: How Much Do You Want It?

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October 27, 2016
Movies, Music, Pop Culture, Rock
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Getty Images

What is it that riles up the Gallagher brothers? The list of answers to that question are as extensive as the number of fans that fill the grounds at Knebworth in 1996, the framing device for the Oasis documentary Supersonic, which enjoyed a one-night U.S. debut Wednesday evening in cities across the country[1].

As several reviews noted ahead of time, Supersonic largely avoids anything from Knebworth onward, instead focusing its efforts on the Gallaghers’ childhood in a Manchester suburb, their shared musical ambitions and the eventual rise of Oasis while merely hinting at what falls outside of the film’s timeline. Despite this somewhat revisionist view – who among us in 2016 isn’t out to use filters to enhance away imperfections, real or perceived – the film is a compelling look at the most important, and self-important, British band of the mid-1990s.

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(Approximately) 30 Thoughts on 30 NBA Teams, 2016-’17 Edition

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October 25, 2016
Basketball, NBA, Sports
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CLEVELAND, OH - JUNE 22: Kyrie Irving #2, LeBron James #23 and J.R. Smith #5 of the Cleveland Cavaliers look on during the Cleveland Cavaliers 2016 NBA Championship victory parade and rally on June 22, 2016 in Cleveland, Ohio. (Photo by Mike Lawrie/Getty Images) ORG XMIT: 648981599 ORIG FILE ID: 542236368

Wake up, wake up wake up wake upppppp! Break out your favorite Starter jacket from the ’90s and saddle up, because the NBA is back tonight. Three games usher us out of the humdrum summer and firmly into fall, where all of our favorite professional basketball players[1] await to push the bounds of reality beyond any of our preconceived notions.

The reigning champion Cleveland Cavaliers[2] welcome the not-reigning-anything New York Knicks to Cleveland, suddenly the epicenter of North American professional sports, where Carmelo Anthony will get to watch the likes of J.R. Smith and Iman Shumpert receive their championship rings. Afterward, the re-tooled and reloaded Golden State Warriors host a Tim Duncan-less San Antonio Spurs while the Utah Jazz visit Portland. With one eye on the proverbial jump ball and another drifting ever so slowly toward the Larry O’Brien Trophy, we take a moment – just one, lest we think too hard about the Bulls – for a thought on each team. As always, best of luck to everyone, especially anyone in a contract year. May you swindle a billionaire out of a few million.

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Independence Day

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October 21, 2016
America, Basketball, NBA
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“Custer’s Last Stand,” Edgar Samuel Paxson

Finally – finally – it is that time of year again. As the leaves turn, and the breeze becomes a chill, the NBA is at our doorstep, knocking incessantly, asking if we have heard the good news and finally accepted Adam Silver into our lives. As is tradition around this time, profile after ostensibly revealing profile has exploded through the Internet’s dams and into our timelines – of teams, of conferences and divisions and, of course, of players. Each one delivers us infinitesimally closer to the players we hold in high regard, whom we can never really know.

Fitting, then, that in the week before the start of the season, two captivating and personal cover stories on Russell Westbrook have preceded the NBA season, one from GQ’s Daniel Riley, and another from Sports Illustrated’s masterful Lee Jenkins. Each is uniquely great in its own right, and both brim with an undercurrent of the rage everyone anticipates and hopes to see manifested in Westbrook’s game on a potentially scorched earth-like MVP campaign. This is the Year of Westbrook.

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The First Quarter: The 3 Best Subplots of the 2016 NFL Season So Far

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October 6, 2016
NFL, Sports
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Patrick Smith/SI.com

High expectations can be dangerous; overreactions, even more so. Change is unavoidable, so no one should be too shocked that the Carolina Panthers and Arizona Cardinals are both 1-3. It could be an unlucky streak, or it could be a changing of the guard. It is simply too early to say. Of course, some things never seem to change. To the frustration of many, the New England Patriots keep winning against all odds because Bill Belichick is a true football savant who consistently switches up his strategy to outwit the opposition. These narratives are not going anywhere, as fans will definitely still be debating the fates of these preseason favorites deep into December and January.

In the meantime, it’s better to focus on the developing subplots. These are not the stories that receive the most attention early on because everyone is too busy losing their minds over their fantasy season not working out as planned. These are the fun developments that show a player making the leap from good to great or the weird trends that threaten to turn the league upside down before they inevitably become just another footnote.

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