I think Adelson is trying to save money. Maybe so she can spend it on campaign contributions to people in the Texas Legislature who would vote for gambling. Everybody here in Dallas knows she wants a casino in Arlington but honestly the odds of her getting it this session (our legislature meets 6 months every two years, and that's right now) are very low. Our lawmakers are busy with too many other problems, mostly self-generated: the big one is vouchers for private schools.
This isn't about tanking the team so the Legislature will do something. There's nothing they can do right now and if they could make a team owner straighten up and fly right, they'd've done something about Jerry Jones a while back.
College football should have its own conferences just for football. For big-time D-1 schools, it's not unreasonable to have 7 cross-country trips, even if it ruins the chance of bringing any amount of student fans to away games. But for all the non-revenue sports it's just ridiculous to have conferences that aren't at least somewhat geographically aligned.
(The most interesting football idea I've heard would be 12-member conferences, play each opponent once, alternate years for home/away, then have promotion and relegation.)
Yeah, it's really the non-revenue kids who get screwed by these megaconferences. If you're holding out hopes of an NBA career, trekking back and forth across the continent may make some sense, but if you're playing, I dunno, water polo, that's just brutal.
I went to a Big Ten school and haven't liked things ever since Ten didn't mean 10. I'm confused by the NCAAF championship system but don't care enough to try to figure it out.
On the teenage boy topic: there was definitely a period where any communication with my son that could be fairly classified as dialogue or conversation was only happening thanks to 2k (and Madden, but mostly 2k). I was grateful for it while recognizing that it was exacting a steep price, both in pay-to-play and dopamine resistance. 2k, more than pandemic zooming, was really what convinced me that a “metaverse” outcome in which many of the most important interpersonal parts of life are going to be dematerialized and transpiring online is more likely than not.
On the trade: I like a conspiracy but I think this is the GM (who seems to have been in the Nike/Kobe orbit) and Jason Kidd (who is old school and hard nosed) wanting to take the last off-ramp before hitching their future success to a megastar that is a defensive liability in the best case scenario and doesn’t seem to believe he needs to worry about conditioning because it hasn’t kept him from success yet. The idea that they had to do the trade secretively or it would have gotten torpedo’d from any of five directions seems correct/plausible to me. I think the people who are saying “hey the mavericks got rolled” are putting too much stock in their having made the Finals last year. It is not so much about AD for Luka when AD is older and injury prone, it is about how to get off the Luka train before it leaves the station and you can’t get off.
Re: the trade, the obvious comparison that I've heard is Zion Williamson, who clearly isn't changing his ways, and now the Pelicans seem well and truly stuck. I think it was a clip from the LeBatard show where somebody said "If they had dumped him two years ago, everybody would've said they were insane, but now everybody is like 'Yeah, that would've been the move...'"
He's a weird dude. I used to enjoy him on the 538 podcast when he was with Micah Cohen and Clare Malone who could match his weird energy, but once they broke that group up, nobody else they brought in was the right kind of odd.
I think Adelson is trying to save money. Maybe so she can spend it on campaign contributions to people in the Texas Legislature who would vote for gambling. Everybody here in Dallas knows she wants a casino in Arlington but honestly the odds of her getting it this session (our legislature meets 6 months every two years, and that's right now) are very low. Our lawmakers are busy with too many other problems, mostly self-generated: the big one is vouchers for private schools.
This isn't about tanking the team so the Legislature will do something. There's nothing they can do right now and if they could make a team owner straighten up and fly right, they'd've done something about Jerry Jones a while back.
College football should have its own conferences just for football. For big-time D-1 schools, it's not unreasonable to have 7 cross-country trips, even if it ruins the chance of bringing any amount of student fans to away games. But for all the non-revenue sports it's just ridiculous to have conferences that aren't at least somewhat geographically aligned.
(The most interesting football idea I've heard would be 12-member conferences, play each opponent once, alternate years for home/away, then have promotion and relegation.)
Yeah, it's really the non-revenue kids who get screwed by these megaconferences. If you're holding out hopes of an NBA career, trekking back and forth across the continent may make some sense, but if you're playing, I dunno, water polo, that's just brutal.
I went to a Big Ten school and haven't liked things ever since Ten didn't mean 10. I'm confused by the NCAAF championship system but don't care enough to try to figure it out.
On the teenage boy topic: there was definitely a period where any communication with my son that could be fairly classified as dialogue or conversation was only happening thanks to 2k (and Madden, but mostly 2k). I was grateful for it while recognizing that it was exacting a steep price, both in pay-to-play and dopamine resistance. 2k, more than pandemic zooming, was really what convinced me that a “metaverse” outcome in which many of the most important interpersonal parts of life are going to be dematerialized and transpiring online is more likely than not.
On the trade: I like a conspiracy but I think this is the GM (who seems to have been in the Nike/Kobe orbit) and Jason Kidd (who is old school and hard nosed) wanting to take the last off-ramp before hitching their future success to a megastar that is a defensive liability in the best case scenario and doesn’t seem to believe he needs to worry about conditioning because it hasn’t kept him from success yet. The idea that they had to do the trade secretively or it would have gotten torpedo’d from any of five directions seems correct/plausible to me. I think the people who are saying “hey the mavericks got rolled” are putting too much stock in their having made the Finals last year. It is not so much about AD for Luka when AD is older and injury prone, it is about how to get off the Luka train before it leaves the station and you can’t get off.
Re: the trade, the obvious comparison that I've heard is Zion Williamson, who clearly isn't changing his ways, and now the Pelicans seem well and truly stuck. I think it was a clip from the LeBatard show where somebody said "If they had dumped him two years ago, everybody would've said they were insane, but now everybody is like 'Yeah, that would've been the move...'"
Nate Silver speaks and writes like what a person trying to imitate AI trying to imitate a person speaks and writes like.
He's a weird dude. I used to enjoy him on the 538 podcast when he was with Micah Cohen and Clare Malone who could match his weird energy, but once they broke that group up, nobody else they brought in was the right kind of odd.