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Date	Title	Body
3 days 14 hours ago	Or working in his brother's	Or working in his brother's chop shop
3 days 14 hours ago	Not with this guy strutting	Not with this guy strutting around the sideline
4 days 4 hours ago	They haven't been elite, but	They haven't been elite, but they've been consistently good. And they're likely going to remain that way given their schedule and division, and a good coaching hire.  The real question is how Penn State continues to be considered this elite program. Counting the championships vacated after the Sandusky thing, they're tied with Northwestern for conference titles since joining the Big 10, and they're going to be at best the fourth best team in the East for the next decade with the scholarship limits.
4 days 4 hours ago	Maybe they listened to Penn	Maybe they listened to Penn State fans as to what constitutes a rivalry.
4 days 5 hours ago	They've been the third most	They've been the third most successful program in the conference since Alvarez took over, far outpacing Penn State (and they have more conference championships since Alvarez won his first in 1993 than Michigan). Now, maybe the Anderson hire leads to a downward trend, but it's silly to pretend that Wisconsin's success is some kind of short term anomoly. It's been 20 years.
4 days 14 hours ago	Wait, does this mean we're	Wait, does this mean we're always going to play OSU and MSU home/home and away/away. WTF? It couldn't have been that hard to arrange.
1 week 4 hours ago	OSU pretty much schedules the	OSU pretty much schedules the same way we did when ND was on the schedule. One game that will likely be a quality non-conference game. One middling Big Eastish team, two MAC snacks.  The Cal series that makes their schedule look so bad this year was scheduled when Aaron Rodgers was their QB and they were a top 15ish team. The next four years, they take on Va Tech and Oklahoma, which will make for far tougher non-conference games than we face those years.
1 week 1 day ago	His larger point about administrative bloat is	His larger point about administrative bloat is right on. See here... http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features...
1 week 5 days ago	I have a theory that Oregon	I have a theory that Oregon and Boise have risen as Washington collapsed in the wake of the Don James scandal. I'm pretty sure they used to compete with USC/UCLA as the dominant school in the Pac 10 by getting the highly ranked kids from SoCal that USC/UCLA didn't have room for and filling in from the PacNW. It does seem pretty clear that the rise of Oregon and the decline of Washington are pretty closely linked. Boise may be a different story.
1 week 5 days ago	Just a reminder that	Just a reminder that "scholar-athlete" was a term coined by the NCAA in the 1950s as a means to evade potential workman's compensation claims made against member schools by injured athletes.
2 weeks 4 hours ago	Wasn't his quote "toe meets	Wasn't his quote "toe meets leather at 1"?
2 weeks 9 hours ago	I suppose anything's	I suppose anything's possible, but his offensive game is really rough for anyone who might be considered a franchise player. And his game is not reflective of the way in which NBA basketball is developing. For 50 years from Mikan to the end of Kareem's career, almost every championship team had an elite offensive center. Since then, there have been two, Hakeem and Shaq, and Shaq had hall of fame wings on his championship teams.  I guess you could argue Dwight Howard in his pre-back surgery iteration had the potential, he got the Magic close, but that's a stretch.  Point is that Drummond could develop into a franchise center, but that's become much more of a defensive position (Tyson Chandler, Hibbert) than someone you throw the ball to in order to get points. The Pistons will still have to find an elite wing to get beyond the 6-8 seed range.  Which they might get. You can get lucky and find those guys mid-way through the lottery, particularly, maybe, next year with all the talent that draft will supposedly have. And their core of Knight-Drummond-Monroe will still be young enough that, if they can keep them together, they can provide a good supporting cast. But the Pistons are still going to need to find someone who's an elite scorer and perimeter defender to compete for championships rather than the playoffs. This is actually a good place to be, there are a ton of teams far worse off. Look at the Nets, they're trapped in cap hell for the foreseeable future and just lost to a team missing its two best players and with the third best hobbled.
2 weeks 15 hours ago	I did read them. I just don't	I did read them. I just don't agree that they constitute proof that he's going to take on a bigger role with the Pistons, particularly one involving day-to-day stuff. 1. The attractiveness of the job. The Piston's pieces are pretty good and they've got some picks and cap room to work with. They don't have a superstar, though, and they're not getting one unless they luck out in the lottery, as the Pistons have never been successful in attracting free agents. The Pistons' promise is not so exceptional, in short, to outweigh the costs of the job, mainly relocating to Detroit from the places where he and his longterm girlfriend live (and where he enjoys being). Add in his reported request to skip road trips when he was negotiating with the Lakers this year, recent hip and knee replacements, and I don't get the sense that he's wanting to try to do a semi-transcontinental commuting thing that the job would likely entail. A fulltime gig in Detroit is just not that attractive for a guy at his point in life. 2. His ego. Phil's ego may be large (and for good reason), but he can essentially choose his job (other than the Lakers, apparently, due to Jimmy/Jenny issues) if he wants to get back into the NBA. 3. The money. Don't see this as exceptional in Detroit versus what he can get elsewhere if he wants this type of job. 4. Relationship with the Gores. This is likely why he's doing this limited consulting thing in the first place.
2 weeks 16 hours ago	Could he do this job from	Could he do this job from Montana and LA? Because it's hard to see him moving to Detroit, a place that he has no connection with and that is a long way away from his longterm girlfriend, at this point in his life. I think it's far more likely that this is a one-off consulting thing and is being hyped by the Pistons to generate fan excitement.
2 weeks 17 hours ago	On Martin's writing... I	On Martin's writing... I totally agree with the accusations of laziness. Someone counted up the number of times that Tyrion "waddles" in the series and its in the high triple digits. He's also been allowed to be incredibly self-indulgent in the way he's allowed his story to sprawl. By saying that he's "been allowed to be self-indulgent," I think a lot of this has to do with the economics of the publishing industry. On the one hand, there have been broad cut backs in editorial staff, so material just does not get edited as carefully as it once did. On the other, the search for sales has made his publisher, I imagine, amenable to splitting what was planned as one 800-page book into two 1000 page+ volumes, despite the fact that the 4th volume brought what had been a fairly relentlessly plot-driven series grinding to a halt as Martin sent his characters all over the place without much payoff (Arya's and Brandt's stories are particularly self-indulgent) while introducing numerous new characters. There is seemingly no editor at his press that will say "no" or "shorter." I think HBO's show runners have done a lot to smooth Martin's issues. The point about Theon is one case. I also feel that Rob's dilemmas are far more clear on screen than in print. It's one of the few examples where a show is better than a book, and I think this is largely because of the constraints that television imposes in the way that publishing no longer does. I do wonder what they're going to do after this, and the subsequent season, where the books really get into plot sprawl.
2 weeks 6 days ago	No politics.	No politics.
2 weeks 6 days ago	From observing my kids, it	From observing my kids, it seems that obsolescence and obsession with the new is an attribute of teens and adults far more than young kids, who tend to continue to use and play with things they like even as they incorporate new things into their world.
2 weeks 6 days ago	And good lord, a new jersey	And good lord, a new jersey has so many advantages over the flood of plastic crap he's sure to get.  1. He will continue to use it. 2. It easily folds up and disappears. 3. You're not going to step on it in the middle of the night and destroy your feet (legos) or break your neck (anything with wheels).   I now only want my kids to get jerseys. They're the perfect present. And as someone with 5-year-old twins, I totally get his obsession with wanting a jersey of a particular player. That seems the age that they pick up on differences, particularly in basketball where you can actually see the people.  Unfortunately, they only seem to mass produce youth jerseys for one or two players, so you may need a custom job if you want a Stauskas.
3 weeks 8 hours ago	I think the NFL would be far	I think the NFL would be far more hostile. To venture a huge stereotype, NFL players are disproportionately rural and southern and come from a culture where the denunciation of homosexuality, and the sense of a homosexual threat, is an important part of the religious culture of many churches. There are also many more people in an NFL locker room, meaning that not everyone has personal relationships, something much more difficult to maintain in the smaller locker rooms of the NBA.  To venture another huge stereogype, openly gay people have been part of urban black culture for a long time to a far greater extent than in southern culture, white and black alike. Perhaps not "accepted members" but present and acknowledged nonetheless. George Chauncey's awesome book, Gay New York, has stories of drag balls in Harlem that would attract thousands of spectators, gay and stratight alike in the 1920s and 1930s.
3 weeks 9 hours ago	The SEC's a whole different	The SEC's a whole different thing, schedule-wise. They combine the features of not enough conference games with protected crossover rivalries to produce some consistently unbalanced schedules. With 3 annual crossovers with no protected games among contenders after the Big 10 goes to 9 games, consistent imbalances over time should be mitigated.
3 weeks 9 hours ago	Sure, but in Chicago, there's	Sure, but in Chicago, there's still the option to drive to Ann Arbor for a game. It's kind of a long haul, sure, particularly if you're trying to do there and back, but it's completely doable (and preferable to seeing a game anywhere else) and other than Northwestern, it's not that much further than going to Illinois or Wisconsin.
3 weeks 12 hours ago	Just as a sidenote, it's	Just as a sidenote, it's awesome that the person to break this barrier is apparently, a very good writer as well. His article does a great job conveying the pressures pulling him in different directions as well as the process that led him to decide to come out.  The short article by his twin brother is really sweet as well.
3 weeks 16 hours ago	I really don't know that it	I really don't know that it will be. I may be exaggerating the limits of Nix's game, but most players big enough to plausibly play the 4 or 5 are going to approach his production just as a function of being large men on the floor. Even if Izzo's not offensively innovative, Nix's absense frees up the offense from having a big blob on the low post clogging things up every position and potentially add something as a pick and pop player and in the open court, two things Nix could never do.  He did give them a good post option when their offense got stagnant, but I think a lot of their offensive stagnancy (is that even a word) owed to his presence on the floor.
3 weeks 17 hours ago	And I think their student tix	And I think their student tix are only partial year, though that may have changed since they shifted from trimesters to semesters.
3 weeks 1 day ago	You're an advocate for ass	You're an advocate for ass cheeks, then.
3 weeks 1 day ago	This is really one of the	This is really one of the best book to film/tv adaptations ever done. I feel like plot developments and character motivation are actually much clearer in the show than in the books. The enforced discipline of 12 episodes at 55 minutes serves the series well. But things are really going to get tough for the show runners in a couple seasons when the plot gets very fragmented. Curious to see which plots they won't follow, because they're going to have to give some up. (Reminder about the no spoiler rule).
3 weeks 1 day ago	The recent history of college	The recent history of college football rivalries suggests that your position is simply incorrect. The SEC championship game has done nothing to dull the passion of the Iron Bowl. Not playing annually killed the Oklahoma-Nebraska rivalry, even though they eventually met for the Big 12 title.  Playing annually at the end of the year is the essence of the Game's rivalry. It represents one final hurdle for the more successful team, a last chance to redeem a season for a struggling team, and an unbearable game when both teams are equally successful. It's not only about championships, it is the single measure that most defines a particular team and that creates its most enduring memory.  The old system could have killed that, since it devalued the rivalry, as both teams could plausibly progress to the championship game. Now that's not possible. The Game might be the single biggest winner in this realignment, as it protects it as the single most important game in the Big 10 every year.
3 weeks 1 day ago	Yeah, this is what I mean.	Yeah, this is what I mean. Nix could be tough in the post, but he was wildly inconsistent. Even after he lost all the weight, he still couldn't move very well. In addition, since his range was so limited, MSU basically had to put him on the block, clogging things up for Harris and Appling, who are good off the drive. Payne has a much more offensively diverse game. He's more mobile and has range to the 3. MSU will be more diverse offensively and able to play at more than one pace. As for Nix's rebounding, Izzo's teams are never going to struggle on the boards. He was a bad matchup for us, because we didn't have (at that time in the year) two bigs we trusted defensively. But MSU without him has a higher upside.
3 weeks 1 day ago	People seem to like OSU more	People seem to like OSU more than that. I don't entirely buy it. They'll be, perhaps, the best defensive team in the nation but you still have to put the ball in the hoop. They don't have anyone who's proven to be able to hit even a 15-foot jumper. But I expect them to be the 3rd favorite. The rest looks good.
3 weeks 1 day ago	Losing Nix is addition by	Losing Nix is addition by subtraction. He did more to clog everything up and slow down their offense than help them with rebounding and physicality.

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