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Date	Title	Body
2 hours 2 min ago	Kobe, tell me how ...	This is the essential footage of Shaq rapping:
20 hours 15 min ago	For what it's worth, the	For what it's worth, the alternating system was really dumb. I have no idea why they didn't go with best record.
22 hours 54 min ago	It never was based on a full season of team	It never was based on a full season of team accomplishment, though. Prior to the current, AllStar winner gets home field, system, home field simply alternated between AL and NL. I think the absence of interleague at was the rationale.
1 day 14 hours ago	As the father of twins, I	As the father of twins, I endorse this wholeheartedly. Also, follow the 3 hour schedule the NICU will get them on as long as you can. As preemies, they're probably going to take a while to feed at home. If you don't keep them on that schedule religiously, it will be really tough. Actually, the first three months are tough, regardless, but the schedule makes it a bit more regulated chaos.
6 days 1 hour ago	Or working in his brother's	Or working in his brother's chop shop
6 days 1 hour ago	Not with this guy strutting	Not with this guy strutting around the sideline
6 days 15 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.
6 days 16 hours ago	Maybe they listened to Penn	Maybe they listened to Penn State fans as to what constitutes a rivalry.
6 days 16 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.
1 week 1 hour 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 2 days 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 3 days 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...
2 weeks 15 hours 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.
2 weeks 1 day 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 2 days ago	Wasn't his quote "toe meets	Wasn't his quote "toe meets leather at 1"?
2 weeks 2 days 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 3 days 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 3 days 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 3 days 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.
3 weeks 2 days ago	No politics.	No politics.
3 weeks 2 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.
3 weeks 2 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 2 days 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 2 days 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 2 days 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 2 days 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 3 days 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 3 days 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 3 days ago	You're an advocate for ass	You're an advocate for ass cheeks, then.
3 weeks 3 days 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).

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