Chicago -
By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes
We’ll be haunted by Ryan Pace’s 2017 draft for the rest of our lives. Plus: Rueing Rodgers; Pat Fitzgerald Unavailable To Coach Bears Until 2031; Lovie Smith Parlays Embarrassing Illinois Failure Into NFL Job; So Cub Again; When Not Bad Is Good Enough You’re The Blackhawks; No Bulls; Sky Jacked; Roundball Roundtable, and more!
Posted on January 29, 2021
By Jim Coffman
Just because a coach says “No excuses” doesn’t mean there actually aren’t any excuses. I’ll get back to that shortly.
When I settled in to watch the ‘Hawks open a two-day, two-game series in Nashville on Tuesday night, I did so with a mindset that anything less than a terrible loss would be promising. And sure enough, the Hawks earned a point with a regulation tie before losing 3-2 in overtime. In so doing, they ran their early season record to 2-3-2, which is not great but not bad considering they opened the season with three lopsided losses.
Coach Jeremy Colliton had a different perspective, and he let it rip after the game.
Posted on January 27, 2021
By Thomas Chambers
Imagery during Wednesday’s inaugural festivities set off a lot of triggers for me.
When the Marine pilots set those tires down on the three dots on the South Lawn, I thought Trump didn’t deserve that kind of precision.
When Orange Crush and the Cabbage Queen stepped out on that little stubby red carpet . . . stubby . . . fingers . . . and the presidential third leg. Our nation’s capital is just so symbolic! Tricky Dick’s red carpet went all the way out to the ‘copter. Just sayin’.
When the four massive Rolls Royce turbofans finally got DJ Tweetin’ Fatass and his extended barnacles up in the air, I naturally thought about the Phantom Zone.
Posted on January 22, 2021
By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes
Attention, white people. Plus: Rags!; Comedy QBs; Kris Bryant Beefs; Does Zach LaVine Wear A Cape Or No?; Blackhawks Blackout; Evanston vs. Champaign, and more!
Posted on January 22, 2021
By David Rutter
Words of illumination and warning to the world’s women, as if they needed it.
If you ladies wondered how sadly addicted to self-admiration men are about their junk, consider Jared Porter, who was Theo Epstein’s managerial protege during the Cubs’ 2016 World Series season. He ran the Cubbies’ department of professional scouting, though it turns out future baseball players were not the only objects of his work.
Epstein and Porter were like THIS (stock image of intertwined fingers bunched closely together). Porter thereafter took another step up the managerial flagpole with the Diamondbacks.
Fast forward to one month ago when Porter is hired as general manager of the often scandal-ridden and competence-challenged New York Mets.
A month into his tenure Tuesday, Porter is fired, which means he got to bank $200,000 of his annual salary that likely would have blossomed to $10 million over a four-year contract.
Why? You can guess. Yes, the traditional wang picture gallery sent to a female acquaintance he was trying to wang. Between unsolicited texts and photos, he sent 60 wang messages to a name-withheld foreign female journalist he encountered in a Yankee Stadium elevator in 2016.
That’s a lot of digital advertising.
Posted on January 19, 2021
By Jim Coffman
In the end, it seemed as though the only thing former Bulls general manager and vice president of whatever John Paxson cared about was saving money for the chairman (Jerry Reinsdorf) and his partners.
He made should-have-been-forever interim (or assistant) Jim Boylen the full-time head coach despite the fact that then-interim head coach Boylen (after Fred Hoiberg was fired in December of 2018) had showed immediately that he wasn’t up to the job. In his first interim weekend, the coach held a ridiculously long practice featuring a clearly excessive amount of sprints and other basic conditioning and then executed an infamous five-for-five substitution in a game.
Do people remember when Tim Floyd did that early in his Bulls head-coaching career? Fortunately for Floyd, Charles Oakley was still in his second go-round with the Bulls at that point and he told the new head coach to never do that again in the NBA (which he did not). Oakley pointed out that deploying that sort of embarrassing tactic would potentially be injurious in the Association, which even way back then almost a quarter of a century ago (1998) was well on its way to becoming the ultimate players’ league.
Posted on January 19, 2021
By David Rutter
Welcome to the Malfunction Junction of college football.
Knoxville and its 100,000-seat Neyland Stadium (plus 500,000 television customers) only look like the environs of Alabama and Columbus. It’s a thin similarity.
Ever since naming Phillip Fulmer the athletic director 13 years ago, football life Eastern Tennessee has been consistently miserable. Fulmer was worse at that job than almost everyone who’d ever held it. He had been a great coach who proved the Peter Principle.
And ever since a rabble-rousing local radio personality and Twitter hordes twisted the Vols into picking the wrong coach four years ago, the program has been plummeting.
That misery hit a loud note Monday when Jeremy Pruitt was fired for “cause,” which means he did something worse than lose football games.
Posted on January 18, 2021
By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes
Awesome culture not even able to pull off a press conference. Plus: Holy Shit, White Sox; The Bad, Bad, Bad Blackhawks; The Less Bad Bulls; Evanston vs. Champaign; and more!
Posted on January 15, 2021
By Roger Wallenstein
With everything that’s happening in our tumultuous world, you can be excused for missing a rather amusing tale coming from the world of major league baseball last week.
As scandals go, this one appears rather tame compared to the PED uproar of the 1990s and early 2000s or the Astros’ sign-stealing scheme.
Mike DiGiovanna of the Los Angeles Times first reported the story after a court proceeding in Los Angeles involving former Angels visiting clubhouse attendant Brian “Bubba” Harkins.
While Harkins, who worked for the Angels for more than 30 years before being fired last March, is an unfamiliar name, people like Gerrit Cole, Justin Verlander, Adam Wainwright, Max Scherzer, Cory Kluber and Felix Hernandez are easily identifiable. All were mentioned in last week’s reporting.
Posted on January 11, 2021
By Jim Coffman and Steve Rhodes
No-man’s land. Plus: Bye Bye Bam-Bam; As The Crow Retires; Zach LaVine Stuffs Stat Sheet; and Evanston vs. Champaign. Go Padres and Red Stars!
Posted on January 11, 2021
