Morgan Beard

Yaxel Lenderborg on his NBA debut and guarding Luka: "I got to see what the NBA is like, man. Lot of flopping, lot of foul baiting, lot of praying to the ref. Interesting first game for me... Being in there firsthand, just watching all the whining and complaining, I lost all respect. That was awful" Transcript of this soundbite: "Yeah, it was interesting. I got to see what the NBA is like, man. Lot of flopping, lot of foul baiting, lot of praying to the ref. Interesting first game for me, for sure. I had a lot of respect for him (Luka). You know, just watching. I didn't really watch the NBA much, I just watched highlights. Seeing him, you know, kill people all the time. But then being in there firsthand, just watching all the whining and complaining, I lost all respect, man. Like that was awful. Like me getting frustrated, it's not about the foul being called, it's about him complaining the entire game. And then you get the foul call, congratulations bro. And then you talk to me like you did something great, bro? Come on, dog. That's just weak. It kinda threw me off for a little while, cause you know, like I said, I had so much respect for him. Gone man, gone. I was telling him he sucks, he can't score on me. You talking and you can't score on me. I said it the whole game. I said a couple cuss words obviously, you know, that's why I got the technical and all that. But I was letting him know, because he was laughing and talking all this because of that one foul call. His only bucket on me was a banker from half court. Like I know that it's a team sport. You know, he had 28pts on us as a team. Me, I took my matchup personally. Tried not to get caught on the fouls. Tried my best. I was thinking about playing him with my hands behind my back to see if that worked, probably would've still got a foul call." Transcript via: reddit.com/r/nba/comments/1x…

Here is (part) of Central Michigan head coach Matt Drinkall's quote in opposition to the proposed 24-team College Football Playoff:

Steve Young went 10-0 in his GameDay picks 😲🧠 ELITE ball knowledge 🔥

I’ve seen enough people ask that I’ll break down the math. Brandon Aubrey XP%: 97% NFL average 2Pt rate: 48% Key assumptions: You score twice and get stops. OT win probability is 50% If you kick the XP twice, you have a 95% chance of sending game to OT, 50% chance of winning in OT. 47.5% chance at winning the game. If you go for two: Get first, kick XP on second and win in regulation: 46.6% of time, win 100% Get first, miss XP and go to OT: 1.4% of time, win 50% Miss first, get second and go to OT: 24.9% of time, win 50% of time Miss first and second 2-Point: 27.6% of time, guaranteed loss By going for two, your win probability jumps to 59.8% chance. So if you guarantee me we get two scores and two stops, you’ll win ~47% of the time kicking extra points, and ~60% of the time going for two. The reason it doesn’t jive with coaches/fans is because delaying a loss feels psychologically advantageous… but losing in OT vs losing in regulation is the same result

I hate to say it folks but I think sports as a whole may have peaked. Everything about sports just feels so forced and unnecessary, a desperate attempt for a private equity firm to squeeze more juice from the lemon. You have college football who is going to expand to a 24 team playoff, getting rid of the most unique thing about college football; its regular season. But these people aren’t college football people, they are tv executives and investors. They could care less about the sustainability of the sports and the tradition of it, they only care about turning a profit. The MLB playoff have begun and if you are between the ages of 22 and 65, you probably haven’t seen much of them because they are all on during the day. A MLB playoff game started at 2 PM Eastern on a Tuesday. This is 11 AM Pacific. Why? Because NBC has to be the only network that can air the Wild Card round, so they need triple headers to be able to get all of the games in. Atlanta and Philly are heading into a game 3 and didn’t even know what time they were playing til about midnight last night because of conflicts with other games and network availability. Corporate greed has completely botched the MLB playoffs so far in order to keep all the games on NBC. It feels as if sports have peaked across the board. We’ve gotten to a point where it’s impossible for fans to care more than they have before, spend more than they have before, or watch more than they have before. Every consumer situation has an infliction point, where the capacity of the consumer is maxed out. The product has to back off in order to not burn out the customer and keep them engaged enough to have them invested long term while they back off and recharge short term. I believe that is where America is with sports now. It currently demands too much of us on a daily basis and has ruined the reasons that we have fallen in love with it. Maybe we all just need a break…