32 thoughts on “JULY 22, 2016: I will say this, though”

    1. I'll just tuck those away in the First National WGOM Savings and Loan to cover all the red ones I've gotten...

        1. the WGOM is pretty damned close to a barter economy. I don't think those bucks store any value.

  2. Aquinas caught part of the speech too. I think he knew I didn't approve, and found it troubling that the speaker seemed convincing when Aquinas "knew" (based on my explanations) it shouldn't be.

    1. It seems telling, somehow, that when the words don't actually mean anything, we can still take the tone and emotion and find ourselves convinced, if we like.

      The kid has been shit-talking Trump for months now as though he knows all about him, which he most definitely didn't, and we've told him we didn't want to hear it. Last night he admitted maybe he was wrong. We'll have to let him watch the speeches next week to really let him wallow in uncertainty. That will be good for him.

  4. The twitters tell me that former Vikings coach Dennis Green has passed away from cardiac arrest at the age of sixty-seven.

        1. I never cared for him as a coach but with hindsight (8 playoff appearances in 10 years) I'm wondering if I was too harsh on him. Especially since I now understand sample sizes. He was gifted Cris Carter, but a lot of the core of his teams over his success were trained by him. I have no idea if the Vikings should have regularly been a 12-4 team over the stretch or if Denny's coaching helped them get to a 9-7, 10-6 point, but it's hard to argue that any coach since him has surpassed him.

          1. I always thought he did a great job with those '90s Vikings teams of keeping the team winning without relying on one particular QB. Just looking at Football Reference, it looks like the primary QB from '92 to '99 was:

            Gannon
            McMahon
            Moon
            Moon
            Johnson
            Johnson
            Cunningham
            George

            8 seasons, 6 QBs, 7 playoff appearances.

          2. The problem with Denny is that he made terrible in-game decisions. He was bad at the things we could see. He was great at identifying talent and developing it. That combo made him particularly frusyrating because there was so much potential.

                  1. MLB is not the NFL. I'm having a hard time grasping what, exactly, Gardy did to identify or develop talent. He wasn't in charge of the draft, or the minor league system, or acquiring players in any other way.

                    Cristian Guzman's only season with the Twins with an OPS+ higher than 79 was 2001, the year before Gardy took over. Luis Rivas got about 1,400 PA with the Twins under Gardy, and managed a non-negative rWAR exactly once in 4 seasons under him. Those are perhaps the two most glaring negatives, but there are lots of other examples of players for whom it is pretty hard to discern a Gardy effect.

                    the credit for developing the roster has to go mostly to Terry Ryan, Jim Rantz, and Mike Radcliffe.

    3. I think the passing of time (and a lot of brutal football) has been a bit kind to Dennis' tenure with the Vikings because what I remember when he left is that everyone hated him, he hated the media and the owners, and it being an all around toxic situation.

      That said, his teams was always good for at least an 8-8 season even with the likes of Sean Salisbury and a washed up JIm McMahon at quarterback.. And that 1998 season was special.

      1. If he had won a Super Bowl, Minnesota would just be another Boston, with pink hats and insufferable fans.

        1. I really like this passage from the NYT story:

          Green landed his first head coaching job at perennial losers Northwestern, in 1981 and coached there for four years without ever winning more than three games in a season. Still, he was named Big Ten coach of the year in 1982 for engineering upsets of Minnesota and Michigan State.

          “That’s where I learned to take my ego completely out of it,” Green said. “You weren’t going to a bowl game every year, and you weren’t going to win as many games as you liked. But you could graduate kids and leave every game with 100 percent pride.”

          1. Eldest Brother worked for Green at Northwestern, that's where he met his wife. I knew him from my days at the TV station, we did The Dennis Green show every week during the season. Never thought he was much of a coach, and I know some personal things that always left me lacking in respect for him as a person.

            1. Interesting. Maybe your experience reflects just how low the bar is for "good person" in football?

                1. I think the whole Penn State and Baylor things extend that sample size out quite a bit.

      1. Thanks, I don't often look up live music from bands I like, so it's been fun doing the research.

  6. There is crying in baseball. Tears of outrage and shock.

    When I asked Melinda J. Young, a deputy prosecuting attorney for Washington’s King County, which includes Seattle and Tacoma, how many youth sports embezzlement cases she had handled, Ms. Young answered: “Too many to count.”

    (I asked her to please count anyway.)

    It didn’t take long to discover that fraud in youth sports was pervasive — “the dark side of the nonprofit sector,” one expert called it.

    The once innocent mom-and-pop world of Little Leagues and soccer clubs had evolved into a prosperous industry, and as with any business, corruption was not uncommon.

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