Same old Browns: Cleveland loses season opener to Eagles, 29-10
September 11, 2016Clevinger can be Wright for Indians: Between Innings
September 12, 2016Happy Monday, you guys. How’d Week 1 treat you? Lots of underdogs took home the prize money for their bettors—well, aside from one, but more on them later. The Buckeyes started out slow only to demolish Tulsa. The Indians look pretty decent while Corey Kluber is really, really vying for another AL Cy Young award. Oh, and the Cavs start practicing in about two weeks starting with Camp LeBron in L.A.
But While We Wait…
Sportsball: They Are Who We Thought They Were
So it turns out that the Cleveland Browns are as bad as many were prognosticating, at least for one day. The game, at least from a narrative standpoint, was there for the having. Rookie quarterback facing his first bout of actual competition, coming off of a horrible preseason, running with a group of players with whom he was not accustomed to playing up until the last week. When all the cards were on the table, however, the Browns were the only team to play thus far in Week 1 to lose by more than nine points.
Fourteen games, only one of which was decided by double figures, and the Cleveland Football Browns were the ones to falter by the widest margin. The Vikings lost their starting quarterback to a devastating knee injury, traded for the guy who the Browns were supposed to play against on Sunday, and they beat their opponent, on the road, with their second-stringer under center. Even the Dolphins, the largest underdogs of the afternoon with the Seahawks being 10.5-point favorites at home, managed to claw through the entire contest to only lose by two.
I know a lot of folks think that the Browns’ offense will keep them in games, but until Josh Gordon returns to provide Robert Griffin III with a more reliable option, this team’s defense is so poor that any offense may not matter—be it in Cleveland or Mexico City.
It’s only one of sixteen, but holy crap was it a bad one.
Technobabble: Apple kills the headphone jack
After being around for roughly 150 years, the headphone jack—that little hole on the bottom of your devices—will be no more, at least when it comes to Apple’s latest incarnation in the iPhone 7. Claiming that the future of audio is wireless (a technology that has been around for some years), iPhone headphones on a going forward basis will be adaptable through Bluetooth. This means abandoning your plug-in headphones that you’ve acquired over the years, making your mobile experience on par with that of many home set-ups now that use network-based Sonos or wireless surround sound systems.
iPhone 7s will come with Earpods that are adaptable via the lightning (or “charging”) port, meaning that your noise cancelling headphones are not necessarily garbage bound for now. But there will also be the chance for users to purchase AirPods (get it?) that are the same size and scope as the Apple headphones you have come to know, but are connected through proprietary wireless means.1 The tradeoff? Increased battery life and the space for an improved camera—both items that have long been needed for power users.
People thought Apple was being pompous and overly aggressive when it rolled out tablets and the concept of mobile computing. And while the laptop is by no means dead, it’s tough to argue that the company didn’t hit on more items than it has missed over the last decade or so. This is the same company that killed off floppy discs and CD-Rom/DVD drives in laptops—both methods of storage having moved to dinosaur status long ago. The whole aux jack will be a big change for a lot of people, but just like with corded phones and reel-based video, there are kids on this planet right now who will one day laugh at you for ever plugging headphones in in the first place.
Culture for the Kids: Spoons out for Harambe
The spirit of Harambe lives on, the latest of which comes in the form of the pre-game huddle for the abovementioned Vikings:
https://vine.co/v/5JD0FhOuAIe
#ActualSportswriting: Hot Takes Need Not Apply
“The Drive That Never Ends” by Seth Wickersham (ESPN The Magazine): “Elway sits alone in his office. He won’t allow himself to get ’emotionally involved’ with players and even most staff, lest he end up cutting them one day. Of course, all GMs say that stuff. But the stakes are high with Elway and not just because he threatens his reputation as a player — ‘greatest locker room quarterback,’ in the words of his former coach Mike Shanahan — with every front office move. ”2
“Chip Kelly’s Second Act” by Chris Brown (The Ringer): “Kelly — stripped of any oversight over personnel — is in charge of a 49ers offense that boasts arguably the worst skill-position talent in the NFL and will be led at quarterback by Blaine Gabbert, whose 71.9 career passer rating puts him behind such exalted figures as Geno Smith and Brandon Weeden. While Kelly’s Oregon and early Eagles offenses broke records by weaving together multiple formations, adaptable running schemes, and multifaceted read-options, all powered by an ingenious spread offense philosophy and a frenetic, up-tempo pace, in the past two years those elements have been undermined or simply fallen away, and Kelly’s offense has become, in Evan Mathis’s words, the most ‘never-evolving, vanilla offense’ in the NFL. How did that happen?”3
“The Disappearance of Justin Blackmon” by Jordan Ritter Conn (The Ringer): “You don’t need much creativity to imagine this man, just a few years ago, setting fire to secondaries across college football. It’s easy to picture him sitting in the green room at Radio City Music Hall, waiting to be selected in the 2012 NFL draft. He’s still imprinted with the muscles of a former Heisman candidate. But in the past two years, Blackmon has appeared in this drafty room on the third floor of this rural Oklahoma building more often than he’s appeared on an NFL sideline.”4
“By staying silent, Roger Goodell and the NFL have come out on top” by Will Leitch (NY Mag): “The press can call out the NFL all it wants, but until people stop watching football, it won’t make a difference. It points to a disconcerting emergency PR strategy that seems more and more common, and effective far beyond the world of professional sports: Just pretend there is no emergency, rely on the public’s distrust of the press, and wait for the media to punch itself out.”5
Video: Are birds beautiful or are they disgusting sky mice?
Here’s John Oliver to settle the debate:
Have a great Monday, you guys. Regardless of what happened on Sunday afternoon, you’re all winners in my mind.
- They’re $159 and will be available next month. [↩]
- As with every Seth Wickersham piece, this one is extremely well-told while being extremely well-reported. [↩]
- I’m so glad to see Brown being absorbed by The Ringer. His analysis makes everyone else who does film studies have to be that much better. [↩]
- Yet another excellent Ringer story by a former Grantland scribe, this one on a player Browns fans should know an awful lot about. [↩]
- A terrific column on the frustrations of covering a league that just pretends there are no issues in addition to being this week’s reminder that columns can also be #ActualSportswriting. [↩]
54 Comments
I felt bad for you (no, really), but I was fist-pumping seeing Michael Bourn help out the Indians in a playoff race again.
“It was as though Jackson wanted to wow everyone with his innovative, gutsy play calls.”
THIS! I was really expecting/hoping that wasn’t a facet of his makeup.
Sorry homie. You guys have had your good run though…it’s our turn again:)
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