Cavs Win the East—again: Cavs-Celtics Game 5, Behind the Box Score
May 26, 2017Indians rant: Are we there yet?
May 26, 2017Happy Friday everyone. Happy holiday weekend. As always, feel free to use this post as your open thread for the weekend. Leave us your book reviews and music recommendations and anything else you feel like talking about. Now if you’ll excuse me I want to talk about Ryan Grigson.
The NFL Fraternity is the best (worst?) fraternity
Ryan Grigson was not good at his job. I’m not going to kill him for the Trent Richardson trade, specifically. That’s a deal that he made to try and win right away. It didn’t work out, but Trent Richardson had a lot to do with that. Despite everyone’s Monday Morning Quarterbacking, I don’t know anyone who would have guessed that Trent Richardson would shrink out of the league the way he did with off-the-field issues and physical failures. Grigson’s failures go much deeper than a single trade.
Grigson took a quarterback that literally every team in the NFL would have wanted in the draft and one that basically all NFL teams would want still to this day. What Grigson did was put a team around Luck that made the world question his worth as an NFL starter while also helping him get beat up to the point that he had a lacerated kidney at one point.
Beyond that, one of the nicer NFL people I follow on Twitter, Josh Wilson of Stampede Blue, said the following.
In all sincerity, I hope that Grigson does well with the Browns. He had a ton of issues with the Colts – mainly talent evaluation and relationships with people within the building – but perhaps a new role with a new team will help him keep growing and be able to have success in that position.
The Browns didn’t hire Grigson to be their general manager, but they did bring in a guy who was known for having issues with people within the Colts’ offices. We’re talking about a guy that Pat McAfee said had “unwarranted arrogance,” whom he saw “treat humans horrendously for 5 years.” Reggie Wayne was a bit more diplomatic, but said “It was about time,” when Grigson was fired.
And yet, this guy is given a job and a paycheck by the Browns so he can work underneath a guy who used to work for him? It’s a hell of a fraternity, the NFL. Just ask George Kokinis who is still working for the Ravens after a partial-year blip as GM for the Browns alongside Eric Mangini.
As I said on Twitter, with a loyalty club like that, if Bernie Madoff had worked in the NFL, he’d have a desk and a salary from his prison cell.
The Cleveland Cavaliers vs. The Golden State Warriors
That’s really all I have on that. Maybe a few exclamation points. The Cavaliers are underdogs. They were underdogs last year. The Warriors have to take the belt back from LeBron James and company. They might do just that, but this is the way it should be.
Book Review: American Kingpin
Last week I read a new book called American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton.1 I heard Bilton on the Longform podcast and knew that I needed to check out the book. It’s all about the rise and fall of the dark web drug superstore, The Silk Road. It’s cobbled together from the court case and reporting around the investigation that brought down the site’s leader Ross Ulbricht.
Ulbricht sounded exceedingly normal from the outside. He is a Texan who attended Penn State. Before long, his political aspirations for extreme libertarianism took hold of his life and he thought he could change the world’s drug policies with his internet disobedience enabling millions of transactions surrounding illegal drugs, weapons, and even fake IDs and legal documents.
The power of the story is in the power of the internet. One man with a dream and a little bit of coding experience can truly change the world. While the feds were able to shut down Ross Ulbricht and The Silk Road, it was a proof of concept that won’t be so easily shut down completely and permanently. It also exposed the power of greed as the true story shows us that it wasn’t just the criminals who found themselves overtaken by a sense of security in greed on the internet with The Silk Road’s ill-begotten Bitcoin.
- No really. Make the title longer. [↩]
62 Comments
If only I knew how many days until preseason…
Madoff? Um , no. That’s a bit much.
i’m okay with Grigson being here , because he will be working under Andrew Berry & Berry will be calling the shots in his department.
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Only two Browns have worn 76, and both are HOFers, so you get both.
Oof
https://twitter.com/PatMcAfeeShow/status/867512859202375680
Sometimes people get promoted higher than their abilities, and that seemed to be the case with Grigson. When you’re a GM, you don’t do much talent evaluation. Especially in Grigson’s case where the position meant that he was running the club. You rely on your scouts and your chief of player personnel to guide your decisions. Or at least you are supposed to do that. Whatever Grigson’s flaws as a GM, people apparently thought enough of his abilities to scout players to move him up the chain to a position he wasn’t suited for. Here’s hoping that he’s back in a position that really does suit him.
YESSSSSS
As Bode said yesterday and some other writers have mentioned, at one point, Grigson was good enough at his job to become a GM. He failed at being a GM, spectacularly. But he was okay at something…let’s only let him do that something.
I was wondering which one you were going to go with. Good call.
Jinx.
and i love Kingpin … https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/66c974adaf11dd86597b6ef5f6c03be767cd0df1d7f0f58a3a0892f11d3c54df.gif
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I’m envisioning Sashi making two phone calls: Hue, we got your NFL guy. Former GM and everything. Andrew, keep this guys travel schedule full and out of the office.
Right. It was an exaggeration like on purpose.
I worked in FSI for 20 years. Guys like Madoff and the clowns that brought us the financial crisis deserve their own special place.
How funny! Almost simultaneous.
This happens all the time in the real world. Great salesman gets promoted to sales manager and flops. It doesn’t mean he/she was a bad salesman, nor does it mean he/she can’t once again be a good salesman.
Yep. Or awesome software developer gets promoted to manager of a team of software developers and flops. Entirely different skill set, but it happens a lot in my industry.
hi PAT … good post.
well done , RGB !!
right. I’d have no prob if Phil Savage/Ray Farmer/Kokinis returned to scout or break down film, areas of competence which led to their promotions. The modern NFL seems filled with guys emotionally stunted from never having done much in life except spend long hours breaking down film for other emotionally stunted guys and fearing they’ll get canned by the next HC. This produces far more martinets like Mangini and ham-handed incompetents like Farmer than masters of the football universe like Belichik. Just keep the dude in cubicle or scouting road trip. I’m far more worried about why Andrew Berry was deemed qualified for the responsibilities granted him at age 28..
Speaking of Mangini and stunted growth……
https://twitter.com/ProFootballTalk/status/868088048734666754
Ugh.
I know it’s easy to think of the guys that played way back in the day as perpetually old people, forgetting that they were young(ish) men when they played the game, but still . . . why does that photo of Motley look like a granddad running away from another granddad? (Not that I would ever want to try to tackle him.)
Or some guy that thinks too highly of himself and is really good at being argumentative goes to law school and becomes a really terrible lawyer. Oh. Wait.
Or maybe this is just to appease the lazy local reportering always clamoring for “MOAR FOOTBAWL PEOPLE, NOW!”
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hi HARV … it’s an honor to chat with you. How could somebody be deemed qualified at such a tender age ?? In case you didn’t know , i graduated cum laude from Harvard with a bachelor’s in economics (great for salary cap) & a masters in computer science (great for analytics) … i was a 4-year starter at Harvard achieving All-Ivy League & All-American status.
My pro career & NFL aspirations were derailed by a herniated disc. So i decided to take a fast track to being a GM someday. So , right out of college i was scouting assistant for 2 years before being promoted to Scout Coordinator & then eventually promoted to Pro Scouting Director … i have also helped with contract negotiations , so i have some experience there as well.
I don’t want to brag , but i have an excellent pedigree as a human being , a student , a top-notch player & now i’m on my way to being a top-flite GM. Only time will bear this out.
sincerely ,
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/cd3d39764287acb39e9dbe483101b1f9639b65fef8af092f6b277ace8419f0d2.jpg Andrew Berry
LMFAO !!
I think of Motley as Jerome Bettis before players could afford to blow off real off-season jobs for serious workouts.
C’mon, rosey glasses. No serious dues paid in amateur talent evaluation, areas of cap and salaries irrelevant to his duties here, and if being a high level athlete somehow qualifies him then Matt Millen would have drafted like Bill Walsh and vice versa. Ray Farmer had better bona fides to find players and slot a draft board.
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hi HARV … i don’t think Millen or Farmer will ever be accused of being brilliant … and some folks are quite adept enough to learn on-the-job. I think he’s done a credible job thus far.
enjoy your holiday weekend !
and this is just me , but between Sashi , DePo & Berry , i think Berry is the most valuable of the 3 .
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Maybe I’m just humoring myself, but I think their utter lack of respect for the local media is one of this FO’s more redeeming qualities.
Someone told me, “You like to argue a lot. I see why you went to law school.” “Is that what you think lawyers do? Just arguing?,” I proceeded to yell at her.
I came home one day after all of 2 weeks of law school and told my wife that I was going to quit. She asked why (amazing listener, this one). “Because I realize that I don’t like these people. I can’t stand lawyers.”
The self-loathing is real. The only thing that eases it is the fact that I hate all of you other lawyers just as much.
I felt Grigson was the worst active GM in all of the big 4 sports when he was fired. I’ve been a fan of the HBT but this is puzzling.
Same feeling. You go in feeling all great and then look around you and see the douchey “future lawyers” (shudders). Going to law school or even being in the legal world is like holding up a mirror…but seeing seeing the worst side of you (the nether regions?)
PS. I’m going to start telling people I don’t identify as a lawyer.
I identify as a third world dictator, and tell everyone I meet. And get super offended if they don’t acknowledge it.
So, you’re a translawyer?
Or, do I have that backwards.
Well, as has been said, they didn’t hire him to be a GM.
I have Andrew Berry’s agent on Line 1…
we also think lawyers yell a lot just for the sake of it. looks like ‘we’ were correct.
you’ve got to have more self confidence. you’re good for second world dictator.
I disagree. I think he’s a total dictator.