Debate Day: The Best Browns Coach Since ’99
August 6, 2015Danny’s Boys: Let’s go camping
August 7, 2015
Happy Friday WFNY’ers! I’m here to tell you that the ocean in Charleston South Carolina is absolutely lovely right now. I hope everyone has a family vacation that’s as much fun as all the swimming we did this week. And I mean it. I want every one of you to take that vacation. Time is the only resource and I don’t feel like I wasted a minute of it this week with my wife and boys. Enough of the sappiness! While we’re waiting…
On vacation from my sports teams…
I’m on vacation this week and in a lot of ways it’s both the best and worst time. I accidentally picked a week when I’d normally be attending Browns training camp and reporting back on everything I see to you. Unfortunately I’ve left Scott on an island there and for that I’m feeling like it was the worst of timing. But from the perspective of where we’ve arrived in time as a website talking about sports I also kind of think it’s the best. Long gone are the days of me losing my mind over Armond Smith or Peyton Hillis as they compete against friendly foes in training camp. The patience needed to know how good or bad the Browns are going to be must wait until the actual season and even then it’s crazy how fast feelings and judgements can change.
Did the Browns have a good year last year? A lot of people would find ways to say yes. A team helmed by Brian Hoyer was 7-4 and looking to make some noise before they fell off the face of the earth. Sure, they ended up being mired by distractions caused by Josh Gordon, Ray Farmer, and Johnny Manziel. Still, that team that went 7-4 with Brian Hoyer doing just enough at quarterback is kind of back this year, aren’t they? Jordan Cameron is gone and so is Miles Austin, but the Browns are probably better off net-net with Dwayne Bowe, Brian Hartline, a returning Andrew Hawkins, and Taylor Gabriel with a year under his belt. And don’t talk to me about Josh Gordon. The Browns basically didn’t have him at all last year. The team is probably better off just knowing he ain’t coming back this year.
That’s just talking about the offense. The defense basically didn’t lose anyone short of Buster Skrine. Skrine’s departure is a loss, but the Browns finally have some competing depth at corner for the first time in a very long time. No, we can’t count on Justin Gilbert yet, but the Browns signed veteran Tramon Williams and have K’Waun Williams, Pierre Desir, and then Justin Gilbert in the running to play in the Browns’ secondary.
The pass rush is another muddled field of players, but doesn’t it feel muddled in a good way? Paul Kruger is still there. Barkevious Mingo is healthy. The Browns will get Armonty Bryant back, they even have a guy named Scott “Bloodbath” Solomon who is getting reps ahead of Mingo. None of this considers Nate Orchard, whom the Browns selected in the second round. The Browns have to put it together, but there’s a really good chance with all those competitors that the Browns might just get after a quarterback this year. Who knows? Maybe they’ll even stop the run too!
The real point though is that I feel that way heading into training camp and if I was there, I’d be a victim of confirmation bias. I’d be looking for reasons to justify to myself that all my hopes and intuitions about the Browns were unfolding before my eyes in a situation where there’s little in the way of actual data to be gleaned. In a lot of ways, I’m better off just skipping it and waiting for the pre-season games.
Let the girl play…
One of the best things about sports is that it’s a place to talk about ultimate equality where performance separates people as opposed to by race or gender — except that we still do separate by gender at times it makes sense. Joe Rogan’s spoken at length about why men and women shouldn’t compete against each other in combat sports like MMA. That makes sense. And generally speaking, these conversations revolve around giving women the same chances that men have to compete in sports. That’s why this next story is kind of weird about a youth travel basketball team emblazoned with a Cleveland Cavaliers logo that was disqualified from their tourney for having a girl play a few minutes.
Last Saturday afternoon, a youth basketball team from Virginia was disqualified from a national travel tournament for having a girl on their roster.
After winning in the Elite Eight to advance to the Final Four of the National Travel Basketball Association Boy’s National Championship, the Charlottesville Cavaliers were disqualified because 10-year-old Kymora Johnson had played a few minutes in earlier rounds. The team the Cavaliers had eliminated in the Elite Eight advanced after the disqualification and went on to win the tournament.
The tourney is standing behind its “rules are rules” thing, but they’re absolutely wrong about this. We know why gender rules are put in place: so that we don’t get a Rodney Dangerfield in Ladybugs situation arising where Jonathan Brandis dresses up like a girl and dominates a girls soccer league. If you think too hard about it all, you might even convince yourself that fair is fair and rules are rules — but you know better. The rules aren’t designed to keep girls from moving up to compete with boys at a higher level.
And, speaking of girls competing with boys at a high athletic level, Melissa Mayeux continues to prove just how capable girls can be at it as she thrives in the MLB European Elite camp competition.
In her first game at the MLB European Elite Camp, Melissa Mayeux goes 2-for-4 with an RBI. http://t.co/28X47Zj7oE pic.twitter.com/qysjvWHszx
— MLB (@MLB) August 6, 2015
The article goes on to talk about the technicalities of the situation and how a team that got beat by the Cavaliers sent photos of the game when Kymora was playing in order to plead their case for disqualification. That’s right. Rather than teaching their kids to lose with grace, they played the technicality card to advance. The tourney attorney even admitted that team disqualification isn’t meant to handle the situation involving Kymora and the Cavaliers.
This is what drives people insane. When everyone looks at something and knows exactly how it should be handled and not, it’s frustrating when people don’t use courage to fight a bad rule and go for the obvious and fair outcome. We’ve become such a scurrying collection of animals in the face of legal jargon and technicalities. And for what? So that a ten-year-old girl can get her team disqualified from a tournament after winning a game? Cool tournament you’ve got there.
Your weekly moment of soccer zen… NEYMAR!
Finally caught up on the new Jason Isbell…
I don’t know why it took me a bit to really catch up on the new Jason Isbell, but no worries. I made it. It’s been especially good vacation listening down here in South Carolina. I’m an indie rock, metal, hardcore kind of music guy, and yet Jason Isbell does it for me. It’s just nearly undeniably good music.
That’s it from me. Have a great weekend everyone.
41 Comments
I recommend Oak Island NC for a family destination. Beaches are not crowded at all, and you can have a beer.
If you don’t like a rule, you can do one of two things:
1. You can break the rule and face the consequences.
2. You can change the rule and live happily ever after.
Since the little Cavs chose to break the rule rather than change the rule, they have to deal with the consequences. That’s how it works.
It doesn’t have to work that way. It really doesn’t unless you want to be slave to a rule that makes no sense.
You cannot allow teams to unilaterally decide which rules they will follow and which they will ignore. It’s as simple as that.
I agree to some extent, but there should be a way to petition and some common sense should be utilized when analyzing such petitions.
Also, oftentimes, we see that it is an after-the-fact argument. She did not play in the game against the team that complained (and ultimately benefited). The team that lost when she played should have to be the one to file the complaint IMO.
Fight the rule then, or don’t participate in the league or get mad when you are penalized for breaking a rule.
Hence my point: If it’s a bad rule, then change it. If it can’t be changed in time to satisfy one person or team, then that’s the way it goes. Life ain’t always fair. Deal with it.
As for who did and didn’t complain, that’s completely irrelevant.
If you let one team break one rule, then you have no recourse if another team decides to break a rule that they don’t like. And before you know it, no rule is enforceable.
Just stick to the rules.
https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQjY7SWo4VTAqoPLG7w2NqCZZtlCdNyZ-hra96FU0uwS70819yf
Uh, Mingo’s hurt.
Love Charleston. Would love to go back soon.
They still get their participation trophies, right?
“As for who did and didn’t complain, that’s completely irrelevant.”
Not necessarily. Were there rules about who can protest, how, and when? In a softball league I used to play in, protests had to be filed in a certain manner by a certain team at a certain time. We had just beat a team in the first round of the playoffs and they thought we used illegal players, but protests must be filed before the game, which they didn’t, so they technically had no direct recourse. They did, however, go tell the team we were playing next to file a protest before our second round game started, which they did.
I’m not going to search for the rules of the tourney, I’m just saying it’s possible there is something in there about who/how/when protests must be filed. Although now I’m curious if there is, and kinda hope there is, and that the protesting team broke the rules so that their protest was illegal.
really good stuff Craig … i would like to talk about hoyer for a spell. yes, he’s the only browns QB with a winning record since 1999 , and yes he had them at 7-4 at one point last year , but was he really that good ? yes, he had a few good moments & played well , but he was DEAD LAST in the nfl in completion % & when it really counted in the game against the colts , he laid a big-time egg & lost his job. it is only my opinion that the browns won in spite of him many times which tells me the browns are getting better as an overall team & that they only need consistent , not spectacular, play by the QB. in fact , the overall team depth may be the best it’s been since our return in 1999. the pundits are predicting 3- 5 wins based on the schedule & the current QB situation … i’m not buyin’ it.
the texans fans will soon feel the same pain we felt with hoyer.
enjoy your vacay …
If the Little Cavs can break the girl rule, then why can’t the protesting team break the protest rule?
hi BOOM … he’s starting to remind me of courtney brown , a 1st round pick with promise , but can’t stay on the field due to injuries.
Oh they can, but then either the Little Cavs should have been allowed to still play, or the protest shouldn’t have been upheld. Either both wrongs are accepted, or both are ignored. In either case, the Little Cavs wouldn’t have been DQ’ed.
hi NEIDS … so , did you have illegal players on your team ??
Depends…are you the commish of that league or a player that I played against? O:-)
LMAO !! … i also played & umped a lot of mens softball … i loved it.
love the soccer zens …
Apparently the tournament told them in advance when the coach asked that she couldn’t play or they’d be DQed. Whether it’s a bad rule or not is irrelevant; he made the choice to go against them and that’s how it goes.
my weekly question to you soccer guys from a new fan who knows nothing: what did the goalie do wrong here? Should he have just made his best guess and aggressively slid at the ball feet first? Or was this just impossible to defend at that range, because this guy can perform a Kyrie-like, stop-and-go ankle breaker and there was going be a countermove for whatever the goalie tried?
This is a great time, sports wise, to be on vacation I have no idea what Craig Lyndall is talking about!
http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/i-dont-make-enough-money-to-go-on-vacation-ecard.jpg
His defenders left him out to dry making any attempt nearly impossible. Had he made a save it would have been amazing. So in short the goalie did nothing wrong other then maybe lose his jock on the play.
Quality.
How does the rule not make sense? I can think of a number of legitimate reasons for why parents might want their child to play on an all-boys or all-girls team. Can’t say I’d agree with the reasoning behind them all, but I wouldn’t say they make no sense.
This is my other problem. WE’RE NOW MIRED IN A CONVERSATION ABOUT MADE UP RULES AND TECHNICALITIES RATHER THAN THE ISSUE AT HAND. Having a girl on your basketball team full of boys is not philosophically wrong at all basically ever. It’s not cheating and if you make up and write up and enforce a bunch of rules, it’s on you. If you want to be a youth basketball league run like a bunch of harumphing attorneys, be my guest, but it’s wrong and a horrible way to go through life.
Forget the rules and look at the issue at hand. Rules are arbitrary creations by human beings, especially when you get down to the granularity of youth sports tournaments. I argue this with my Fantasy Football Commissioner all the time. We can make up a bunch of rules, but then we’re going to spend most of our time not talking about football stats and amazing players, but rules about waiver wires and trades and all the other stuff that has nothing to do with the point.
Look at what we’re all here to do. We want to have a tournament to name the best youth basketball team in the tournament. Did disqualifying the team with the girl accomplish anything other than enforcing your made up, arbitrary rules? If so, then you failed.
#216 represent:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CLw5hEGVEAAVA6i.jpg
First, Craig, just because YOU think something is not philosophically wrong at all basically ever doesn’t mean that it isn’t. Obviously, the people who run the tournament think it is.
Also, how do you know the rule is arbitrary? It’s obviously there for a reason, and no one else had a problem with it. Maybe there are liability issues in play. Maybe they let a girl play once and she got badly hurt, and the tournament get sued. I don’t know. But you don’t know either. We shouldn’t call a rule arbitrary or a technicality if we don’t know what the impetus behind it is.
BTW, I’m the current Commissioner of our fantasy baseball league, and I go strictly by the book. No deviation whatsoever. And I’ll tell you why. I was commish about ten years ago, and I was pretty loosey-goosey. If a guy sent me a transaction in a few minutes late, I’d let it slide. If somebody else messed up his roster, I’d let him fix it without penalty. And you wanna know what happened? Of course you do. Chaos ensued, followed by bitter arguments and hard feelings. So this time around, it’s no breaks for anybody. I told everybody this, and they all understand it. And it works. I disallowed one transaction because a guy got it in 11 seconds late. And when I told him that, he understood and didn’t put up a fuss. This is the only way to run a league. The ONLY way.
*an
if that’s the case, then perhaps the only way to get the rule changed was to win a bunch of games in the tournament, get DQ’d and get the team on national news. Hey, wait a second…
…and if the situation were flipped and it was a boy in an all-girls’ tournament? How would you react then?
I think msnbc digitally added the ELITE part as it iseems to be different handwriting
I think I covered that in the post. That’s the polar opposite. That’s the only thing that we actually have to guard against, not the reverse in basketball.
First of all, yes, my opinion is my opinion about this issue philosophically. I think the people who run the tourney are completely wrong.
Second of all, I agree with your Fantasy Football situation. Seems like you have a lot of rules that make sense and need to be enforced strictly. I have no issue with that. My point is about too many and incorrect rules. My league changed from being about football to being about reading and following the various rules and codes. It was nuts.
Here’s the real question. Do you have a no girls rule? 🙂
Our league is called the He-Man Women-Haters Club (ask your grandparents :).
I would say there’s not much he could have done there, but basically don’t get caught in no-mans-land between staying on your line and going out to make a play. Pick one and hope for the best. And then let your defenders know in no uncertain terms that it’s bad strategy to let a guy like Neymar go unmarked while you scoop the ball out of the back of your net.
Good quality or poor quality?
Good in the funny sense, poor in the life choices sense.
/yeah, 3 internet days is like 3 real life years, so what, wanna fight about it?
I just like to imagine that you have been pondering your response to my snarky question for 3 full days, perhaps losing sleep, and eating nothing but the pen cap that you chew on when you’re in deepest thought.
http://www.theloop.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/jerk-store.gif
Ha, that’s pretty much what I imagine people are thinking of me every time I post. (presuming anyone actually cared, which is presumptuous)
I try to avoid imagining what people think of me. It takes me to dark places.