The Sun Devils themselves aren’t as impressive as Graham’s coaching tree.
Some guys are great facilitators.
Hayden Fry took Iowa to 14 bowls and engineered two top-10 finishes but is known for a coaching tree that features Bill Snyder, Barry Alvarez, and a wide array of Stoopses.
Hal Mumme took Kentucky to back-to-back bowls for the first time in 15 years but is remembered for his air raid disciples: Mike Leach, Dana Holgorsen, etc.
Former Miami and North Carolina head coach Butch Davis hired a host of future head coaches — Chuck Pagano, Greg Schiano, Rob Chudzinski, Randy Shannon, Mario Cristobal, Curtis Johnson, Everett Withers — but oversaw just one top-10 finish and one NFL playoff bid himself.
Mike Bellotti won 116 games with three top-10 finishes at Oregon, but his coaching tree shows he might have been better at prepping others than helping himself. He hired Washington’s Chris Petersen as his receivers coach, he named future Tampa Bay Bucs head coach Dirk Koetter as his offensive coordinator in 1996, and he brought in a New Hampshire assistant named Chip Kelly in 2007.
Graham has had a fine career for himself. The 52-year-old has been a head coach for 11 seasons, and while he had the reputation of a mover — his first four seasons took place at four different schools — he has won 88 games, generated three ranked finishes, and won at least 10 games five times. He has had only three losing seasons.
At some point, however, he might become more known for the coaches he hired than for the games he won.
At Rice, he hired Major Applewhite (now head man at Houston) as his offensive coordinator and David Beaty (Kansas’ head coach) as his receivers coach.
At Tulsa, he brought in Gus Malzahn as offensive co-coordinator, and after Malzahn left, he brought in future SMU head coach Chad Morris. Malzahn just lured Graham’s 2016 offensive coordinator, Chip Lindsey, to Auburn.
Memphis head coach Mike Norvell spent nine years under Graham, moving from Tulsa grad assistant to Pitt offensive co-coordinator to Arizona State coordinator. Norvell brought Chip Long, Graham’s tight ends coach and recruiting coordinator, to Memphis as offensive coordinator. The pairing worked well enough that Long became Notre Dame’s OC after one season.
Jay Norvell joined Graham’s staff in 2016 before landing the Nevada job.
That’s six current college head coaches, plus likely future head men like Long and Lindsey. Graham’s newest offensive coordinator, former Alabama receivers coach Billy Napier, is regarded as quite the up-and-comer, too. Graham has former head coaches like Phil Bennett and Dave Christensen on the staff as well.
This is one hell of a coaching tree, one that will continue to blossom. And Graham’s barely been a head coach for a decade! Working under Graham means learning strong organizational principles and a system based on speed and aggression. With those basics, you can go in a lot of directions.
Of course, if you earn the reputation of molding exciting assistants, your reward is ... having to hire a lot more of them.
Two of Graham’s three losing seasons, by the way, happened in the last two years. From 20-7 in 2013-14, ASU has fallen to 11-14 since. The Sun Devils have regressed in almost perfectly linear fashion:
S&P+: eighth in 2013, 25th in 2014, 49th in 2015, 83rd in 2016
Offensive S&P+: 13th in 2013, 24th in 2014, 26th in 2015, 56th in 2016
Defensive S&P+: 15th in 2013, 41st in 2014, 81st in 2015, 114th in 2016
The offense has fallen, and the defense has vanished. The former can be explained in part by assistant coaching turnover; the latter, though, is a bit of an indictment — Graham, a former defensive coordinator himself, hasn’t lost a ton of defensive assistants. He’s either made the wrong hires or hasn’t recruited the right guys.
The ASU offense should be exciting in 2017; leading rusher Demario Richard, leading receiver N’Keal Harry, and flex guy Kalen Ballage (last year’s No. 2 rusher and No. 3 receiver) return, as do six linemen with starting experience. Three exciting transfers become eligible, and Graham and Napier have a pool of four semi-experienced quarterbacks. A return to the Off. S&P+ top 30 is conceivable.
The defense, however, could determine Graham’s fate. Coaches rarely survive three consecutive years of regression. The Sun Devils return lots of juniors and seniors on D, including attackers like end JoJo Wicker and linebacker DJ Calhoun, and Graham brought in Bennett, a seasoned coordinator. The good news is that a fourth straight year of defensive regression is nearly impossible.
Graham squads are fast, confident, and assertive. His 2016 ASU team was flawed from the start, but against lesser competition, that didn’t matter too much. When the schedule got more difficult, however, the Sun Devils had no answers.
First 4 games (4-0): Avg. percentile performance: 61% (~top 50) | Avg. yards per play: Opp 6.6, ASU 6.3 (minus-0.3) | Avg. score: ASU 49, Opp 34 (plus-15)
Next 4 games (1-3): Avg. percentile performance: 39% (~top 80) | Avg. yards per play: Opp 6.3, ASU 4.0 (minus-2.3) | Avg. score: Opp 35, ASU 23 (minus-12)
Last 4 games (0-4): Avg. percentile performance: 17% (~top 105) | Avg. yards per play: Opp 8.4, ASU 5.1 (minus-3.3) | Avg. score: Opp 51, ASU 29 (minus-22)
Even early in the year, during tight wins over teams like UTSA and Cal, the defense was giving up a scary number of big plays. When the competition improved, the big plays became deadly. IsoPPP measures the magnitude of an offense’s successful plays, and ASU ranked 128th out of 128 FBS teams in IsoPPP allowed. If the Sun Devils weren’t creating havoc, they were getting gashed.
Meanwhile, quarterback Manny Wilkins dealt with ailments and was replaced by a couple different freshman quarterbacks. The run game vanished, which put far too much pressure on the QB of the week.
This is all a very bad combination, and after semi-respectable results — a 41-20 loss to USC, a 23-20 win over UCLA, a 37-32 loss to Wazzu — ASU imploded. This was a really bad team in November. Some shuffling on the coaching staff was warranted.
Despite his defensive background, Graham’s teams have been far more likely to excel on offense than defense through the years. Of his 11 offenses, six have ranked 26th or better in Off. S&P+, and only two have ranked outside of the top 60.
The Sun Devils ranked 56th in 2016, dragged down by Wilkins’ injury issues. When he was healthy, ASU was still limited by an iffy run game, but the passing game was at least dangerous. Freshmen Dillon Sterling-Cole and Brady White (combined: 51 percent completion rate, 4.8 percent INT rate, 3 TDs to 5 INTs, 5.5 yards per pass attempt including sacks) simply weren’t ready.
Wilkins: 63% completion rate, 2.9% INT rate, 6.1 yards per pass attempt (including sacks)
Sterling-Cole & White: 51% completion rate, 4.8% INT rate, 5.5 yards per pass attempt
The backup situation will likely be in better shape, at least. White, a former blue-chipper, and Sterling-Cole are both back, but Wilkins is also getting pushed hard by Alabama transfer Blake Barnett, who worked with Napier in Tuscaloosa. Barnett began 2016 as Bama’s starter but was quickly usurped by Jalen Hurts. In a small sample, he took a ton of sacks and hit on some really big passes.
Jerome Miron-USA TODAY SportsBlake Barnett
Whoever wins the QB job will have a potentially awesome receiving corps. ASU does have to replace its two most efficient receivers — slot men Tim White and Frederick Gammage— but in Harry, Ballage, and slot receiver Jalen Harvey, the Sun Devils have three players who combined for 123 catches and 1,458 yards.
Harry, a former blue-chipper, held his own as a freshman No. 1, and Ballage combined an early 100-yard rushing game (137 yards, seven touchdowns against Texas Tech) with two late 100-yard receiving games (combined: 13 catches, 223 yards against Oregon and Utah). Meanwhile, senior Cameron Smith caught 41 passes in 2014 but has struggled to stay on the field the last two years.
Joining the veterans are two exciting transfers. Sophomores Ryan Newsome (Texas) and John Humphrey (Oklahoma) are custom-built slot receivers with high ceilings. If either can replace White’s efficiency, and the winner of the QB battle can stay on the field, the passing game should hum.
The run game, though? A line that helped ASU rank 15th in power success rate and 21st in stuff rate is experienced despite the loss of two-year starting left tackle Evan Goodman. But neither Ballage nor leading rusher Demario Richard were even slightly efficient against defenses less awful than Texas Tech’s. Richard gained at least five yards on just 29 percent of his carries (the national average is about 40 percent), Ballage 28 percent.
ASU rarely moved backwards but still ranked 107th in rushing success rate. Returning everyone involved doesn’t automatically help those numbers.
Cole Elsasser-USA TODAY SportsKalen Ballage
Defense
The offense obviously has some question marks, but the raw components, plus Graham’s history, suggest improvement. Graham’s defense, however, has lost the benefit of the doubt. ASU showed the downside of aggression last fall, ranking a not-awful 67th in success rate and 45th in havoc rate but giving up an almost impossible number of big plays.
I mean, damn:
ASU allowed 3.7 gains of 30-plus per game (125th in FBS), 1.8 rushes of 20-plus (86th), and 12.5 passes of 10-plus (127th). To account for that, you better have the best efficiency numbers in the country. The Sun Devils did not.
A little bit of new blood could help. Graham brought in Michael Slater as line coach after the Beaty assistant engineered a massive turnaround on the Kansas D-line in 2016.
More significantly, he hired Bennett, Art Briles’ former coordinator at Baylor. Setting aside any moral issues you might (justifiably) have with former Briles assistants so quickly finding new work, this move makes sense. Bennett crafted a defense that served as a strong complement to the mach-speed Baylor offense.
The basics of the Bennett defense — an imposing defensive line anchored by a seasoned, swarming secondary — sound a lot like the basics of the defense Keith Patterson spent the last few years trying and failing to maintain in Tempe. (Patterson remains on staff as linebackers coach.)
Slater could have some fun with JoJo Wicker and Tashon Smallwood up front. The two combined for 20 tackles for loss and five sacks, and backup Renell Wren contributed six and 1.5, respectively. Linebackers DJ Calhoun and Koron Crump, meanwhile, combined for 22 and 13.5. That’s a lot of returning havoc, and Bennett should know how to use some of those pieces.
Kelvin Kuo-USA TODAY SportsJoJo Wicker
Of course, havoc wasn’t the problem last year — breakdowns were. And the state of the secondary doesn’t automatically lead one to believe they will be solved. A more effectively aggressive front seven can produce aggrieved, mistake-prone QBs, but when the QBs get the passes off, they’ll be throwing into the teeth of a secondary that must replace half of its top four cornerbacks, plus safety Armand Perry, who just retired with injury issues.
The returnees are experienced; there just might not be enough of them. Safeties Marcus Ball and Chad Adams and corners Kareem Orr and Maurice Chandler are all either juniors and seniors and combined for 22 percent of ASU’s tackles last year. But they created almost no disruption — ASU was ninth in the country in LB havoc rate but 127th in DB havoc rate — and gave up at least four touchdown passes four times last year.
Opponents completed 64 percent of their passes and produced a 156.9 passer rating; ASU basically turned every opposing passer into USC’s Sam Darnold (161.1). And while Graham is not averse to signing JUCOs, he’s going to be relying on younger players to provide an energy boost in the back — four-star redshirt freshman Chase Lucas, for instance, finished the spring as a starting corner.
As goes the ASU pass defense, so goes ASU. The havoc recipe was all wrong in 2016, and that cannot continue.
Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY SportsKoron Crump
Special Teams
It could have been a lot worse for ASU last year; if not for the No. 4 special teams unit in the country, the Sun Devils could have gone lost at least a couple more games. They did, after all, go 2-1 in one-possession finishes.
Unfortunately, the primary reason for ranking fourth in Special Teams S&P+ was Zane Gonzalez, and he’s gone. Gonzalez went 13-for-15 on field goals over 40 yards and booted three-quarters of his kickoffs for touchbacks, setting a bar that his successor might not come anywhere close to clearing.
Tim White’s punt returns were the next reason for ASU’s strong special teams ratings; he’s also gone. This unit is almost completely starting over.
Even as the wins have vanished, ASU has continued to look like a Graham team: aggressive, fast, and willing to risk a few explosions to create some of their own. But the combination of injuries and poor pass defense created a disaster against just about any team with a pulse last fall.
Naturally, after three years of regression, S&P+ has stopped believing in the Sun Devils. They are projected to improve, but only to 58th, and with a brutal North slate that includes Stanford and Washington but misses Cal and Washington State, 58th isn’t good enough to guarantee a bowl.
Like Arizona and most of the Pac-12, though, ASU’s fate will be determined by tossups. Including non-conference games against SDSU and Texas Tech, the Sun Devils are looking at eight games with win probability between 35 and 60 percent. They had one likely win and three likely losses, so they’ll have to win a majority of the tight games to make sure their bowl drought ends at just one year.
At least Graham’s latest round of hires looks strong. His new offensive coordinator and defensive line coach are up-and-comers, and he brought in a potentially valuable old hand to save a flagging defense. ASU should show enough progress to keep Graham in Tempe for another year, but it might take until 2018 for everything to click again.
The new head coach’s style is patient, but the Ducks are all about speed.
Life moves pretty quickly sometimes.
On Nov. 28, 2014, USF finished a dismal 4-8 with a 16-0 loss to UCF. The next day, Oregon wrapped up an 11-1 regular season with a 47-19 pasting of rival Oregon State. A week later, the Ducks won the Pac-12 title game and clinched a spot in the inaugural College Football Playoff. They destroyed defending national champ Florida State before succumbing to Ohio State in the title game.
Oregon’s 2014 quarterback, Marcus Mariota, threw for nearly 4,500 yards, rushed for nearly 800, and produced an otherworldly 181.7 passer rating in a Heisman campaign. USF quarterback Mike White’s passer rating that year: 112.4. Backup Steven Bench: 106.2. Both transferred.
To date, Taggart was 6-18 in Tampa-St. Pete, and he would move to 7-21 with a three-game losing streak the following September.
A mere 15 months later, Taggart was named Oregon head coach. I’ll pause for the record scratch sound effect.
Taggart shifted toward a more spread-out, fast-moving offensive approach, which catered to the talent on hand and sparked an offensive renaissance. After averaging 14.5 points per game in his first 25 contests against FBS opponents, Taggart’s Bulls averaged 40.5 per game in their last 21. In 2016, quarterback Quinton Flowers threw for 2,812 yards and rushed for 1,609, excluding sacks.
Meanwhile, Oregon’s defense fell apart. The Ducks went from allowing 23.6 points per game in 2014 to 37.5 in 2015 to 41.4. Their Def. S&P+ ranking plummeted from 39th to 94th to 119th. Following 2015 regression, head coach Mark Helfrich hired former Michigan head coach Brady Hoke as coordinator to stem the bleeding. He could not.
After the 1-3 start in 2015, USF won seven of eight to finish the regular season, then went 11-2 in 2016. Oregon fell by four wins in 2015 and another five in 2016. After going from 13-2 to 4-8 in two years, Helfrich was fired. Despite Taggart’s minimal Pac-12 experience — he was Stanford’s running backs coach for two years and has otherwise spent his other 16 coaching years east of the Mississippi River — he was offered the job.
Granted, Taggart didn’t start perfectly; three Ducks players were hospitalized following conditioning workouts in January. But it doesn’t appear there will be any lingering repercussions from that. Meanwhile, Taggart brought in big-name assistant coaches like Jim Leavitt (former Colorado defensive coordinator) and Mario Cristobal (former FIU head coach and Alabama assistant), signed a top-20 recruiting class, and, most importantly for 2017, inherited a squad that returns more of last year’s production than almost any in FBS.
On offense, quarterback Justin Herbert, the top three rushers (who combined to average 6.3 yards per carry last year), the top two receivers, and five linemen who have combined for 69 career starts — including all-conference guys Jake Hanson and Calvin Throckmorton — all return.
Though we can wonder about talent and play-making ability, experience won’t be an issue on a defense that returns five of its top seven linemen, five of six linebackers, and its top five defensive backs.
Because this is Oregon, much was made about the offense’s regression, but that was drastically overblown. The Ducks ranked third in Off. S&P+ in 2015, post-Mariota, and with a freshman quarterback, they fell all the way to 20th last year. With this level of experience, they’re projected quite high.
The defense, though, was truly miserable, and Leavitt’s ability will determine whether this is a methodical rebuild or a speedy one. He was an incredible get, on paper. The former USF head coach generated three consecutive finishes in the Def. S&P+ at USF — 13th in 2005, 20th in 2006, sixth in 2007 — and needed only two years to transform Colorado’s No. 109 defense into one that ranked 12th.
Taggart proved at both WKU (2-10 in his first year) and USF (2-10 again) that he doesn’t mind taking his time putting the pieces in the right places. But Oregon is built on speed. The Ducks made two national title games by pressing tempo as far as it will go, and more recently they collapsed in record time as well. Expectations and culture likely won’t allow for too methodical a rebuild.
Last year’s Oregon preview was built on a flawed premise: that the Ducks’ defense probably couldn’t get any worse. After producing a top-40 Def. S&P+ for five of six years between 2009-14, they had plummeted in 2015, and while there was nothing to love about the Hoke hire, that drastic a single-year change is typically followed by a return to the mean.
If Oregon’s defense was likely to rebound, and if the offense still had enough pieces for a top-10 or top-20 finish, then I surmised that Helfrich had a good shot at rebounding. Not so! Instead, the defense was hopeless from nearly the opening kickoff. Looking at single-game percentile performances, the defense didn’t once play at a 50th-percentile level. They combined decent big-play prevention with the worst efficiency in the country, and they were subjected to slow death on a weekly basis.
When the offense — which was handed over to Herbert in early October — showed up, the Ducks were competitive. They lost by three at Nebraska and California and at home to Colorado, beat Utah, and destroyed Arizona State. But if the Duck attack wasn’t rolling right out of the gates, things got out of hand. At halftime, they trailed USC 24-6 and trailed Stanford 38-13 and lost each game by 25.
Heading into 2017, the defense almost literally can’t get worse! I’m pretty sure of it this time! And not just because going from Hoke to Leavitt at coordinator is ... a bit of an upgrade.
“At first it was, well, let’s just run West Coast, but see how it looks in the ’gun,” Taggart said. “And then it got intriguing, because we started seeing all the options available that we didn’t have under center. And then we started running all the practice reps, Quinton in the ’gun, spread out, but with the shifts and motions. And it was like … wow.” [...]
“That’s probably the biggest thing to take away. What I’ve seen is a coach who’s been adaptable, who’s been willing to change. Because we did change. A whole lot,” [former USF associate head coach David] Reaves said. “We were 12 personnel [one running back and two tight ends], running the ball, motion and shift, two and three tight ends and fullbacks, and then we’re taking meetings all over the country with spread teams who do the exact opposite so we could better understand them.”
I’m going to go out on a limb and assume Taggart didn’t change to his version of a spread with the thought that he’d be making a run at the Oregon job, but it worked that way. USF was run-heavy and fast and combined power principles with an ability to force solo tackles. Taggart should find Oregon personnel to his liking.
Even with turnover at quarterback — FCS transfer Dakota Prukop began as starter and was fine, but with a youth movement underway, Herbert took over five games in — Oregon’s offense was one of the most balanced and steady in the Pac-12.
Including sacks as pass attempts, Herbert averaged 7 passes to every rush as opposed to Prukop’s 3.3, but he proved some of his rumored upside. He was up and down but produced a passer rating over 150 in four of seven starts and threw just four interceptions in 255 passes. Meanwhile, Tony Brooks-James thrived next to Herbert, averaging 8.1 yards per carry in Herbert’s starts.
With Brooks-James and senior Royce Freeman (945 yards, 5.6 per carry) returning, and with Herbert getting to lean on senior receivers Charles Nelson and Darren Carrington II for another year, there’s plenty to like about the skill corps.
Russ Isabella-USA TODAY SportsDarren Carrington II
Granted, there’s less to like if Nelson or Carrington gets hurt. The top three tight ends are gone, and the leading returning wideout outside of these two is sophomore Dillon Mitchell. He caught two passes for nine yards.
Griffin is a former four-star, as are fellow sophomores Alex Ofodile and Malik Lovette and incoming freshman receiver Jaylon Redd. At running back, it’s not too late for former blue-chipper Taj Griffin to begin exploring his upside. Still, you go from seniors to freshmen on the depth chart quickly.
The line should be fine, though. Oregon ranked 38th in Rushing S&P+ and 36th in Adj. Line Yards despite giving an incredible 46 of 60 possible starts to freshmen. Hanson and Throckmorton were each named honorable mention all-conference despite first-year status, and the left side of the line — guard Shane Lemieux and tackle Brady Aiello— is back as well. Throw in another four-star sophomore (backup center Zach Okun) and a 6’7 JUCO transfer (sophomore George Moore), and you’ve got what you need for the next couple of years.
Scott Olmos-USA TODAY SportsTony Brooks-James
Your hires often reveal your intentions. Taggart didn’t bring his USF assistants over wholesale, instead combining Marcus Arroyo (a former Tampa Bay Bucs offensive coordinator who spent 2016 drastically upgrading Oklahoma State’s running back corps) and Cristobal (most recently Alabama’s offensive line coach) at the co-coordinator spots and adding former UCLA offensive coordinator Michael Johnson as receivers coach and former USF assistant Donte Pimpleton to coach RBs.
There’s a lot of spread experience and a lot of pro influence. And the personnel should match the intentions.
Defense
If you’re going to collapse, you might as well do it with youth. That’s the best thing I can say about the 2016 defense.
The leading tackler on the line was sophomore Jalen Jelks, who combined 26 tackles with four TFLs and two sacks while missing four games.
The leading tackler at linebacker was freshman Troy Dye, by far Oregon’s most disruptive defender, with 13 TFLs and 6.5 sacks.
Among the four leading tacklers in the secondary were a freshman (safety Brenden Schooler) and two sophomores (corner Ugo Amadi and safety Khalil Oliver). They combined for 3.5 TFLs and 12 passes defensed.
Scott Olmos-USA TODAY SportsTroy Dye
Youth and attrition are almost always a disastrous combination, and for Oregon, they were apocalyptic. Only one lineman played in all 12 games, and only one of the top eight tacklers at linebacker did. There was more stability at defensive back, but contributors Ty Griffin and Reggie Daniels still combined to play in just 10 of 24 possible games.
We don’t know what Hoke wanted to do; what we do know is that depth issues forced Hoke into extreme bend-don’t-break mode.
We also know that bend-don’t-break isn’t really Leavitt’s thing. Granted, it had to be in 2015, when his first Colorado defense didn’t have the depth or injuries luck it needed to attack successfully. But in 2016, with both experience and health on his side, his Buffs soared.
CU ranked 12th in Def. S&P+, combining efficiency (24th in success rate) with strong red zone execution. They were a bit passive against the run (in fact, they had the nation’s worst stuff rate) but obliterated opponents’ respective passing games. Nine of 14 CU opponents produced a passer rating under 110, and five were under 80. CU ranked 17th in Standard Downs S&P+ and 10th in Passing Downs S&P+, a relentless defense that was balanced enough to find massive success.
(Taggart’s hire of Arroyo was delightfully, if also indirectly, petty — Arroyo and OSU torched Leavitt’s CU defense to the tune of 7.1 yards per play, most all year allowed by the Buffs.)
Photo by Steve Dykes/Getty ImagesArrion Springs
It could take Leavitt a year in Eugene, too. Despite six to seven seniors starting, the players with the highest upside are still young. Dye is still a sophomore, and junior outside linebacker Justin Hollins (9.5 TFLs last year) could thrive in the new system if healthy.
While the upperclassmen are well-known, for better or worse, a large crop of youngsters — freshman tackle Jordon Scott, redshirt freshman end Hunter Kampmoyer, sophomore linebacker La’Mar Winston Jr., redshirt freshman safety Brady Breeze, true freshmen safeties Billy Gibson and Deommodore Lenoir, true freshman corner Thomas Graham Jr. — could steal upperclassmen’s spots.
Special Teams
Taggart’s USF defensive coordinator Raymond Woodie will serve as special teams coordinator. And Oregon could use some special teams coordination. The Ducks were great in some aspects (eighth in kickoff success rate) and terrible in others (121st in punt success rate) on their way to a No. 78 ranking in Special Teams S&P+.
Charles Nelson is still terrifying, if rather all-or-nothing, in returns, and place-kicker Aidan Schneider is mostly solid. But Oregon is starting over both in punting (not a bad thing) and kickoffs (maybe a bad thing).
Because of returning production, recent recruiting success and Oregon’s not-so-distant past as an elite team, S&P+ is giving Taggart and the Ducks the benefit of the doubt. They are projected second on offense, 77th on defense, and 23rd overall, which puts them in position to be favored in as many as 10 games.
It’s not hard to see that, is it? In Freeman, Nelson, and Carrington, the Ducks boast some high-ceiling holdovers from the previous era, and Brooks-James could be ready for a massive star turn. The defense just got a coaching upgrade and is infinitely more experienced.
It’s not hard to see the opposite, though. The massive turnover on the staff, a potential culture change, and some tactical tweaks might take a while to pay dividends on offense, and ... when your defense is as bad as Oregon’s was a year ago, the Ducks might need a couple years.
Taggart is a patient guy and ended up in Year Zero situation (in which the first-year reset is significant enough that progress isn’t possible until a coach’s second year) in each of his first two head coaching gigs. Hell, at USF he basically had two Year Zeroes. Still, I like what he inherits.
I’m not sure I can co-sign on the idea of the Ducks surging back into the top 25 in 2017, but ... top 40? I could see that. That likely puts them around 7-5 or so — not good enough long-term but solid out of the gates. We’ll set the bar there.
It's that time of year again, when I'm wrong in public and write "it's that time of year again, when I'm wrong in public" to diffuse just how wrong in public I'm about to be. Baseball predictions are hard and pointless, but you're here, so we'll suspend our disbelief together.
Last year, the gimmick was false confidence. It ended with a prediction that Hector Olivera would win the National League Rookie of the Year award. He was arrested for domestic violence, traded, suspended, convicted, and released before the year was over.
He did not win the National League Rookie of the Year award.
This year, no gimmicks. I'll use the same alchemy of available information and gut feeling that I always do, except maybe this way will lead to fewer dumb emails from people who thought I was actually confident in last year's predictions. I'm not confident. I'm scared and cold, just like you.
AL East
This is easily the most difficult division to predict. Not at the top, with the Red Sox having a clear advantage according to the computers and our common sense, but the rest of the way down. Will the Yankees have enough youthful power to overcome their declining veterans? Will the Rays stop giving up dingers like it was 1987? Will the Orioles cobble together an average rotation? Will the Blue Jays overcome the loss of Edwin Encarnacion?
Maybe! Unless they don't. Unless they do. Give me answers to all of those questions, and we'll have a proper order for the East. But without those answers, we're just stumbling around with gut feelings and unconscious biases. The Blue Jays feel nice in second place because we're used to them. The Orioles look like a last-place team because it physically hurts me to watch Ubaldo Jimenez pitch. And so on.
The Red Sox are the easy pick for first, and there's a temptation to suffer from Red Sox fatigue and talk yourself into a wacky surprise of a pick. Don't fall for it. Even if David Price is out until May, this is a team with everything you want to see in a franchise: a stable mix of veterans and youngsters, a deep minor-league system, and the money and willingness to fix problems as they come up.
The Blue Jays made the postseason in consecutive seasons after going decades without getting in, and they have a deceptively deep rotation with a lot of upside. They're counting on an awful lot of over-30 guys, and that'll keep them away from first, but don't be surprised if they play deep into October again.
The Rays were blindsided by the jumpy home run ball last year, but they're too smart not to have address the problem internally over the offseason. They have the best defensive outfield in the game, and entire organization seems like it's built to prevent runs by suffocating hits. Their hitters also seem good at suffocating hits, which is why third place is as high as I can go.
The Yankees are going to be the Yankees from the GIF again, and it's going to happen soon. They've done a remarkable job building up the farm, and their worst contracts are coming off the books soon. This will be a year of purgatory, but it will be one of the last.
The Orioles might hit 250 home runs, bless them, but they might allow 260. There are a couple of ways that it might work. There are a couple hundred ways that it might not.
AL Central
It's taken a while, but the Indians are finally the clear favorites. This used to be the realm of the brainless Tigers prediction, easy as pie, until the Royals came around. Now there are two rebuilding teams and two reloading teams sinking under the weight of time and money. And there are the Indians, who won the pennant last year despite losing two of their best starting pitchers.
The Indians have health on their side right now, and they should get to show off the rotation that would have made them World Series favorites or close to it. They also made the most inspired move of the offseason, signing Edwin Encarnacion, who fits perfectly in the lineup.
The Tigers won 86 games last year, which is about six or seven more than I would have guessed if you asked me in February. They got nothing out of Jordan Zimermann, who seemed like the best value of the offseason, and Justin Upton was a bit of a flop, too. They should get more from both of them this season, but the question is if the pitchers will stay healthy and effective.
Also, I regret to inform you that the bullpen might be a problem, but there's no way anyone could have seen that coming.
The Royals were dealt an unfair, devastating blow with the death of Yordano Ventura, and there's no quantifying just how much they'll miss him. They're a team staring over the abyss, with important pending free agents and aging players who might not be this good again.
The White Sox and Twins are rebuilding. This has been enough content about the White Sox and Twins to hold you over for a couple months.
AL West
Another tricky division to peg, but this time at the top. The Astros have the burgeoning young stars and they enjoyed a productive offseason. The Rangers have history on their side, having won the last two divisions. The Mariners will pick one of these years to not be the Blue Jays of the west, just like the Blue Jays decided to stop being the Blue Jays a couple years back. The Angels are a little better than you think, and the A's aren't exactly a 100-loss disaster.
The Mariners have power and speed, and they should help their pitchers out with improved outfield defense, too. The rotation will need all the help that's offered, but everyone in the starting five makes sense for a win-now team, with the right mix of risk vs. reward.
The Astros have both risk and reward, too, but there's a little too much risk to pick them as easy favorites. They should play a game in the postseason, at least, and they have the talent to win 100 games with a few breaks, but that starting pitching, man. It was the wrong offseason to have that problem.
The Rangers were supposed to be rebuilding, remember. Their 2015 was a surprise, and their 2016 was, too. They needled the sabermetric community by winning nearly every one-run game they played, setting all-time records and tinkling on logic. They can win again, and they can do it in a way that makes us all less cynical. An awful lot has to go right for them, though.
The Angels can't rebuild — not when they have so many untradeable high-priced players who at least contribute a little bit, and not when they have the best player in baseball — but they don't have the money to reload. They split the difference and added some underwhelming but logical players, and now they'll have to hope their young pitchers stay healthy and stop acting like, well, young pitchers.
The A's are a creative small-market team that's struggled to produce capable major leaguers from their own farm system. That's a problem. They've been active enough to build a competent roster, but an optimistic and worthwhile goal would probably be .500.
NL East
The Nationals and Mets are the Mr. Pibb version of Yankees/Red Sox, with an annual rivalry that'll do just fine until some of the other teams can join in. The good news: Some of the other teams are about to join in.
The Nationals are the favorites, though, with one of the deepest rotations in baseball, if not the deepest. It's worth noting that they won 95 games with Bryce Harper being merely okay and several veterans falling down the stairs. They probably won't get the same kind of season from Daniel Murphy, but that doesn't mean this isn't one of the most well-rounded rosters in baseball.
The Mets are close, though! The Mets are close, especially if Matt Harvey pitches as well as he's capable of pitching, and the spring reports were looking good. They'll struggle to score runs, though, with so many boom-bust guys in the lineup that they're almost daring the baseball gods to light the fuse.
The Phillies can pitch! A little. When healthy. Possibly. But they're on the right track, and I'll reward them by being a little aggressive with this prediction. They could win 84 or 85 games, which would mean that we'd pay attention to them all the way into September. When they fell, they fell hard, but they didn't stay down for that long.
The Marlins, like the Royals, deserve better. They'll wear a patch on their sleeve and a hole in their hearts, and they'll have to make do. They have the best outfield in baseball, depending on your confidence in the young Red Sox or the renaissance of Andrew McCutchen, but there are just too many gaps in the rest of the roster to get overly confident.
The Braves might be the best last-place team in baseball, depending on the AL East, but they've done a nice job of being interesting in a crucial year for the franchise. I don't know if Bartolo Colon and R.A. Dickey are going to combine for 64 starts this year, but I know there's a chance, and that they're two of the most watchable 40-somethings in baseball history.
NL Central
The Cubs won the World Series. Seems like people should have made a bigger deal about that, but here we are. They'll win the NL Central in 2017, too. The fine print doesn't matter as much.
The Pirates are pretty good, too! Just not as good the Cubs. But if Jameson Taillon and Tyler Glasnow break out together, they might be as good as the Cubs. Let's all hold hands and wait for these young pitchers to not disappoint us, because when has that ever happened?
The Brewers aren't really better than the Cardinals, but this is my court-mandated Super Esoteric PickTM, and I'll stick with it. They have a young lineup that's worth paying attention to, even if their rotation features more Matt Garza than the FDA recommends.
The Cardinals aren't really worse than the Brewers, but I enjoy a good trolling and cigar before the season. In fact, in a previous edit of this prediction, I wrote that the team overachieved their Pythagorean record last year, when they actually underachieved. But I'm not here to talk about "facts," and I'm not convinced the lineup or rotation is steady enough to guarantee 89 wins and wild-card contention. Maybe I'm just bitter about the time Mike Matheny almost broke my face with a home run in 2005.
The NL West has been a Giants/Dodgers battle for the last couple years, as it has been throughout history, and that shouldn't change much here. Except, hold on, watch out for the Rockies, who might score a million runs. And the Diamondbacks are probably talented enough to pay attention to, even if Yasmany Tomas is going to trip over the period at the end of this sentence.
The Dodgers are rich, the Dodgers are talented, the Dodgers have an enviable farm system, let's all blow kisses toward the Dodgers.
Miss u, Frank McCourt.
The Giants are also rich, but they've spent millions keeping players like Brandon Belt, Brandon Crawford, Buster Posey, and Hunter Pence around, while spending big on Jeff Samardzija and Johnny Cueto. They, uh, don't have an enviable farm system, though that means they're good for at least one surprising rando making a huge difference this season.
The Rockies are the dark horse team of 2017, with Nolan Arenado leading an impressive lineup that plays in a good ballpark for impressive lineups. The pitching isn't exactly suspect, but it's just dodgy enough to keep them away from the top two. If the rotation makes significant progress, though, we'll know by the end of May, and it'll be all aboard the Dinger bandwagon.
The Diamondbacks probably aren't as bad as they were last year. That's the good news. The bad news is that they won't be as good as they were supposed to be before last year, either. A.J. Pollock coming back will help a great deal, and it's not like Shelby Miller can be any worse, but a thin farm and a rotation that's almost entirely comprised of pitchers who stumbled last year will keep them away from the postseason again.
The Padres are rebuilding and proud of it. They're doing it right, so don't make fun of them.
...
Okay, maybe a little bit.
...
But Manuel Margot is going to be one of your favorite players, so you might as well start appreciating him right now.
It’s an unseasonably warm late-October day, and the 22 players on Quinnipiac’s reigning back-to-back national championship women’s rugby team are squished onto their practice field. You can’t tell while they’re stretching — there’s enough room for the normal toe-touching and quad-pulling — but when the team starts to run through its passes and handoffs, you see that something’s off.
A scrum half lobs the ball to a back, and instead of the usual juking left to right, the back always runs north-south. The players are handcuffed by the space here, and they’re so used to it they don’t even think about running outside.
This is the third field they’ve used over the last five years. It’s got bent goal posts that have already been moved once and likely won’t survive a predicted second move. It’s also 30 percent smaller than the fields where the student-athletes will play during away games. Quinnipiac’s rugby pitch is so inhospitably narrow that it forced the team to play all of this season’s games on the road.
It’s pretty there, at least. The field is nestled below the hills of Sleeping Giant State Park in Hamden, Conn., which provides a spectacular backdrop of foliage. The rugby athletes all wear Quinnipiac white and blue, offsetting the surrounding trees bursting with fall color.
Senior Abby Cook likens it to Villanova’s men’s basketball team trying to prep for a repeat by practicing on a halfcourt. Except instead of being cut on the horizontal, Quinnipiac’s pitch is cut vertically, a challenge that affects how Cook and her teammates strategize. “We had to adapt by starting all our breakdown plays on the sideline that would typically be started in the middle of the field,” Cook says.
The too-small field is only one of the many challenges faced by this young team at a university that historically has faced legal troubles relating to how it manages women’s sports. Only two years before Quinnipiac’s rugby team was formed in 2011 — the second Division I women’s rugby program in NCAA history — the university found itself embroiled in a Title IX case of its own making.
In 2009, the university decided to eliminate men’s golf, men’s outdoor track, and women’s volleyball in an effort to save money. On its face, the moves seemed strictly motivated by cost cuts. But the school’s female students already lacked participation opportunities comparable to the men on campus. Quinnipiac quickly learned that it couldn’t cut a women’s team without a fight.
Five volleyball players and their coach immediately sued in federal court, claiming the school was in violation of Title IX, the 1972 federal statute that prohibits any school that receives federal funding from discriminating on the basis of sex. The following year, a judge sided with the volleyball team. “Quinnipiac University,” U.S. District Court Judge Stefan R. Underhill wrote in July 2010, “has violated Title IX … by failing to provide equal athletic opportunities to its female students.”
The volleyball team was saved.
The school then spent the next few years appealing the decision, losing repeatedly. Finally in 2013, four years after the original suit was brought, Quinnipiac agreed to settle. As part of that settlement, the newly formed rugby team ended up playing a starring role in the court’s demands for how Quinnipiac needed to fix its wrongs. Yet today, the school is still struggling to meet its legal obligations, like providing rugby with an appropriate field.
The settlement was a big deal. “We got a major victory for Title IX,” said former Quinnipiac women’s volleyball coach Robin Sparks at the time. “This isn’t just a win for the female athletes at Quinnipiac, but for all female student-athletes across the country.”
The National Women’s Law Center reacted by thanking “the brave young women at Quinnipiac who took a stand,” because, its director wrote, “all female athletes at the university will benefit, and schools nationwide should take note of how the legal issues were resolved.”
Hope was the result; change seemed to be on the horizon.
It’s been over three years now. Gender equity in sports remains an issue at the vast majority of universities and colleges across the country, and how the Department of Education will enforce Title IX under the new Trump administration is unclear.
Deadlines have come and gone, and Quinnipiac has made enough improvements to show progress on paper. But in reality, what progress it has made did not come easily, not even with a courtroom win. The coaches and players on the women’s rugby team have had to remain vigilant in the fight for gender equity on their campus. They have continually pushed their school to do the bare minimum of what is required, despite the university having a court order and Title IX mandating those requirements.
Nearly 45 years after Title IX was passed, we are still asking why it is so hard for schools to create gender parity in sports. Quinnipiac, perhaps, offers the perfect case study. If a school like Quinnipiac — relatively small in size, punished for its prior behavior, and under the microscope because of it — struggles to get this right, what does that mean for everyone else and for Title IX as law in practice?
Quinnipiac is far from alone in how it struggles to meet gender equity in sport. Title IX passed in 1972, and as the National Women’s Law Center’s Neena Chaudhry told SB Nation, “If you look at the numbers at the beginning of Title IX and now, of course we have made a lot of progress and we see more women Olympians now. But I think that sometimes obscures what’s really happening at individual schools.”
The reality at most universities and colleges is that 45 years later, the battle for equality is still being waged. “We can look at numbers. We can look at cases. We can look at what we hear from people on the ground,” Chaudhry says. “We know there’s still a lot of work to do.”
A recent Vice Sports report, using the data schools must submit to the Department of Education under the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA), found that “many NCAA Division I athletic programs may not be fully compliant with Title IX” because universities have disparity in athletic aid between men’s and women’s programs, low participation rates for women’s sports, or are “overstuffing the rosters of inexpensive sports such as women’s rowing and counting the male practice player opponents used by many teams as female athletes.”
These kinds of inequities exist on the high school level as well, with girls of color receiving the fewest opportunities to play school sports.
Dr. Donna Lopiano, former CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation, echoes these findings. She estimates that “80 to 90 percent of most institutions are out of compliance with Title IX.” At the least, because the Quinnipiac volleyball players sued, “there is now court precedent in terms of how courts will treat schools who purposefully use these mathematical manipulations, that they shouldn’t be given the fruits of their lies,” Lopiano says.
Under Title IX, to achieve gender parity between men’s and women’s sports, universities and colleges have to meet one of three different requirements: 1) equity in participation opportunities for both men and women; 2) scholarships offered proportionally based on the number of male and female athletes; and 3) comparable overall treatment of women’s and men’s sports (including but not limited to quality and maintenance of locker rooms and facilities, equipment and supplies, access to practice fields, publicity of teams and events, the quality of coaching, academic tutoring, traveling budgets, etc.).
In 2009, when Quinnipiac cut its women’s volleyball team, the administration tried to replace it with competitive cheerleading. Then-Director of Athletics and Recreation, Jack McDonald, said at the time that Quinnipiac would “continue to provide gender-equitable and competitive opportunities for the greatest number of male and female student-athletes in these fiscally challenging times.”
During those times, according to local reporting, Quinnipiac was in the midst of “a building boom,” including “a new, $52 million hockey and basketball arena” while also “freezing senior management salaries, ending job searches, and reducing operating budgets by 5 percent.”
That same year, John Lahey, president of Quinnipiac, was one of only 36 presidents across the country to make more than $1 million in salary, bringing down $1.8 million in total compensation. To this day, he remains one of the highest paid university presidents in the country.
“80 to 90 percent of most institutions are out of compliance with Title IX.”Dr. Donna Lopiano
Title IX allows universities three different checks to prove that they are providing enough participation opportunities for female athletes. First, a school can show that the number of opportunities is proportional to the number of women on campus (i.e. if the full-time undergraduate student body is 50 percent women, 50 percent of the athletic opportunities must be for women.)
Second, it can demonstrate a history of expanding opportunities, though that standard is hard to meet since it requires continually adding sports and teams. Third, a university can prove that it’s fully and effectively meeting all the interests and abilities of the underrepresented sex so that there is no outstanding demand for more.
Of the three Title IX requirements, Quinnipiac argued that it was meeting the first –– proportional participation opportunities for both genders — by swapping volleyball for competitive cheering and maintaining equitable numbers in other sports, offsetting the big money men’s sports like hockey and basketball with a large women’s track and field team.
The court rejected that claim since the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which oversees the enforcement of Title IX, has never approved competitive cheerleading (or its cousin, acro-tumbling or stunt) as an acceptable sport to count as participation opportunities.
Quinnipiac also argued, like most schools do, that it was meeting participation opportunities for women under the third “fully and effectively” option –– satisfying all the women’s demands for more participation opportunities. This, despite leaving a team of volleyball players without a sport to play.
Lopiano served as an expert witness in the case, testifying that the school was purposefully miscounting “the number of participants in every sport in order to misrepresent what the female participation gap really was.” Lopiano told the court that Quinnipiac was double- and triple-counting female athletes so that a single woman competing in multiple sports would get counted multiple times. A judge did not agree with the extent of miscounting but ultimately found that Quinnipiac’s participation numbers were intentionally inaccurate.
On top of all of this, the court found that the disparities in how Quinnipiac funded men’s and women’s sports amounted to inequitable treatment. Since universities often can’t fund all sports at the elite level, the NCAA allows Division I schools like Quinnipiac to divide teams into three tiers of funding. With its 6,703 undergraduate enrollment, QU must divvy up $26.5 million in athletic expenses among 21 teams spread throughout all three tiers.
The tier one teams — ice hockey and basketball at Quinnipiac — get the most publicity, have the biggest market draw, and receive the most substantial funding, with descending levels of funding in tiers two and three.
The tier system solves budget constraints but easily creates inequity if unchecked. “Title IX says is that it’s OK if you want to treat sports differently,” Lopiano adds, “but you have to have the same percentage of male and female athletes within each one of those levels of competition. So it would have to have the same percentages in tier one, two, and three for men and women,” which Quinnipiac, she says, “didn’t begin to do. There were more women in pauper than there were second tier, first tier.”
After the court ruled in 2010 that Quinnipiac was in violation of Title IX, Lynn Bushnell, Quinnipiac’s vice president for public affairs, released a statement saying that the university would be adding women’s rugby as a varsity sport in 2011. In November 2010, it hired Becky Carlson as the program’s first head coach.
But by the time it settled in 2013, most of the disparities identified in the original court case remained and so had to be addressed as part of the settlement’s consent decree. At its most broad level, the school was not allowed to cut women’s teams and had to provide more scholarships to female athletes and better benefits to their teams.
More specifically, the school agreed to “ensure that its Title IX coordinator is trained concerning gender equity in athletics,” to “spend at least $5 million to improve the permanent athletic facilities used by its women’s varsity sports teams … so that they are comparable to the facilities provided to men’s varsity sports teams in the same tier,” and are obligated to “elevate two … women’s teams to tier one.”
The court said that both men’s and women’s ice hockey and basketball counted as these “sports of emphasis,” but that Quinnipiac needed to also elevate women’s field hockey and another women’s sport, which it had to determine within six months of signing the decree, to tier one. Over the last three years, it has elevated women’s soccer and men’s and women’s lacrosse to that level. Additionally, as part of the decree, the school is not allowed to retaliate against anyone who helped with the litigation.
Women’s rugby was mentioned repeatedly throughout the decree. The team was 2 years old when the school agreed, via the decree, to “upgrade the quality and condition of the rugby pitch to ensure that it is safe for practices and competitions.” The pitch should be “the maximum dimensions allowed by the International Rugby Board [100m x 69m],” level, “not contain holes, dangerous rocks, or other hazards,” and be “maintained to a quality comparable to the varsity soccer fields.”
The team would get at least nine full scholarships, have a full-time head coach and full-time assistant coach, and “compete in at least two-thirds of its regular season against NCAA varsity rugby teams.” Quinnipiac also promised to “make a good faith effort to promote women’s rugby as a varsity sport.” The decree promised similar treatment for the women’s track and field team.
Both sides agreed on a “referee,” Jeffrey Orleans, to oversee the implementation of everything laid out in the settlement. Orleans’ job is to implement and monitor compliance, provide annual written updates to the court, and make recommendations to Quinnipiac for it to comply properly.
“Quinnipiac has made substantial compliance progress during the course of Decree.”Jeffrey Orleans
The entirety of the decree was in effect through June 30, 2016. The referee will remain in his position, though, until June 30, 2018, because the school has until then to make all of the improvements to facilities on campus. But once the referee is gone and the consent decree is no longer the guiding document, Title IX will still be in effect and Quinnipiac, under federal law, must continue to strive for gender equity among its student athletes.
After the case was settled, Lahey went around to the various schools on campus to discuss the overall state of the university which, on the heels of the landmark settlement, included a discussion of how Quinnipiac would become Title IX compliant.
Associate Professor of Journalism Rich Hanley was at one of these forums and recalls that Lahey felt the judge in the case had used wide judicial discretion. “[He] mentioned broadly that it was the judge’s interpretation of Title IX that led to the decree. I think he thought it was open for debate in terms of the decree. He was obviously going to follow it,” Hanley stresses.
In his final full report in July 2016, Orleans wrote that “Quinnipiac has made substantial compliance progress during the course of Decree,” noting the women’s rugby championship in the 2015-2016 season as one example of the women’s teams’ “recent competitive achievements.” He conceded that “changes and additions to the senior administrative staff, and development of that staff’s advertent focus on Title IX are still in progress.”
As for the rugby pitch, Orleans wrote that Quinnipiac had pursued the city of Hamden’s permit processes “consistently” but that it had taken longer than expected. The school originally predicted that the new facilities for rugby would open in fall 2015; those have been pushed back to fall 2017. He also wrote that as he had “expressed in prior Reports … Quinnipiac has fulfilled its Decree commitments for supporting women’s rugby,” including “promoting the growth of women’s rugby as a Division 1 varsity sport.”
When the bar is low, any step over it seems like a success. Many felt that the bar was on the ground at Quinnipiac when the original Title IX suit was filed in 2009. Progress has been made, as the court-appointed referee attests. But frustrations still abound for the Quinnipiac women’s rugby team over the seven-year battle to get the university to meet its legal obligation.
Back on its too-tiny field on that late fall day, the team starts off practice with a number of stretches, led by the captains.
Coach Carlson walks among the players, encouraging them and pushing them to do more than a purely physical workout. As stretches turn into plank poses, Carlson quizzes her athletes on general trivia — everything from the Civil War to what the fastest fish is (It’s the sailfish, for the record.) Carlson is an acolyte of the DiSC coaching method— Dominance, influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness — which uses individuals’ personalities and personal assessment to achieve the greatest success on and off the field.
She credits the methodology for creating a team culture which vaulted a team of walk-ons from a 3-6-1 record in the program’s first season to 15-1 in its second. It’s also made Carlson an internet target for relying on assumptions regarding athletes’ behavioral traits.
Dressed in navy track pants and a gray Quinnipiac T-shirt, her blonde hair pulled back from her face, Carlson is making a point. She wants her athletes to know she’s as invested in making sure their brains are working as hard as their bodies.
After warm-ups and a quick 10-minute scrimmage, the team gathers around Carlson, who wants to go over their loss to Central Washington two days before. “Why weren’t we effective during the last game?” she challenges. After a bit of contemplation, the players begin calling out responses that analyze themselves as much as their play.
“It feels weird to say that — we lost,” one admits.
Carlson has the team run through one of the plays that cost it the game against Washington. As the athletes fall into formation, Carlson runs right along with them, just as passionate, just as invested.
They win their next game against Vermont’s Castleton University by an astonishing 213-0.
A month later, in November, Quinnipiac takes the rematch against Central Washington— the national championship game — 46-24. Like in its last title game, Quinnipiac is the road team because its miniature pitch isn’t suitable for hosting championship games.
“Women’s rugby was forced to give up their field because ‘it’s just women’s rugby’”Bill Roskopf
QU’s women’s rugby team played all but one game of the 2016-17 season on the road (The lone “home” game was at Southington High School, located a half-hour away.)
“I recruited fast, outside wings that use the width of the field to put points on the board,” Carlson explains. “But during our practice, you would see that players would be making shorter passes and are more bunched together,” due to the lack of space. “We had to change our game plan basically. We’ve always been a team that scored our points from the outside. If you look at this year, we scored our points from the inside. It’s statistically proven.”
The lack of a regulation-size home field not only limits the team’s strategy, but it has impacted the support it has seen from its university fan base, a blatant disregard for the portion of the consent decree which requires Quinnipiac to increase the dimensions of the pitch to the maximum dimensions allowed by the International Rugby Board.
Bill Roskopf’s daughter Emily is a sophomore on the team, and he’s astounded by what he sees as the school’s sexist treatment of the rugby team.
“Women’s rugby was forced to give up their field because ‘it’s just women’s rugby,’” he says. “If there was a NCAA men’s rugby team on campus that used the same game field, there is no way the university would have asked them to play a 100 percent road schedule. Of course there is no way to prove this, but it’s my hunch. If the university built a new ice hockey arena, they wouldn’t ask the team to play 100 percent on the road while they built a new arena … no way that would happen.”
Emily still has two more years to play for Quinnipiac, so she is passionately invested in whether or not her team has a home field to play on. Rugby is everything to Emily and the main reason she’s attending Quinnipiac. “[Rugby] defines who she is and how she spends her time,” Roskopf says of his daughter. “Emily was heavily recruited by most top-tier college rugby programs. Because she knew she wanted to play in college, she only considered schools with NCAA or Division 1 rugby programs.”
When it came to choosing Quinnipiac, Emily says that a big part of her decision was Coach Carlson. “When I was on my recruiting trip, I was really impressed by the team culture and expectations. Coach Carlson knows what each and every one of her athletes is capable of, and she pushes them to be the best that they can be.”
It was a fight to even get that space to themselves. Before the consent decree, during the team’s first season (2010-11), it was given time on Quinnipiac’s intramural field 1. The space (which was the largest one the team has been given to date at 39.6m x 13.7m) is considered a “rec field,” and any club team that reserved a timeslot was able to play on it. Carlson recalls leading practices and intramurals squads were converging on the sidelines, waiting for rugby to finish. The field was also not level and contained holes, rocks, and other hazards that made practicing on it difficult.
The following year, the team was moved to a smaller field 2 than the first, at 33.5m x 15m; another with holes and rocks. The team had to share this field from 2011 to 2013, despite Carlson frequently emailing and taking her concerns to the athletic department in person.
“I pointed out to the lawyers that we were the only varsity team sharing our field with intramurals, and the lawyers included it in the decree,” Carlson says. Finally in 2013, the school dedicated the field solely to women’s rugby, a stipulation specifically prescribed by the consent decree.
The second field was still too small to be used to host games, and Cook remembers that this field was particularly perilous. The International Rugby Board, the NCAA standard, requires a 5m safety minimum around a pitch’s edges that the field barely accommodated before the grass ended. “[If] you tackle[d] people out of bounds,” Cook explains, “we would literally tackle them into a gravel road if we went too far.”
After winning its first national championship, the team was relegated to the smallest field yet 3: a 33.5m x 14.8m space that was formerly used for men’s soccer practice. Due to the size, it is unusable as a regulation rugby field.
The school’s plan is to eventually give women’s rugby the 36.6m x 21.3m men’s soccer field 4 after necessary renovations are made. Quinnipiac has recently been given the OK from the town of Hamden to start construction on a new 1,500-seat stadium for the soccer and lacrosse teams. But the school had a difficult time with its application, facing resistance from Hamden’s residents, many of whom oppose building a stadium so close to Sleeping Giant State Park.
One of the main reasons that the men’s soccer team is in need of a new field is because the current one — which women’s rugby will supposedly inherit — has flooded several times in the past year due to poor drainage. In 2013, when Carlson was told by the university that it planned to repurpose the soccer field for rugby, she met with John Copela, QU’s head groundskeeper, to discuss the potential move.
According to Carlson, Copela told her that “it would not be a smart move to put rugby on the soccer field without renovations including full resodding and drainage installed due to flooding and heavy foot traffic crossing to other athletic fields.” When Carlson asked Copela if he had any insight about what the future plans were for the rugby team, she says that he advised her that he had seen “nothing that included rugby up to that point.”
“The university complies with Title IX and is committed to the equitable treatment of all male and female student-athletes, which includes women’s rugby”Greg Amodio, director of athletics
When Carlson noted these concerns to QU Vice President Mark Thompson via email in September of 2013, he said he would do some research and get back to her, but never did. According to Carlson, when she met with him to initiate some follow-up after her email, he stated that neither he nor the athletic department “were aware the soccer field required any upgrades.”
Yet, a year earlier in 2012, an article for The Chronicle reported that“… several times over the past few years the field has flooded and forced both the men’s and women’s teams to cancel their upcoming matches.” But McDonald commented to the paper that the men’s soccer field was part of their “master plan” and that fixing the flooding problems would be addressed.
Still, the flood-prone pitch, which needs resodding, would be an upgrade. “It’s better than the field that I have played on the last three years in the sense that it’s gonna be regulation-sized and it’s going to be able to seat 50 or so people” in metal bleachers that run alongside the field, she says.
But she’s also realistic about the state of that field and what it will take for it to be up to par. If “they replace the grass and stuff, it might be,” she hesitates, “I don’t know. It’s not what the soccer team is going to get up in the new construction area because they’re going to have gorgeous stadium seating and locker rooms and just great stuff.”
SB Nation reached out to Quinnipiac University’s Athletic Director Greg Amodio, Deputy Director Sarah Fraser, Associate Athletic Director of Sports Information Ken Sweeten, and President Lahey to learn more about why the school has taken so long to fulfill many aspects of the consent decree as they relate to women’s rugby. However, we were not given a chance to ask any questions and instead were given the following statement by Sweeten on Amodio’s behalf:
“The university complies with Title IX and is committed to the equitable treatment of all male and female student-athletes, which includes women’s rugby,” said Greg Amodio, director of athletics.
Despite this statement, the women’s rugby team still does not have an adequate field. Recent graduate Tesni Phillips remembers when she began playing for the women’s rugby team during her freshman year and how the team had to share a locker room with women’s cross-country, while the men’s ice hockey and basketball teams had multiple locker rooms for themselves.
After taking the next two years off from rugby, Phillips returned for her senior year to find that rugby finally had its own dedicated locker room. “It was still really, really small,” says Phillips, noting that it was just one of the things that made it seem to her that the administration wasn’t particularly interested in looking after the team.
“It’s about the size of, like, two living rooms and with a bathroom attached that has three showers, two stalls, and three sinks,” Cook says of the team’s current locker rooms. It might have 35 lockers, she guesses, but probably more like 30. Since the team is currently made up of 22 players, “that locker room fits my team now alone.” But a full rugby roster is 30 athletes, and as it stands now, Cook says, “If we carried 30 kids, there’s no way we would have all fit in that locker room.”
There are other challenges, too. The consent decree has specific language that outlines QU’s responsibility to promote the sport both internally and at large. But Carlson and her players have been demoralized by the lack of support for their athletic success.
Compare this to when the women’s rugby team won its first national championship in 2015.
It was if the team didn’t even exist. Plans for a billboard congratulating the team contained misspellings and never materialized. The most recognition it received, according to Carlson, was when QU administration gave the rugby team gold XXL T-shirts, although the acronym of its league (the National Intercollegiate Rugby Association) was misspelled.
There was no congratulatory email from President Lahey, and the school store didn’t sell any rugby championship gear, driving Carlson and her team to set up an online shop themselves where they sold over $2,500 worth of merchandise in a weekend.
“If we carried [the full squad of] 30 kids, there’s no way we would have all fit in that locker room”Abby Cook
In the Quinnipiac Chronicle’s “Latest With Lahey,” a Q+A with the president, from April 20, 2016, President Lahey was told that “the rugby team posted on social media, upset that Lahey had emailed the student body about Quinnipiac making the Frozen Four when he did not send an email when rugby won its national championship.” He was then asked what he would say to the women’s team. His answer deflected the direct question and did not answer why he did not acknowledge the team’s championship win:
“We have 21 sports and rugby is still an emerging sport, actually, but I love them all. When they win a national championship, I think that’s great, but I would say, again, the amount of media coverage–it’s not a question of my recognizing a team, I recognize all our teams that do well and I call coaches after games and talk with them–so the point that I really was communicating about the men’s hockey is the amount of national coverage that they gave the university….I try to look at not just the team’s athletics in terms of their success on the field, or on the ice or on the court, or wherever it is, but what it is doing to extend the good name of Quinnipiac far and wide. And I think if you use that as the standard and that’s what I was really thanking the team for and congratulating them.”
We asked Carlson if she had ever heard from President Lahey personally, either after a regular season game or the national championship ones. She told us that she has received “zero [calls] to date.”
According to the consent decree, “Quinnipiac will make a good faith effort to promote women’s rugby as a varsity sport and to encourage other NCAA Division I schools to sponsor women’s rugby as a varsity sport with the goal of establishing a Division I varsity women’s rugby athletic conference and a NCAA varsity women’s rugby national championship.” In other words, the school’s promotion and support of women’s rugby, both within the QU community and outside, is not optional.
Back in 2014, Carlson sat down with Jon Alba, then a reporter for Q30 Television, a student-run television station. She spoke at length about the issue of gender inequity when it came to media attention. According to Carlson, the rugby team had an in-person meeting with Sweeten and student media reps around the same time this video clip was released. Carlson says that they did listen to the team’s concerns, but that, in her recollection, they responded by saying that “… women’s sports were of no interest to their readers and that people care more about men’s ice hockey and basketball.”
The students who attended the meeting were tired of being told that nobody cares about women’s rugby and that was the reason it lacked sufficient media coverage. Carlson’s athletes came to the meeting prepared, pointing out the unequal representation of men’s and women’s sports on campus.
What the rugby players asked for was straightforward: They wanted equal coverage of women’s sports at the school, along with equal content within the school paper’s pages. The athletes reminded the media reps that this was a Title IX issue and that they should and could actually make a difference with how they covered sports at the school.
The athletes didn’t stop there. In May of 2016, rugby player and junior Flora Poole wrote an op/ed for The Quinnipiac Chronicle running the numbers when it came to the school supporting the various athletic teams via social media.
“In the spring 2016 semester alone, the handler behind Quinnipiac University’s Twitter account dedicated 415 tweets and retweets on Quinnipiac athletic teams and their achievements. Three hundred and forty-two were dedicated to men’s ice hockey, eight to men’s basketball, one to men’s baseball and 65 to all women’s sports combined. Leading up to its national championship, rugby received four tweets over a period of 14 days promoting its championship. Men’s ice hockey, on the other hand, received 46 tweets in a period of three days covering their quarterfinal against Cornell.”
Poole’s op-ed is poignant, especially in the aftermath of the Title IX case, where Quinnipiac legally needs to be doing better. When we spoke, Poole noted that perhaps her strong words, which called out Quinnipiac for placing men’s athletics above women’s, have had a positive impact.
“In terms of administration, there has been — from the athletic department — more acknowledgement of our games this year. It’s little things really. This year they have been very good with the Athletics Instagram; every single game they’ve promoted us and have done a photo of the day.”
The rugby team created the Fill the Silence campaign last year in response to the lack of coverage. Players posted numerous snapshots and statistics on their own social media pages that pointed to the fact that stories and information on women’s athletics on campus are sorely lacking, especially compared to the men. Cook notes that things have gotten better, but her point of comparison shows just how low the expectations of school support are.
Cook also says that this year, the team received announcements for game days, something that wasn’t always released on time.
“The athletic department has been better this year,” she says. “They haven’t messed up our names in our write-ups, which I know is a really low standard, but take what you can get at this point.”
When the team won its second championship in a row, President Lahey still did not send a campus-wide email, though he did acknowledge the team in a Facebook post. The school paper is covering rugby games with more frequency, and the athletic department seems to be stepping up its sports information game as well. When the team won its second national championship, the Quinnipiac Bobcat’s homepage included photos and a lead story.
Quinnipiac held a pep rally for women’s rugby in December, where the school handed out T-shirts to the student body and feted the team for winning its second title. President Lahey did not attend.
“The athletic department has been better this year ... They haven’t messed up our names in our write-ups”Abby Cook
Professor Hanley, who had been present when President Lahey addressed faculty after the consent decree was issued, is also an Athletics Council chairperson for QU and noted in a phone interview that the team deserves better treatment than it’s getting. “Rugby is national champion team. I think they should be treated like national champions. I think those athletes and their coach deserve the red carpet treatment for all they’ve accomplished. They deserve a first class facility.”
Junior Jessica Maricich transferred from Carlson’s alma mater in Illinois, Eastern, which had its rugby program suspended in 2015 due to injuries. She says her passion for the sport and for athletic equity only grew when she began playing for QU and Carlson.
“We don’t get the support I believe we deserve,” says Maricich. “But the team culture and those behind Coach Carlson, we fight for things we deserve. Even though we’re accepting what we have, and making the best of the situation, we’re also fighting for what we deserve — which is something I really like with this team.”
Carlson’s advocacy may have emboldened her players, but she worries that it’s also put a target on her back. She filed an affidavit with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in early 2017, charging Quinnipiac with discrimination and retaliation.
Her affidavit states:
“In stark contrast to its treatment of male coaches, the University failed to provide me and my team access to necessary benefits, resources, and support services — such as adequate practice and competition fields, training programs, equipment, recruitment support, and access to media and publicity – that I needed to carry out my job as head coach.”
Carlson says that when she pushed the administration for these things, she opened herself up to baseless accusations and retaliatory discipline, which impacted her both professionally and personally. As she writes in her complaint:
“… this discriminatory treatment has required me to work more hours with significantly fewer resources, making my job more difficult, forcing me to work more hours for less money, benefits, and personal time relative to male coaches, and reducing my chances for competitive success.”
There are not many court cases like the one that led to changes at Quinnipiac. Suing is expensive and contentious. Coaches don’t want to lose their jobs for speaking up, and players don’t want to risk their playing chances since they are only in school for a few years.
Lopiano says that most schools aren’t interested in doing the work to get gender parity because schools want their “men’s sports program at the highest competitive level” and so they say, we “don’t have the money to give [women] the same opportunity.” Unfortunately for these schools, though, Lopiano adds, “there’s no financial excuse for not complying with federal law.”
Moving forward, it’s hard to say what will change overall, either at Quinnipiac or universities in general. Chaudhry notes that no action is taken on gender equity in sports unless someone speaks up; the Department of Education is not out actively looking for violations. Quinnipiac’s struggles to comply with Title IX remain a problem at other programs.
For instance: Earlier this month, the Seattle Timesinvestigated the reported numbers of women who row for the University of Washington and “found dozens of women who appear to have not been on the women’s rowing team, but whom the UW counted as crew participants in reports to federal officials over the past several years.”
In the end, it will continue to be up to the student athletes and their parents to hold the schools accountable. “[They] are often the ones who are vigilant,” Chaudhry says. “The more they know, the more they can try to make sure their schools are providing equal opportunities.”
The fight might be growing even more arduous. There is currently uncertainty about how the Trump administration — and specifically, the Department of Education, under Secretary Betsy DeVos — will handle Title IX. Most of the discussion has been about the problem of campus sexual assault, but the overall concerns that the DOE will not enforce gender equity under Title IX bleeds over into sports, too.
As Lindsay Gibbs recently reported, outside of the main concern that the Office for Civil Rights within the DOE will stop enforcing the law, there are fears about the scope of the law dwindling.
“If DeVos follows through on her plans to privatize education and hold charter schools receiving federal funds to different standards than public schools, as she indicated she would in her confirmation hearing, this could mean that fewer and fewer schools are even required to follow Title IX guidelines at all,” Gibbs wrote.
Still, as the law has been interpreted for years now, Chaudhry says, “schools have affirmative duties. They have to go out and ask their female students; they have to look around and see what’s popular in the geographical region … they can’t just sit back and say, ‘well, we haven’t heard anything from anybody so I guess we’re OK.’”
Beyond that, she adds, “they also have to have a process by which people can request new sports or request that sports that might be club sports be elevated to varsity sports.”
The fight for gender equity in sports at Quinnipiac over the last eight years — both in court and on the ground at the university — is indicative of this overall struggle. It was hard to get the legal victory, and once that was secured, it’s been difficult to get the consent decree enforced to the point of Carlson filing her recent complaint with the Office for Civil Rights.
This is now all thrown into relief against the backdrop of the new Trump administration. Indications suggest that the enforcement of Title IX will not get easier, and perhaps might even become much harder if the Department of Education does not prioritize it as it had done during the last presidential administration.
The hard and troublesome truth of this issue, though, is that female athletes are not asking for much. They want a place to practice free of rocks and potholes, a space large enough to run plays and host games. They want adequate resources like locker rooms that have sufficient space for teams and enough trainers to monitor their health. Often, they are simply requesting that their athletic departments and university administrators care about them and the sports they play — and show it.
Cook, who loves rugby and has given four years of her life to playing the sport for Quinnipiac, gets to the heart of this issue:
“I want [the administration] to be involved in the growth of our program. They’re so disaffiliated from all things rugby that it’s no wonder our student body doesn’t support us. You don’t even talk to us or know what we’re doing.”
How the Rockets made the wildest scheme in basketball analytics work
By Tim Cato | Published
Patrick Beverley talks to everyone. Go to a team practice, and his voice can be heard pinging around the floor. Find him after a game, and he’ll turn a weak question around on an unsuspecting reporter. Tell him a teammate attended a Beyoncé concert, something he says he would never do, and he’ll spend several minutes trying to figure out who it was. (It was James Harden, he finally deduces.)
Ninety minutes before the Rockets and the Grizzlies face each other in Houston in early March, Beverley starts talking to me.
“You going to chapel?”
Beverley is upbeat, even buoyant, as he sweeps through the locker room like he owns the place. In a sense, he does: the five-year veteran has seniority as the longest tenured Rocket, drafted in the second round a couple months before the Harden trade. Clearly, he doesn’t want me to feel left out.
I ask if I can be his plus-one.
“Yeah, come along!”
We both know it won’t happen. Media members aren’t allowed within the sacred confines of a pregame chapel service, typically a 10-minute affair involving both teams. But Beverley’s invitation was in good faith. He really wanted me to attend. He tries inviting a few more non-athletes in the room, before giving up and heading out the opposite door.
This expression of faith seems a bit antithetical in the context of the Houston locker room. After all, the Rockets aren’t just known as one of the league’s analytical pioneers, but have fully built their team off unfeeling data. The space where the players reside on game day is a reminder of those beliefs.
A long, continuous LED board stretches horizontally above the players’ lockers, alternatively displaying the league leaders in several advanced statistical categories. Where most teams play chronological footage of their opponent’s most recent game, the Rockets group various plays together, like pick-and-rolls and screens, and even show tendencies for the referee crew assigned to this game. It’s all a reminder that hard evidence is valued.
But faith has its place in the Houston locker room. Without the Rockets trusting that the system will yield results, they don’t believe their 55-win season and No. 3 seed could have happened.
“Our guys believe in our system,” says Monte McNair, the team’s vice president of basketball operations. “We hope there’s some grounding to it with our shot selection and the way we play. But certainly having our players believe not just that their shots are going in, but that their system can take them to the championship, is huge.”
Seconds after Beverley bounds out, Ryan Anderson strolls through the locker room. Where Beverley spills out infectious energy, Anderson is earnest and unassuming. He couldn’t have heard Beverly’s earlier invitation, but he sees me standing standing off to the side and extends a similar offer.
“You wanna go to chapel?”
The Rockets are not just the league’s most surprising team. They are a basketball laboratory conducting bold experiments beyond the boundaries of modern offensive efficiency. These are boundaries, mind you, that the Houston franchise has played a part in establishing over the past few years. This season’s Rockets have shattered three-point records and eschewed mid-range shots even more than years past. The league has been trending in this direction for years, but the Rockets have taken the movement and fueled it with nitrous.
Two seasons ago, Houston set the league’s record for three-point attempts, only to obliterate that record by attempting nearly 500 more this season. They have taken only 579 mid-range shots — inside the arc, outside the paint — total this year, by far the lowest among all 30 teams. In fact, four players around the league have taken more shots from the mid-range individually than Houston has as a team.
None of that inherently matters, except for the fact that it works. The Rockets have the league’s third-best record and would be on course to set a new standard for offensive efficiency if it wasn’t for those pesky Golden State Warriors. What’s fascinating is that the Rockets have doubled down on their offensive approach while retrenching around a singular star.
It was only a year ago that the Rockets were unceremoniously ousted from the postseason by those Warriors after a long, dismal season of infighting and disinterest. Harden and Dwight Howard resented each other, which essentially forced their teammates to choose sides. The reaction once their season mercifully ended could be summed up in a phrase: good riddance.
The team felt it necessary to conduct a top-down evaluation of their entire approach in order to regain their footing as one of the West’s top teams. General manager Daryl Morey has always viewed basketball through a progressive lens, but with a struggling defense and a dismal conclusion, common sense pointed to the Rockets taking a more traditional approach after last offseason’s debacle. Instead, Morey ripped up conventionality, lit it on fire, and launched it into the Gulf of Mexico. Still, McNair told me even the Rockets weren’t expecting the team to be this good.
After chapel, once congregating players revert back from parishioners to competitors, the Rockets launch 42 threes and make 18 of them, pushing Memphis and their traditional big man basketball into a quicker pace than they’re accustomed to playing. The Rockets score 123 points in a double-digit win and that isn’t even Houston’s best ball.
“We can play better,” Rockets head coach Mike D’Antoni says post-game.
D’Antoni’s hiring last May put this year’s experiment in motion. You don’t hire the virtuoso who conducted the famed “Seven Seconds or Less” offense for the mid-2000s Phoenix Suns to play conventionally. In D’Antoni’s last two coaching stops with the Knicks and the Lakers, players hadn’t bought all the way into the quick-tempoed dogma. But the success of the Warriors, who played a similar style, inspired D’Antoni to give it another try. With Houston, he found the perfect situation.
“They’d been playing this way for a while and they wanted to go to even another level,” D’Antoni tells me after a shoot-around. “They know that’s what I believe in.”
With D’Antoni on board, the next item on Morey’s agenda was free agency. Morey had no qualms letting Howard walk, replacing him with a platoon of Clint Capela and Nene. He then doubled down on the offensive end by signing Ryan Anderson and Eric Gordon, two shooters hardly known as defensive stalwarts.
“This is the team we have,” D’Antoni told the team in one of their first meetings. “These are the weapons we have, so let’s utilize them.”
The most important piece, however, was already on the roster. One of the first things D’Antoni did was broach Harden with the idea of playing point guard. Though the 6’5 guard had consistently handled the ball throughout his career, he had never been given total autonomy over an offense. D’Antoni used every trick in the book to convince him.
“Groveling, begging, I’m old and he felt sorry for me,” D’Antoni says. “I thought it was good for him and his career, but also mainly, because I thought we could win that way. And he wasn’t reluctant at all.”
Two seasons after coming in second in the Most Valuable Player award voting to Stephen Curry, the move has made Harden a leading MVP candidate again. He posted career highs in points (29.1) and assists (11.2) while still tying his most efficient season ever, with a True Shooting Percentage of 61.3. His 53-point, 16-rebound, 17-assist game in December revealed the ceiling of his ridiculous play, but even Harden’s off games still helped the offense.
His presence and playmaking benefit players like Anderson and Gordon, who often can be found spotting up several feet behind the arc. If a defense shifts too far in hopes of containing Harden, he can find shooters within moments. Stay home, and Capela is an effective dunker on the roll. Mess up on defense even for a moment and Harden has his choice between the two. The results have been exactly according to plan: open threes and easy dunks.
“James has really brought out the best in everybody,” D’Antoni says. “He’s the key. You can’t do it without him. You can have all these nice ideas, but it can’t be translated without him. He’s been terrific.”
Instead of standing pat or looking for more defensive help at the trade deadline, Morey dealt for Lou Williams, one of the league’s top bench scorers. The Rockets ramped up their offense even higher, finishing the season scoring even more points and launching more 3s at opposing defenses.
In making the trade, the Rockets said: Screw it, we’ll just score even more.
They have bought in fully to Morey and D’Antoni’s system, putting their faith not just in the numbers, but themselves.
Morey once believed multiple superstars was the only way to a championship. It’s why the team originally signed Howard, and the reason they appeared to be hours away from securing Chris Bosh in 2014 the following summer. That mindset changed and Houston accepted Harden as their sole superstar. Now the second best player on any given night is, “Whoever the other team doesn’t want to guard as heavily,” as Anderson put it.
There is, however, a downside. One game later when facing the Spurs, a likely second-round playoff opponent, Harden has an extraordinary first half before he is swallowed up by Kawhi Leonard in the second. When Harden struggles in the fourth quarter, San Antonio narrowly wins. Harden refutes that the Spurs — or anyone — can bring the Rockets away from their quick-paced, fast-moving style. Houston did manage 110 points in the loss, after all.
“We’re going to get shots,” he says. “We’re going to play our game no matter who we play.”
D’Antoni introduced a mantra into the locker room when he arrived in Houston, and it has stuck with his team all year. So what? What’s next?
As it happened, what came next was another loss, this time back at home against the Utah Jazz. But D’Antoni isn’t flusteredafter the game, and indeed, it was one of only four times all season that the Rockets lost consecutive games. Later, D’Antoni compares his team to a casino table in Las Vegas.
“It’s a little bit like a pit boss,” he says. “You’ll have runs against you. You’ll have people who start winning hands. But your odds are, you keep building hotels. You’re the winner. You’re not going to beat the house. We don’t feel like they’re going to beat us. In one game, yeah, they might win, we might lose a game, this and that. But we think, over the long haul, they’re not beating us.”
That’s the science. But D’Antoni knows as well as anyone that championships aren’t won without all the cards falling in the right order a few times. His Suns teams never even made the finals, something that requires the ultimate convergence of luck, timing, talent and chemistry. Not all of those are factors a team can control.
The myth that jump shooting teams can’t win championships is dead, dispelled by the Warriors (and really, the 2011 Mavericks before them). Jump shots will ebb and flow in the regular season, but the Rockets trust that their mathematically proven strategy will win out over the long run. Threes, after all, will always be greater than twos.
Houston’s three-point approach, the team believes, puts them in a position to beat anyone in the playoffs. The rest is out of their hands, especially against opponents that might be slightly better on paper than them. Catch the Warriors or Spurs on a good shooting night, and anything could happen. Can it happen over a seven-game series? It’s a final test that they only partially control.
That’s why the Rockets allow every player to find their own way to fit into Houston’s scientific, data-driven approach. Basketball can be viewed through numbers, but it isn’t a computer simulation. The Rockets, as brought together by Morey and D’Antoni, push boundaries supported by tangible evidence and are as grounded in mathematics as any team we’ve previously seen. Still, it couldn’t live without the players who collectively provide the team its heart.
To answer the age old question: can science and faith coexist? In Houston, they’re proving it must.
Before the team played San Antonio, I received one more invitation to join the team at chapel, this time from Sam Dekker.
“If you care to join, come on down. It’s a good time.”
Nashville likes sports. Hockey is a sport. It’s the Stanley Cup Final. Let’s not overthink ‘hockeytowns.’
“I listen to real country, but not thisshit.”
Ten years ago next week I was standing in a green room at something called the CMA Festival inside the Tennessee Titans’ stadium, ushering a professional wrestler from various press interviews to merchandise signings and then to the stage, where he was helping emcee the event.
The wrestler wanted to know something about the upcoming band so he could ad lib on stage. Neither of us knew them, or any other band in the lineup. We were yelling to each other over the crowd — of course I ended up yelling that last part too loud in a hospitality tent with scores of folks purposed with shoveling thatshit.
Everyone was looking at me. One radio executive guy walked over.
“Son!”
I gritted my teeth. My impeccable taste in American roots music couldn’t save me now. Jason Isbell wasn’t gonna suddenly parachute in for an extraction. So I just took my whipping.
“Son, this whole thing here [he started waving his hands] is a sellin’ a good time. That’s all. It’s not art, it’s not poetry. Maybe you don’t want to hear that, but it’s about a good time,” he said.
“Hey look, I didn’t -” I started to say, but he cut me off by laughing. That’s what Capital ‘N’ Nashville does when you complain about its character, or its tact or gaudiness or pandering: it keeps on doing whatever it is you object to and laughs. And makes money off it.
“Our boys go out there and bust their asses to figure out how to give folks a good time,” radio guy said. “That’s it. Find what they want, find what makes ‘em pay to show up and then when you get it you run their asses ragged with the good time ‘till they don’t want it no more. We’re here to have a good time.”
The man patted me on the back and went to get a beer from an ice chest. I said nothing.
“Ask him the name of the band,” the wrestler said.
A few years ago my wife and I sat next to defenseman Kevin Klein, now of the Rangers, in a cramped restaurant. He was on a date and we didn’t say anything to him. The Predators were good that season but still building towards the level of reverence we hold them in now. Maybe I should’ve said something to him. Maybe it would’ve helped his date.
There is a weird code of silence about celebrities in this city. If you’re famous and actually want to be left alone to do mundane stuff like get coffee or go to the store and not be famous doing it, this is your town. Nicole Kidman is a really nice person. I don’t really have anything to say to her when I see her around, so I don’t. No one does.
Welcome to Nashville: No one talks to Jack White in public and everyone is better for it.
A few years later I was waiting with my wife to get a sonogram of our first child and saw Shea Weber in the waiting room.
“HEY SHEA GOOD FUCKIN’ HUSTLE ON THE FORECHECK OUT THERE LAST NIGHT,” I screamed.
I’m just kidding. I didn’t say anything. But I told that joke to a Canadian friend one time and he rebuked me, “That’s the difference, man, in Toronto you would have.”
Would have what, been an asshole in an obstetrician’s waiting room? Is that how hockey is supposed to be? I don’t know. We don’t know here, but we’re starting to accept and enjoy that ignorance. We just made all this stuff up: The Tim McGraw, the chants, the offensively bright yellow (sorry, “gold”) sweaters, the catfish, the “Thundercats” logo — this whole happy mess is the result of an experiment to successfully grow a hockey fan base in a total vacuum, absent its heritage and its dogma.
A bunch of white trash and transient hipsters didn’t just up and become Nashville Predator fans three weeks ago. The Predators got here in 1998, long before Nashville was an “It” anything, and didn’t do much to earn anyone’s interest. Then they almost lost their franchise to the Canadian equivalent of a Bond villain.
Then the city and a handful of local businessmen fought back and kept the Predators from moving to Kansas City or Ontario. It wasn’t so much an effort to keep a beloved team — or sport, let’s be honest — but the idea of that good time.
When the franchise was announced a healthy amount of Michiganders had migrated to Middle Tennessee to work at a newly opened Saturn auto plant. When the Predators would host Detroit over the Christmas holidays, the seats at Bridgestone Arena could become two-thirds red. No one seemed to mind. Over the next two decades the health care industry and no state income tax would bring in white collar labor from New England, New York, and Illinois.
And the Southerners wandered in at a steady rate. You’d see NASCAR fans who liked the speed (and its ensuing violence), college football diehards with nothing to do after New Year’s, and even one Kentucky basketball fan I met in a beer line one night who told me he only started buying partial season ticket packages to lock in better seats for the SEC basketball tournament at Bridgestone Arena. Then that guy from Kentucky got hooked on hockey. Predators hockey.
I’ve lived in Nashville for 11 years. I’m from Georgia. When I was 10 my family was stationed in Virginia and my Boy Scout Troop went to a Capitals game at the old Patriot Center. The game I saw was fast and fun and the logos were cool.
Moreover, it was an entirely new sport free of the burden of assigned family loyalties and crippling disappointment (see: Atlanta). In a million Canadian think pieces about non-traditional hockey markets I’ve never seen anyone figure out that a fresh start is a wonderful gift to a fan. This is the South. If the wrong thing happens in college football we’ll set your yard on fire while you’re at church. Sometimes it’s nice to go enjoy a game free of such a consequence.
Aaron Doster-USA TODAY Sports
When you’re an ice hockey team in Tennessee with a bright yellow robot cat logo and piano keys on your jersey collar there’s no such thing as a bandwagon. The whole fan base is made of bandwagon.
That’s how you survive as a NHL franchise in a non-traditional market: You don’t bring hockey to a city, you let a city bring its culture to you. If the growth of a particular sport is often crippled by the provincial prejudice of its birthplace, the cure isn’t flavorless universalism — it’s new kinds of provincialism, y’all!
Besides, acceptance of the actual game and its eccentricities comes easier than you’d imagine. We needed a more fluid, higher-scoring game than Barry Trotz so we got a coach who almost fought a player that one time. We like that. We were told a charismatic talent celebrated too much for a stodgy French culture so we welcomed him with a total embrace of his “antics.” That pissed off the French, and we love that.
We’re going to enjoy playing against the best player in the sport on its biggest stage and holler like idiots doing so. We’re going to enjoy the otherworldly goaltending of Pekka Rinne. We’re going to celebrate team architect David Poile for the wizard that he is. Haven’t won a Cup in your province since Watergate? Bless your heart. Cheer for us if you want, we don’t mind.
But please know we’re going to be big, bawdy, and offensively country about this whole hockey thing. We’re going to treat a rotation of one-night sensations as lifelong superstars. Is that a Colton Sissons hat trick to close out the Ducks? Well now he’s Wayne Gretzky in this state, and in this state no one watches the World Juniors.
The Stanley Cup Final is coming to Nashville, Tenn. Don’t overthink it. We’re not. This is fun.
Trust us, we’re about to run your ass ragged with a good time.
How the Cavs battled back down 3-1 to beat the Warriors, giving Cleveland its first pro sports championship since 1964.
Yes, the Golden State Warriors set a regular-season record with 73 wins with the NBA’s first unanimous MVP only to blow a 3-1 lead in the 2016 NBA Finals. But perhaps once our memories (and the memes) fade, the winners can finally write their own history, allowing the next generation of basketball fans to view this series through the lens it deserves.
It didn’t happen because the Warriors stumbled. Failure is easy: You literally don’t need to do anything. But winning, defying odds that stretched three games and 52 years, that required LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, and the rest of the Cavaliers to ascend with remarkable individual and team performances, becoming the league’s first champions in nearly four decades to win Game 7 of the NBA Finals on the road.
Just like the previous two seasons (and perhaps for several more), one of these two teams will be crowned NBA champions. But even if it’s too early to write the history book on their rivalry, the 2016 chapter is closed.
Relive how it was decided, with the best of SB Nation’s NBA coverage from each game.
June 2, 2016 | Oracle Arena, Oakland, Calif. | Golden State leads, 1-0 (Box Score)
Photo by Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images
Golden State jumped to a 1-0 series lead over the visiting Cavaliers on the back of Shaun Livingston, whose 20 points equaled Steph Curry and Klay Thompson’s combined total and doubled that of Cleveland’s entire bench.
Paul Flannery: “The two-time Most Valuable Player couldn't make a shot and the seventh man who couldn't buy a basket in the previous round suddenly couldn't miss. If that was the only strange occurrence in Game 1 of the NBA Finals then maybe we could start to figure things out. Once again we were reminded that nobody knows anything. Or maybe, we already know too much.” — The Warriors find yet another way to beat the Cavaliers
June 5, 2016 | Oracle Arena, Oakland, Calif. | Golden State leads, 2-0 (Box Score)
Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
Draymond Green, the Warriors’ do-everything glue guy, scored a game-high 28 points, giving Golden State what appeared to be a commanding 2-0 series lead. (Foreshadowing!) Adding injury to insult, the Cavs lost Kevin Love to a concussion that forced him to miss the second half, as well as Game 3.
Liam Boylan-Pett: “The two-time first team All-NBA defender has been superb on defense as expected against Cleveland -- he's been everywhere, and his ability to not commit a foul in the lane is a sight to behold -- but his offense is making a difference in the finals. He's shooting 51.6 percent from the field and 50 percent from deep. The Cavaliers' game plan is begging Green to make shots from deep, and he's delivering.” — Draymond is taking over, and there’s nothing the Cavs can do about it
June 8, 2016 | Quicken Loans Arena, Cleveland | Golden State leads, 2-1 (Box Score)
Photo by Bob Donnan - Pool/Getty Images
The Cavs roared back on their home floor, jumping ahead by 20 points in the opening frame before putting the game on ice in the second half. With Kevin Love sidelined, Tyronn Lue went small with Richard Jefferson at the four — a bold move that set the stage for LeBron James (32 points) and Kyrie Irving (30) to break out.
Paul Flannery:“Credit Cavs' coach Ty Lue with the lineup switch. Credit LeBron with having a signature game when it was needed most. Credit everyone in Cleveland, with the exception of poor Kevin Love who will now have to endure another 48 hours of talk about how he's the problem. ‘Let's slow down with that,’ Jefferson said. ‘At the end of the day, we protected once. We protected home court.’” — The NBA Finals get real but stay absurd
June 10, 2016 | Quicken Loans Arena, Cleveland | Golden State leads, 3-1 (Box Score)
Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images
Steph Curry, quiet in the first three games, exploded for 38 points to give the Warriors the 3-1 series lead that eventually birthed 1,000 memes. Accompanying Curry’s offensive explosion was Andre Iguodala’s continued excellence on the other side to help disrupt Cleveland’s game plan and contain LeBron James.
Paul Flannery:“The Warriors are the revolution realized. Look up and down their roster and you will see players who at one time or another or in different situation would have slipped through the cracks and had their contributions minimized. Curry isn’t really a point guard. Green is an undersized four who plays center. Even Barnes, a prototypical wing on paper, has been a force as a smallball four. Iguodala is merely the epitome of all those experiences.” — The Warriors are the revolution
June 13, 2016 | Oracle Arena, Oakland, Calif. | Golden State leads, 3-2 (Box Score)
Photo by Pool/Getty Images
With Draymond Green suspended following his Game 4 antics, LeBron James extended the series with a brilliant performance (even by his lofty standards): 41 points, 16 rebounds, seven assists. Kyrie Irving added another 41 points, as the duo became the first-ever teammates to top 40 in the same Finals game.
Tom Ziller: “Why can't he always play like he did on Monday? Because the way he always plays is already better than just about anyone who has ever played basketball. When you average 28-9-7 at the highest levels of the sport, sometimes you'll do better than that (see: Game 5) and sometimes you'll do worse (see: earlier this series). If LeBron managed to average 41 for a series, people would find a way to criticize the loss in which he scored 30. There's so little acknowledgment that what he's already doing is almost unprecedented, and that leads to outsized expectations with no bearing in reality.” — Why LeBron James can’t always play ‘like that’
June 16, 2016 | Quicken Loans Arena, Cleveland | Series tied, 3-3 (Box Score)
Photo by Jason Miller/Getty Images
LeBron James was magnificent again with another 41-point performance, refusing to let the Warriors repeat as champions on his home court and forcing a winner-take-all Game 7 in Oakland. The Curry family, meanwhile, was in full meltdown mode, with Ayesha accusing the NBA of being rigged after watching Steph foul out.
Tom Ziller: “It was the purest form of LeBron you'll ever see. He settled for stagnancy and long jumpers a couple of times at the end of the third and looked a bit gassed, but the intermission was all he needed to come back fierce. No one in the game -- no one since Jordan, Magic and Bird -- can play like this. Throwing alley-oops, finishing alley-oops, torturing Andre Iguodala in the post, smothering Draymond Green, swatting Stephen Curry and being everywhere every second.” — No one’s disrespecting LeBron James anymore
In a series of blowouts, Game 7 was atypically close the entire time before Kyrie Irving’s dagger with less than a minute remaining won Cleveland its first pro sports championship since 1964. LeBron James turned in a triple-double, setting up Uncle Drew’s heroics just a minute earlier with an iconic chase-down block on Andre Iguodala.
Paul Flannery: “Game 7's are rarely this good. There were 20 lead changes and 11 ties and nothing ever felt answered until those last seconds ticked off the clock. That's when belief gave way to shock, and shock slowly dawned on everyone that the reality of the moment was at hand. The Cleveland Cavaliers were freaking NBA champions. More than half a century of Cleveland sports heartbreak melting away in the warm glow of the Larry O'Brien trophy. LeBron cradled it in his arms and that's when reality gave way to tears.” — You can believe in LeBron James
Everything you need to know about Cleveland and Golden State’s third straight NBA Finals matchup.
After what may be considered the longest preseason in history, the Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers resume their battle for NBA supremacy with their third straight NBA Finals matchup. Game 1 tips off in Oakland, Calif., at 9 p.m. ET, and will be televised on ABC and streamed live online at WatchESPN.
This year’s series will determine not just this year’s champion, but also how we view the previous two. Was Cleveland’s historic comeback in 2016 a temporary interruption of Golden State’s dynasty, or the beginning of its own?
Each team took different paths to return to the Finals. The Warriors reloaded last summer by adding Kevin Durant, finishing with the league’s best record yet again. The Cavs, meanwhile, kept their core intact and coasted for much of the year, finishing with four straight losses and the East’s No. 2 seed.
But ever since the real season began, both teams have played as well as ever, entering the Finals with just one playoff loss between them — the fewest since the NBA moved to the 16-team format in 1984.
The NBA playoffs started with 16 teams, but for the third year in a row, the Warriors and Cavs were the last ones standing. Take a look to see how we ended up in the same spot yet again.
How the Rockets made the wildest scheme in basketball analytics work
By Tim Cato | Published
Patrick Beverley talks to everyone. Go to a team practice, and his voice can be heard pinging around the floor. Find him after a game, and he’ll turn a weak question around on an unsuspecting reporter. Tell him a teammate attended a Beyoncé concert, something he says he would never do, and he’ll spend several minutes trying to figure out who it was. (It was James Harden, he finally deduces.)
Ninety minutes before the Rockets and the Grizzlies face each other in Houston in early March, Beverley starts talking to me.
“You going to chapel?”
Beverley is upbeat, even buoyant, as he sweeps through the locker room like he owns the place. In a sense, he does: the five-year veteran has seniority as the longest tenured Rocket, drafted in the second round a couple months before the Harden trade. Clearly, he doesn’t want me to feel left out.
I ask if I can be his plus-one.
“Yeah, come along!”
We both know it won’t happen. Media members aren’t allowed within the sacred confines of a pregame chapel service, typically a 10-minute affair involving both teams. But Beverley’s invitation was in good faith. He really wanted me to attend. He tries inviting a few more non-athletes in the room, before giving up and heading out the opposite door.
This expression of faith seems a bit antithetical in the context of the Houston locker room. After all, the Rockets aren’t just known as one of the league’s analytical pioneers, but have fully built their team off unfeeling data. The space where the players reside on game day is a reminder of those beliefs.
A long, continuous LED board stretches horizontally above the players’ lockers, alternatively displaying the league leaders in several advanced statistical categories. Where most teams play chronological footage of their opponent’s most recent game, the Rockets group various plays together, like pick-and-rolls and screens, and even show tendencies for the referee crew assigned to this game. It’s all a reminder that hard evidence is valued.
But faith has its place in the Houston locker room. Without the Rockets trusting that the system will yield results, they don’t believe their 55-win season and No. 3 seed could have happened.
“Our guys believe in our system,” says Monte McNair, the team’s vice president of basketball operations. “We hope there’s some grounding to it with our shot selection and the way we play. But certainly having our players believe not just that their shots are going in, but that their system can take them to the championship, is huge.”
Seconds after Beverley bounds out, Ryan Anderson strolls through the locker room. Where Beverley spills out infectious energy, Anderson is earnest and unassuming. He couldn’t have heard Beverly’s earlier invitation, but he sees me standing standing off to the side and extends a similar offer.
“You wanna go to chapel?”
The Rockets are not just the league’s most surprising team. They are a basketball laboratory conducting bold experiments beyond the boundaries of modern offensive efficiency. These are boundaries, mind you, that the Houston franchise has played a part in establishing over the past few years. This season’s Rockets have shattered three-point records and eschewed mid-range shots even more than years past. The league has been trending in this direction for years, but the Rockets have taken the movement and fueled it with nitrous.
Two seasons ago, Houston set the league’s record for three-point attempts, only to obliterate that record by attempting nearly 500 more this season. They have taken only 579 mid-range shots — inside the arc, outside the paint — total this year, by far the lowest among all 30 teams. In fact, four players around the league have taken more shots from the mid-range individually than Houston has as a team.
None of that inherently matters, except for the fact that it works. The Rockets have the league’s third-best record and would be on course to set a new standard for offensive efficiency if it wasn’t for those pesky Golden State Warriors. What’s fascinating is that the Rockets have doubled down on their offensive approach while retrenching around a singular star.
It was only a year ago that the Rockets were unceremoniously ousted from the postseason by those Warriors after a long, dismal season of infighting and disinterest. Harden and Dwight Howard resented each other, which essentially forced their teammates to choose sides. The reaction once their season mercifully ended could be summed up in a phrase: good riddance.
The team felt it necessary to conduct a top-down evaluation of their entire approach in order to regain their footing as one of the West’s top teams. General manager Daryl Morey has always viewed basketball through a progressive lens, but with a struggling defense and a dismal conclusion, common sense pointed to the Rockets taking a more traditional approach after last offseason’s debacle. Instead, Morey ripped up conventionality, lit it on fire, and launched it into the Gulf of Mexico. Still, McNair told me even the Rockets weren’t expecting the team to be this good.
After chapel, once congregating players revert back from parishioners to competitors, the Rockets launch 42 threes and make 18 of them, pushing Memphis and their traditional big man basketball into a quicker pace than they’re accustomed to playing. The Rockets score 123 points in a double-digit win and that isn’t even Houston’s best ball.
“We can play better,” Rockets head coach Mike D’Antoni says post-game.
D’Antoni’s hiring last May put this year’s experiment in motion. You don’t hire the virtuoso who conducted the famed “Seven Seconds or Less” offense for the mid-2000s Phoenix Suns to play conventionally. In D’Antoni’s last two coaching stops with the Knicks and the Lakers, players hadn’t bought all the way into the quick-tempoed dogma. But the success of the Warriors, who played a similar style, inspired D’Antoni to give it another try. With Houston, he found the perfect situation.
“They’d been playing this way for a while and they wanted to go to even another level,” D’Antoni tells me after a shoot-around. “They know that’s what I believe in.”
With D’Antoni on board, the next item on Morey’s agenda was free agency. Morey had no qualms letting Howard walk, replacing him with a platoon of Clint Capela and Nene. He then doubled down on the offensive end by signing Ryan Anderson and Eric Gordon, two shooters hardly known as defensive stalwarts.
“This is the team we have,” D’Antoni told the team in one of their first meetings. “These are the weapons we have, so let’s utilize them.”
The most important piece, however, was already on the roster. One of the first things D’Antoni did was broach Harden with the idea of playing point guard. Though the 6’5 guard had consistently handled the ball throughout his career, he had never been given total autonomy over an offense. D’Antoni used every trick in the book to convince him.
“Groveling, begging, I’m old and he felt sorry for me,” D’Antoni says. “I thought it was good for him and his career, but also mainly, because I thought we could win that way. And he wasn’t reluctant at all.”
Two seasons after coming in second in the Most Valuable Player award voting to Stephen Curry, the move has made Harden a leading MVP candidate again. He posted career highs in points (29.1) and assists (11.2) while still tying his most efficient season ever, with a True Shooting Percentage of 61.3. His 53-point, 16-rebound, 17-assist game in December revealed the ceiling of his ridiculous play, but even Harden’s off games still helped the offense.
His presence and playmaking benefit players like Anderson and Gordon, who often can be found spotting up several feet behind the arc. If a defense shifts too far in hopes of containing Harden, he can find shooters within moments. Stay home, and Capela is an effective dunker on the roll. Mess up on defense even for a moment and Harden has his choice between the two. The results have been exactly according to plan: open threes and easy dunks.
“James has really brought out the best in everybody,” D’Antoni says. “He’s the key. You can’t do it without him. You can have all these nice ideas, but it can’t be translated without him. He’s been terrific.”
Instead of standing pat or looking for more defensive help at the trade deadline, Morey dealt for Lou Williams, one of the league’s top bench scorers. The Rockets ramped up their offense even higher, finishing the season scoring even more points and launching more 3s at opposing defenses.
In making the trade, the Rockets said: Screw it, we’ll just score even more.
They have bought in fully to Morey and D’Antoni’s system, putting their faith not just in the numbers, but themselves.
Morey once believed multiple superstars was the only way to a championship. It’s why the team originally signed Howard, and the reason they appeared to be hours away from securing Chris Bosh in 2014 the following summer. That mindset changed and Houston accepted Harden as their sole superstar. Now the second best player on any given night is, “Whoever the other team doesn’t want to guard as heavily,” as Anderson put it.
There is, however, a downside. One game later when facing the Spurs, a likely second-round playoff opponent, Harden has an extraordinary first half before he is swallowed up by Kawhi Leonard in the second. When Harden struggles in the fourth quarter, San Antonio narrowly wins. Harden refutes that the Spurs — or anyone — can bring the Rockets away from their quick-paced, fast-moving style. Houston did manage 110 points in the loss, after all.
“We’re going to get shots,” he says. “We’re going to play our game no matter who we play.”
D’Antoni introduced a mantra into the locker room when he arrived in Houston, and it has stuck with his team all year. So what? What’s next?
As it happened, what came next was another loss, this time back at home against the Utah Jazz. But D’Antoni isn’t flusteredafter the game, and indeed, it was one of only four times all season that the Rockets lost consecutive games. Later, D’Antoni compares his team to a casino table in Las Vegas.
“It’s a little bit like a pit boss,” he says. “You’ll have runs against you. You’ll have people who start winning hands. But your odds are, you keep building hotels. You’re the winner. You’re not going to beat the house. We don’t feel like they’re going to beat us. In one game, yeah, they might win, we might lose a game, this and that. But we think, over the long haul, they’re not beating us.”
That’s the science. But D’Antoni knows as well as anyone that championships aren’t won without all the cards falling in the right order a few times. His Suns teams never even made the finals, something that requires the ultimate convergence of luck, timing, talent and chemistry. Not all of those are factors a team can control.
The myth that jump shooting teams can’t win championships is dead, dispelled by the Warriors (and really, the 2011 Mavericks before them). Jump shots will ebb and flow in the regular season, but the Rockets trust that their mathematically proven strategy will win out over the long run. Threes, after all, will always be greater than twos.
Houston’s three-point approach, the team believes, puts them in a position to beat anyone in the playoffs. The rest is out of their hands, especially against opponents that might be slightly better on paper than them. Catch the Warriors or Spurs on a good shooting night, and anything could happen. Can it happen over a seven-game series? It’s a final test that they only partially control.
That’s why the Rockets allow every player to find their own way to fit into Houston’s scientific, data-driven approach. Basketball can be viewed through numbers, but it isn’t a computer simulation. The Rockets, as brought together by Morey and D’Antoni, push boundaries supported by tangible evidence and are as grounded in mathematics as any team we’ve previously seen. Still, it couldn’t live without the players who collectively provide the team its heart.
To answer the age old question: can science and faith coexist? In Houston, they’re proving it must.
Before the team played San Antonio, I received one more invitation to join the team at chapel, this time from Sam Dekker.
“If you care to join, come on down. It’s a good time.”
The second day of the draft begins Friday, Aug. 28 at 7 p.m. ET, with ESPN and NFL Network airing both rounds. We'll have all the live coverage here, so stay tuned as the selections roll in.
On Saturday, teams will make their final selections as Day 3 of the NFL draft after a captivating first two days of the event. Rounds 4-7 of the draft will take place all day, starting at noon ET, with ESPN and NFL Network airing all five rounds.
Day 1 began with the Cleveland Browns doing as expected, selecting Texas A&M defensive end Myles Garrett. The Browns later grabbed Jabrill Peppers and David Njoku to complete their three-selection first round.
Three teams traded up for their hopeful franchise quarterbacks on Day 1. The Chicago Bears took Mitchell Trubisky, the Kansas City Chiefs grabbed Patrick Mahomes and the Houston Texans selected Deshaun Watson.
The 2017 NFL Draft continued on Friday night, with more trades and some intriguing picks in Rounds 2 and 3.
The Green Bay Packers started off the second round by drafting cornerback Kevin King, one of three Washington cornerbacks to get selected in Round 2. Just like on Thursday night, the team with the third pick of Friday night traded up one spot, but this time not with as much fanfare, or criticism, as the Bears moving up to select Mitchell Trubisky.
On Friday, the Jacksonville Jaguars moved up to pick No. 34 to select Alabama offensive tackle Cam Robinson. Another noteworthy pick was Florida State running back Dalvin Cook going No. 41 to the Minnesota Vikings, who traded up with the Cincinnati Bengals for that pick. Acquiring the Vikings’ fourth-rounder, Cincinnati now has nine picks to make on Day 3 of the draft.
After three picks in the first round, the Cleveland Browns may have found their starting quarterback, taking DeShone Kizer out of Notre Dame with the 52nd overall pick.
We'll have all the live coverage here, so stay tuned as the selections roll in.
Football as we know it is done, because the lawyers are here. When the lawyers arrive, things as you know them are over. After making an initial beachhead with concussion lawsuits in the NFL, The Lawyers (capital letters necessary) are pushing inland and making great, great gains. There are lawsuits against helmet manufacturers, against the NFL, the NCAA … anyone with a finger on the game at this point, in the year 2017, will be liable for the game’s excesses, violences, and lasting damage.
Do not for one second read that as “blame The Lawyers.” You can if you like. It’s fun, and no one wants to stand in the way of fun as long as you don’t actually mean blame The Lawyers. Like foot soldiers in a war, lawyers are merely rubber ducks on a great tidal swell of football-related backlash, doing what they are told, and being pushed by currents sweeping back from a century of American football’s flailing about with no regard for itself or fellow swimmers.
Football is not under attack from anything other than football. Football declared war on itself long ago, and advanced the campaign in a thousand small steps. In 1905 it outlawed the Flying Wedge and legalized the forward pass, but stopped short of further liberating linemen and backs from constant impact by loosening the rules on eligible linemen. In the 1970s player size followed the national obesity curve upward, increasing the m in F=ma to unprecedented and increasingly dangerous levels, making the F (force) involved in the game greater than ever.
When the 2000s rolled around and CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) emerged as a real correlation with the game of football, the NFL and others followed the noble example of tobacco companies by falsifying research, denying all charges, and focusing on selling the product to children.
That is what sent the lawyers to football’s shores in the first place, and now deep into its heartland and beyond. Not a sense of aggrieved offense by coastal elites at the uncompromising game of the American interior. Not the allure of potential settlement money hitting the nostrils of the American legal community.
What sent them was the slow realization by parents that Pop Warner football could be the gateway drug that leads their promising, unblemished child to an adulthood with a degenerative brain condition. What sent them was the understanding that over time, American schools from middle school up had institutionalized and venerated a game capable of seriously harming those who played it — and even protected it in law and beyond in the form of societal and cultural protections no court order could budge from good standing.
Football asked for this to happen. It asked for liability insurance to become so expensive it might price out substantial numbers of high school teams from even having programs. It encouraged its own violence and actively discouraged research on that violence’s long-term effects. At the highest levels of the game in particular — the NFL — those in charge encouraged a game of head-first violence, and made that violence an inseparable and often explicit part of their brand.
[RECIRC]
Yes, other sports have concussion problems — hockey, most notably, followed by soccer and wrestling. But The Lawyers aren’t here to talk to you about them. They are here to talk about football. And if The Lawyers are here, then football as we know it is already dead, or at the very least obsolete.
The Lawyers are not the people you want to rebuild or evolve the game. Neither are the corporate overlords of the NFL, who will only embrace innovation and a real honesty about the game’s potential long-term consequences at what may be non-figurative gunpoint. They cannot and should not be relied on because they are too invested in the current system to have any incentive to change.
Players, coaches, stakeholders, fans, and other invested parties cannot rely on the NFL for other reasons.
One is simple math: To make the biggest impact possible on the game, those who want football to survive must target the largest slice of the game. Football remains the number one participation sport in the country in high schools, with over a million players in 2015-16. For most of the people who play football in the United States, their exposure to the game in a serious and organized fashion begins and ends there. Football is not owned by anyone. If it were, though, the largest shareholders would be the ones playing on Friday nights.
Another reason to not wait for the NFL or college football to change first: The game of football can’t afford to wait, and needs to thrive where it lives, not where it is most monetized and commodified. Interventions suggested to improve the game at the highest levels tend to rely on expensive equipment, increasingly elaborate rulebooks, and advanced medical technology.
Using those as a stopgap to patch over the glaring issues in football’s foundations is only that: a stopgap, and an expensive one that won’t work for the game as a whole over time. Your high school, unlike St. Thomas Aquinas in Fort Lauderdale, cannot afford a squad of robot tackling dummies at $8,295 a pop. A rural high school in Utah will not have the mythical handheld medical equipment needed to diagnose a concussion instantly, nor have officials with the resources and support needed to parse out the complexities of the latest targeting rules.
In this future, the game of the American people — its most popular sport — will become something only available to those who can afford the resources to play it, much less watch it.
The game needs to change. It has changed once before, when football was a smaller pastime largely limited to colleges and universities. It still took a standing president of the United States’ intervention to temper the violence of the sport — and only then, after actual deaths occurred on the field. The game wasn’t the heavily leveraged, culturally embedded, and highly lucrative billion-dollar industry it is today. The odds of significant change happening now without legal intervention, given what the sport is and who profits most from it, are very, very long.
If — and it is a huge if — football will survive, then its revamp should start simple. Those who want football to continue in one form or another should think of the basic building blocks of football itself as changeable, updatable programming. They should start at the grassroots of the sport to affect the largest number of possible teams and games and leagues playing the sport. They should think about the nature of the game itself, and how to keep as much of it as possible without leaning into the excesses of football as it is currently played.
It should start now. Football 3.0 is coming, and this is what it will look like if it wants to survive.
F=MA
The chief variable affecting any and all discussions of football and its risks is force: Force applied through hitting, tackling, and the random collisions of any game. Force causes concussions; Concussions are strongly correlated with degenerative brain diseases like CTE; CTE and other associated long-term neurological disasters are the chief reason youth participation in football has been down or flat recently, and also the thing driving the current wave of lawsuits and legal drama surrounding the NFL and other leagues.
Force is at the core of football, and it is also what could kill football. Curbing the game’s plague of force-related issues — without creating an entirely new sport and burying the old one completely — means dealing with force as a necessary evil at worst, and as a prohibited but inevitable ghost in the machine at best.
The future of football will be about reducing force wherever possible, redirecting it, or eliminating it altogether.
The bad news is that the equation can’t change: F=MA, and always will. If it’s assumed that football will be a game of reduced force, then it’s also assumed there will still be some degree of force via the basic identity of football as a contact sport. Bringing the ball carrier to ground, blocking another player, moving through living, breathing traffic — these are all basic elements of the game. Without them, football is handball without nets.
The lone good part about this equation: There are variables to work with here, and they are flexible. Acceleration (at least to the point of attack) can be redirected or eliminated in some cases. Mass can be lowered by either rule or game design, and the product of force itself can be redirected or dispersed through rules, further tweaks to game design, and playing technique.
There are two other variables here that matter. The first is space, both in terms of football’s standard playing field, and in terms of how the players are allowed to line up and function within it. The second variable is time, and within it the number of repeated exposures to/opportunities for impact.
SPACE
If reducing the impact in football while keeping as much of the essential contact of the game is a goal, then there is another way to change the game for the better: cut unnecessary impacts as much as possible.
Schemers have already found one way to do this and it has been a part of football for the better part of 40 years: Spread players out and create a game of players in space, rather than a clustered mass of beef in cleats pounding away in close quarters.
Spacing out offensive players created a greater chance for a ballcarrier to find open grass. As a (largely unintentional)* side effect, players also had less traffic to deal with, and more of a chance of avoiding repeated hits fighting through blocks and clustered tacklers.
*I talked to Mike Leach via a phone interview. He doesn’t believe the game has much to improve on in terms of new rules. “We really don’t need to change the game, I think.” Most coaches echoed the same sentiments: that football was inherently risky, and that was something accepted by all players. At the same time, many were surprisingly open to changes in the game when you suggested them — right down to extreme ideas like removing helmets and changing the number of players on the field. Coaches are single-minded, but shockingly open-minded provided the idea did not get in the way of winning.
Washington State coach Mike Leach, and his fellow Air Raid guru Hal Mumme, also experimented with spacing along the offensive line. Rather than lining up in close quarters in three-point stances with a hand on the ground, Air Raid linemen began each play basically standing up, ready to pass block.
They did something else new and different, too: they stood farther apart than any other linemen, sometimes six feet apart. What looked like madness turned out to have a lot of method behind it. Not only did quarterbacks have wider passing lanes between and over their linemen, but running backs suddenly had wider run lanes.
That’s relevant for two reasons. One: Those sub-concussive, continuous blows defensive and offensive linemen take on every play are repetitive, brutal force — particularly in the run game, where a literal butting of heads happens on every play. That violence doesn’t serve anyone well in terms of entertainment value, or in terms of long-term safety for linemen. Spacing it out, and turning every block into a one-on-one situation with carefully enforced rules about contact to the head, eliminated some of the lowest value and highest cost spectacle on the field.
Two: back to traffic management. Many of the biggest, most frequent collisions at or past the line of scrimmage happen in the run game between linebackers and running backs. In standard or tight offensive line setups — where linemen are shoulder to shoulder — the running lanes created can be narrow at best.
That clumping of mass moving at high speed in the middle of the field often sets up brutal collisions between running backs and linebackers. Think of Ray Lewis and Eddie George in their prime, hitting each other head-first forever in a narrow hallway: That’s the running back vs. linebacker matchup in the conventional run game, and that’s the series of constant face-to-face impacts that likely reduced lions of the midfield like Junior Seau to CTE cases.*
*That setup is so fundamental to the core of football’s identity that it is literally a fundamental: the Oklahoma drill, whose variants all involved a.) compressed space and b.) at least two players pitted head-to-head in a potential high-impact situation.
Note the clarifier there: a potential high-impact situation. There is the possibility the ballcarrier makes the tackler miss. That possibility of escape and avoiding contact goes down by large percentages when the space is constricted. If wide splits were not just the norm, but required by rule and enforced, would that theoretically give ballcarriers coming out of the backfield more of a chance of escape, and thus shave off a substantial margin of bone-rattling hits?
In addition to what looks like horizontal spacing to the overhead/TV cam viewer, consider lateral spacing. Defensive linemen and offensive linemen in the Canadian Football League start a full yard apart from each other. In comparison, linemen at the snap in the NFL start just eleven inches, or the width of the ball, apart from each other.
Because there are no easy solutions in life, the benefits of starting three feet from your opponent on the line come with some definite disadvantages. The main one should be obvious to anyone who’s taken even a joking three-point stance in a backyard football game: Both linemen have space to take at least one step, upping the acceleration they can get, and thus increasing the total amount of force in the equation.*
*There was one suggestion that went too far: starting linemen in a clinch, thus eliminating the instant impact that happens at each snap of the ball. Bob Stitt, the football coach at the University of Montana, objected: “Now you just eliminate scheme in the run game.”
All this tweaking at the line of scrimmage and spacing raises the question: If football is going to be safer, and survive, is the battle in the trenches the first thing to go?
After all, flag football removes almost all contact along the line, leaving offensive linemen to serve as little more than juking traffic cones. In some versions of flag football, there’s no offensive line at all — just like several variations of seven-on-seven football camp play, a pass-dominated version of the game used primarily to develop quarterbacks and wide receivers.
Arena Football League only requires that offenses have four players at the line of scrimmage, and defenses have three. In almost every variation of the game created since Teddy Roosevelt led the charge to modernize the game in 1905, the first thing to go in terms of numbers and importance has been the lineman. (Unless you’re Stanford football, but they’re an anomaly in an otherwise slimming trend, schematically speaking.)
The 300-pound leviathan may also become a relic of the game for other reasons.
MASS
The other variable in football from a safety perspective is the “m” in F=ma — mass.
The progressive bloat of the American populace and the corresponding rise in the size of football players is well-worn territory now. Almost any comparison will do, because they all show the same familiar trend, presented with extremity and consistency.
For instance: The 1955 Oklahoma Sooners went undefeated and won the national title with a roster where the heaviest player — left tackle Steve Champlin — tipped the scales at a whopping 225 pounds. The 2017 Super Bowl champion New England Patriots, by contrast, had 15 players over 300 pounds, and defensive backs like 220-pound Nate Ebner, who weigh more than the Sooners starting linemen on both sides of the ball.
Or take the individual case. There’s former Baylor tight end LaQuan McGowan, who played at 405 pounds. Jared Lorenzen of the New York Giants played quarterback at 300 pounds; Levon Kirkland of the Pittsburgh Steelers played linebacker at 275 pounds, give or take whatever he ate pregame. Even cornerbacks and punters have gotten heavier.
More importantly, not even the switch to a spread-out game has stopped the race to put as much poundage at every position as possible. With all that mass and ass on the field at once, there is more potential energy on the field than ever before — and it all moves as fast or faster as it ever did.
So if football’s evolution involves mitigating the massive forces exerted on players, there is another simple variable: require players to bring less mass to the party.
One option is instituting weight limits for players — something that already happens at the Pop Warner levels and in Sprint Football, a variation of the game where players must weigh no more than 178 pounds. (They must also have more than 5 percent body fat, in order to prevent players starving themselves too much to make weight.) The most unique suggestion: Allow football teams to have as many people on the field as they like, but limit the total amount of weight to a flat 2400 pounds, aka the “one horse-sized duck, or 100 duck-sized horses” system of football weight management.
[SIDEBAR]
Setting weight limits could cause a whole different range of problems: players going to unhealthy limits to make weight; the difficulty of weighing every single member of a football team like cattle before every game; the many, varied, and creative lengths teams and players might go to in order to cheat the system. Imagine the horror of a weight cut — a deeply unpleasant, miserable experience any high school wrestler or MMA enthusiast is all too familiar with — and you’re with us. Faced with one type of enforced and encouraged type of disordered eating, football players would simply be trading it for another.
Weight classes and limits also only serve one purpose: to reduce force. There is another option, one relying less on overt regulation, and more on changing the demands of the game on athletes while opening the game up even further: make the field bigger, both longer and wider, and open up the offensive game by making players run more.
This is sort of like buying a mansion to help you lose weight (“the two-mile walk from the kitchen to the bedroom really put a dent in my caloric deficit”) but it might be worth considering.
Football teams in the era of spread offenses and nickel defenses have already moved further and further away from traditional crowded run schemes. Stretching the field along either axis creates more space, making room for missed tackles, more open field running, and requires a leaner, fitter athlete.
Specifically, building a deeper end zone avoids much of the constriction and heavy traffic impacts seen in the red zone. It also has the non-safety related side effect of opening up the end zones for offensive play-callers. The CFL’s field is longer and wider, and features a 20-yard deep end zone. There aren’t a whole lot of stats on CFL red zone concussions versus NFL red zone concussions, true, but the dynamics of the game are quantifiably different re: scoring. As of 2014, CFL teams scored about three more points per game, passed for more yardage, and ran the ball fewer times per game than the NFL.
The safety difference between the two games may be marginal. However, football is a game of margins, and margins matter when talking about not one, but many different little things to help make the game safer.
ACCELERATION
Acceleration is less easy to control than mass. The emphasis on speed in football has coincided with a gradual but real increase in overall player speed — particularly speed gained in a short amount of space. The 40-yard dash has become the standard for measuring straight line speed because football players rarely run further than 40 yards. In automotive terms, top speed matters much less than a player’s 0-60 time.
No one wants a slower game. However, there is one simple edit eliminating a lot of opportunities for the kind of long, high-speed runs taken at targets that also happen to be running a long way at high speed: Cutting the kickoff and punt return from the game completely.
This isn’t even a controversial suggestion, or one that isn’t by some measure already happening. The NFL has already toyed with reducing returns, moving kickoffs to the 35-yard line in 2011, and then in 2016 testing a rule moving all touchbacks to the 25-yard line instead of the 20.* Greg Schiano, former head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and current defensive coordinator of the Ohio State Buckeyes, has advocated for the complete abandonment of the kickoff altogether.
Pop Warner football has already eliminated the kickoff, removing the play from all games in ten-and-under play. If the kickoff is already out of the largest youth football league in the nation, it won’t be long for the rest of the game, either. Add in eliminating punt returns, and football cuts the two greatest consistent opportunities for acceleration at the highest speed out of its force-heavy system.
*Ironically, the 2016 rule change backfired and produced more returns and fewer touchbacks, a warning to anyone who believes more rules will change the game in predictable ways. Returners, given deeper kicks to return, simply kept running them out of the end zone. Returners, under any rules, are going to try to return kicks.
TIME
The repeated application of force in football involves another variable not represented in the equation: Time.
Maybe we shouldn’t think of it as “time playing football,” but as two things: “number of interactions in a period of time” seems bulky and overly academic. It’s way easier to say snaps or plays — opportunities for impact and all the nasty things that come with that repeated impact.
That number, at least in the NFL, has been pretty consistent over time. College football games, however, have gotten progressively longer, both because of the college clock rules and the advent of hurry-up, no-huddle offenses. Those offenses run more plays; those plays usually pick up more first downs. First downs stop the clock in college football, and games creep closer and closer to the 3-1/2 hour mark.*
*The 2016-17 National Title game, for instance, started at 8:17 p.m. Eastern time, and ended at 12:25 a.m., taking a total of 4 hours and 8 minutes to complete. Clemson ripped off 99 plays against Alabama — an obscene number of plays in the NFL, but not unusual for modern college football.
The hurry-up has its own issues outside of safety — it requires vigilant officiating, for one, and a small but dedicated crew of coaches despise it — but few want it to disappear in the name of shortening games. The hurry-up is entertaining, creates more offense and more scoring, and often allows overmatched teams to stay in games longer against superior competition. It is one way to play the game of many, and part of football’s basic DNA is the freedom to scheme, plan, and move players and the tempo of play around as you like.
Rather than dictating a specific speed of play, the easiest fix is enforcing what’s already there: the prescribed length of the game itself. First downs in the college game should not stop the clock. Let it run. The clock is the clock, and barring injury timeouts, teams may work as slowly or as quickly within 60 minutes as they please.
The other issue solved by changing clock rules: Game length from a spectator’s perspective, both in the stadium and watching on a screen.
The in-game experience of watching a football game is painfully constipated by ad breaks and the dreaded man in the red cap who walks onto the field for stoppages. The test for this among football fans is that a lot of them even know who the man in the red hat — the link between the studio and the game — is. At home the experience is seamless, but in the stands you can see every wire.*
*This is meant quite literally now, thanks to the overhead cam rigs at every major game. The watershed moment for a college fan realizing that every game is recorded inside a poorly constructed, non-climate-controlled studio is Marvin McNutt of Iowa nearly getting blindsided by a falling Skycam in the 2011 Insight Bowl. At modern football’s most extreme, the football players can be an inconvenience to equipment designed to record them playing.
The on-screen experience, too, is an inflated, overlong commitment for many fans. The “100 commercials, 11 minutes of action” rule remains in effect in the NFL, where the league’s championship game features just 12 minutes of actual action spread out across four to five hours of pregame and postgame broadcast time.
That is a quality of life issue for fans — especially potential younger fans who have never lived in a world where they can’t watch exactly what they want when they want at their own pace. Live sports broadcasts, more than ever, can’t be any longer than they have to be. This goes double for football, which in 2016 experienced either flat or declining viewership at all levels.
The most valuable franchise in sports is the Dallas Cowboys, but three of the top five are soccer teams: Real Madrid, Barcelona, and Manchester United. The world’s most valuable sports franchises function and thrive on games broadcast without commercial interruption, and sponsored in large part by on-field advertising, subscription fees, and team sponsorships.
It’s not the preference of the NFL, sure. But it has been done, and done well, and done by successful sports franchises. The future of American football probably involves embracing things currently considered heretical to the NFL and its airtight branding. There will be sponsors on uniforms, and in-game advertising on the stands, and whatever else the leagues and their television partners can plaster onto a TV screen — if only because the attention spans of the audience will only get shorter, and their patience for enduring even the biggest and most coveted live sports broadcasts more scarce.
Safety has been at best an intermittent concern for football management, but money? Money always gets their attention. If there’s a way to neatly avoid broadcast overruns and make game length more predictable, then yes:, teams and leagues and conferences will suddenly be interested in safety and game length.
BEHAVIOR
The last variable is the one mentioned first by coaches and players: Technique.
That is unusual in one sense: Technique is the most human, varied, and inconsistent part of football’s basic dynamics and gameplay. If it could be perfected, there would be no helmet-to-helmet hits, no fumbles, and no jobs for coaches to teach technique for longer than a week or so at a time.
Technique is the part players and coaches can work on, perfect, and dictate as policy and practice. That technique, in a future where football has to express less force as a game, must change. Some in the NFL already know that, and are at least incrementally working towards it by stealing wholesale from rugby.
There is a saying rugby coaches and players are fond of saying, usually when they’re around football players and coaches: “Rugby is a tackling sport, while football is a collision sport.”*
*The saying is a variation on a quote from Michigan State football coach Duffy Daugherty. His original line: “Football isn’t a contact sport, it’s a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.”
Rugby may seem like a strange or even ill-advised place to look for solutions to football’s problems. It has its own problems — serious, serious injury problems, including concussion problems of its own on top of a paralysis risk due to the scrum.* It, too, is a contact sport that can’t begin to disavow its basic violence. Embracing rugby’s techniques, at first glance, might seem like insanity.
*Rugby is itself in the midst of its own internal debate over player size, safety, and the rulebook. The line-out is ridiculously dangerous even by American football’s standards. Still, one college rugby coach I interviewed said the degree of violence in the basic interaction of tackling has no comparison. “We go to football practice and watch football players make routine tackles that would get you thrown out of a game. Our jaws drop.”
[SIDEBAR]
The saying is accurate, though. Tackling is formalized in rugby; the process, by rule, involves bringing the ballcarrier to ground. Football tackles are more freeform. A player can tackle a ballcarrier by bringing them to the ground shoulder-first. They may also drive through the player with the shoulder, making no attempt to bring them to the ground. Both are completely legal — provided no contact to the head is made.*
*Reminder of how recent the cultural reform regarding helmet-to-helmet hits is: The opening logo of the NFL’s Monday Night Football used the image of two helmets smashing together until 2006.
The Seattle Seahawks in particular have preached the virtues of the “rugby tackle,” i.e. form tackling designed to bring people to ground. It has, in limited use, made for better football. The Seahawks consistently finish near the top of the league in defense, particularly in tackling and yards allowed after catch. But more importantly for the purposes of creating a game that can survive long-term, the Seahawks finish towards the bottom of the league in reported concussions annually.*
*Reported concussions vs. unreported concussions is a thorny, difficult issue here given the number of concussions that aren’t diagnosed properly by sideline officials, or that are unreported by players not wanting to lose a single snap of play to injury. The data is imperfect, but it is also a start.
Yet there’s some logic in looking to football’s direct ancestor for answers. Rugby also features the kind of impact football tackling has, but contains much, much more of it. The average American football game has about 79 tackles, while a rugby game contains around 221 different collisions between players. Rugby is statistically about as dangerous as football in terms of total numbers of concussions — but mostly because rugby produces so many more opportunities for contact.*
*The NFL plays just 16 games per season. Rugby manages to produce a similar amount of reported head trauma with almost three times the amount of collisions per game, and with many, many more games. The NRL regular season, the Australian Premier League of rugby, is 23 games long all by itself. That doesn’t include preseason matches, international obligations for players, the finals series (their playoffs), and other exhibition matches. Invert that comparison, and think about the horrors of football’s physics. In many fewer games, football manages to do as much or more damage than rugby.
Let’s not limit rugby’s influence to just tackling. For football in particular, there is an inextricable link between technique and equipment. All of those rugby collisions happen without a helmet. People have considered the helmetless player in trying to pull football, and the NFL in particular, back from the brink.
It is not as insane as it sounds. Players, most notably Hines Ward in 2012, have suggested it. The helmet, introduced as little more than leather skullcap with flaps to prevent ears from being torn off, is not what it started as. It has evolved into full-on armor, less a method of protection at this point, and more a weapon, a point of attack driven into the opponent.
There is some data supporting this. (Some.) A University of New Hampshire study tried it for just five minutes during a few practices a week, fitting players with a head-impact sensor to measure any possible reduction in head hits. Even that marginal reduction in helmet use lowered the overall number of head impacts by 28 percent — a startling drop in any context, but even more so before you consider that just a small slice of the overall total of practice time was used.
That is just one study, but it’s intriguing enough to back up what football players alone will tell you anecdotally. The helmet is as much a weapon as it is protection. Whether it means eliminating the facemask, introducing lighter alternative headgear, or getting rid of it altogether.*
* “The helmet definitely gives you that feeling of being invincible.” That’s former NFL lineman George Foster when I ask him if removing helmets makes any sense. “I don’t know what the overall effect would be, but yes, if you take that facemask or that helmet off, they’ll get their head out of the situation real quick.”
The final factor in improving technique will be reforming and simplifying the system of rewards, punishments, and rules governing player conduct on the field. In other words, make the rules plain so that football can spend less time and energy litigating itself as an event, and more time in play.
To wit: The NFL has an 88-page rulebook. The National Federation of State High School Association’s rulebook stands at 116 pages. The NCAA’s massive rulebook is 218 pages in total, and has a separate casebook for officials to study specific situations. There are numerous websites designed to keep officials fluent and fluid in their understanding of the rules.*
*For fun, take just one of those quizzes. Afterwards, marvel at how little you know about the game you thought you understood.
Reading through any of those rulebooks is only recommended if you want to understand what a technical, overwrought, and overwritten piece of pseudo-criminal code the rules of American football are. Any future where the rules of football are not made clearer and simpler is one where the rulebook continues to bloat. More rules make slower officials; slower officials make slower games; slower games make for bad football, an unwatchable product for a game competing with shorter attention spans.
The vagaries of the rulebook also make for more hesitant play. Somewhat counter-intuitively, hesitating on the field of play can get a player injured just as quickly as blindly blowing through a situation without thinking. This is especially true for defenders, who under current contact rules often have no idea how fast or slow they’re supposed to go in a tackling situation — and who could be ejected by rule for helmet-to-helmet contact even if they do everything correctly. Those are interactions, mind you, which often take place in half-seconds of action.
The overall sense from talking to players and coaches is that contact rules often give little discretion to the referees in how they enforce them. Subjectivity is a dangerous thing to bring to officiating, but over-prescription is, too. The rulebook already has a series of flagrant vs. inadvertent distinctions, but these should be simplified to the point where a referee, working by a generously worded rulebook, has enough discretion in a game to make those calls in a quick and decisive manner.
A lot of the future of football simply involves stealing good things from other sports, and officiating is no different. Red cards and yellow cards for fouls may be subjective, but they also allow officials to control physical games with obvious, clear signals.
Rugby uses them, soccer uses them, and in a full-pitch game like American football, their arrival is overdue, if only for one reason: A personal foul is a judgment, like many other legal-ish football penalties. A yellow or red card, though — that’s a stimulus, a signal, a clear indication the player in question has done something personally distasteful to the game.*
*Are we suggesting that the tedious cycle of awarding yardage to the other team for personal foul penalties by the other team, instead of putting the burden on the player, is a boring thing to watch? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. If there were some way of slimming down the rulebook to eliminate false start/offsides penalties, endless procedural penalties, and substitution and eligibility infractions, we would. Mike Pereira is great at his job, and explains and interprets the rules of football as well as anyone on television. Counterpoint: a game should not require Mike Pereira to explain the vagaries of its rules to you.
They work well, and are a more economical way of controlling game flow and player conduct than stopping the entire game every three minutes and addressing the public at length with a list of charges and subsequent punishments. Ed Hochuli’s biceps aside, officials and officiating are not an attraction of the game. They shouldn’t be treated like one, or forced by design to be one.
CODA: THE PEOPLE’S GAME
All of this re-engineering comes with a warning, and then a statement of purpose.
That warning is that football, even 20 years from now, will never, ever be completely safe. No sport really is — not golf, a sport where 54,000 people every year end up in the emergency room when they are hit by errant drives and golf carts; not recreational cycling, not skiing or swimming or any other activity where humans take the not-insignificant risk of leaving their house and putting their bodies in motion.
Football does hold the unique identity and accompanying risk of being a sport encouraging repeated, enthusiastic, and yes, violent contact. Any future involving something recognizable as football has to include at least an element of that, and should. Part of the innate appeal of the sport, even if only played in a backyard or recreationally, is the violence, the speed, the chase, and yes: the understanding that getting caught or beat might mean contact with another player.
That is the crucial difference football needs to embrace and understand. A sport that is watched and not played is a bloodsport, a spectacle. It has no investment from those watching, no claim held, no understanding of the cost, the experience, the time, the stress, or the reality of the thing being observed. The slow reaction to the issue of head trauma at every level is a perfect demonstration of this effect: Without actual stakes, and divorced from their own reality, fans and observers can’t really even being to grasp a splinter of the violence they see.
Football might not need more stakeholders in order to survive as a product. A sport that was once internationally beloved can continue profitably for years without widespread participation. (See: Boxing.)
Football does need more stakeholders to survive as a game, though. The people who need to save what may be left of the game so that it can survive are the stakeholders themselves: coaches, players, and the people who understand how to make games and then play them. They have to act now, or risk losing the game to its worst tendencies encouraged by its worst landlords.
The sum parts of the game of football should be made to be as close to free as possible. Someone will have to own the rest, including its future. It may as well be the people who want it to survive as a game, not as a business. The game of football has to belong to those who play it and love it. That starts the way the first version of the game started: in a field on open grass, running.
For the first time in 40 years, the Wizards have a core the city can proudly rally behind.
Take one step off the Metro into the revitalized U Street Corridor, and you’ll find a long line waiting across the street at Ben’s Chili Bowl, the beloved two-story diner famous for chili served on half-smoke sausage.
Between two banners adorning the restaurant's red cursive name sits a ledge with a simple message: “A WASHINGTON LANDMARK SINCE 1958.” Back then, the U Street Corridor was a hub of African American culture, known locally as “Black Broadway.” In the ensuing years, it was torn apart by 1968 riots following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, infected by the city’s crack epidemic, and rebuilt into one of its hot spots through gentrification.
Trendy bars and remodeled landmarks dot both sides of the street, but Ben’s Chili Bowl’s cafeteria-style layout remains. The clientele is more diverse, but the food and mood haven’t changed.
For the last five years, the restaurant housed a mural depicting four of its most beloved customers: Go-Go music legendChuck Brown, local radio iconDJ Donnie Simpson, Barack Obama, and Bill Cosby.
In January, amid rising pressure to remove Cosby due to repeated sexual assault accusations, the restaurant’s owners decided it was time for a fresh coat of paint. They held an online vote featuring a long list of local celebrities, politicians, and legends to replace the old mural.
That list caught the eye of Hunter Lochmann,the senior vice president of marketing and brand strategy at Monumental Sports and Entertainment (the parent company that owns the Wizards and Capitals). At first, he asked the restaurant to add John Wall, the Wizards’ star player, to its long list.
But soon,a more ambitious idea popped into Lochmann’s head. He contacted Vida Ali, the daughter-in-law of the restaurant’s founder, with a long-shot request. Would the restaurant consider a temporary mural portraying Wall and backcourt partner Bradley Beal to drum up interest in the team’s upcoming playoff run?
To his surprise, Ali said yes.
“We really don’t do organizations, per se,” Ali said. “That’s why I think they thought it was such a long shot. But they’re more of a team, so it was kind of more that spirit of supporting a team that was kind of fun to do.”
Two days before the team’s home playoff opener against the Atlanta Hawks, Wall and Beal joined hundreds of fans to celebrate the unveiling of the new and improved Ben’s Chili Bowl mural. It’ll stay there until May 5, Ali said, though a deep Wizards playoff run could merit an extension.
But Ali had one lingering question: what about Monumental’s other professional sports team, the Capitals? They were also starting a playoff run and Ali told Lochmann she would have happily dedicated mural space to celebrate them, too. What better way to honor the rabid hockey fanbase that’s now sold out Verizon Center 315 consecutive times?
“The Capitals, you can always build a brand there,” Lochmann told me. “But they’re further along in the connection to the city in some ways [than the Wizards].”
That bond between city and team was damaged by decades of irrelevancy and neglect. But for the first time in nearly four decades, the Washington professional basketball franchise has a product worthy enough to stitch that connective tissue back together.
Scott Cunningham/NBAE via Getty Images
Ted Leonsis has a plan. Its revelation came not from the Wizards or the Caps, but from the city’s football team. Back in 2009, Leonsis fielded an email from an SB Nation Washington football team blogger. If he owned that team, how he would fix its toxic culture?
“I dashed it off very, very quickly, and whoever got it, he was so happy that I responded that he published it,” Leonsis said in a wide-ranging interview at Monumental’s corporate headquarters. “It’s taken on a little life of its own.”
That’s when the “The Plan” became ubiquitous around town. The first step wasn’t about winning championships or building dynasties. It was about confronting the team’s history, or lack thereof. From there, a more tangible goal emerged. “Right now, everyone is in the mode of, ‘How do we overcome a history and become a have team,’” he said.
In Ted-Speak, a “have” team is known for enjoying decades of sustained success and countless legacy players that activate a rabid fanbase and engender loyalty for life. With Wall and Beal leading the Wizards to a division title for the first time in 38 years, that foundation may finally be in place.
Becoming a have team requires a history that’s actually worth celebrating. That’s why The Plan calls for building around a collection of high draft picks who take their lumps before maturing together into a homegrown core that inspires a generation of fans.
That’s a history the Wizards simply don’t have. In the decades following their 1978 championship, the franchise became a remote outpost just as the sport was growing in popularity. When they weren’t a dumping ground for past-their-prime stars like Moses Malone, Bernard King, and Michael Jordan, they were staining their few strokes of genius, like Chris Webber or Gilbert Arenas.
Against this backdrop, Leonsis’ blueprint was a breath of fresh air, especially after Wall arrived in 2010 via a rare dose of lottery luck. Yet, it didn’t take long for the trauma of embarrassment to return. The Wizards didn’t just lose in Wall’s first two seasons. They lost while earning a reputation as a place that lacked any institutional control.
“We didn’t win shit,” Wall recalled. “We were losing all the time. Coming from where I came from [Kentucky], we only lost three games, so I’m used to winning all the time. It was a different culture.”
Leonsis and longtime general manager Ernie Grunfeld paint this as a necessary transition period to clear out players infected by Arenas’ tomfoolery. But mistakes were made that still had lasting effects, such as picking Jan Vesely sixth in the 2011 draft or Leonsis exuberantly referring to Wall, Andray Blatche, and Jordan Crawford as a “new big 3.”
“Those guys were so young, they were trying to develop theyselvesand make a name. I was trying to do the same,” Wall said. “There wasn’t a veteran presence out there to help us.”
There was more lottery luck in 2012. The Wizards scooped up Beal with the third pick, giving them a potentially dynamic young backcourt. Their homegrown principles were put to the test when they flirted with a trade for James Harden, but ultimately decided to build with youth.
(The specific details of the possible Harden trade package depend on who you ask. Leonsis now admits he was against the idea, while management sources at the time suggested the talks were more informal. Grunfeld declined to comment when asked for this story).
“Filtering it through The Plan, it was, ‘Can you have two ball-dominant alpha people on the team?’ It was hard,” Leonsis said. “We envisioned what’s happened now, which is a point guard who has the ball a lot and a shooting guard. And boy, if that worked, they’d play well together for a long, long time.”
In the coming years, Nene, Trevor Ariza, and Emeka Okafor arrived to offer Wall and Beal with much-needed veteran savvy. When Okafor suffered a career-ending injury before the 2013-14 season, Grunfeld sacrificed a first-round pick to acquire Marcin Gortat, believing his pick-and-roll fluency would tease out Wall’s craft.
It worked. For a time.
The Wizards stunned the Bulls in the first round of the 2014 playoffs, with Beal starring alongside Wall. That convinced free agent Paul Pierce that the Wizards were the have team he needed to join. After an uneven 2014-15 season, the Wizards again turned heads in the playoffs and may have become the first local Big 4 team to make its conference finals in nearly two decades if not for a Wall wrist injury.
That’s what made last season so deflating. The Wizards were only five games worse, but that was enough to dismantle whatever cache they had built. Kevin Durant, who had been linked with a possible return home for years, refused to even grant the organization a chance to make its pitch.
The league had spoken. The Wizards, despite modest success, were not a have team. Not yet, anyway.
Scott Cunningham/NBAE via Getty Images
Under a different owner, the core may have scattered into the NBA winds. But Leonsis is a patient man who believes management upheaval breeds franchise instability in toxic ways. One of Leonsis’ favorite pastimes is poking fun at those who advocate major changes, whether they’re angry fans, critical columnists, or even other organizations that “destroy their team” in order to “win the offseason.”
Leonsis and Grunfeld were encouraged by last season’s second-half performance following a trade for Markieff Morris, but were troubled when players kept telling them them 2015 first-round pick Kelly Oubre didn’t get enough of a chance to play.
Leonsis takes these exit interviews with players seriously — they convinced him to retain Randy Wittman in 2012 despite a modest 18-31 finish. Now, the players were reminding him that The Plan only works when those young players are put in a position to succeed.
That’s why Grunfeld and assistant general manager Tommy Sheppard camped out at Pelican Hill in Newport Beach for eight hours last spring to secure a commitment from Scott Brooks. They knew the former Oklahoma City Thunder head coach had first-hand experience incubating a generational core in a city with little basketball history.
Once free-agent pursuits of Durant and Al Horford failed, Grunfeld made a decision. For better or worse, he told Wall and Beal, you’re the leaders. No more passing the buck to veteran crutches. No more letting on-court wounds fester and lead to resentment.
“We had a conversation with them that, this is your time, this is your team,” Grunfeld told me. “You have to take the bull by horns. And I think they both have.”
Wall further established his franchise-player credentials with a fourth straight All-Star appearance, and those around the team believe Beal should have joined him this year. They are The Plan come to life.
“John will be here for his career,” Leonsis said. “We don’t take him for granted, we love him. Brad will be here his whole career. Once they start to be recognized as being great players, and some of the other great players in the league start to age out, then you have other players who go, ‘Well I want to play with the Wizards.’ If I play with John Wall, I’m going to get paid.’”
A 2-8 start tested fans’ patience, and the Wizards’ playoff hopes looked bleak well into December. But suddenly, the team started to string together wins. At first, they were nail biters, but they soon became dominating displays showcasing the team’s balance and unselfishness.
The Wizards won 17 straight home games from early December to February, the second-longest streak in franchise history. Attendance rose from an average of 15,231 fans in the 11 games before the streak to 19,592 in the 13 regular-season games after it. Six of those 13 games were sellouts, compared to just one of the previous 28.
The young core leveled up, with Wall as the maestro, Beal as the sweet-shooting assassin, Otto Porter as the do-it-all complement, and Oubre as the athletic wild card. Brooks fostered a consistent joy for competition, giving his players confidence while keeping them engaged with the daily grind.
Before games, you’ll see Beal and player development coordinator Winston Gandy staring each other down in spirited one-on-one contests. (“I’ve been getting stops on you recently,” Gandy bellowed before a late-season game against the Hornets).
Brooksempowers his growing player development staff with essential roles and encouraged all assistant coaches to spend quality time on the court with players after practices and before games.As Gandy and Beal went at each other, lead assistant coach Tony Brown rebounded for the other Wizards shooters.
“They were very organized last year, but this year, I feel that they’re a bit more militant,” Oubre told me. “That’s a great thing. We need that. We need people to be on top of us.”
As they surged up the standings, the Verizon Center swelled with enthusiastic locals. Wall has long grumbled about a lack of respect locally and nationally, pointing to infrequent national television appearances and transplant-heavy crowds that turned marquee matchups into road games. But this year, he’s noticed a difference.
“In the past, we wouldn’t have a great fanbase in the regular season, but it would always get better in the playoffs. You’d expect it to be that,” Wall said. “But this season, it’s gotten a lot better. It’s been amazing for us.”
That crescendo is symbolic of Leonsis’ larger ambitions. When Pierce was in town, he told Leonsis that the Wizards would never become a have team until Verizon Center was a scary place to play. Even when the Wizards made back-to-back second-round appearances, they curiously struggled at home.
This season, they finished with the league’s fourth-best home record and have won all their playoff home games. Nobody would confuse Verizon Center with Oracle Arena at its loudest, but these baby steps for most organizations are quantum leaps forward for this one.
Leonsis’ peers are starting to notice, much to his delight. Near the end of our hour-long conversation, Leonsis recounted how fellow owners at a recent NBA Board of Governors meeting said they feared a potential playoff matchup with the Wizards. “Oh, you’re gonna be beasts for a long time,” Leonsis recalled them saying.
Dare we say, the Wizards are becoming … cool?
As the city rediscovers its long-dormant Bullets Fever, the organization has taken steps to ensure this flicker of success has staying power. When advertising at the Gallery Place Metro station opened in late March, the organization arranged to plaster every space they could with faces of different Wizards players alongside their hockey brethren.
Passengers step off the train and are immediately greetedwith billboards featuring a screaming Morris, a focused Bojan Bogdanovic, and a snarling Gortat grabbing a rebound. Banners reading “THIS STOP: PLAYOFFS” hang on the upper levels leading to the arena exit. Take the escalator down to the green line, and you’ll descend between giant posters of Wall and Beal hawking 2017-18 season tickets.
Each sign is punctuated by the team’s new slogan: #DCFamily. Lochmann heard Brooks use it in his introductory press conference and decided to co-opt the sentiment.
“They break every huddle with ‘FAMILY ON 3,’ so we’ve kind of positioned it as it’s a chance for Wizards fans to kind of re-emerge with the family,” Lochmann said. “Join the family. Be a part of the family.”
The last time the Wizards made the playoffs, the organization used the phrase #DCRising, which encouraged folks to get in on the ground floor. Now, the Wizards want to expand the tent and convince the city that this collection of familiar faces won’t let them down. They aren’t interlopers from somewhere else or cult heroes who burn their 10 minutes of fame. They’re D.C. pillars and they’re here to stay.
Even if their place in front of Ben’s is only temporary.
48 hours inside the gates of America's most famous horse race
I’m in the beach and swimwear section of the basement-level T.J. Maxx on Wall Street in New York City and I’m frantic. I’m going to Kentucky tomorrow for the Derby, a strange Southern party that has always fascinated me, a Yankee from New England.
“Do you have a hat?” my editor asked me earlier today, and I realized I expected one to magically appear when I got to Louisville. That’s clearly not how things work, so here I am, trying to decide between the lesser of two straw evils. I send a picture of each to my mother. She tells me to buy the white one because the black one makes me look like I’m going to a funeral.
The next morning I get on a plane, cross several state lines, and land in the pouring rain among the lush green hills and steel gray rivers of Louisville.
Two women, who I assume are from some sort of tourism department, greet arriving passengers at the gate. Their hats match their red, rose-printed dresses, and I marvel at the feathers and curlicues cascading out from their brims.
My hat is crushed in my bag.
“I had a bunch of girls from Vanderbilt in the car wearing ponchos before you, so it smells like flowers and plastic,” says my Uber driver named Randy. We’re driving through the rain, passing boarded-up houses that surround Churchill Downs.
I’m on my way to the Oaks, the set of races held the Friday before the Kentucky Derby. Everything we pass is gray, except for the blinking red and blue lights of a police cruiser and the yellow caution tape marking off a crime scene next to it. There’s a big heroin problem in the neighborhood around Churchill Downs, Randy says. Homicides have been on the rise, too.
Inside the track, the white-washed tunnels feel like a mix of a country club and the concourse of a baseball stadium. It smells like cigars, beer, and a front yard after a heavy rain.
Everything here is pink, from people’s outfits to the banners hanging from the painted rafters. It’s Filly Day, and some of the proceeds go to breast cancer research. I didn’t realize Filly Day was a thing, so I’m wearing a black dress, my stupid hat, and black toenail polish. If anyone asks, I’ll just say I’m from New York.
The people in lines inch closer to the betting windows or booze vendors as they wait to bet or buy what’s probably their thirteenth mint julep or aluminum bottle of Bud Light. They look miserable. They should be miserable, because a steady drizzle alternates with downpours, and everyone is dressed for what they want the weather to be. Women stick it out in sundresses and rompers, baring their shoulders, midriffs, knees. The cuffs of men’s seersucker pants are caked with mud, their sleeves wet. They’re playing pretend, wearing costumes and acting like they enjoy shivering on a 45-degree day.
A damp cold has settled into my bones, numbing my toes, tensing up the muscles in my shoulders and the back of my neck. I want to leave, but I haven’t seen a horse race yet. I’ve never seen a horse race, so as the bugle blows, I go down to the rail by the track and hold onto the wet metal.
The gates open and the race starts on the opposite side. I watch the Jumbotron set up in the infield, an open cage for drunk people which is slightly cheaper ($90) than the cheap seats in the grandstands ($175). Suddenly the horses, the purest manifestation of bloodlines, the embodiment of animal eugenics, round the corner and go from screen to flesh.
Their hooves spin through the track, which looks like frosting on a cake that’s been left out in the sun. Mud spatters the horses’ flanks and creeps up the jockeys’ legs, whose silks haven’t changed in 150 years. The jockeys strike the backsides of the beasts with riding crops.
I strain against the rail, speed and strength hurtling through my chest. I didn’t expect the race to be so visceral, to be so overwhelmed, for the horses to run right through me. I feel like someone knocked the wind out of my lungs.
What I can’t feel is my entire left foot at this point, and I’m having trouble typing notes on my phone because my fingers are so stiff with cold, so I leave. Outside the gates, I have to step through an obstacle course of soggy horse race trash that covers the stone entrance: shattered mint julep glasses, soaked betting books, cigarette butts, the runoff of American vices. It looks like a hangover.
In the middle of all of it, there’s a guy selling red t-shirts. He holds one up, and yells out the slogan stamped across the front: “Donald Fucking Trump,” he cries. “Donald Fucking Trump!”
I’m at the Barnstable Brown Gala on Friday night standing three feet away from Tom Brady. A barricade of folding chairs separates me from the football god as he holds court. His teammates Danny Amendola and Jimmy Garoppolo sit on one side of him, and an old guy I don’t recognize sits on the other.
A muscled man in a suit and a flat-billed Navy hat — clearly Brady’s Guy — swats away people wearing sparkling evening gowns and crisp tuxedos. They keep trying to sneak through the makeshift guardrail of seats. He firmly tells them, in a pronounced Boston accent, to stop.
Stahhhhp.
Brady’s Guy is raising his voice at one particularly adamant woman when all of a sudden I hear the sound of splintering wood and look over to see Brady’s chair spontaneously collapse, sending him crashing to the floor. There’s a collective gasp as Brady’s Guy springs to the quarterback’s side to help him up. Brady looks stunned at first, then starts to laugh. He stands up and brushes himself off.
“Was this your chair?” he jokes to another suited man. Brady grins. “Sorry I broke it.”
The surrounding crowd breaks out into relieved laughter.
The Gala is an annual event that the Barnstable-Brown family hosts the night before the Derby. Patricia Barnstable, who was of the Doublemint twins (along with her sister Priscilla), married Kentucky doctor David Brown, and they started throwing this party at their home on Spring Drive 29 years ago to raise money for diabetes research. So far, they’ve donated more than $13 million to the Barnstable Brown Diabetes and Obesity Research Center at the University of Kentucky.
Sadly and ironically, David developed diabetes and died of complications in 2003. So now Patricia, her mother Wilma, and her and David’s son Chris Barnstable Brown — a lawyer and football writer who lives in New York City — organize and run the party. They don’t hire a PR firm because stars like Peyton Manning, Jeff Bridges, Brady, and Katie Couric know that if you’re going to the Derby, you can’t miss this. Patricia handles all the celebrities; Wilma sells each of the 1,200 or so tickets over the phone herself.
People are lined up along the rainy street outside the gates to watch the celebrities show up. The fans scream out names (“IT’S JOEY FATONE!!!”) as the party busses unload. They call horse racing the sport of kings, so it’s fitting that American royalty — the ones who grace the pages of the tabloids I browsed while I waited in the checkout line at T.J. Maxx — show out for it.
This party is a weird and wonderful pocket of Chris Barnstable Brown’s life, a yearly pilgrimage to pay homage to his roots. He recalls how, when he was ten years old, he danced in his backyard with Brooke Shields at the party. How his father used to shake the hand of every single guest who came through the wrought iron gates on either side of his driveway.
Which is why he’s still standing outside in the cold drizzle, two hours after the party started: to carry on his father’s tradition. From my perch on a riser in the press pen beside the red carpet area, I watch him shake the hand of each bedazzling star, moneyed Kentuckian, and guest of a guest who enters his family’s home.
Photo by author
Jesse Eisenberg poses awkwardly. Richie Sambora slides in and does a jazz hands pose. A bunch of famous people I don’t know — but who are apparently a big deal from some superhero TV show — put their arms around each other. Jeff Bridges and his wife are as sexy as you want them to be in real life; Jason Witten’s hair is thinning. Tracy Morgan jokes with the local newscasters. The cast of Vanderpump Rules, a reality show about bartenders at a Los Angeles restaurant, preen. New money oozes from their pores.
I shed my raincoat, hide it behind a catering table, and go back to the party in my evening dress and heels. The woman guarding the VIP section nods and pulls a rope aside when I flash my media badge, and I make my way up the sloping hill to the tent where I can see Aaron Rodgers, Randall Cobb, Jimmy Garoppolo, Bode Miller, Rickie Fowler, and Justin Rose hanging out.
Rodgers stands by himself away from his teammates. He’s facing the stage, where someone — maybe country singer Travis Tritt, but I can’t remember, and that seems unlikely — is covering a Ben Harper song. I introduce myself. We stand there listening together.
“Do you play an instrument?” I ask.
“Yeah, I play the guitar,” Rodgers says. “I love this song.”
“I just went to a Ben Harper concert a few weeks ago,” I say. “He played with his daughter. It was pretty cool.”
Rodgers lights up. “Really?” He says. “Ben is the reason I play. I sent him a signed jersey after I saw him in concert, and he sent me back a guitar. Can you believe that? He sent me a guitar!”
“Whoah, you should send more musicians signed jerseys,” I tell him. “You’d probably have way more guitars by now if you did that.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Rodgers says.
I get the sense that he wouldn’t mind being left alone, so I leave him alone. People keep coming up to take selfies with him. He obliges, always gracious, but you can tell it’s exhausting. A few tables away, Brady — who’s secured a sturdier chair — is dealing with the same thing. This is their price of admission.
“Aaron hates this shit,” says Eric Bakhtiari, ex-NFL player and brother of Packers tackle David Bakhtiari, looking over at Rodgers. “Normally, you know who I let through? Veterans and attractive women. My brother guards Aaron on the field, I guard my brother off it.”
He pauses and turns back to me. “You can use that in your story, it’s my gift to you.”
It’s now midnight, and Kid Rock — who was recently photographed in the Oval Office with President Donald Trump and Sarah Palin — is rapping. The Packers circle up and decide it’s time to go. So do the Patriots.
I watch Julian Edelman embrace Brady, then embrace Garoppolo, and then grab a bottle of water off the table and chug it in under thirty seconds. Both crews of players get whisked away by men in suits. Our new American thoroughbreds are paraded through the crowd like horses in the paddock before the Derby.
Kentucky has so far felt like an acid trip you’d have while reading US Weekly, a prep school semi-formal, and a frat party during a monsoon. Parts of Louisville I pass going in and out of the track are so bleak, but the trappings of the Derby are so bright. A huge swath of history seems missing, like someone’s painted over a wall without stripping it first.
Photo by authorShirley Mae Beard at Shirley Mae’s Cafe and Bar
I go searching for what it is and head over to Shirley Mae’s Cafe and Bar, where a Clinton/Kaine sign still hangs on the iron bars of the front door. Carrying my hat in my hand and shivering in my sundress and raincoat, I push it open to enter an empty front room with a few tables and a well-stocked bar. It’s dimly lit and humid in here; the bar feels sticky and soft. You could carve your initials into it using only a fingernail.
Pictures of celebrities posing with Shirley Mae Beard, the owner, hang behind the bourbon bottles. I see Whoopi Goldberg, Hillary Clinton, B.B. King, Morgan Freeman. That famous picture of Clinton wearing sunglasses and looking at her cell phone hangs on the wall, blown up to the size of a poster.
Shirley Mae’s daughter Dee Simpson comes out from the kitchen. She’s wearing a shirt that says, I’M NOT ARGUING, I’M JUST TELLING YOU WHY I’M RIGHT, and has very short graying hair that she’s growing out after rounds of chemo. Three months ago doctors finally declared her cured of uterine cancer, but she says being cancer-free is like being in AA — you go day-by-day, month-by-month. Shirley Mae and her shock of white hair shuffle around behind the counter, stirring the contents of pots and poking at frying chicken.
“Oh, look at you, you got your hat and everything!” Dee says. She smiles, and her eyes crinkle in a way that gives me the sense that she’s not not making fun of me.
“Let me see what you’re wearing, take off that rain coat,” she says. I oblige.
“You trying to catch a man in that dress?” Dee laughs. “Lookin’ all fancy for the races.”
I laugh, too, and turn what I imagine is a very deep red. I feel like an overdressed moron in this dress and goddamn hat. It all might fit in at Churchill Downs, but right now it just seems silly, like I’m an actor who forgot to change after a play.
Shirley Mae used to throw another celebrity-filled party, an antidote to the hoopla at the track. In 1988, she started the Salute to the Black Jockeys Who Pioneered the Kentucky Derby in honor of the 15 black jockeys who won the race, a piece of history that gets lost in an overwhelmingly white event. Until 2000, a black man hadn’t ridden in the race since 1921. This year, not a single jockey is black.
“There weren’t any [Derby] events that attracted the black community,” Dee says as we sit down at a table near the kitchen. “You just had to get in where you fit in. They used to have jazz in the park, and that was something we kind of clung to. So my mom came along, and there’s a lot of apathy here. She just decided that she wanted something for the Derby that the black community could get involved in and black kids could be inspired by. This event is not just something that happens to us, it’s about us.”
Celebrities — the ones whose pictures hang on the wall — used to headline Shirley Mae’s festival. They’d take the stage the family put together in the back alley behind the bar. It sits on South Clay Street in Smoketown, an approximately thirteen-by-fourteen block area of Louisville that’s cordoned off by I-65 on one side and South Fork Beargrass Creek on the other.
“Kids grow up in the projects and wind up with apartments in the projects,” Dee says. “They can’t get out. It wasn’t a jumping off point, it was just a circle.”
Eventually, the city hiked up the tax rate, residents couldn’t keep up with their payments, and authorities seized and razed the old projects that used to surround the restaurant. The city handed them to developers; developers replaced them with condos containing a few rent-controlled units the projects’ old residents could apply to live in. Many of the houses nearby bear foreclosure signs. If you go on Zillow right now, there are at least ten pre-foreclosure auctions. You can buy a three-bedroom house for $23,000. The blurbs describe the area as “up and coming.”
“So the area is gentrifying?” I ask.
Dee looks at me, expressionless.
“I don’t know what that means,” she says.
“It’s like, when, uh, well ... it’s like, when —” I fumble over my words and Dee interrupts me.
“It’s taking you an awfully long time to explain that word,” she says, chuckling. “Do you know what it means?”
I finally come up with an explanation and Dee says yes, that’s what happening.
Shirley Mae comes over and half-tosses a paper plate of food I haven’t ordered onto the table in front of me. It’s loaded up with a pile of ribs, hot-water cornbread, soft green beans topped with chopped tomatoes and onion, and mashed potatoes indented and filled with a pool of yellow, melted butter. I thank Shirley Mae. She just nods, puts a styrofoam cup of gravy down next to the plate, and then walks away.
“She knows the history well, but she’s tired,” Dee says. “We’re open 24 hours starting today, we don’t close ‘til Sunday morning. We have a liquor license and we take advantage of it.”
The liquor license is largely why the festival stopped. The family couldn’t both work the two bars they own and host the event, so they ended up missing out on the weekend, which is the biggest forty-eight hour bonanza any Louisville bar can ask for each year. The festival also got too unwieldy, and Shirley Mae didn’t want to charge or exclude anyone. Satisfied that the history was now at least out there more than it used to be, Shirley Mae and her family held the last Salute to Black Jockeys in 1995.
I ask Dee how she feels about the Derby now.
“Well, it’s a rich man’s thing, okay? And all the snobbery that goes with it. The trappings that go with being rich, that’s the Derby. The hats. That’s debutante-ish.”
She gestures to my hat that I’ve tried to hide on the floor under my chair.
“You get here from New York. You buy into the imagery of it. You get the hat. You got the hat before you got on the plane, you know what I’m saying? ‘I gotta get my hat.’”
“It was on your list.”
I go to the backside of Churchill Downs early on the morning of the Derby.
To get in, you need to either own a horse, work with the horses, or have a media pass. It’s calm among the long, low green roofs of the barns. They look like a child took all the Monopoly houses out of the box and arranged them in even rows. The hay smells sweet. A dumpster bin filled with wood chips and manure sends steam up into the cold drizzle.
The horses, physical manifestations of millions and millions dollars, wait in white-washed stalls. I’m standing in front of Patch, a Derby contender and fan favorite. He stretches his regal neck over the ropes across his doorway. Ginny DePasquale, who’s been an assistant to Patch’s trainer Todd Pletcher for about twenty years, reaches out to cup the horse’s nose in her hand. She pulls his face towards hers.
“It’s kind of quiet back here,” she says, turning back to me. “Because you can’t hear the races and you can’t hear the crowds.”
The loudest noise is the chorus of birds chirping the way they do when the weather might clear up. The cords of veins in Patch’s neck look like they’re straining to get out from under his mahogany coat. He moves his beautiful head in a sweeping arc, and as he turns to the side I see the deep socket where one of his eyes should be.
Photo by author
Vets removed it due to an infection last year, and now there’s just a crater of bone. Skin and hair have grown over it, like moss on a stone. Ginny says they haven’t been able to see a difference in him since the operation.
She excuses herself to go check on another horse, and I make my way to the workers’ cantina where they serve tacos, burgers, pancakes, and, on race day, $20 cigars. The room reminds me of an Elks Lodge.
The backside is a village — along with the cantina, there are dormitories for the seasonal workers, 80 percent of whom come from South and Central America (Guatemala mostly) to work in the barns. They wire money back home from the local grocery store. There’s a recreation room back here, too, with pool tables and betting windows where money gets siphoned from workers’ pockets back into the racing machine. The spire of a small chapel breaks the monotony of the rectangular barns, cutting into the sky like a mirror of the spires across the track.
Four separate ATMs line the wall under four TVs in the cantina. The sun comes out and the mood lifts. A mix of English and Spanish floats up to the ceiling. Workers and people who look like they could be owners, but I’m not sure, pore over the same betting books.
The first race of the day is about to start. As the cashier hands me my change, I hear the national anthem pipe in through the television’ speakers. The cantina goes silent. Everyone — citizens and non-citizens — stands up to face the wall of televisions, placing their hands over their hearts.
Photos of the Capitol building in D.C. flash as the anthem plays, alternating with visuals of fireworks bursting over Churchill Downs. Montages of waving American flags crawl across the screen. The room sings in unison. A hispanic worker shifts his weight from foot to foot. A white guy fidgets with the cowboy hat he’s holding to his chest.
When they get to “home of the brave” everyone claps and lets out whoops that bounce off the low ceiling and linoleum floor. The patriotic cheers linger until the chatter of several languages resumes and swallows them up.
I change behind a car in the parking lot of the backside, trading my jeans and thousands of sweatshirts for a cotton sundress and a black, feathered fascinator I bought from a lady selling hats in my hotel. I face the sun. For the first time in three days, I’m finally warm.
A guy driving a golf cart offers me a ride to Gate 10 and I hop on. We tear out of the backside, joining the lines of people in pastel who are streaming towards the spires. A group of old men sit in lawn chairs and hold up numbers from one to 10 as women go by.
In his essay about the Derby that I reread on the plane, Hunter S. Thompson wrote, “Along with the politicians, society belles and local captains of commerce, every half-mad dingbat who ever had any pretensions to anything at all within five hundred miles of Louisville will show up there to get strutting drunk and slap a lot of backs and generally make himself obvious.”
I see plenty of dingbats in the concourse: three separate guys dressed as Colonel Sanders, at least ten different men in seersucker suits with pink Vineyard Vines foam whales on their heads (most of them overweight, in a fratty, beer-y kind of way), a woman whose pink shoes perfectly match her date’s pink suspenders, 30,000 swooping haircuts on 30,000 different white men, and a woman brandishing a cigarette holder like she’s Cruella de Ville.
Photo by author
I also see Jax, one of the cast members from Vanderpump Rules, buying a drink. I take a selfie with him because my friends are obsessed with the show (ironically, I think, but I could be wrong), and when I turn around, I bump into a guy wearing a suit with the Packers logo plastered all over it. His girlfriend’s yellow and green hat and skirt matches. Aaron Rodgers is somewhere upstairs on millionaires row. The fan and the idol are separated by only four floors but millions of dollars. They won’t see each other today.
I’ve gotten completely lost while I people-watch, and realize I’m wandering in circles through the maze of tunnels as I look for Section 125. I attempt to get up to Millionaire’s Row just for the hell of it, but the guards aren’t interested in being sweet-talked. One of them looks at my ticket and tells me I need to go back out to Gate 1 in order to find my seat.
Gates. There are so many gates. This place exists in gates. In barriers. In lines. Some are literal, like the lines of people waiting to buy drinks or make bets. Or the line the horses cross to determine how much you’ve won or lost. Or the wrought iron gate that guards the driveway of the Barnstable Brown house on Spring Drive. Or the barricade of folding chairs protecting Tom Brady from fans. Or the white columns that pen reporters in behind the red carpets all weekend. Or the gate the horses strain against before the start of a race. Or the railing that keeps fans back from the track. Or the mechanical arm at the entrance to the parking lot of the backside. Or the ex-NFL player who decides to shield Aaron Rodgers from people at parties — except for 10s, and real life heroes who’ve been to war.
Other barriers and lines are legal, like the one the city tried to draw around Shirley Mae’s restaurant so they could demolish it for 20 extra parking spots. Some gates are metaphorical, like the one that keeps people in Smoketown from getting off the wheel of poverty.
But the most indelible lines here are the ones you can’t see. They’re made of blood, and they determine how thoroughly a beast has been bred, how deeply a family is rooted. No amount of money can redraw lineage, but wealth is a master key. With enough money, there are very few gates you can’t open.
I look around at the drunk people. Do they know we’re all being corralled? Not just here, but everywhere? Organized according to our ability to access the real American dream, in which the only path to wealth is to have money to begin with? If they know that being here at all means you’ve accessed something?
I finally find Section 125. At the entrance, a drunk guy is slumped on the ground with his back against the concourse wall. He looks up at the usher, who’s telling him he doesn’t have the correct wristband to get in.
"Trust me, I have the right one,” he slurs, showing her his wrist.
"No, you don't, sir,” she says.
"I have the right wristband,” he insists.
"No, sir. You don't,” she says again.
I show her my wrist and she nods. I walk to my seat.
On Friday at the Oaks, I thought this weekend was about nostalgia. I thought it was a pageant, a relic of an America that doesn’t exist anymore, when celebrity belonged to people in bloodlines named Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, rather than to servers from L.A. restaurants famous for punching each other in the face and sleeping with each other on a reality show.
But Donald Trump, a tacky reality star himself, is our president and the pictures coming out of the White House only feature white men. This isn’t a nostalgic America. This is our unscripted reality. How we divide ourselves is a much deeper part of our nation’s soul than how we come together. Yes, we’re all watching the same thing today, but we’re seeing it from vastly different vantage points, each determined by what we can afford and which gates our names open. By unalterable bloodlines.
Photo by author
I make my way down to the rail. I’m buzzed on bourbon and I’ve lost 26 dollars betting on horses. My throat is sore from the secondhand cigar smoke. I’m blessedly warmed (and burnt) by the sun, which has dipped below the spires and thrown our section into shadow.
The crowd — mostly made up of people who aren’t from Kentucky, but, like me, have parachuted in for the experience — starts to sing “My Kentucky Home,” a song written in 1852 by Steven Foster, a man who also wasn’t from Kentucky. The song used to contain the word “darkies.” That’s been changed to “people” now.
Between breaks in the song I hear a woman a few feet away from me yell at another woman who’s trying to squeeze onto the rail.
“Where is your seat?” she demands. “You aren't legally supposed to be here!”
“The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home, ‘tis summer, the people are gay,” sing the stands.
"Your ticket isn't for here,” the woman continues, getting shriller. “You can't be here!”
“Weep no more, my lady, oh, weep no more today,” the crowd sings.
“Sure, it's the right section, but it's not your seat!” screams the angry one. The other woman shrugs and doesn’t move. The angry one gives up, fuming, her elbow akimbo so that it digs into her pesky neighbor’s side.
The song ends and the crowd erupts again. Across the track, people claw at the fence of the infield. They’re stacked on top of each other. I’m pushed up against the rail by the crush of other bodies, too. Everyone around me strains to catch a glimpse of the gates where the horses are lining up.
The gates open.
The crowd roars as Classic Empire, Patch, Always Dreaming, Irish War Cry, and 16 other purebreds race by. I once again feel the thunder of the hooves in my chest, and the cold metal of the rail in my ribs. The stands seem to cheer, seem to breathe, seem to vibrate as though they were one giant body. For two minutes everyone here, from the owners on Millionaire’s Row to the drunk college kids in the infield to the workers watching from the windows of the cantina, is united by the primal experience of watching these animals run. The frenetic energy is bigger than any of us. It transcends the barriers, leaps over the gates, erases all lines. It's so loud that it becomes its own deafening silence.
And then the last horse finishes and the race is over. Always Dreaming wins. Vinnie Viola — a friend Trump tapped for Army Secretary, who withdrew due to compromising business ties — owns the horse. The mud’s stopped flying, heart rates have slowed, the money’s been counted. We’re all just winners and losers again, sectioned off according to where we’re supposed to be. A man in a green suit behind me jumps up and down and screams. He had $700 on Always Dreaming.
The 21st WNBA season is ready to test athletes to the fullest, demanding more from its stars than ever by reinventing the way the game is played. No longer are point guards just ball-handlers, power forwards strictly low-post hustlers and centers board-crashers. Basketball unicorns are roaming freely throughout the league following an organization-saving season that saw MVP Nneka Ogwumike finish a fadeaway dagger in the final seconds of a decisive Game 5 to lock up a Los Angeles Sparks championship win over the perennial favorite Minnesota Lynx.
High-octane play will be felt from the jump as the Washington Mystics reintroduce themselves in what many expect to be the best offense the WNBA has ever seen, modeled after the Golden State Warriors. Nabbing the Sparks' starting point guard Kristi Toliver and 2015 MVP Elena Delle Donne, the defending champions and revenge-seeking Lynx have a third party threatening their chances for a Finals rematch.
If you haven't been paying attention, now is your chance. This league is here to stay, its rivalries are building up, and a trio of powerhouse teams is ready to shatter the basketball precedents set before them. It's a new age in the W.
Nashville likes sports. Hockey is a sport. It’s the Stanley Cup Final. Let’s not overthink ‘hockeytowns.’
“I listen to real country, but not thisshit.”
Ten years ago next week I was standing in a green room at something called the CMA Festival inside the Tennessee Titans’ stadium, ushering a professional wrestler from various press interviews to merchandise signings and then to the stage, where he was helping emcee the event.
The wrestler wanted to know something about the upcoming band so he could ad lib on stage. Neither of us knew them, or any other band in the lineup. We were yelling to each other over the crowd — of course I ended up yelling that last part too loud in a hospitality tent with scores of folks purposed with shoveling thatshit.
Everyone was looking at me. One radio executive guy walked over.
“Son!”
I gritted my teeth. My impeccable taste in American roots music couldn’t save me now. Jason Isbell wasn’t gonna suddenly parachute in for an extraction. So I just took my whipping.
“Son, this whole thing here [he started waving his hands] is a sellin’ a good time. That’s all. It’s not art, it’s not poetry. Maybe you don’t want to hear that, but it’s about a good time,” he said.
“Hey look, I didn’t -” I started to say, but he cut me off by laughing. That’s what Capital ‘N’ Nashville does when you complain about its character, or its tact or gaudiness or pandering: it keeps on doing whatever it is you object to and laughs. And makes money off it.
“Our boys go out there and bust their asses to figure out how to give folks a good time,” radio guy said. “That’s it. Find what they want, find what makes ‘em pay to show up and then when you get it you run their asses ragged with the good time ‘till they don’t want it no more. We’re here to have a good time.”
The man patted me on the back and went to get a beer from an ice chest. I said nothing.
“Ask him the name of the band,” the wrestler said.
A few years ago my wife and I sat next to defenseman Kevin Klein, now of the Rangers, in a cramped restaurant. He was on a date and we didn’t say anything to him. The Predators were good that season but still building towards the level of reverence we hold them in now. Maybe I should’ve said something to him. Maybe it would’ve helped his date.
There is a weird code of silence about celebrities in this city. If you’re famous and actually want to be left alone to do mundane stuff like get coffee or go to the store and not be famous doing it, this is your town. Nicole Kidman is a really nice person. I don’t really have anything to say to her when I see her around, so I don’t. No one does.
Welcome to Nashville: No one talks to Jack White in public and everyone is better for it.
A few years later I was waiting with my wife to get a sonogram of our first child and saw Shea Weber in the waiting room.
“HEY SHEA GOOD FUCKIN’ HUSTLE ON THE FORECHECK OUT THERE LAST NIGHT,” I screamed.
I’m just kidding. I didn’t say anything. But I told that joke to a Canadian friend one time and he rebuked me, “That’s the difference, man, in Toronto you would have.”
Would have what, been an asshole in an obstetrician’s waiting room? Is that how hockey is supposed to be? I don’t know. We don’t know here, but we’re starting to accept and enjoy that ignorance. We just made all this stuff up: The Tim McGraw, the chants, the offensively bright yellow (sorry, “gold”) sweaters, the catfish, the “Thundercats” logo — this whole happy mess is the result of an experiment to successfully grow a hockey fan base in a total vacuum, absent its heritage and its dogma.
A bunch of white trash and transient hipsters didn’t just up and become Nashville Predator fans three weeks ago. The Predators got here in 1998, long before Nashville was an “It” anything, and didn’t do much to earn anyone’s interest. Then they almost lost their franchise to the Canadian equivalent of a Bond villain.
Then the city and a handful of local businessmen fought back and kept the Predators from moving to Kansas City or Ontario. It wasn’t so much an effort to keep a beloved team — or sport, let’s be honest — but the idea of that good time.
When the franchise was announced a healthy amount of Michiganders had migrated to Middle Tennessee to work at a newly opened Saturn auto plant. When the Predators would host Detroit over the Christmas holidays, the seats at Bridgestone Arena could become two-thirds red. No one seemed to mind. Over the next two decades the health care industry and no state income tax would bring in white collar labor from New England, New York, and Illinois.
And the Southerners wandered in at a steady rate. You’d see NASCAR fans who liked the speed (and its ensuing violence), college football diehards with nothing to do after New Year’s, and even one Kentucky basketball fan I met in a beer line one night who told me he only started buying partial season ticket packages to lock in better seats for the SEC basketball tournament at Bridgestone Arena. Then that guy from Kentucky got hooked on hockey. Predators hockey.
I’ve lived in Nashville for 11 years. I’m from Georgia. When I was 10 my family was stationed in Virginia and my Boy Scout Troop went to a Capitals game at the old Patriot Center. The game I saw was fast and fun and the logos were cool.
Moreover, it was an entirely new sport free of the burden of assigned family loyalties and crippling disappointment (see: Atlanta). In a million Canadian think pieces about non-traditional hockey markets I’ve never seen anyone figure out that a fresh start is a wonderful gift to a fan. This is the South. If the wrong thing happens in college football we’ll set your yard on fire while you’re at church. Sometimes it’s nice to go enjoy a game free of such a consequence.
Aaron Doster-USA TODAY Sports
When you’re an ice hockey team in Tennessee with a bright yellow robot cat logo and piano keys on your jersey collar there’s no such thing as a bandwagon. The whole fan base is made of bandwagon.
That’s how you survive as a NHL franchise in a non-traditional market: You don’t bring hockey to a city, you let a city bring its culture to you. If the growth of a particular sport is often crippled by the provincial prejudice of its birthplace, the cure isn’t flavorless universalism — it’s new kinds of provincialism, y’all!
Besides, acceptance of the actual game and its eccentricities comes easier than you’d imagine. We needed a more fluid, higher-scoring game than Barry Trotz so we got a coach who almost fought a player that one time. We like that. We were told a charismatic talent celebrated too much for a stodgy French culture so we welcomed him with a total embrace of his “antics.” That pissed off the French, and we love that.
We’re going to enjoy playing against the best player in the sport on its biggest stage and holler like idiots doing so. We’re going to enjoy the otherworldly goaltending of Pekka Rinne. We’re going to celebrate team architect David Poile for the wizard that he is. Haven’t won a Cup in your province since Watergate? Bless your heart. Cheer for us if you want, we don’t mind.
But please know we’re going to be big, bawdy, and offensively country about this whole hockey thing. We’re going to treat a rotation of one-night sensations as lifelong superstars. Is that a Colton Sissons hat trick to close out the Ducks? Well now he’s Wayne Gretzky in this state, and in this state no one watches the World Juniors.
The Stanley Cup Final is coming to Nashville, Tenn. Don’t overthink it. We’re not. This is fun.
Trust us, we’re about to run your ass ragged with a good time.
How the Cavs battled back down 3-1 to beat the Warriors, giving Cleveland its first pro sports championship since 1964.
Yes, the Golden State Warriors set a regular-season record with 73 wins with the NBA’s first unanimous MVP only to blow a 3-1 lead in the 2016 NBA Finals. But perhaps once our memories (and the memes) fade, the winners can finally write their own history, allowing the next generation of basketball fans to view this series through the lens it deserves.
It didn’t happen because the Warriors stumbled. Failure is easy: You literally don’t need to do anything. But winning, defying odds that stretched three games and 52 years, that required LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, and the rest of the Cavaliers to ascend with remarkable individual and team performances, becoming the league’s first champions in nearly four decades to win Game 7 of the NBA Finals on the road.
Just like the previous two seasons (and perhaps for several more), one of these two teams will be crowned NBA champions. But even if it’s too early to write the history book on their rivalry, the 2016 chapter is closed.
Relive how it was decided, with the best of SB Nation’s NBA coverage from each game.
June 2, 2016 | Oracle Arena, Oakland, Calif. | Golden State leads, 1-0 (Box Score)
Photo by Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images
Golden State jumped to a 1-0 series lead over the visiting Cavaliers on the back of Shaun Livingston, whose 20 points equaled Steph Curry and Klay Thompson’s combined total and doubled that of Cleveland’s entire bench.
Paul Flannery: “The two-time Most Valuable Player couldn't make a shot and the seventh man who couldn't buy a basket in the previous round suddenly couldn't miss. If that was the only strange occurrence in Game 1 of the NBA Finals then maybe we could start to figure things out. Once again we were reminded that nobody knows anything. Or maybe, we already know too much.” — The Warriors find yet another way to beat the Cavaliers
June 5, 2016 | Oracle Arena, Oakland, Calif. | Golden State leads, 2-0 (Box Score)
Photo by Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
Draymond Green, the Warriors’ do-everything glue guy, scored a game-high 28 points, giving Golden State what appeared to be a commanding 2-0 series lead. (Foreshadowing!) Adding injury to insult, the Cavs lost Kevin Love to a concussion that forced him to miss the second half, as well as Game 3.
Liam Boylan-Pett: “The two-time first team All-NBA defender has been superb on defense as expected against Cleveland -- he's been everywhere, and his ability to not commit a foul in the lane is a sight to behold -- but his offense is making a difference in the finals. He's shooting 51.6 percent from the field and 50 percent from deep. The Cavaliers' game plan is begging Green to make shots from deep, and he's delivering.” — Draymond is taking over, and there’s nothing the Cavs can do about it
June 8, 2016 | Quicken Loans Arena, Cleveland | Golden State leads, 2-1 (Box Score)
Photo by Bob Donnan - Pool/Getty Images
The Cavs roared back on their home floor, jumping ahead by 20 points in the opening frame before putting the game on ice in the second half. With Kevin Love sidelined, Tyronn Lue went small with Richard Jefferson at the four — a bold move that set the stage for LeBron James (32 points) and Kyrie Irving (30) to break out.
Paul Flannery:“Credit Cavs' coach Ty Lue with the lineup switch. Credit LeBron with having a signature game when it was needed most. Credit everyone in Cleveland, with the exception of poor Kevin Love who will now have to endure another 48 hours of talk about how he's the problem. ‘Let's slow down with that,’ Jefferson said. ‘At the end of the day, we protected once. We protected home court.’” — The NBA Finals get real but stay absurd
June 10, 2016 | Quicken Loans Arena, Cleveland | Golden State leads, 3-1 (Box Score)
Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images
Steph Curry, quiet in the first three games, exploded for 38 points to give the Warriors the 3-1 series lead that eventually birthed 1,000 memes. Accompanying Curry’s offensive explosion was Andre Iguodala’s continued excellence on the other side to help disrupt Cleveland’s game plan and contain LeBron James.
Paul Flannery:“The Warriors are the revolution realized. Look up and down their roster and you will see players who at one time or another or in different situation would have slipped through the cracks and had their contributions minimized. Curry isn’t really a point guard. Green is an undersized four who plays center. Even Barnes, a prototypical wing on paper, has been a force as a smallball four. Iguodala is merely the epitome of all those experiences.” — The Warriors are the revolution
June 13, 2016 | Oracle Arena, Oakland, Calif. | Golden State leads, 3-2 (Box Score)
Photo by Pool/Getty Images
With Draymond Green suspended following his Game 4 antics, LeBron James extended the series with a brilliant performance (even by his lofty standards): 41 points, 16 rebounds, seven assists. Kyrie Irving added another 41 points, as the duo became the first-ever teammates to top 40 in the same Finals game.
Tom Ziller: “Why can't he always play like he did on Monday? Because the way he always plays is already better than just about anyone who has ever played basketball. When you average 28-9-7 at the highest levels of the sport, sometimes you'll do better than that (see: Game 5) and sometimes you'll do worse (see: earlier this series). If LeBron managed to average 41 for a series, people would find a way to criticize the loss in which he scored 30. There's so little acknowledgment that what he's already doing is almost unprecedented, and that leads to outsized expectations with no bearing in reality.” — Why LeBron James can’t always play ‘like that’
June 16, 2016 | Quicken Loans Arena, Cleveland | Series tied, 3-3 (Box Score)
Photo by Jason Miller/Getty Images
LeBron James was magnificent again with another 41-point performance, refusing to let the Warriors repeat as champions on his home court and forcing a winner-take-all Game 7 in Oakland. The Curry family, meanwhile, was in full meltdown mode, with Ayesha accusing the NBA of being rigged after watching Steph foul out.
Tom Ziller: “It was the purest form of LeBron you'll ever see. He settled for stagnancy and long jumpers a couple of times at the end of the third and looked a bit gassed, but the intermission was all he needed to come back fierce. No one in the game -- no one since Jordan, Magic and Bird -- can play like this. Throwing alley-oops, finishing alley-oops, torturing Andre Iguodala in the post, smothering Draymond Green, swatting Stephen Curry and being everywhere every second.” — No one’s disrespecting LeBron James anymore
In a series of blowouts, Game 7 was atypically close the entire time before Kyrie Irving’s dagger with less than a minute remaining won Cleveland its first pro sports championship since 1964. LeBron James turned in a triple-double, setting up Uncle Drew’s heroics just a minute earlier with an iconic chase-down block on Andre Iguodala.
Paul Flannery: “Game 7's are rarely this good. There were 20 lead changes and 11 ties and nothing ever felt answered until those last seconds ticked off the clock. That's when belief gave way to shock, and shock slowly dawned on everyone that the reality of the moment was at hand. The Cleveland Cavaliers were freaking NBA champions. More than half a century of Cleveland sports heartbreak melting away in the warm glow of the Larry O'Brien trophy. LeBron cradled it in his arms and that's when reality gave way to tears.” — You can believe in LeBron James
The 2017 NHL expansion draft is upon us. 30 teams have submitted their protection lists, and now it's up to the Vegas Golden Knights to sift through, make side-deals and finally announce their roster on Wednesday night during the NHL Awards. Until then, you can try to do better than them with the SB Nation expansion draft tool!
You can't pick just anyone! Every NHL team can protect a certain amount of players from exposure, using one of two methods:
7 forwards, 3 defensemen, 1 goalie
8 skaters, 1 goalie
Which method gets used comes down to different teams' situations. The rest of the rules are as follows:
Players with No-Movement Clauses are automatically protected.
First & second year pros are automatically exempt.
Players with long-term injuries are exempt.
Vegas must select one player from each team for a total of 30 players.
Vegas must select at least 14 forwards, 9 defensemen and 3 goalies.
20 of Vegas' selections must be under contract for next season.
You can tell what people think of both Lopez and Russell by how they frame this deal. It's a complicated bargain: Lopez is actually good, though he's only signed for one more year, and the Lakers have little faith in or need for Russell with Lonzo Ball two days away from the squad. Furthermore, the trade cleans up a mess few realized L.A. had on its hands: a lack of 2018 cap space. Since Lopez's deal is expiring, losing Mozgov's hefty salary opens up a max salary space for Paul George or another superstar. (Like, uh, LeBron.) Getting another first-round pick — albeit a low one — helps build a trade package for George in the interim.
The Nets, meanwhile, take a chance on a pretty interesting 21-year-old who will get a fresh start in a still-large market. This is exactly the sort of trade the Nets should be making.
Oh no! Kawhi Leonard appears to have cut off his braids! This is all Tony Snell's fault. How dare he have a surprisingly cromulent season in Milwaukee a while after cutting off his braids. Snell broke the Braid Brothers pact, and now we all are left to suffer.
Dwyane Wade, however, opted into his $24 million contract. Many Bulls fans want a reboot around younger players. But do you really want this front office doing that?
The debate pitting the prospects of Lonzo and De'Aaron Fox against each other is quite rivet — BAH GOD THAT'S DE'AARON FOX'S DAD'S MUSIC! First of all: Papa Fox's name is Aaron Fox, which makes it doubly fantastic that he named his son De'Aaron. Second of all, his quote about Lonzo vs. De'Aaron in college is phenomenal. Can we get Mr. Fox some of LaVar Ball's TV appearances please? Thank you.
And finally: Oh yeah, the Hawks traded Dwight Howard for Marco Belinelli and A Plumlee To Be Named Later. We have reached the "Dwight Howard traded in what you'd think is a salary cap dump based on first glance but actually his team isn't saving any money and just wants to desperately get away from him no matter what" stage of his career.
The 2017 NBA Draft promises to be one of the most exciting in recent memory. We've already seen the No. 1 pick traded, and several big names are on the block. But what will actually happen when teams get on the clock? Stay tuned with our NBA Draft tracker.
The 2017 NBA Draft is upon us, and we've already seen plenty of fireworks. We should expect even more once the draft begins at 7:30 ET on ESPN. Keep up with all of the NBA Draft results as they happen with this tracker.
There has been a shakeup at the top of the draft. The Boston Celtics, who won 53 games last year, originally owned the No. 1 overall pick thanks to a brilliant 2013 trade with the Brooklyn Nets. But instead of using that selection, they elected to trade it to the Philadelphia 76ers. Boston received this year's No. 3 pick and a future first-rounder from either the Lakers, Kings, or 76ers in the next two years. It's the first time the No. 1 pick has been traded since 1993, when Orlando dealt Chris Webber for Penny Hardaway.
The 76ers are widely expected to select Markelle Fultz, a terrific point guard out of Washington, at No. 1 overall. Fultz will pair with Joel Embiid and Ben Simmons to form a core the 76ers hope will compete for years to come. The Lakers will likely take Lonzo Ball at No. 2, just as the outspoken Ball family hoped.
From there, things get interesting. The Celtics could do anything at No. 3, and several other high lottery picks are in play in potential blockbuster trades. Stars such as Paul George, Kristaps Porzingis, and LaMarcus Aldridge could be on the move, as George seeks to escape Indiana for the Lakers following next season and Porzingis has fallen out of favor with Phil Jackson. But this is the NBA Draft, so count on something unexpected happening.
Other top prospects in this draft include Duke's Jayson Tatum, Kansas' Josh Jackson, Kentucky's De'Aaron Fox and Malik Monk, and Florida State's Jonathan Issac.
Follow along with every pick in the 2017 NHL Draft here.
Nico or Nolan? Or someone else?
The 2017 NHL draft is full of questions that will be answered when the New Jersey Devils select someone with the first overall pick on Friday night. Common thought suggests it will be either all-around Canadian center Nolan Patrick or flashy Swiss center Nico Hischier.
But in a draft class lacking a bonafide superstar, that's still up for debate. As are the picks that follow. The Philadelphia Flyers select second overall, and the Dallas Stars might trade their third overall pick. Four teams (the Stars, Blues, Coyotes and Golden Knights) hold multiple first round picks. All the ingredients are there for a night of first round trades. The Knights, the NHL's expansion team, has three first round picks to use.
As the draft deepens, teams like the Red Wings will use a stockpile of draft picks to jump-start rebuilding efforts. It should be a long, but intriguing, two days of hockey drafting.
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