UMFan83

I’m trying to put into scope how shocking it would be for Everton to go down. They’re in a group of like 10 teams where it seemed nearly impossible to get relegated but they also clearly aren’t in the top tier of teams and haven’t been for awhile. Less shocking than Leicester winning the championship, more surprising than George Mason making the Final Four?

Very relatable. I have a hard time watching non-Bears games without some sort of gambling involved (including fantasy)

Apparently he was betting parlays which reassured the NFL that he wasn't betting based on inside info and this likely kept him from getting a much more severe punishment and possibly banishment

Not idiot owner but an idiot player this time

This and, I remember reading Fields throws to open receivers were amongst the lowest, if not the lowest, in the NFL. That had to be a side effect of the fraud known as the Nagy offense. I think part of this is that Fields had to recalibrate himself from college open to NFL open. We saw him make those throws in the Steelers game down the middle of the field. Then he got hurt a couple times and we didn't see him continue displaying this skill, but I think he gets it now. Sucks so badly that he missed almost the entire 2nd half of the season. After that Steelers game he played one below average half against the Ravens and then was out a month, then came back for I think 2 games and then was done. Almost no chance to build off that Steelers game. Even in Matt Nagy's shitty offense I bet if he doesn't get hurt the discussion on Fields this offseason is a little different because he would have shown more improvement later on in the season. Edit: I almost forgot that the 49ers game was right before the steelers game too. He was nothing special as a passer in the 49ers game but he looked a lot more confident and comfortable in that game leading up to the Steelers game.

I thought the Ricketts family was too debt ridden and dealing with biblical losses to spend $20m on FA

Holy crap I knew we hit a lot of batters last year but didn’t realize it was a historically high amount. Good news is most of them were 88 mph or less

people stopped donating prizes at some point. Before we all got jaded and sarcastic (which I love) this was a pretty nice community

This does not say anything about anything but the Bulls are now 15-107 against the top 5 seeds of either conference since the start of the 2017-2018 season. I know the Bulls were bad all those years but that seems pretty incredible. Most good teams will have a couple slip-ups against bad teams that they take lightly but it was almost never against the bulls

Also I bet they dont notice DJJs shot on Allen if they weren’t looking out for flagrant against him. But I wonder how that last possession would have been different (where LaVine got fouls and then didn’t get fouled shooting a 3) if the Bulls were down 2 instead of 4.

Sucks. Happy we played a competitive back and forth game against a contender on national tv. But in falling short at the end the Bulls flaws again show themselves for everyone to see. Sucks that this fun season is going to be defined by a historic inability to beat good teams by the national media. Well unless we do something about it

Yeah the constant adding of things behind a paywall sucks. They deserve to get paid so ultimately I'm ok with it, but its forced me to make undesirable choices and cutting out things I don't want to. Like even Desipio...have been reading their website since 2003 but Andy recently launched a paid newsletter for all his writings. For whatever reason I drew the line there, just couldn't afford another niche paid site. I'm happy they are making money but sucks that there's so many paid services that I cant keep track of them all without sifting through my credit card statement. I almost switched back to cable recently but then I realized 95% of the non-sports TV I watch is streaming. Wish all these companies could get on board with a company that bundles everything up in one neat monthly fee (like cable!) but that defeats the purpose of why they launched their standalone streaming services. For journalism I really want someone to launch some sort of per article service where I don't have to make a new monthly subscription just to read one interesting sounding article behind a pay wall. Like Spotify for journalism. Give me like 30 articles a month for a fixed fee from a wide brand of papers and then after that I could spend some de minimis amount per article. Oh that's interesting headline. 4 cents? Sure I'll open that article. Ooh a premium long form article for a dollar. Okay I really love that writer/topic, sure. The spotify analogy is interesting because at first I thought "that would never happen because companies require interesting articles to increase subscriptions and wouldn't care about getting pennies for someone reading 1 article" but that's exactly what people thought about streaming music when it started becoming popular. Maybe a good business idea?

Really horsefeathering sucks but I always thought they might put 14 team playoff back on the table in exchange for something else. Rob Manfred sucks so badly. I saw someone on twitter suggest this format for a 14 team playoff and I could get behind it: DIV 1 - bye DIV 2 vs. WC4, DIV 3 vs. WC3 - 3 game series, all played at division winner. Wild Card team has to win all 3 to advance WC 1 vs. WC 2 - True best of 3 series, all played at higher seed. Or make it a single winner take all game. Gives a huge advantage to winning the division so maybe we won't just see teams try to win 80 games and sneak into the playoffs. In addition, the top WC teams have more of a chance to make it to the division series so again there's more incentive to win more games to get a better seed.

The Chicago Audible podcast which I listen to on YouTube pretty faithfully is a part of this group now. IDK if I'll still have free access to it, but I would kinda miss it. But in general, I'm with you. Got rid of cable probably 10 years ago and the last 6-7 years had streaming services. Started with Netflix (who keeps raising their prices), then to Hulu, Disney+, ESPN+/Insider, Discovery+, Paramount, Amazon, Peacock, HBOMax, was doing Sling for live TV and with all the services we had + internet, it was costing us more than cable. So, changed my internet provider and added regular cable and dropped most of the streaming services (even Netflix). Saving us so much money. I'd be more apt to pay $56 and be done w/ it vs. another money nickel and dime that I gotta keep track of. Yeah the constant adding of things behind a paywall sucks. They deserve to get paid so ultimately I'm ok with it, but its forced me to make undesirable choices and cutting out things I don't want to. Like even Desipio...have been reading their website since 2003 but Andy recently launched a paid newsletter for all his writings. For whatever reason I drew the line there, just couldn't afford another niche paid site. I'm happy they are making money but sucks that there's so many paid services that I cant keep track of them all without sifting through my credit card statement. I almost switched back to cable recently but then I realized 95% of the non-sports TV I watch is streaming. Wish all these companies could get on board with a company that bundles everything up in one neat monthly fee (like cable!) but that defeats the purpose of why they launched their standalone streaming services.

I'm surprised to see this as I feel like there's as much quality stuff there day to day as ever. Between their national MLB and CFB coverage, which I think both are top-notch, and the beat guys for my teams all churning out solid content consistently, I enjoy the heck out of that site. I probably end up reading 3-5 pieces per day on there most weekdays. Yeah I dunno I spend like 5 minutes a day looking at the articles before going elsewhere. To be fair, at this stage of my life I'm really just interested in articles that are focused on my team. There's maybe 1 a day for that. Occasionally there's a good national article but most don't appeal to me. I don't really pay attention to college football at all outside of Michigan, sometimes the big 10 but almost all the teams are eliminated from the CFP by October so I stop caring. It also bugs me that they only update their Bubble Watch twice a week. Feel like for a premium journalism site they can update daily like ESPN does. I'm probably unique in my consumption habits though.

Interesting QB analysis that is very favorable to Fields. (3 different charts in the tweet chain if you click on it) Fields was the 3rd most accurate deep ball passer, 10th most accurate deep ball passer under pressure and 3rd most accurate tight window passer. No idea how much this says about overall QB skills though. While most of the names at the top are the usual suspects (Mahomes, Allen, etc) Zach Wilson and Daniel Jones pop into a couple of these top 10s while Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady were below average in all 3 charts. Deep ball isn't necessarily their games though.

https://www.allchgo.com/ New Chicago sports media site launched today. To be honest the launch articles are kind of meh...you'd think they'd have some good stories queued up for the launch. Some of the articles (think they are all free today): -5 things the Cubs need to address post-lockout -5 things the Sox need to address post-lockup -Articles on 2 WRs the Bears should target in the draft -What the new Hawks GM has to do now -Article about DeRozan But maybe it improves....they have good writers on board. It's $9 a month though (or $56 a year). I subscribe to way too many online journalism/streaming tv services so this is a non-starter for me right now. Wish them all the best though, great journalism is worth paying for so maybe they will win me over at some point. I kind of hope the Athletic goes under as I find less and less interesting content there and could easily reallocate that money to a site like this.

:-k

Yep. The Bulls have been winning shootouts but that crunch time execution is not fully sustainable. DeRozan is not going to shoot 70% down the stretch of games every time. Tonight he missed 2-3 in the final minutes and while not the difference it made holding on much more difficult. When teams double DeMar or deny him the ball the Bulls offense can really struggle. Zach let’s face is not 100%. Hes not as explosive and that makes it difficult for him to get his shot off. I know offense isn’t the problem here but like i said at firstc the bulls have been winning these shootouts against bad teams and it’s not surprising that their luck has changed a bit as the schedule gets tougher

I’m sure the Bucks and Sixers games will go better :D

you won the heart of da bum when he realized your user name was not just you misspelling IBM.

He’s definitely lacked explosion over the last few weeks and that’s hurt his entire game.

Just got through the first episode. Very upset you didn't mention who won the first ever Home Run Derby. I still wear my undersized Aramis Ramirez Cubs jersey with pride :D Edit: Nevermind I guess the prize was a Jeremy Hermida autographed bat (which I still have!) The Aramis jersey must have been a different contest Otherwise great stuff, great podcasting voice especially

I probably won’t but would love to be alive for the moment these baby boy billionaires slip up enough to rouse the masses into action (ha!). I genuinely can’t tell if these slimy worms think they’re clever or just know they have all the guns, seem to be becoming less and less cautious as they buy up more and more of the world — https://twitter.com/wavingatyou/status/1499055924094328834?s=20&t=E2MkFMHl8bXqDqqiAM0PfQ Meh I'm not sure if Kris Bryant is the best example. The Cubs manipulated his service time because it was very low risk for him to miss 2 weeks in order to gain an extra year of control. If they had to keep him out until like Memorial Day to ensure he doesn't win ROY in a year they were definitely trying to contend, I think that's a bridge too far. Certainly can see it being damaging in other scenarios though when a team isn't in a win now mode.