Mr. WEO

is it because professional soccer is so popular in the US?

Johnson had 3 solid years in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable career. Fell off a very steep cliff after 2012. Even in those 3 years his catch % was only 56. Definitely TBD myth making here...

on the Chiefs he did have 172 and 150 yards two playoff games.

So Josh Allen is the best QB? phew, lol. I appreciate the work done here. Josh had a better O-line play this year, but as far as "sack discipline"--he was far and away the best at avoiding sacks--mainly because of his legs and savvy. His sack% is a half of Mahomes's and about 1/3 of Burrows. Mahomes is an elite scrambler though. Burrow, not as much. Jaden Daniels will be a superstar. Caleb Williams isn't long for this league. He will be in the Justin Fields pipeline to journeyman soon. The Bears draft Fields, after his rookie season the Bears ownership dumps the GM. Hire Poles. Picks Williams. Commanders ownership dumps GM and hire Peters. He takes Daniels. Which team had 100 year old owner? lol. imagine being a Bears fan. No better than Cleveland. "Slaughterhouse of Dreams"...

he could be in HOF: 2nd team. lol. Basketball HOF is open admission at this point.

My son and I were at that nut punch game. So stupid. I would have tried to trade his selfish azz after that. Would have won the Finals they won without him. Kerr was as integral to the Bulls dynasty. One of the best 3 point shooters of his day. 6th MOTY twice. Championship winning shot '97. Played all 82 games 4 of 5 seasons with the Bulls. 3 rings. He's not getting in.

I respect your opinion. But given the low success rate of the 3 pointer (38% of shots taken this season by all teams were 3's and only 36% of those were successful) these guys don't defend the arc like you think--why would they? With the way guys kick out and get cheap 3 free throws or 4 point plays...why would they. Sure the might guard the best 3 point shooters, but in the history of the 3 point shot, only 5 players have shot over .500. There's a bunch of guys with over 400 attempts who have made less 1/3 of them. Why step up on them? Fair better value play is get in the lane for the defensive rebound. And this is what you see--as I showed above, offensive rebounds are up and defensive rebs up. This is all easily seen watching the game. The 3 point shot has relaxed, not increased defensive requirements. Indy could have simply watched the Thunder chuck up another 30 3's and still won, given how badly they were missing. Alos, Free Throw attempts have dropped by almost 27% since the mid 80's----it's not the refs are "just letting them play", it's that there's much less tough D in the paint. Guy drive to the hoop unmolested. I understand everyone wants to draw a straight line from "kids play more, training is better", etc. to "the league has more talent top to bottom today". But the data (and observation) don't support this conclusion.

feelings…

My point that in Kerr's era, Green doesn't get in. The bar is lower. Green played on a dynasty, that's the most powerful item on his CV. Solid defender. But the Warriors win all those rings with a lesser defender in his spot. As for a facilitator, if he had his 5.6 assists, 2.3 TOs, and 8.9 points on the Knicks, Pelicans, Jazz, etc, he's not a HOFer. If almost 40% of the shots your opponent is taking are 3's, there's really not much defense to be played. OKC was trounced in game 6 not because of a suffocating Indy Defense. It's because they made 27% of their 30 3 pointers. That 91 points despite 30 3 point shots. Unwatchable--how can you conclude you are watching a much higher skill level?? Teams take twice as many 3 pointer than they did even 17-18 years ago--but they are no better at it. Transition game is cross half court, pull up and launch a 3. So Offensive rebounds are down. There's not the post up inside game anymore, and if guys drive to the basket, then offense do so with impunity as there is little physical enforcement in the lane--fouls called are down 35% from the Celts/Lakers heyday (yet the flops and whining for calls are at an all time high). All this science and training and youth game playing...and you still have a 5 team division without a winning record. An higher overall skill level of player distributed around the league with mostly similar budgets, this should not happen. 5 teams with less than 25 wins. In 1985, there was 1. 1995 there were 4. Given an overall significant increase in size, speed and skill, shouldn't the wins be more evenly distributed, i.e. fewer awful teams? All boats lifted?

now it's time to invest in carwashes, a branded BBQ sauce and a restaurant named after himself!

Putting Green in the HOF would be like putting Steve Kerr in as a player. Name the 6 HOFers playing Sunday night. The game has changed to where it's almost unrecognizable. No defense. Incessant flopping and begging. Fundamentals are gone---traveling and carries are allowed parts of the game now. Worst of all, the 3 point play is the basis of every offense. 20 years ago, 17% of teams shots were 3's. Now every team is over 30%--the average 34%! And they aren't better at it. This was perfectly displayed in Game 1 of the Knicks/Celtics game. Celts took 60 3's.....and hit 15 of them. It's unwatchable. I do like the special treat you left: using "AI" to make your point. That info is culled from dudes posting stuff on Reddit. lol.

Most of today's legit future HOFers, other than Curry, are transients. They hop from "superteam" to another, as the league moved (at the bests players demand) to migrating All-Star teams. Durant hasn't won a championship since he left GS--6 years ago . Klay Thompson a HOFer? He's missed a lot of basketball for half of his career. Draymond Green a HOFer? He can't score. He's dirty. Decent defender. 13 years ago, the Thunder couldn't win a championship with Durant, Harden and Westbrook. Not once. Now the Thunder can win it with pretty much 1 guy against a team that has pretty much 1 guy. this is true. lots of players take a bunch of gamers off. most starters played 80+ games back in the day....without the league reprimanding them or their coaches.

Top players probably as good. top to bottom on the roster, I disagree. The 2 big stars in the Finals are Halleburton and SG-A. The league is never again going to see 2 teams facing off for the championship with a combined 6 HOFers (Celtics/Lakers) on the court or 4 on the same team at once (mid 90's Bulls).

I would love to see Notre Dame play the Browns in Dublin!

huh? no. I'm calling him a good guy for telling Coleman D1 basketball isn't for him after all...he did the kid a huge favor in recruiting him and then letting him go. You keep saying I'm not giving "NBA players" for being good. Most of them are. Others simply aren't that good--but since teams don't (and probably can't ) scout every single player in the country, they instead focus on power 5 1 and done kids. So it's impossible to conclude that these teams eliminated every possible option. So they end up with guys like Springer, who would likely get destroyed 1 on 1 against as kid like Cotton in the day. As for Manuel, the obvious reply is the they didn't have to pick ANY QB that year, given the slim pickings (Wilson and Cousins were easily available the year before). Yet they settled on a guy who would predictably flame out soon (partly because country bumpkin GM thought Wilson was "too short"). But you would argue that EJ was better than any other college QB available anywhere.... simply because he was drafted. Makes no sense.

Dodge TRX?? lol wtf.

now they have 6-7. But at least we can agree that there are terrible pros. While all of the bolded is true, the claim that the talent is 1000x better than in the NBA's heydays 80s/90s, and by extension, the game is 1000x better is clearly wrong to anyone who watches the game. The main problem is that almost no one plays in college for 4 years anymore. Defense is non existent and very soft and the whole game is about 3 point shots. That's the entire league offensive philosophy. Teams are chucking upwards of 60+ 3's per game. It's hard to watch. I'm not knocking all NBA players, just the very bottom of the bench. You insist that they are better than nearly every player at their position that is not on an NBA roster. This could only be true if you assume that the scouting/drafting process is infallible--this is obviously absurd. Look at the NFL--every year guys wash out of the league after a season, despite all of the prep work in evaluating them. But if you scouts suck, then why would you believe that they can always spot the best players to the exclusion of all other players? They can't possibly scout all players. The Bills drafted EJ Manuel, essentially, after seeing him play in the Senior Bowl. He was terrible. You would conclude that, never the less, he had to be better than 99% of the QBs playing college football at that time---simply because he was drafted and made a roster. That's absurd. I'm using him as an example. If Moss had been coached and developed and as many resources were used to developed his game as was spent on Springer, I think it's reasonable that he could have been an NBA journeyman bench warmer who rarely played any meaningful minutes on 3 teams in 4 years. He's pretty good yes. But it's pretty rare for a top program to tell one of its recruits "maybe football would be for you"----after 6 games. Izzo would never do this if he had any use for Coleman at all.

How did you conclude that guys like Jaden Springer are much better than Moss and his HS game? he played 15 games in college, then was inexplicably drafted into the NBA, where he has played 8 minutes a game on 3 different teams over 4 years, scoring under 3 PPG. He's not a good pro basketball player at all. He's a practice body. Moss could have been such. As for being discouraged with basketball, I bet if he had better guidance in his youth, he could easily gotten to D1 prospect and ended up as the 15th guy on a bad NBA team. His youth was pockmarked with difficulty--much of his own making. I think this affected his confidence. Again, as for getting a deep bench spot in the NBA, the bar is not nearly as high as you claim. It's the Peterman fallacy. He's historically awful, yet he still bounces around the league. That doesn't mean that there aren't very good college QBs (Div 1A or Div 2) out there who are "not good enough" simply because they weren't noticed/scouted/drafted/signed by an NFL team. The claim that you have to be better than all other players at your position just because you got a roster spot on a pro team is intuitively false and proven so frequently. You can't reasonably conclude that every scrub in the NBA is better than any other player who did not get the opportunity to play...simply because they made a roster. why would a coach tell a supremely talented kid that he recruited that he shouldn't continue with basketball if he was that good or had that much potential? Why wouldn't he say, "forget football, you're going to be a star here"?

Moe Alie-Cox is one. Specialization is player choice nowadays. It's pretty simple--if Izzo thought he could use Coleman, he would have developed him and encouraged him.

Fair enough--not a starter, but could ride the bench for the Jazz or the Pelicans. The examples I gave show this. Supreme athlete who could play--there's a lot of guys down the bench in the NBA who never play simply because they aren't good enough. They are there to mop up in garbage time and run in practice. No teams are asking any of them to break guys down off the dribble, splash 3's or run the point. You know this.

well "99% of other basketball players" includes you and me..so what? anyway, guys like the one's I listed aren't good pro players. they simply aren't. Moss could have easily sat on the Knicks bench throughout the early 2000's and racked up 1.9 minutes per game over a season. NBA roster has 15 active players. Moss is as tall or taller than 6 guys on the roster, including 3 starters. There's not much reason to believe that a garbage time scrub on a 17-65 team (Jaden Springer on the Jazz, for instance) is going to school a prime young Moss on the court. people commonly make the error of concluding that, since a player is on a pro roster, that they are simply better at that sport than every other player who didn't make it. that fallacy is revealed when we see crappy players like Ryan Leaf and Nate Peterman starting games. you would have to be crazy to believe that either of those bums would "school 99%" of all other QBs in the country, simply because they made a roster. Well, Izzo never played him-he obviously felt he was more likely to excel at football than at basketball, hence the kind advice. If he was that good, he would never have made him choose. Why on earth would he? plenty of NFL guys played a lot of D1 basketball. It's easy to conclude that Coleman's game was not as good as any of those guys.

In a football-mad country, this League's championship game pulled in "LEGO Masters" numbers, and 1/3 of the viewers of an episode of "Georgie and Mandy's First Marriage"...

that would be 80mph, lol. come on. I set cruise control for 85 and I'm getting passed routinely. This kid's a clown, but this is nothing

one shouldn't need any convincing at all to travel to Dublin...

This is the one player on earth that Beane could NOT offer a 1 year contract?? hey, we got Tre back tho...!