Reed83HOF

Great article and it was written for the NHL, but it applies to all sports and so many TBD members and the Bills https://theathletic.com/1062155/2019/07/04/down-goes-brown-the-20-stages-of-watching-your-team-make-a-horrible-free-agency-mistake/ Stage 1: The first rumors You’ll never quite remember where you first heard the original rumor.You might hear it from a friend who swears he heard it from a friend whose uncle-in-law used to work with the assistant GM’s former cleaning lady. But at some point, somebody strings together a sentence featuring a player’s name, your favorite team, and a number that is just way too high. Stage 2: You laugh at those rumors I mean, come on. That much? For that guy? Nice try. Granted, your team’s GM isn’t exactly crushing it out there. He’s been known to make the occasional mistake. He’s lost a few trades, and overpaid on a few contracts. Also, he once ended a press conference by confidently striding away from the podium and then pulling on a door labeled “PUSH” for half an hour. Stage 3: One of the real insiders reports it Uh oh. OK, that’s a bad sign. Those guys are pretty plugged in, and they don’t make stuff up. If they’re talking about it, there has to at least be something to it. This is not good. Stage 4: You talk yourself into the cap hit as long as the term is reasonable Look, the numbers being thrown around are pretty crazy. But what if this is one of those short-term deals? Those happen sometimes. Your team has a bit of cap room this year, after all. Sure, you were hoping they’d use it to fill one of the roughly nine different holes in the roster, but maybe they could just give it all to this guy on a one-year deal. Aren’t expiring deals for a lot of money a good thing? Stage 5: The desperate search for any rumors linking the player to any other team Please, let somebody else be linked to this guy. You don’t even care who. There has to be some other sucker out there. Stage 6: The deal gets announced This is always a fun moment, especially if this is one of the rare cases where you’ve skipped steps one through five entirely because the deal is coming out of the blue. You haven’t had the chance to brace yourself at all, and suddenly you get blindsided by a name and a number that don’t make sense. teams are starting to figure out that it can help to let a slightly higher number leak ahead of time so that the actual price seems reasonable by comparison. This will make you feel better for roughly 30 seconds before you run the numbers and realize they’re still awful. If your team isn’t a little bit smart, then the official announcement will be even worse than you thought and you’ll need to go and lie down in a dark storage closet for the rest of the day. Stage 7: Don’t look at the analytics Seriously, don’t. No good has ever come from a fan looking at the analytics. They always bring misery. Look away! Stage 8: You looked at the analytics Oh lord, it’s even worse than you thought. Look at this chart, with the circles and the bar graphs and the comparables! Do you realize what this means? No, of course, you don’t, nobody has ever understood an analytics chart. But you’re pretty sure this one is bad. Why are all the arrows going down instead of up? Stage 9: The GM press conference Pure comedy. You can have your George Carlin and Richard Pryor; there’s no better standup routine in the world than an NHL GM who just signed a terrible contract that he thinks is really good. It’s just a nonstop word salad of meaningless clichés and hackneyed narratives. Watch carefully, and you can actually pinpoint the exact moment where having to hear himself describe the deal out loud makes the GM realize that he’s made a horrible mistake. If you’re lucky, he’ll even drop a quote like “I’m not worried about Year 6 or 7 right now, I’m worried about Year 1” that can become your go-to sound bite whenever you’re about to make a bad decision in your own life. Stage 10: The extra details leak out Wait, the contract is also buyout proof? With heavy bonuses and lockout protection? And there’s a full no-movement clause? Why? This! (Gestures furiously at the term and cap hit)! This is the no-movement clause! Stage 11: The defenders emerge Some fans will always defend everything their team does. It’s cool. It’s what fans are supposed to do. You root for a team, and that means you have their back, whether they deserve it or not. Sometimes, the defender’s job is relatively easy. The contract is a little rich, or maybe a bit long, but that’s free agency. You either overpay, or you don’t get the player. Cap space is great, but at some point you need to fill out the roster and get better. Better to pay a little too much than sit on the sidelines. Besides, the cap will probably go up. There’s a new TV deal coming. And maybe the player will be better than you think. Sometimes a change of scenery helps, you know? He’ll have a chance to get healthy, the coach will get the most out of him, and the team’s grizzled veterans will make sure he works hard Stage 12: The conspiracy theories No, see, the deal might look bad now. But what if we’re just looking at it all wrong? Those crazy signing bonuses will just make it easier to trade the guy, maybe as soon as tomorrow. The point is that the same GM who recently fell off the stage at the draft is probably secretly playing four-dimensional chess here. Just have some faith, man. Stage 13: You grudgingly decide to give the new guy a chance Fast forward ahead a few weeks. The rush of early July is long past, the dog days of summer have slowly dragged by, and training camp has arrived. He didn’t force anyone to sign it. He just negotiated for the most money he could, same as you or anyone else would want to do. And he’s saying all the right things. He seems genuinely happy to be here. You even heard something about him being in the very best shape of his life, and nobody would say that if it wasn’t true. Stage 14: The first few shifts of the exhibition schedule Nope, he’s awful. You were right all along. This contract is a disaster. Stage 15: The last remaining fans turn on the deal This stage can arrive in a variety of ways. Sometimes, it happens almost immediately. Others, it may take a while. It can be a gradual process, with fans falling off the bandwagon one at a time like leaves from a tree on an autumn day. Or maybe there’s some turning point that shocks everyone into reality. Occasionally, the process never fully completes itself, and you get one of those weird intra-fanbase civil wars where everyone screams at each other about one specific player for years. But one way or another, the tide turns. The diehard defenders will remain, but otherwise the mood gets ugly. The player might be booed. People get fired. Other fanbases make punchlines. It is not a fun time. Stage 16: The years go by So many years. There are positives. If you wait long enough, the player will occasionally have a good game or a good week, and they might even string together a pretty decent season. At times, the needle will be nudged from “abject disaster” all the way up to “mild catastrophe.” At some point, those defenders from Stage 11 might emerge to take a victory lap, as if we don’t remember that they all jumped ship in the years in between.But mostly, it’s what you expected: A guy getting paid too much money for not enough production. And at some point, the conversation will shift to: “How do we get rid of this guy?” Stage 17: The inevitable buyout It always ends badly.But the end result is the same. The team wriggles out of the deal, but probably eats a lot of money to do it. Maybe it costs them a draft pick or a prospect too, or they end up taking back a deal that’s almost as bad. But they’re off the hook. It’s over. There are always mixed feelings when this stage arrives. Relief, that the story has reached an end. Anger, that it ever came to this. Sympathy, for the new GM who had to figure it all out, because by this point the guy who signed the deal in the first place is long gone, working as a scout for some other team where his college roommate is in charge. Maybe just a little bit of regret, as you wonder if you were all too hard on the player. He always seemed like a good guy. By the way, it should go without saying that if and when the player returns for his first game back with his new team, he will look amazing and score the game-winning goal. Just accept it now. Stage 18: The revisionist history You may not reach this stage until years later, but it will come. Actually, somebody will try to tell you, the deal wasn’t that bad. Actually, everybody liked it at the time. Actually, this newly discovered stat suggests that the player was better than you thought. Actually, the deal was horrible but it prevented the team from doing some other even more horrible thing so that makes it good. Don’t you feel dumb now? These people are the worst. Stage 19: The self-reflection This is the stage where everybody involved learns some hard lessons. The front office that signed the deal looks back on how they miscalculated so badly. Ownership comes to understand how they allowed it to happen, and how they can prevent similar mistakes in the future. Fans think back to their initial reactions, and recalibrate their expectations going forward. The media re-read their hot takes, reflect on what they got wrong, and vow to do better next time. This step has never actually happened, but scientists believe it is theoretically possible. Stage 20: The next contract OK, see, but this time it will be different…

https://www.12up.com/posts/tom-brady-posts-bizarre-photo-on-instagram-that-barely-looks-like-him-01de8anha1gc/partners/41255

the right hooker?

I used to be now I'm not what you see, lord I try And now it seems all those dreams have come true, but they're passing me by Some fast talkin' mama for a dollar put a smile on my face I'm drivin' all night I end up in the same old place My gypsy road can't take me home I drive all night just to see the light My gypsy road can't take me home I keep on pushing 'cause it feels alright And who's to care if I grow my hair to the sky I'll take a wish and a prayer, cross my fingers 'cause I always get by Fast talkin' jerk for a dollar wiped the smile off my face I'm drivin all night Just to keep the rat in the race

Pull me back together Or separate the skin from the bone Leave me all the pieces, and then you can leave me alone Tell me the reality is better than dream But I found out the hard way, Nothing is what it seems! I push my fingers into my eyes It's the only thing that slowly stops the ache But it's made of all the things I have to take Jesus, it never ends, it works it's way inside If the pain goes on All I've got, all I've got is insane

Worse huh?

Expected to see this here - it's not; so here it is...

IIRC, it wasn't the Beane counters - HBO actually want more GOT, it was D&D who wanted out and decided that they would take the 13 episodes in seasons 7 & 8 and shoe horn it into a scripted ending. I read somewhere on the inter-webs, (this is extremely condensed) that GRR wrote the story to grow organically, he would create a gardening bed and place the characters in a situation and ask, how would they react and that is what he wrote. It was very organic, that is what in essence created the depth and all of the various plots and character arcs and the story would grow with many branches and twists and turns; it also became a B word to manage (apparently the other way to write a story is to have a very rigid framework that you follow all the way through). Once the decision was made to end the series D&D knew the ending they wanted and gave themselves 13 episodes to move the characters along to be able to fit the ending, which in essence is the rigid framework method. That is what has made the last couple seasons seem less cohesive overall and gets us to where we are today.

If it's hard, is it really a pass?

Blonde beard time or not show up again LOL

Actually a lot of them seemed to have wanted him gone, just not after he was allowed to spend $100 million in FA and presumably ran the draft Also saw on the Jets fan boards, speculation is that there was an issue with Hiemerdinger and McG and the Jests decided to dump them both. How much of this is damage control to not make Gase a scapegoat - who knows LOL

Le'Veon's new look: