Welcome to Dellyville: Cavs vs. Bulls Game 6 Behind the Box Score
May 15, 2015C-Cap Recap: Just Out of Reach
May 15, 2015
Happy Friday everyone. This is another of those posts where I don’t know what happened in the Cavs game when I wrote all this. Still, win or lose, I hope it helps start your Friday off…
Just trust someone smarter than yourself…
I’ve been thinking about the Patriots and their deflated footballs a lot. I’ve talked about it on the podcast where Mike Burgermeister took a hard line approach saying the Pats should have been disqualified and the Colts should have moved on last season. I disagreed loudly with that assessment as you might imagine, but have a listen for yourself.
Additionally, I lent a couple hundred words to Josh from MTAF who put together a collective take at his site. Read all the takes including my own, but I specifically loved Jeff Nomina’s take, even though I really don’t agree with it completely. I wish I’d written it because it made me laugh and made some good points.
The Patriots lobbied for a rule, exploited it, lied about doing so, and then interfered with the investigation. This is after having been found guilty of Spygate. When the Super Bowl champs have been caught cheating for a second time, the NFL has to come down hard or risk losing any credibility in the sport. Imagine if it were the Browns in the AFC Championship game instead of the Colts. We’re ready to burn Kelly Olynyk at a stake right now for ruining a championship opportunity. Also: for possibly being a witch.
And I understand people wanting to compare this to recent legal issues with players, but I expect a judge and jury to punish those players, not Roger Goodell. Equating domestic violence to football games is a losing exercise. The league can, and should punish the Patriots for being a bunch of cheating cheaters.
And then I read Dan Wetzel’s take at Yahoo and decided that it kind of put the whole thing to rest for me. I’d been unable to put it all together the way that I wanted based on the facts and my own personal feelings to the whole thing, and so I was almost relieved to come across a comprehensive opinion that I could just point to and say, “This says it all.”
My favorite part is this…
Still, at this point it’s worth contemplating the totality of evidence, as Wells likes to write. And what’s apparent is deflate-gate was more misdemeanor than felony, a molehill that commissioner Roger Goodell’s office turned into a mountain via incompetence, vengeance or both.
The idea a Patriots lackey carried game balls into a bathroom and took a little air out via a needle prior to the AFC championship game is a relatively moderate rule violation – and a comical bit of gamesmanship. It’s wrong and deserves punishment but not something that should merit a four-month, multi-million dollar investigation and the tsk-tsking of over-the-top pious law-and-order types.
It would have been the most perfectest thing ever if Yahoo! hadn’t plastered a mostly-unrelated, Auto-Play video at the top of the post, but that doesn’t truly impact the content of Wetzel’s piece, but it leads me to my next topic…
Facebook is going to start being the publisher…
At the heart of what WFNY is, we are content creators. We are writers and podcasters and cultivators and we do so here within the confines of a URL and a framework that’s cost us a lot of time, money and sometimes technical headaches to keep up. As we’ve moved along, we’ve embraced social media and it has moved a lot of the conversation off of these actual pages and onto other platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Good or bad, those are just the facts. Now, in an effort to improve user experience on Facebook, the world’s most comprehensive online community is hosting the actual work of publishers on their pages, albeit with individual branding and revenue shares with those publishers. They are calling it “instant articles.”
The articles, which are hosted on Facebook’s servers, are well designed and create a genuinely better experience than the typical 8-second wait for an article to load on the mobile web.
But if the format proves successful, and Facebook maintains its dominance in distributing news online, publishers could become ever more dependent on a platform they can’t control. Those concerns may prove valid, but it hasn’t stopped big partners from signing up. Soon, many more publishers may feel that they don’t have a choice. Whatever happens, the arrival of instant articles marks a turning point in the evolution of the news.
I find this all so fascinating considering where I’ve been since I started doing things on the web. When I was a teenager, I bought an HTML book and built an unofficial homepage for the death metal band Acid Bath in a text editor. I hosted it in a folder at my local dial-up ISP and people could get to it by going to a convoluted web address including the ISP’s URL and my username. It was something like this… www.dial-up-isp-name.com/~clyndall/acidbath.html It’s times like this when I like to remember just how revolutionary Google was when it came out.
From there, fast-forwarding about ten years, we went to hosted blogging platforms like Livejournal, Blogger and others. I thought I was too cool for that, so when I started my various websites and eventually FilteringCraig.com, I used a hosting company and a self-managed installation of my content platform. I started out using Movable Type which ran on a programming language called PERL and then eventually ended up with the big winner of the content wars, WordPress. This very site is still running on WordPress to this day. Now, it’s really hard to think that the future is even on a page like this.
In the future, why would a publisher, who specializes in writing, editing and formatting really have much of a desire to do work on hosting or back-end if some ginormous company is going to just do it for us? In addition to that, someone like Facebook also has more potential eyeballs and a more pronounced ability to sell directed advertising. For a site like ours, where we have never been able to afford to have anyone working even part time to really monetize the site, it could help transform our efforts from legit hobby to legit business. For sites that are already making great money selling ads directly, it might be a real scary proposition to have Facebook disrupting the publishing world, but for a smaller site like ours, it could represent a true democratization of the marketplace, where brand names are minimized and the work itself, if it’s good enough, will get just as much attention as whatever someone writes at any other publication.
It’s scary too though. The best thing about maintaining this URL and this content management system is that it does keep the fence up around our back yard a bit. Where the comments on Facebook about WFNY content isn’t subject to the “Before You Comment” guidelines that we’ve tried to keep over the years. I’m sure there are plenty of other risks that I haven’t thought of just yet, but it seems like this is somewhat inevitable. Just like newspapers have been marginalized as a physical medium, it makes sense to me that someday our individual URLs and websites aren’t going to be important forever either.
On the bright side, the more I think about the web right now, the more it all feels like trickery rather than publishing. Want to get traffic? Be vague in a headline or find something popular that someone else already said. Want to monetize it? Place ads in such a place so that people accidentally click on things! TRAFFIC TRAFFIC TRAFFIC! At some point, I really think we’ll look back on this time on the Internet as positively goofy. Hopefully there will be a day where the very best work is featured most prominently because it was created by the smartest beat writer or the most astute commenter and not the one who works at the biggest company with the most Google juice because they’ve rocked the popularity algorithm.
Sometimes those are the same thing, and I don’t have an ego to think that I’d be a beneficiary except as a reader. That’s good enough for me though. I look forward to it as a reader.
Your weekly moment of soccer zen… it’s all about the (camera) angles
Sometimes I wonder if the zen of the weekly soccer zen occasionally has more to do with the luck of the camera angle with which the moment is caught. This is one of those times. Just love seeing the defender faked out and such an impossibly long shot somehow manage to find an angle with the bend into the goal. Hard to blame a keeper on something like this.
And as a bonus, I’ll illustrate my point with this goal. This goal is really pretty incredible, but the camera angle fails to really make it as compelling as it really could be. Imagine if they had this with one of those fancy Monday Night Football, overhead camera wire shots that turns the game into a third-person shooter.
Ryan Adams did an encore on Letterman…
Everyone posted this clip yesterday and so you might have already seen it, but I don’t really care. I love it so much I want to see it again. Ryan Adams played the same song he made his Letterman debut with Starting to Hurt. It was a great performance and when Letterman was saying goodbye, he asked them to reprise it after shaking their hands and Ryan and his band obliged. They say it isn’t easy to say goodbye, but with Letterman it sure is a lot of fun even though the end is near.
23 Comments
Waiting for a forum to throw out this idea so here goes.
In professional sports, I would like to see a penalty for appeals that are not won. Lets say for instance Tom Brady has a 4 game suspension for this. If he appeals it, he could get 2 or it could go to 6. I think that teams take advantage of this appeal process too much, especially in baseball. If several guys are suspended at the same time, they will spread out their appeals, or delay the suspension long enough that it is most beneficial to the team.
If Brady appeals the suspension, can he do it the week they play Pitts, and then serve the suspension after that game (it probably would not benefit them as the new final game of suspension would be Indy)?
It’s a terrific finish in that first soccer clip, but my favorite part is how the scorer uses that lean to his left as he gathers, which pulls his marker just enough to open the space when the scorer eventually turns to shoot. So well done.
Apparently, someone hacked the Chicago Bulls wikipedia page last night….
http://www.diehardsport.com/nba/someone-hacked-the-bulls-wiki-page-made-lebron-james-the-owner/
http://www.diehardsport.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Screen-Shot-2015-05-14-at-10.36.37-PM.png
http://www.diehardsport.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/CFA8ZCXWgAAlNWa.jpg-large.jpeg
Wetzel has a fantastic way of just using common sense to piece together his thoughts with an amazing level of attention to detail throughout. One of the best.
it works that way in baseball, but in the NFL, they are strict in that you must immediately appeal. being that it is the offseason, the only way that he doesn’t serve the suspension would be if the NFL drags their feet (and they won’t want that to be the story week1, so they won’t).
of course, the issue with Goodell being the guy to hear the appeal is another story.
my favorite part is how the scorer uses that lean to his left as he gathers, which pulls his marker just enough to open the space
my 7yo is also fantastic at that left lean with his marker to pull the color into the open space and stay within the lines. he gets full credit on all coloring assignments that one.
🙂
Someone sent me a pic with Delly listed as the owner. And another with his head photoshopped on the MJ statue.
/crayola’d
Great write up of publishing and mediums such as Facebook. What I’m most concerned with is that what will happen is the opposite of what you suggest: It won’t be a true democratization of content, but instead a place where big names and big money are pushed (because that’s what makes Facebook money) along with clickbait and crap (for the same reason). Good content will almost never see the light of day under Facebook’s algorithms, which contrasts with Google’s rewarding of quality content, because search is a completely different medium than shove it in your face. [I just thought of this difference as I typed it.] Ultimately we’ll have two worlds – one with the crap of Facebook based on what piques people’s interest, and one with the content of Google based on people genuinely searching for answers. Should be an interesting world, with a mix of idiots and searchers. Sigh.
if Google, FB, or someone else (most likely) is able to come up with a model that self-searches to put the quality content “in your face” then they are going to make a ton of money. for instance, if you’ve read the past 4 Wright Thompson pieces, it immediately gives you a link when his next one is pub’d.
the issue, as with most things, is that is an incredibly complex problem and one that smart advertisors will look to undermine once the algorithm is set. so, we need to create a living algorithm that will constantly adjust to the ever-changing landscape and hope that it doesn’t decide that it’s best to just blow up the outside world.
Google Now already does that, actually, and it’s freaking amazing. And scary. But they do a nice job of finding articles that I’d like that I’d have never found otherwise that are high-quality, whereas I feel like FB will quickly become this ever-growing mess of crap for most people based on the clickbait they click on. It kind of already has.
will have to test out Google Now. but, long-term, the one that people prefer is the on that will win out until someone makes something more popular.
That’s my fear, though – it won’t be what people prefer necessarily, but which one is shoved in their face. {shudder}
I must admit I really enjoyed all the irrational Bulls fans on Twitter last night.
The NFL has fumbled so many issues over the past 12 months that they NEED to come down hard on this one. It’s a small bit of gamesmanship but it’s a serious offense. If it was so inane, there wouldn’t be a rule. But there is a rule because the NFL needs standards – an even playing field. This isn’t PED’s (which, laughably, everyone in the league uses) or spying on another team, but it is enough of a violation that it deserves a penalty – and a harsh one – if only to feed the hungry wolves.
There have just been too many instances where this team has pushed past the limits of fairness for me to ever respect them again. I think many fans feel the same way. The NFL has to come down hard in order to save face, for sure, but also to earn back the trust of the fans and the players.
Just because the score of that particular game was not close doesn’t mean the violation should be any less punishable. Brady may have done this in every game this season, and you can be sure that on at least ONE of those occasions he was adequately aided by the smaller balls. Maybe that turned the game into a Pats victory/maybe not. But it could have, and that’s why there are rules.
Lastly, the fact that they are trying to go after Wells, who has a history of being an absolute bulldog, is not smart. I imagine if this goes to court that Tom Brady will have his text records supoenaed. It will damage him beyond repair. The lies they are telling are Armstrong-esque in nature.
JR Smith having fun with Knicks:
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nba-ball-dont-lie/j-r–smith-needles-knicks-on-instagram-after-cavs-advance-to-eastern-conference-finals-170439410.html
Wait, so Ryan Adams played an encore on Letterman and it wasn’t his big hit from that awful Robin Hood movie??
……what a waste…hope he at least played Summer of ’69.
I hope in the course of the appeal the NFL looks into the obvious history of deflating prior to this game and docks them another four games and another firstie and another mill.
Hey Craig, **ICYMI** I wanted to put a finer point on our discussion too and put up a post from the perspective of Andrew Luck. Just gonna leave this here… Andrew Luck responds to Robert Kraft.
Was nice to see Karlos Dansby on the same page: he thinks Brady should be out a full year.
you know that speech in any given sunday? here’s belichick’s version:
life’s a game inches, so is football. .. THE INCHES WE NEED ARE EVERYWHERE AROUND US. .. on this team we
FIGHTCLAWCHEAT for that inch. .. because we know that when we add up all those inches that’s gonna make the difference between winning and losing — BETWEEN LIVING AND DYING!!!!https://youtu.be/WO4tIrjBDkk
every snap in that first half was an inch that the pats stole. 73. inch by inch. how so many are willing to defend the pats right to cheat is simply stunning to me.
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I’m not sure why we’d want to penalize players (or anyone) for exercising their rights. If you appeal a verdict in Cleveland Superior Court, you can demand your rights without penalty. Why is it better to penalize people?
I’m just going to say that deflated balls are a wonderful thing to say over and over again in a pubic forum. Even so, if the Pats can get away with it, then all the teams can get away with it. Ballboy lets a little air out, half the teams probably do it anyway. Don’t be fooled into thinking Tom Brady isn’t a good QB.