Monday, March 18, 2024

March Maddening

The calendar’s best sporting event is upon us, which seems a good time to point out that we should enjoy it while it lasts in its present form because the Big Hats appear to be considering ways to alter the experience and to further enrich the few. 

We speak, of course, of the NCAA basketball tournament. The NCAAs are three weeks of the best that college basketball offers, with intriguing matchups and compelling performances and buzzer-beaters, with just enough upsets and unlikely teams to mask how tilted the overall field is toward the privileged. I’ve whipped that dead nag previously, so I’ll go light in this installment. 

Going forward, the changes being contemplated are in the name of progress, evolution, and governance. Squint and those components might read like “money.” The tournament’s current format has been in place since 1985, when the field expanded to 64 teams. A 65th team and play-in game were added in 2001. Three more teams and the “First Four” concept in 2011 gave us the present 68-team field – 32 conference champions, 36 at-large invitations. 

Discussion about expanding the tournament to 96 teams has been around for more than a decade, a truly terrible idea that I’m convinced will come eventually. It embodies the questionable notion that “if some is good, more is better.” An expanded field would provide at least an extra week of programming and content, which means larger payouts from TV networks. 

The primary reason I think an expanded field is coming has more to do with football than basketball. Football-fueled expansion and realignment has created 16- and 18-team mega-conferences, with no telling what sort of consolidation might occur in the next several years. Those leagues and schools are going to expect (read: demand) the same NCAA Tournament participation percentages in the new landscape. In other words, four or five or six teams from a historic 10- or 12-team league will become seven or eight or nine teams from oversized collections. 

For reference, in the past decade more than 81 percent of at-large bids to the NCAA field have gone to the Power Six conferences (ACC, SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, Big East, and the soon-to-be late, lamented Pac-12). Add the recent ascendant and multi-bid Mountain West Conference, and the remaining 25 leagues might be fighting for scraps. 

In addition, what might NCAA governance look like in the future? Will there even be an NCAA? The power football conferences, bolstered by gajillions in TV money, are doing their own thing. What passed for NCAA leadership has been all but neutered as the organization flails about trying to get a handle on athlete empowerment. Who and what might administer the basketball tournament? 

ESPN snoop Pete Thamel recently posted a piece that said talks are ongoing about a possible 80-team hoops tournament. Plenty of people are quoted in the piece calling the NCAA Tournament a “treasure” and hoping to preserve it in something resembling its present form, that the model shouldn’t simply be blown up and re-created simply because a new power structure is in place. Yet SEC commissioner Greg Sankey, a smart fellow who can step into a leadership vacuum when he sees it, might have given away the goal within the penthouse boardroom: “Nothing remains static. I think we have to think about the dynamics around Division I and the tournament.” He pointed out UCLA’s recent run from First Four to Final Four and Syracuse’s run to the Sweet 16 from a play-in appearance and said, “That just tells you that the bandwidth inside the top 50 is highly competitive. We are giving away highly competitive opportunities for automatic qualifiers (from lower-rated leagues), and I think that pressure is going to rise as we have more competitive basketball leagues at the top end because of expansion.” 

There you have it. The NCAA Tournament not as (relatively) inclusive reward for a season’s accomplishment, but an additional exposure for the membership’s elite brands. Kinda makes you wish for something more pure and less mercenary, like an Apple stock buyback or a Silicon Valley IPO.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Pluck of the Irish

Only fitting on this day that we celebrate Ireland rugby's hard-fought 17-13 win over a game Scotland squad in Dublin yesterday. The win on the final matchday of the 2024 Six Nations gave the Irish back to back titles. The hard-luck Scots dropped all the way to fourth in the table. 

So if you have occasion today, and I suspect you do, tip one back in honor of the lads in green.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Annoying Words, Redux

Nearly 15 years ago, in a very different age, Whitney took to these interwebz to decry the use of the trite in most conversation and how it signals a lack of creativity. At least that's how I took it.

Among other things, he took aim at "it is what it is". He had no way of knowing at the time that my father would fall back on that phrase to deflect well-meaning concern from folks worried about the progress of the cancer that would eventually take him. Fucking cancer.

I digress.

And I write what follows with some trepidation, because "it is what it is" became meaningful enough to me that a graphic variant of the phrase is tattooed on my arm. Let's hope nobody here has cause to claim "thank you for all that you do".

I don't love the ubiquitous "thank you for your service" many people offer to our military and veterans, but it's a damn sight better than how we treated uniformed service members early in my life, and it at least acknowledges a specific sacrifice made.

"Thank you for all that you do", on the other hand, is the absolute bare minimum one human can offer another. It requires no creativity, no active thought about what the received actually, y'know, does. It's the gratitudinal equivalent to saying "you are here". 

In first encountered the phrase in question in a corporate setting, when some anodyne executive thanked a team by using it. I knew from the moment he said it that he didn't really know what the team did or how they contributed. Or if he did know, didn't care enough to take the 30 seconds to think about it and offer a tiny little customized grace note.

Once I started hearing it, I became attuned to it. Politicians say it as pablum to feed constituents. Parents say it to teachers - guarantee Dave has heard it (or at least had it directed to him - not sure Dave listens much to other people). 

Look, I know that cliches exist for a reason - they're a shorthand that can be helpful in certain situations. And I'm prone to my own verbal and written crutches (this sentence offers one such exhibit - I start way too many sentences with "and"- this is the second one in this short post). Dammit, though, when I'm trying to tell someone I appreciate them, I try really hard to be sincere, and at least offer an inflection that conveys I mean what I'm saying. 

It's possible I'm becoming (even more) curmudgeonly as I age, and that I protest too much about an innocuous platitude. I can only offer my own testimony here. You may not share my opinion. If that's the case, I hope you have a great day, and thank you for all that you do.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Best of Enemies

Last Sunday, Jurgen Klopp's Liverpool tied Pep Guardiola's Manchester City, 1-1, in a cracker of a Premier League match at Liverpool's Anfield Stadium. The two teams are separated by one point in the league table with 10 matches to play. To make things even more potentially epic, Arsenal is tied with Liverpool and technically atop the table on point differential.

In late January, Klopp announced his intent to leave Liverpool at the end of the season after 8 and a half years with the club. During that span, Klopp won a Premier League title, a Champions League trophy, the FIFA Club World Cup, the FA Cup, the League Cup and the UEFA Super Cup. He will go down as one of the most beloved managers in club history, as much for his Teutonic Care Bear personality and rollicking, fast-paced, pressing football as for his results.

@meninblazers JURGEN KLOPP GIVES THE BEST HUGS. "It's very important that you're empathic. That you try to understand the people around you and give real support to the people around you." #LFC #Liverpool #Klopp ♬ original sound - Men in Blazers

While Liverpool fans revere Klopp, one imagines that they wonder what might have been if Guardiola hadn't been at City at the same time (and the Emirati-owned club hadn't spent prolifically - and allegedly illegally - on amassing exceptional talent). Guardiola has been in Manchester since 2016, and won five Premier League crowns, two FA Cups, four League Cups, a Champions League title, a UEFA Super Cup and a FIFA Club World Cup.

If the results on the field in England were tilted towards Guardiola, the two managers are actually evenly matched across their careers. Over the course of their careers, the pair have met 29 times (Before England, Klopp coached Borussia Dortmund in Germany against Guardiola's Bayern Munich). Klopp's teams have won 12, Guardiola's 11, with six draws. No manager in world football has beaten Guardiola more times than Klopp.

There are rare occasions in sport and, really, in any endeavor, where rivals compete intensely while maintaining great personal respect and in doing both, elevate their profession. Klopp and Guardiola have undeniably changed English football from a smashmouth war of attrition to an attractive, pressing, intense competition.

And the two know it and respect the others' contribution to the game. Klopp recently said of Guardiola, "I knew 3,000 players who were better than me but I still loved the game. It never frustrated me, he made me a better manager. I know I am not bad but he is the best." 

For his part, Guardiola admitted, "Personally he has been my biggest rival from when he was at Dortmund and I was at Bayern Munich. He will be missed, personally I will miss. I am pleased because without him I will sleep a little bit better the night before we play against Liverpool! But I wish him all the best."

The two exchanged words and a warm embrace after Sunday's classic. We won't likely see a better rivalry any time soon.

Monday, March 11, 2024

We're a Joey Votto Fan Site Now

I come before you today to rectify a great wrong. We have failed as a collective in our duty to the world. How is it possible that we've never feted Joey Votto, among the Gheorghiest athletes of our time?
The 40 year-old Votto signed a minor league deal this week with his hometown Toronto Blue Jays after 17 seasons with the Cincinnati Reds, where he became a fixture on the field and in the community. Votto has 356 career homers and a slash line of .409/.511/.920, making him among the most excellent players of his era. He's also unquestionably at or near the very top of the list of funniest and least self-important major leaguers. 

We've compiled a handful of videos that tell the story better than our words could. Here's hoping Votto makes the Jays' major league roster and gives us a few more of these.

Friday, March 08, 2024

Gheorghe Explains: We Need to Talk About North Carolina

As we semi-officially enter the serious phase of what promises to be a deeply unserious, moronic, and fury inducing election season, it's time to welcome back G:TB's semi-recurring exposition of the political landscape and the forces afoot in the land. Today we'll turn our gaze to the Tar Heel state, which just served up a gubernatorial candidate for the ages. And by ages, we mean the Dark Ages.

Last Tuesday, in a widely expected vote, the North Carolina GOP nominated current Lt. Governor Mark Robinson as its candidate for the state's top spot in November. Robinson is an orotund firebrand, an unabashed culture warrior and evangelical Christian. He's also at or near the top of the list of opportunistic MAGA loons loosed by the decay of the once-coherent conservative movement.

Consider this small sampling of headlines from news outlets across the globe in the wake of Robinson's nomination:





I suspect you get the point, gentle reader, and so we won't belabor it. What we will note is that Robinson represents the furtherance of an ideology based not so much on policy or a philosophy of governance but on grievance. Robinson and the GOP don't care about getting things done (note as evidence the abject inability of the U.S. House of Representatives to legislate and chew gum at the same time). Rather, the modern GOP cares about making the right people ripshit frothing angry, propriety be damned.

Like the Ur-MAGA himself, Robinson has filed for multiple bankruptcies, has a history of avoiding, evading, and just not paying taxes, and has admitted to paying for a woman he impregnated to have an abortion. He's an objectively shitty person and a charlatan, and the North Carolina GOP voters Do. Not. Care.

Robinson will face Democrat Josh Stein in the general election. Stein is an earnest, ultra-competent, highly qualified public servant. He's been North Carolina's Attorney General since 2017. Prior to that, he served three terms in the state senate. Given the dichotomy between his accomplishments and mien and Robinson's, this shouldn't be a contest. And every report since the primary concluded suggests that it'll be neck and neck. For fuck's sake, North Carolina. 

Fevers tend to break eventually. That, or they kill their hosts. I hope, fervently, that the MAGA fever currently infecting our body politic will break this November. I fear, genuinely, that it won't and that the consequences could prove fatal to the way we perceive ourselves as a people. 

Prepare to man the battlements, good people of Gheorghe. Winter is here.

Thursday, March 07, 2024

RIP Steve Lawrence

Steve Lawrence passed away today at age 88. For you young folks (including me), he was a singer and actor known to our elders and Vegas-goers of a generation or two ago. You could look him up.

But I'd rather post Mike Myers' rendition of the man, as seen in one of my favorite SNL sketches.

Enjoy.