For a slightly above average NFL running back, he sure doesn't lack confidence.
Image by Streeter Lecka / Getty Images
I think someone might be losing his mind.
Well, this is gross.
Maybe it's not surprising. He's obsessed, after all.
Here at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference, the Krossover company is demonstrating a fantastic app in which you can test your sports-viewer savvy by watching the first half of a play and trying to predict what happens in the second half. For example, you're shown the beginning of a fast break and asked to choose who you think will ultimately score, or shown pre-snap motion around the line of scrimmage and asked to guess how many defenders will rush the passer. It's incredibly simple, but has the potential to be endlessly complex. (Imagine having to guess between cover-3 and cover-2 coverage, or pick the cut a player should make using the guidelines of the Princeton offense.) The only downside to this game — which isn't yet available to the public — is the fact that it seems like once it's released it will, in short order, destroy the working productivity of the entire planet. (No reason it couldn't be used for soccer.)
One of the games available for testing here at the conference covers referees' calls. You see a clip of two basketball or football players colliding and have to guess: what was called, a block or a charge? Defensive pass interference or no flag?
Here's who's got the current high score.
The last decade of the NFL has hinged on one big decision by Bill Belichick in 2001.
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Folks in the Bay Area have been saying good-bye to Alex Smith for weeks now, and it came as no surprise for any Niners fan from Modesto to Half Moon Bay to hear that Smith had finally been traded. What was surely the most surprising bit of information was the early word on how much the deal might send back — a 2013 second-round pick and a conditional third-rounder next year — from Kansas City, where Smith will be the No. 1 guy once again under new coach Andy Reid. Colin Kaepernick, who nearly led the team to a historic Super Bowl comeback win three weeks ago, is SF's undisputed starter for the foreseeable future, unless something unexpected happens.
It was fitting, then, that news of Smith's inevitable exodus leaked just a couple of news cycles after we learned of Tom Brady's new contract extension, the one that helps the team stay competitive, gives him a raise, and guarantees that he retires as the greatest New England Patriot of all time and one of the top five quarterbacks in NFL history. And the only reason that sentence doesn't solely reside in some fantasy world penned by a 13-year-old Mainer writing NFL fanfic until 3 a.m. every night is because something unexpected happened in Foxborough on Sept. 23, 2001. In the same way that Alex Smith lost his starting job this past season to a concussion, New England's Drew Bledsoe lost his job late that afternoon to a sheared blood vessel in his chest. Tom Brady, an unheralded sixth-round draft pick from Michigan and one-time chubby kid from San Mateo, California, came on in relief and never relinquished his position. Brady went on to lead the team a Super Bowl win that season, never mind the four more appearances (and two wins) that subsequently followed.
There was some middling, healthy debate in San Francisco about whether it was right that Smith lost his position last season through little fault of his own, though fans had seen enough of Smith and been underwhelmed by six-plus seasons of mediocrity. The Patriots faced a much more delicate midseason quarterback controversy in 2001. In many ways, football fans haven't seen such a great QB battle like Brady/Bledsoe since it occurred. (And no, Tebow/Sanchez in New York doesn't count. For it to be a great controversy there should be at least one decent quarterback.) Furthermore, there's a chance we may never see one again that has such far-reaching implications. Because matters shook out the way they did, Brady, head coach Bill Belichick, and some others will be NFL Hall of Famers one day. But it almost never happened that way, and Bostonians were torn for weeks.
As an intern in the Boston Globe's sports department during the Patriots' 2001-02 season, I was prone to saving certain section covers that caught my eye. For reasons that escape me even in hindsight, I kept two that pertain to Brady. The first came from the days that followed Drew Bledsoe's clearance by the team's medical staff, when Belichick and the rest of the organization had to make the call as to whether Brady, who'd gone a respectable 5-2 since stepping in as the starter, would continue in that role or whether Bledsoe, who'd suffered his "sheared blood vessel" thanks to New York Jets linebacker Mo Lewis, might return as the main man in Foxborough. As you can see from the Globe-conducted polls at the left, public opinion was certainly in Brady's favor, but the consensus was not unanimous. Belichick, who was still fairly unproven in his own right as a head coach at that point, had to make a decision that, no matter what, would be unpopular with some segment of his team's fan base.
He stuck with Brady. The following week, the Patriots lost to the team they would later meet (and beat) in the Super Bowl, the St. Louis Rams, and public opinion had started to turn the other way.
That story — plus LeBron's pre-game dunks, the badasses in Indiana, and more — in BuzzFeed Sports' Five Point Play.
Image by Ray Stubblebine / Reuters
Stephen Curry had a hell of a week. First, he went for 38 points on 20 shots in a loss to the Indiana Pacers, which also featured him trying to fight Roy Hibbert, who outweighs him by 95 pounds and outheights him by a foot. Then he scored 54 in a loss to the Knicks. Between those two games, he shot 18 of 23 from three-point range, padding his already astronomical percentage from beyond the arc to a ridiculous 44.7%. What we as spectators witnessed was an NBA player announcing himself as a titan to the world at large — if not a star, than at least a planet, with a significant and persuasive gravitational pull.
Because that's the thing about Curry right now — not only is he playing tremendous basketball, but he's doing it in a way that seems both unsustainable and unstoppable. It's unsustainable because you can't consistently make 18 of 23 three-point shots, no matter how pure your stroke is, particularly when you rarely set your feet to shoot and tend to play offense like a jackrabbit, bounding from spot to spot before firing away again. It's unstoppable for the same reasons: most players in this league, no matter hot they get, will never shoot 18 of 23 from beyond the arc in a two-game span, even if nobody bothers to cover them. And make no mistakes, players are trying to cover Curry; it's just that, when a player can shoot on the fly like he can, and he can run, too, taking the ball up the court in a negligible few seconds, there's not much you can do.
However, you'll notice something else about those two games: the Warriors lost both. Despite Curry's heroics, Golden State's defense is still a dreary nightmare — they gave up 108 points to the PACERS — and, unlike the Rockets, their offense isn't quite good enough to make up for it. The Warriors are on a long-due skid, and it's one that will likely carry over into the playoffs, where even Stephen Curry won't be good enough to get them through a brutal Western Conference bracket.
That being said, make room for Curry's name in the league's point-guard conversation. Chris Paul and Tony Parker have the top two spots locked up, but Curry's right in the running, alongside Russell Westbrook, Kyrie Irving, and Jrue Holiday, for third place.
Speaking of the Pacers, their 108 points against Golden State might have more to do with how bad the Warriors' defense is, but it also shows a certain trend for Indiana. The league's best defense — they're surrendering only 98.9 points per 100 possessions, a fantastic number — has helped Indiana go 18-9 in 2013, and the offense, which recently added former #1 option Danny Granger back into the mix, has finally started to improve, managing to score over 100 in four of its last six games. More importantly, the Pacers have a late-game option in Paul George, which is a must for any team hoping to succeed in the playoffs. Throw in the intimidation factor that they gained after Hibbert and co. brawled with the Warriors, and the playoff future starts to look bright in Indiana. Granger has been horrid so far, but he's only played in three games; if he can get back to even a decent fraction of his past effectiveness, and George continues to score, not only might the Pacers be the only team able to beat the Heat — the Heat might be the only team able to beat the Pacers.
Guys, it had nothing to do with the fact he was 7-over par.
Image by Stuart Franklin / Getty Images
Image by Stuart Franklin / Getty Images
Wha?! Why?
Source: lyapalater
Source: Vogue
Source: lyapalater
Iman Shumpert could play for the Red Bulls!
Source: youtube.com
Phaidra Knight wants to go to the 2014 Olympics for bobsledding. But she needs some help.
Image by Bryn Lennon / Getty Images
Image by Mike Coppola / Getty Images
Mo refers to herself as a “dirty Irish girl.” Mind, meet gutter.
Source: johmydepp
Total badassery!
A 3-D representation of hero-ball.
Image by Harry How / Getty Images
A UC-San Diego economist and a Microsoft researcher from New York have disproven the long-held conventional wisdom that Kobe Bryant is a patient teammate who reacts to Laker struggles by trying even harder to get his teammates involved on offense.
Just kidding, of course. What the researchers actually found, in the course of researching a Sloan Analytics Conference paper about how teams' strategies change depending on whether they're trailing or leading, was a striking visual demonstration of just how extreme Kobe's hero-ball tendencies become when games are slipping away from his team. (The paper's main argument is intriguing as well — the authors believe that teams with a lead become too conservative about taking three-pointers, and that trailing teams' desperation often inspires them to play with more strategic effectiveness than they would otherwise.)
Looking specifically at Bryant, the authors came up with the striking chart below. In most game situations, Bryant's usage rate — a measure of how often his team's possessions end with him shooting or turning the ball over — are on par with a typical star offensive player. But when it's getting to be crunch time and the Lakers are tied or trailing, Bryant goes nuts. And the worse they're losing, the more he shoots. Look at this illustration rocket upward in the left front corner:
To put that number in context, Allen Iverson's usage rate at his ball-dominating peak was 37.8%. In other words, when the Lakers are in trouble in the fourth quarter, Kobe — a guy whose teammates have included Shaq, Pau Gasol, Dwight Howard and Steve Nash — becomes a bigger ballhog than Allen Iverson was in the era in which the 76ers officially changed the name of their team to "Allen Iverson and Eleven Guys Named Bill Who We Found Playing Pickup At The Y."
He threatened to quit. We're lucky he didn't.
Rah! Rah! Ouch.
Via: cheerleaderfail.com
Via: cheerleaderfail.com
Via: gifbin.com
Via: cheerleaderfail.com
Mind-bogglizing.
GAHHH.
Ibaka denied intentionally hurting Griffin: "He hit my hands away. He's strong, so when he grabs you, your jersey or whatever, and you try to defend yourself and rebound. So maybe you can do some move, not to hurt, just to get good position. But then something happens where you get hurt in the paint. It's not anything where I want to try to hurt him. I'm not that kind of person. I just try to play hard, and that's it. "If you can see the replay, you can see he grabbed my jersey first so I wanted to try to defend myself. Not to hurt him."
Image by Stephen Dunn / Getty Images
This is not cool.
These are the greatest baseball cards in the history of man and dog-kind.
The website Old Time Family Baseball has done a tremendous job of compiling some of the weirdest baseball cards ever released: 1993 Milk Bone-sponsored cards with players and their dogs. But what if the dogs' and players' faces switched? WHAT THEN?
Her name is Terra and she brings girl power to a new level. Watch her trounce the poor little boy she's up against in this dance battle.
Via: youtube.com
