Tuesday 9/24/24
Here's why no one--including Patrick Mahomes--is going to match Tom Brady: Brady was amazing in the first half of his career and even better in the second. You might be able to match his first decade, but you won't come close to his second. He was elite for so long and there was no drop-off in his game. He dialed in on his fitness and his discipline. Look at Mahomes already. Does he look like he's in great shape to you? No. I'm hearing people say that the Chiefs can go undefeated this year. Here's what I've seen: A team winning with smoke and mirrors. They're not so much as making key, big plays as they are getting key, big calls. That's how they're edging people. Slipping past them.
I think the current NFL product is very lackluster. This may be worst I've seen the league. There are no great teams, there are no very good teams, and I don't think anyone is all that good, period. I think quarterback play is as lackluster as it's been in decades. What's decades? Call it since the 1950s or 1940s. People get worse at things. They're less creative, less driven.
Everything changes to accommodate everyone else. That is, everything waters itself down. The NBA is less about basketball than it is the three-point shot. The sport is a shot. These NFL games are ugly. I don't mean ugly in the good sense of defensive brawls with teeth-rattling hits all over the field in the mud. I mean they're about teams struggling and then somebody wins which often has a lot to do with getting a pass interference call or playing more conservatively. You do win now by playing not to lose because both teams are trying not to lose and somebody has to prevail. Look at at all of these QB stat lines of something like 18 for 29 for 178 yards, a TD and no pics. Victory!
It's boring. But people get dumber and dumber every day, and it takes less and less to keep them entertained. Anything that's inherently entertaining and can be entertaining for an intelligent person is too complicated for them, requires too much concentration. People like football because it's the perfect sport for an age in which we keep getting stupider. Each play is three seconds long. Does anyone watch without stuffing themselves? People love that. Drinking? Look at all of the stupid, mindless shit that people find entertaining. Like monkeys. You give a monkey a baton and it's like, "Wow, this is awesome." That's people now with TikTok. Mr. Beast. Barstool. Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift cutaways. Talk about Taylor Swift cutaways. Instagram.
Give them anything more than these things and their watered down intellects and corroded brains can't keep up. Their DNA has been over-made by their phones and idiotic video bursts. They can't think, they can't read, they can't think critically, they can't come up with an original thought, they take every cue in their lives from what everyone else is doing and how everyone else is, they cut every corner they can, they're always trying to do less, they're always going down and never up, and they're so lazy and weak and full of excuses and lies and they believe their excuses are valid reasons and their lies are truths because other people make who are lying and making excuses make excuses and lie for them. All truth is offensive and usually taken for a personal attack. No one is strong enough to face who they are, what they aren't. People don't change. They don't grow. They find ways to self-congratulate themselves for their bad qualities.
Here's something wholly typical of how people are. Just about everyone. The other day I saw that this MLB player--I don't even know who--was optioned to Triple A because he stayed out until 8 in the morning at a casino and the team had a day game. It doesn't matter if they had a night game. There's a curfew. There was a time when any person would understand how rational this was. Today? No way. Everyone was like, "Since when does your employer have control over your private life?"
It is amazing to me--and the amazement never wears off--how stupid everyone is. I can hardly believe this is real. Our world. That life is not some terrible nightmare now. I pinch myself as if I might wake up. I don't understand how humans can all be so dumb. It has changed. It was never like it is now. And the lack of standards. The complete absence of character. Of competence. Of professionalism.
Okay, let's say you could stay out all night, and go from the casino, reeking of booze, to the ball park. That's professional? That's the best you can do? That's putting your best self forward? No wonder so many people are shit stains--look at all of the parenting. Because these people are parents. Most parents have no business being parents. They're just snapping off more human misfires like themselves. They're not smart enough to teach their kids anything. They don't have any values or standards. They don't have morals, principles.
Imagine saying to your kid, "You stay out at that casino boozing, show up to the park a few hours after, you don't need sleep, you're a man, you do what you want, that's how I raised you."
But leaving aside, people just can't cogitate. They can't get the wheels to turn in order to think. You're paying someone millions and millions of dollars to play a game. You have such a financial investment in that employee. So, yeah, you probably shouldn't be cool with your employee drinking all night and then showing up for work without any sleep. This isn't a tech bro or a CPA or a professor. This is someone whose job involves their body and the highest level of physical performance. How about if it was a surgeon? Your loved one is going under the knife in the morning, and the surgeon who will be cutting into her brain just came from the casino where he'd been all night. Would you like that? It's his time, right? He wasn't at work.
Then people said if the player's performance slipped, you could just get rid of him anyway. If there weren't these clauses in contracts that you can't do things like this, you'd be cutting a player and paying him the millions of dollars of his guaranteed contract not to work. Does that seem reasonable or like good business?
I can't believe I have to write some of the things I write in these pages. It's a lot of things, actually. It shows you how crazy the world now is that these are truths that not only need to be said, but are highly controversial to say. And offensive.
Because if you don't just say, "Do whatever you want, you are amazing, you could never ever do anything wrong, you are the best, everything about you is the best, and you being 350 pounds makes you so sexy, and you being incapable of writing a single grammatically correct five-word sentence doesn't mean you're not the smartest person in every room on earth, the leading expert on everything from space to politics to the Beatles and stuff you've never even heard of yet, and oh yeah, because you're in a fantasy league you could definitely run an NFL team and would preside over a dynasty, and you over here who is some crazy cat lady who decided yesterday she was going to self-publish a 'romantasy' are totally, totally, totally a real writer and as legit as any writer has ever been," etc. etc. etc. etc., people lose their minds, or they would, if they had minds.
They're just so much much mental flab. Mental lard asses who can't get off the proverbial couch where the shit is spoon fed to them. That's their lives, they bitch, they talk out of their asses, bitch some more, do more ass talk, and then croak and it ultimately means nothing that they ever even existed, because there are a billion people exactly like them who think like they do--which is to say, never think--and talk exactly like them and know nothing like they never knew anything.
I can have on some random sporting event now--a quasi-amateur sporting event--and am more entertained. It might be rugby, field hockey, women's college basketball, and there's a more arresting human element. This is the guy who writes about the NFL and talks about the NFL, so you can't be all "But but but but but." I'm the actual expert. I just see things for what they are. And here's something I've realized: For a big-time professional league to thrive, it needs great teams. Just because someone wins back to back doesn't mean they're a great team. It means they won back to back. Someone always has to win the thing. You are better off with a league that has great teams and a few Sisters of the Poor type of teams than you are a league full of "Eh, whatever" teams, which is what the NFL is now.
And I'll do this, too, with the Patriots. People won't like this, but do you know what the Patriots' last great team was? The 2004 team. They won a ton after that, of course, but why? The quarterback. Yes, there were some great players--Gronkowski--but that 2016 team wasn't great. The quarterback was so great and smoothed a lot of stuff over.
You need great teams. Look at baseball this year. Who is even very good? Okay, the playoffs will be wide open. But you stand a great chance of having some random ass team get hot for a bit and win the title. And if you ran it again twenty other times, they wouldn't sniff the championship. You like that? Randomness as this dominant aspect? I don't.
That doesn't mean I don't love the surprise team winning it all. But I want the underdog to have their big moment, not some team to have their fortnight of fortune. The 1960 Pirates--yes. This year's Tigers, not really. I don't think the Tigers can win it, for the record, but it wouldn't be shocking to me if they got to the World Series and here we are with a week to go, three Wild Card slots, a boatload of teams making the playoffs, and they might not even get in.
Yes, I wanted the Red Sox to get in this same way and have the same kind of run that would be more about that randomness than how good they were, but that's because I root for the Red Sox and it would at least give me something to watch later in the day after I started work at two in the morning. But I know what it would mean. I wouldn't be operating under any illusions. This would instead have been about own Boston-based self-interests.
I look back on the 2021 Red Sox and you know what I think? They kind of blew. They weren't good at all. Kicking the ball all over the yard, running into outs. No fundamentals. (The Sox are always wretched now with fundamentals, but Alex Cora is a great manager, right?) And they got within two games of the World Series. That whole season was a mirage. Everything's so watered down that you get a few breaks, you click for ten days, and there you are. So many things feel less legit. They are less legit. Yes, I know, it's up there on baseball-reference, but those Red Sox weren't some real contending team. The Sox easily could have been 81-81 that year, the same as they're on pace to finish this year. You could throw these garbage Sox into the playoffs and they could win a round against a team that had a bye because they were sitting around.
But yeah, Mahomes isn't going to match Brady. Later I'll set the record straight on what Shohei Ohtani actually is historically with basic, undeniable facts that are available to everyone in the world but apparently are only accessed and known by me, which I'll share on here and people can do that thing where they get incredibly angry that I've said the truth but are incapable of doing anything at all to countervail it because it is the truth and they understand that it's the truth, which doesn't stop them from getting angry and actually makes them more so. Look at all of these people in publishing.
