All That and a Bag of Mail

It’s Friday and we’re off with the mailbag. 

Our beaver pelt trader of the week is Lamar Odom. Just because he managed to turn a drug filled multi-day binge with hookers into a way to END HIS DIVORCE.

He won Khloe back by using so many drugs and banging so many hookers that he almost died. 

This is so counterintuitive it’s brilliant.

On to the mailbag.  

Clint writes:

“My wife and I are currently at Baptist Hospital awaiting the arrival of our 3rd child. By this time, were pretty relaxed and just enjoying the moment.

We’re both products of Lipscomb University, so conservative in nature. My question: what are the top 5 things NOT to say while your wife is pushing?”

1. “I am never eating a roast beef sandwich again.” 

2. “Yay, triplets!”

3. “Your vagina is so huge!”

Seriously, I don’t care how massive your penis is. Once you see a baby’s head come out of a vagina, the idea that you were ever satisfying this thing was laughable. 

4. “This hospital has the hottest nurses I’ve ever seen. Their bodies are perfect!”  

5. “So, I’ve been thinking, this whole marriage thing really isn’t working out very well for me.”   

Good luck with number three. 

Luke writes:

“If you took the five major U.S. sports (baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and soccer) and placed their fanbases from left to right on the political spectrum, what would the order be?

Basically, you’re ranking the fanbases from the highest percentage of fans who tend to side with liberal politics, to the highest percentage of fans who tend to side with conservative politics. My girlfriend and I have been debating this, and we have come up with different rankings.

I believe only a gay, liberal, conservative, moderate, Muslim such as yourself can come up with a definitive ranking.”

Great question.

I’ve added in NASCAR and PGA to the list as well.

Here is my political scale from left to right: (Note, i am doing zero research on this, it’s just my opinion without any analysis at all, you guys can look up other studies and see how I do relative to the actual results).

Basketball, soccer, baseball, hockey, football, PGA, NASCAR

I don’t think there’s any doubt that basketball and soccer are the most left leaning. Black people watch NBA at a much higher rate than white people do and their votes are overwhelmingly democratic. Soccer is the most popular on the east and west coasts, there’s zero doubt that its fans are more liberal in nature.

I also think there’s zero doubt that NASCAR is the most conservative, being Southern dominated and white, while the PGA is the second most conservative. Golf fans tend to be older white men with ample disposable income, the foundation of the Republican party. The fact that NASCAR guy and country club Republican support the same political party remains hysterical to me. This is exactly how the Civil War went, by the way, the rich slaveholders with tremendous financial risk in the perpetuation of slavery got the poor white people to fight a war to help preserve slavery for them.  

I’d say baseball and hockey are right in the middle, because while the baseball demographic skews older and whiter, it’s really popular in the northeast, which is an era predominately filled with blue state voters. Hockey is the whitest team sport in the country. Seriously, go to an NHL game and look for minority fans there. It’s like 99% white. The overwhelming whiteness is skewed by the fact that most people in the South and Southwest don’t care about the sport so you end up basically analyzing the political leanings of the Midwest and Northeast, an area where Democrats tend to win. So the politics on hockey would lean right, but not insanely so. 

Football, if you combine college football with the NFL, is more conservative than it is liberal, although it’s moderated by the fact that football is so popular you get a wide swath of the American public. Here’s a crazy political stat for you, did you know that 90% of white men in the South voted Republican in the last presidential election. 

90%!

Anyway, I’m pretty confident in this political analysis of sports fans. 

Also, can we end the social media trend of people responding to large swaths of data by pointing out that this doesn’t apply to them. This is all social media is these days. “How dare you say that men like sports more than women? I’m a woman and I like sports more than my boyfriend! So you’re wrong and sexist.”

This is like every post on Deadspin, by the way.

Yes, you’re all so unique, what a beautiful pretty flower you are!  

Ryan writes:

“Okay, here goes. Theoretically speaking what college football matchup for the national title game would get the best ever rating? Anything goes that is somewhat possible. So you couldn’t say Team A has an alien for a qb or something. I think I got it. Lets say sometime soon Notre Dame cancels its series with Navy for whatever reason. Navy comes up with that magical season and goes undefeated. They have a set of brothers that are absolute stud players and only choose Navy because their dad and grandpa are Navy grads and lifers. Navy rides them to a magical season and makes the CFB playoff. Notre Dame does as well and they both win to face off for all the marbles. Can you imagine the rating this would pull? Especially with a military school in there. I think everyone with a pulse including non-sports fans would tune in with the Navy/American pride angle to this matchup.”

Navy would be a disaster for the college football rating. The patriotism angle would be eclipsed by the, “They ain’t played anybody,” crowd. In case you haven’t been paying attention, no one in college football has ever played anybody. That’s like 95% of the Tweets I get after I post my top ten every week.  

I think the best rating you could do right now would be Ohio State against Alabama. You get the Big Ten and the SEC and you get the Urban Meyer vs. Nick Saban angle. College football is unique because it isn’t a city sport. So whereas in pro sports you want New York and Los Angeles because those big cities are more likely to pay attention if their team is playing, it really doesn’t apply as much in college sports.  

I know we just saw Bama-Ohio State last year, but I think that actually increases interest this year. 

The bigger issue is this — ratings are determined by how close the game is more than the teams involved. That is, if the game stays close into the fourth quarter the audience continues to build. So it’s better to have, say, Clemson against Utah — which is probably the single worst hypothetical title game I could come up with this year in terms of ratings — decided on the final play than it is Alabama-Ohio State with one team winning by three touchdowns. 

It’s also underrated how much putting this game on ESPN cuts out a casual, dumb audience. We like to treat ratings numbers as sacrosanct, but the reality is more people would be rated as watching if this game was on ABC. That’s not really because more people watch, it’s just because ratings measurement is horribly flawed, old people still watch network TV more than young people.

Did you know that sports bars don’t count at all in the overall number of viewers? Nor do gyms or any other public places with televisions, like airports or even plazas with huge outdoor screens showing the game.

Of course, the ratings also end up much higher for post-sports on television too. Most sports fans are fairly dumb. That is, you’d be amazed to look at ratings numbers on the morning after a big game. They’re still high even though the game has been over for hours. 

Why?

Because so many fans fall asleep — or pass out — with their TVs on from the night before. I’m not kidding about this, the rating for a six am SportsCenter on New Year’s morning after the college football playoff aired the night before will still be millions of viewers. Now some of those people will wake up in the early morning hours and turn their TVs back on, but the majority of them have passed out or fallen asleep. 

Voila, ratings magic. 

 

Todd writes:

“When A&M beat ASU to start the season all my Aggie friends said it was an upset win. I say that if you are favored, even though you are ranked lower than the team you beat, it’s not an upset. Please rule on this. Your decision has beer riding on it.”

That’s stupid, it’s not an upset if Vegas favors your team to win. And the Aggies were favored to beat Arizona State.

Otherwise you’re allowing the opinion of sixty dumb sportswriters in a poll to override the opinion of the smartest sports minds in Las Vegas.  

We were actually talking about this last night before the Countdown Show on FS1. Fox has the Utah at USC game this weekend. And I was saying that you have to address the fact that Vegas has USC favored in this game. To me, it’s a major part of the storyline. It speaks to the fact that people don’t believe in 6-0 Utah. If I were Kyle Whittingham, I would hammer home to my team the fact that they’re an underdog in this game. 

I think it’s one of the rare occasions when the line is actually going to impact how the game is played. 

Being an underdog is a positive for Utah. 

Ben writes:

“Unfortunately, there will never be another Steve Spurrier. The quotes, the antics, and the unpredictability will never be duplicated.

Among the many things he did during his 26 year career, perhaps his most impressive accomplishment is being the only coach to ever win the Heisman as a player and coach a Heisman winning player.

What are the odds of this ever happening again? Are there even any former Heisman winners that are currently coaching? Something tells me RGIII and Manziel aren’t going into coaching when they hang up the cleats.”

My initial thought: It will definitely happen again because Heisman winners don’t necessarily have great NFL careers and some of them will end up coaching in college because they have to work full time. 

But crazily enough no Heisman trophy winner is currently coaching in college. So maybe I’m an idiot and this actually won’t happen again. 

Bryan writes:

“I’m from Northeast Mississippi. My grandparents lived in this tiny little town that only had a yellow light on the highway telling people to slow down. Anyway, in the pasture back behind their house, there was an old wooden shed filled with junked farm equipment and other stuff. My brother and I had hiked back there because we were told there were some old 1930’s bootleg whiskey bottles and we wanted them.

We open the door and can see them on a window sill across the room. The room is completely filled with old metal junk. We’re going to have to crawl across the top of everything to get them. Our first thought is who the hell knows what is living in there. Old wooden shed, pasture, rural South, you know there’s a snake or two. Just a matter of what kind. So we step in and immediately hear a buzzing sound. We look to the right and there’s a rattler. A big, fat one too. So we step out and think about how we’re going to do this.

Enter grandma. She has come out to check on us. Complete in her slippers and housecoat in the middle of a blazing hot afternoon. We explain the situation and she says “You want my gun?” Her gun was a small Beretta pistol, 1 in the chamber and 9 in the clip. She was fond of firing it off in the front yard to scare off stray dogs. Remember, this is a small shed, filled with rusted metal. Who the hell knows where the bullet would ricochet. We tell her no, but she insists. She comes back with it and is preparing to reach around the corner of the door, fire it off with her left hand (she’s a righty) to kill the snake. We finally convince her this is a bad idea.

But this isn’t the end of the gun. When we moved her shortly thereafter to a retirement home, she took the gun with her and slept with it under her pillow. My father had to sit her down and say “Miss Janie, you can’t have a gun in the retirement home. They just won’t allow it.” She finally gave it up to my uncle.” 

I love Southern grandmas. 

Rob writes:

“It is currently 12:20 in the AM and I am hunkered down in my room studying for a nearing exam. I want to go out to the kitchen to scrounge up some grub, but my roommate has a female over in the living room, one that I am not acquainted with nor do I really want to be acquainted with. He has had her over a few times recently and they are both always out in the living room. Am I in the right saying that whenever a guy with roommates has a random girl over, they should hang out in the guy’s bedroom? To me, this seems best for all parties involved. The roommates are free to use any part of the apartment/ house, and the girl is spared having to watch her hookup’s roommate cook spaghetti in his underwear whilst humming “Jump” by Van Halen.”

The living room?

Is he courting? Is it 1847?

They should definitely be in his room. 

J writes:

“So this has been an ongoing debate at work for the last year or so. One of my co-workers is about 25+ years older than I am. He is of the opinion that blue jean/denim jackets are a must have if you are a male.”

You can’t wear a blue jean jacket unless you own a farm with cattle. 

This is a rule that all men should follow. 

Phil writes:

“As I found myself watching the Mississippi State Louisiana Tech game Saturday (Yes, you’ve turned me into a degenerate gambler so I now spend Saturdays watching irrelevant games such as this one) I couldn’t help but think, “Good hell, how does Jeff Driskel look like such a competent quarterback? This can’t be the same person that, with the help of Will Muschamp, destroyed our program in just 3 years!” I decided to do some research to see if this was a fluke or if somehow within just a few months he had become a decent quarterback. Based on the fact that our passing offense was ranked 107 out of 128 last year I assumed it was a fluke. However, to every Florida fan’s surprise it turns out he’s actually a decent quarterback. Not only is he decent, he’s really good. He’s 9th in the nation in passing with 2,115 yards and 13 touchdowns this year. Naturally, as a Florida fan, my mind was blown. I couldn’t fathom how someone can look so inept for 3 straight seasons and then be in the top 10 the next.

My question is simple, how!? Was it 3 Offensive coordinators in 3 years, was it Will Muschamp’s cancer like effect on teams, or was it the tough SEC defenses? Now I have just as much SEC bias as the next beer drinking, football watching, fried foot eating southerner, but I refuse to believe the SEC defenses are responsible for single-handedly destroying our program. What has changed so drastically to make Jeff Driskel a productive member of a football team? This is a great question so please don’t butch it!”

I think it was bad offensive coaching and an inability to stay healthy. 

Remember that Driskel led the Gators to an 11-1 season his first year as a starter. 

Hell, look at what McElwain has done with this year’s Gator team and pretty much the same players. Coaching matters, even when you have talented players. Driskel is a perfect example. Muschamp’s offense was just cursed.