All That and a Bag of Mail

It’s Friday, rejoice.

And right off the top of today’s column, I want to thank the teachers and administrators of Williamson County, Tennessee, where my kids attend public schools. Today, the 2020-21 school year was completed. It was 100% in-person instruction that began last August, and it was done 100% safely.

While so many cities and states failed their kids in public schools, our county found a way to safely complete the entire school year in person, and I will be eternally thankful for their hard work and reliance on the science and data, as opposed to the fear porn, to make this possible. In fact, I’m so pleased by this that I don’t believe I will ever move outside of Williamson County, Tennessee for the rest of my life.

Heck, based on the schools being open and in person this year, I even felt good paying my property taxes this year, which was a first.

It’s pure and complete madness that some public school districts weren’t open this year and still aren’t sure they will be open by the fall of 2021. As all of the school districts that had in-person schooling begin to complete their years, every school district that didn’t do in-person instruction should be shamed to the ends of the earth. Because they all failed their children.

Okay, on with the Friday mailbag.

Jason writes:

“With the PGA Championship this week, what are the four ‘majors’ of college football regular season match-ups?”

It can vary from season to season, but I’d say the four majors of the past ten years or so would be:

Alabama-LSU

Ohio State-Michigan

Florida-Georgia

Alabama-Auburn

You could have honorable mentions based on past years for: Clemson-Florida State, (historically Florida State-Miami would have been the bigger game), Texas-Oklahoma, USC-Notre Dame, and Auburn-Georgia.

But I think the four I listed above would be the majors.

JRod:

“Do you feel worthy of a contract extension for your Little League team? Was it a ‘rebuild’ year?”

After starting 5-2 on the season, our team lost six straight games to finish the season by a combined score of 55-8.

Do you know how hard it is to lose six baseball games by this margin when you are limited to scoring only five runs in a half inning? Total and complete tailspin.

There is a 100% chance that if I were analyzing the coaching of this team, I’d be demanding the entire coaching staff be fired after these six straight losses.

I’m the assistant coach — third base coach is my primary focus on the staff — and during one of the recent beatdowns, as we locked in our third or fourth error of the inning, the head coach turned to me and said, “You know on draft evaluation day, it was really cold and raining. We only got to see a couple of throws and a couple of swings.”

I didn’t attend draft evaluation day, but I definitely laughed thinking about what the reaction would be if we had post-game press conferences after our little league games and that line was dropped by the head coach. It would definitely be played on a loop on all TV networks and sports talk shows.

Side note: how funny would post-game little league press conferences be? Just volunteer coaches getting absolutely grilled by full-time sports journalists covering the teams like beat writers? This could be a popular YouTube sports series, for sure.

The highlight of the season for me was when our head coach gave the “if you don’t want to be here, you can leave” speech that is a staple of every team I’ve ever been on. We were losing like 7-0 at that point, and our head coach asked for any kid that didn’t want to be there — they are all nine and ten years old — to raise their hands if they wanted to leave, and I swear to god, one of the kids raised his hand!

I was standing behind the head coach kind of giving the kid the “put down your hand” gesture, but the worst part of it all was the kid who raised his hand and wanted to leave WAS CURRENTLY PITCHING.

Our pitcher was ready to just walk off the field in the middle of the game and quit the season!

I’ve never seen anything like it.

Anyway, the season is over, and I’m not going to lie, I was ready for the season to be over.

Matt The Bama Fan writes:

“I hate Florida. I hate Tebow. Is it weird I am pulling for him to have extreme success this year?”

No, I think Tebow, fair or not, has become a national Rorschach test for our sporting country and many people are like you, rooting for Tebow even though you haven’t rooted for him in the past.

It speaks to how broken our sports media coverage is that a guy who has never done anything wrong in his life — who won two national championships, a Heisman Trophy, and started and won an NFL playoff game against the Pittsburgh Steelers — is somehow considered a controversial guy because he’s overtly religious and is willing to switch positions to continue his career.

The same people who spent years telling Tebow to switch to tight end are now furious that he’s doing so? I just don’t get it at all.

But I’m rooting for him to succeed too.

I don’t know Tebow well, but in our private conversations over the years, he’s been the exact same guy in those conversations as he has been publicly.

I’ll just put it to you this way, is there a single guy reading this right now who wouldn’t be happy if Tebow married his daughter? Isn’t he pretty much the ideal son-in-law? I just don’t get it.

Plus, let’s not pretend what’s going on here is that uncommon — NFL teams regularly bring in non-traditional football players and give them chances to make the team. Think about the Aussie rules football players in NFL camps, the Mountain from Game of Thrones came to a camp, the Bills brought in Chris Hogan as a former lacrosse player and turned him into a wide receiver, Julian Edelman moved from quarterback to wide receiver for Bill Belichick. Heck, what about other tight ends in the past who have never even played football in college, like Antonio Gates, who are brought in to try and learn the position? My point is, Tebow in an NFL locker room training camp isn’t remotely uncommon at all, and he’s actually got more bona fides on the football field than most players. Stories like Tebow’s are a yearly staple on Hard Knocks.

Given that Tebow hasn’t taken any hits on the field in years, has proven to be great in short yardage situations down near the goal line, and has previously proven himself as a leader in Urban Meyer’s Florida locker room, I don’t see how this is a bad move at all.

Purely from a cultural leadership standpoint, Tebow feels like he could be a great locker room guy for a young team. There’s no doubt Tebow will sell quite a few seats and a ton of jerseys. Plus — and I think this is the genius move of it all — he helps take the pressure off Trevor Lawrence in a massive way.

I mean, no one is even talking about Trevor Lawrence right now at all because he’s entirely in Tebow’s shadow. That seems ideal for a young quarterback and feels like a Jedi mind trick move by Meyer.

I’ve long said I don’t get the Tebow hate. But the insane takes that Tebow continues to provoke in the blue checkmark brigade of sports media still blow my mind. Yesterday, Stephen A. Smith used Tebow’s signing by the Jaguars as an opportunity to rip Tebow’s white privilege and somehow tie it into George Floyd. If you didn’t see this take, go check out our write up here.

This take from Stephen A. Smith came on the same day there was a report that the Dolphins, Washington and the Raiders were all still interested in trading for Deshaun Watson, even while there are still 22 different sexual assault allegations outstanding against Watson.

Is that black privilege, the fact that 22 different women can accuse you of sexual assault and the NFL doesn’t do anything at all? Can you imagine if a white quarterback had been accused of sexually assaulting 22 different women, and the NFL wasn’t doing anything? The blue check brigade would have lost their minds.

Yet it happens here, and there’s virtually no commentary on it at all.

Here’s the simple truth of the matter: NFL teams do whatever they can to make their teams better. So long as they believe your talent exceeds your problems, you will keep getting signed, no matter what your race is. Tebow has no problems and he’s been a very talented football player. Watson has many problems, and he’s currently a very talented quarterback.

So both get chances to continue to make NFL teams better. Their race doesn’t matter. Trying to make this racial is an insanely lazy take and ultimately serves to divide sports fans along racial identity politics lines. What’s more, and worst of all, it’s just an incredibly dumb argument.

Fuss writes:

“Is the rest of the NFL silent on Deshaun Watson because they know what he did is actually commonplace in the league and they don’t want a bigger scandal?”

I don’t think what Deshaun Watson did is very common at all.

First, very few guys would book this many massages from this many different women in the first place. Every athlete I’ve asked about this says they find it very strange. No one picks a therapeutic masseuse on Instagram. And once you find someone who is aiding your performance through therapeutic massage, you don’t switch from one person to another. A good massage therapist is like a good personal trainer, you can’t switch every time because your results won’t be anywhere near as good. That’s why most athletes keep their personal trainers for years.

Second, if your goal is lots of anonymous sex, you’re a starting quarterback in the NFL! In Houston, for god’s sake! You could have sex with a different woman every day of the year if you wanted to — for free — without even having to work that hard at it. You don’t need a masseuse to get sex. Which is why I don’t think this was directly about sex either, because there are way easier ways to get relatively anonymous sex if you’re a young, rich and famous athlete in a major American city.

So what was going on here?

It’s always risky to psychoanalyze a stranger’s behavior, but Deshaun Watson is a publicly religious guy and he has had a serious girlfriend as well. So this seems like a situation where a guy would be worried about his reputation if he was chasing sex in public or if he was directly paying for sex in private. I think the massages were Watson’s path to casual sexual encounters with relatively anonymous women without the danger of getting caught or feeling bad about his behavior. I suspect the way he rationalized his behavior was he was getting a massage, it wasn’t his fault if the women decided to give him a happy ending during the massage. Heck, in his mind, it wasn’t even sex, it was just a happy ending.

And if these happy endings did occur, given the fact that it was just the two of them in the room, who was ever going to believe the women anyway if they claimed he’d behaved inappropriately? After all, the massage required that he be nude to receive them. It was a perfect cover. What’s more, he might truly have convinced himself he was doing nothing at all wrong.

I think Watson believed his power dynamic — and his reputation for being a good guy — protected him from ever being accused of any wrongdoing during the massages. And he was right, potentially for a couple of years or more, until one woman went public and then all the other women who felt he’d behaved inappropriately also decided to come forward as well.

Have I nailed the situation? Who knows, but it seems like a plausible reading based on the allegations so far.

Again, no one knows for sure what Deshaun Watson did with all these women, except for Watson himself, but my position on this story from the moment it began has been that it’s unlikely 22 different women are making up a story like this. Watson may truly believe he didn’t do anything wrong by encouraging these women to give him a happy ending during his massage, and he might not have known how his behavior appeared to these women as well. But that’s probably being very charitable towards him.

Because if you truly thought your behavior was totally normal, why were you constantly seeking out new women for massages?

I still suspect these cases end in a settlement, but the wild card remains whether any criminal charges will be filed as well. And the largest issue from a media perspective is this, why in the world is Tim Tebow being more criticized for trying out for tight end than Deshaun Watson is being criticized for allegedly sexually assaulting 22 different women?

It’s madness.

WG writes:

“Would you ever consider facing Darren Rovell in the boxing ring?”

I mean, if you paid me enough money, I’d consider anything. But you’re getting me at a time when I’ve never needed money less, so I’m not that motivated to jump at opportunities solely based on money.

Most importantly, I also don’t think it would remotely be a fair fight.

I don’t know what Rovell’s height and weight are, but I know he’s quite a bit smaller than me. I just had a physical this morning — Fox is taking out key man life insurance on me — and I was 6 foot, 180 pounds. I figure if I trained for a fight, I could get down to 6 foot 170 or 175 fairly easily. That would still be way bigger than Rovell.

As a result, a boxing match between the two of us would be a massacre.

In general, when it comes to boxing anyone, however, I’m 42 years old now and make a living off my brain working well. It would take an insane offer for me to let anyone swing at my head for any amount of money.

…

Okay, thanks again to local Williamson County schools for getting the school year in, and I look forward to seeing some of you down at the beach over the next couple of weeks.

Because I’m headed to Florida tomorrow, and I can’t wait.