July 29, 2020
Good Day Grover Pickers,
If you are reading this, we may not have any time left. Football season started yesterday with all the NFL teams reporting to camp. It could end anytime due to the Covid-19 Corona Virus, or, as Bomani Jones calls it, “Cooties”.
So, The Commissioner, Your Commissioner, has moved up the start of the weekly in-season informational tirade so we can squeeze in as much football as we can before whatever ending we are served.
You’re welcome!
To start the season, the NFL is testing all players everyday. Those with negative tests remain. Those who test positive are reassigned to the Miami Marlins. The NFL is saying it expects HUNDREDS of players to test positive base on recent foot traffic at Atlanta gentleman’s clubs.
As of this morning 25 NFL players have chosen to take a $150,000 loan from the league and opt out of the season to avoid the ‘Cooties’. This breaks down by team like this:
Kansas City Chiefs- 1 opt-out, a starting OL who is also a doctor.
New England Patriots- 24 opt-outs in order to tank the season and be in position to draft Trevor Lawrence.
In slightly related news, Cam Newton joined the Patriots, likely for just one year. It says here Cam Newton will reunite with Ron Rivera in Washington and win the Super Bowl played in 2023.
Oh, and Washington is now just “Football Team” instead of “Racial Slurs”. They should name it like soccer and call themselves “FT Washington” for now.
Why do soccer teams have the dullest names in sport such as “FC”, “Sporting”, or “City”? Washington could do a modern version of that style if it went with “WTF Washington”, “SMH Washington”, or “ELI5 Washington”. Given the team’s recent workplace troubles, they should avoid “AMA Washington”.
Pat Mahomes has already won 2020. It’s not a high bar, but Mahomes won the Super Bowl, MVP, signed a new contract for all the money in the world not claimed by Warren Buffet, and perfected his behind-the-back pass while in quarantine.
Mahomes is winning so often, he needed to buy some L’s just to balance his life so yesterday he became a part owner of the Kansas City Royals.
The NFL Pre-Season is cancelled. Not that you or anyone else will notice until Week 1 of the season when every team racks up 23 penalties and 13 turnovers and loses all of the non-Cooties infected players to hamstring tears and high ankle sprains. Either way, by pandemic or soft-tissue injury, the chance of fielding a full Week 2 NFL schedule is the same chance Dr. Fauci has of finding home plate on the first pitch.
Reminder: The Commissioner already gave out the solution to this ‘Covid vs. NFL’ problem and the NBA adopted a version of it in Orlando. It’s a bubble at the Mall of America in Bloomington, MN. I know Minnesota has earned some bad press lately for police brutality, racism, violence, and lack of awareness around white privledge, but that was in Minneapolis. The Mall of America is in Bloomington which is one WHOLE TRAIN STOP south of Minneapolis. Completely different frozen world.
This from the Grover Picks Post on December 3, 2018:
“American malls are dying. If Mall of America, the largest such building of it’s kind in the world, wants to survive, it needs a deal with the NFL. Tear out the amusement park and install three full football fields in the center of the field. Keep everything else exactly the same. Then, each Sunday, play three NFL games simultaneously on those fields. If the Vikings have a road game, they can just move to the other end of the mall. This allows 6 fan bases to commingle on the mall concourses. It’s as close as we’ll come to a live Red Zone. Everybody wins. Except the Jets. “
Now, that may have sounded weird two years ago, but right now MLS is doing EXACTLY THAT, only at Disney World. The “MLS Is Back Cup” plays simultaneous games on adjacent fields starting at 8am. It’s just youth soccer with older players and fewer juice boxes. This plan works, minus the commingling part and as long as everyone is wearing a mask.
Baseball should be doing this in Omaha and wherever in Iowa that Field of Dreams scam is.
The NHL is doing this in a bubble called “Canada”.
NFL- go sign a lease at the malls!
Last Chance U
The Netflix series Last Chance U is now available for season 5. It is awesome, following the 2019 camping of Laney College in Oakland. This is by far the best season and I’ve only watched the first episode.
The previous 4 seasons were all about tubby old white dudes yelling profanity at mostly Black dudes for few good reasons. In the era of Black Lives Matter, I would not want to be East Mississippi Community College. These previous seasons showed disinterested students making vague attempts at school. They feature, small, nowhere towns with little hope and too few adult coaches behaving like adults. It was a show about how football was the center of an abusive system that very occasionally gave someone a new chance and more often ended in embarrassment for everyone and much misery.
Season 5 has much less screaming*, more mature adult coaches, and profiles of some players who really are trying to do right by themselves and use football to their benefit, rather than the more common use of these young men for the benefit of schools and coaches. There are moments at Laney when the coaches take actions that demonstrate a genuine interest in the welfare of student athletes, which we can all hope is more often the case in football programs than it was at EMCC and Independence. At least, that’s episode 1. Highly recommended.
*I cannot stress enough how ‘less screaming’ is relative to the insane amount of unhinged screaming in the first four seasons. There’s plenty of unfiltered yelling and frustration at Laney, but compared to EMCC and Independence CC, Laney is a Buddhist Monastery.
College Football
There was a time in America, it was March of this year, when a college athletic director spoke out loud to say, “If we don’t have students on campus, I don’t see how we can have athletes on campus.” That AD now runs a hot dog cart in Vladivostock.
There will be college football because
A) Dabo will kick the virus in the teeth and
B) Oklahoma State needs the money.
Do you need a better reason?
There won’t be many, if any, non-conference games at this point. Each conference is handling the schedule differently.
Pac 12– These are Universities with football teams attached- may not play until spring since several campuses won’t have students present and California isn’t allowing gatherings that would make for practice. This finally may be Oregon State’s year!
SEC – These are Football programs with classrooms attached- The SEC forges ahead because as the marketing slogan says, “It Just Means More”. The “It” is money, pride, freedom, money, the Constitution, grit, heart, money, and honest belief in lost causes, want-to, and intrinsic self confidence that nothing worse will ever happen to me than my current circumstances. “It” does not mean the well-being of players, coaches, families, fans, education, or science, especially when the ’science’ is a work-in-progress guess by people who never played the game.
ACC– These are Basketball programs with football teams attached to schools and also Notre Dame. Clemson and Virginia Tech and FSU will definitely play. Why else do these schools exist? Duke won’t play just to spite the other schools. Syracuse may or may not play, but news of the pandemic may not have even reached that part of New York yet. Miami probably needs to just scrimmage itself in its own bubble for the health of everyone in Miami.
Big 10– Michigan State has a huge covid outbreak right now. Wisconsin and Iowa have big White Privilege problems. Ohio State has an All-American problem in that if the Buckeyes don’t play this fall, half the team will enter the NFL draft and they will be left with nothing but high school All-American freshman on the squad. Which will still be enough to beat Michigan.
Big 12– Yeah, sure, whatever the rest of you guys wanna do, I’m good with it. Just let us know. We’ll just be chillin’ on the lake till ya holler at ya boy.
Ivy League– The Ivies announced weeks ago they will play football in Spring 2021! Get ready for Brown vs Columbia to dominate your Saturday’s in May!
Hey, the XFL is a Spring League, too! The XFL will be auctioned from bankruptcy this week. The winning bid gets a couple TV contracts, a lifetime supply of DC Defenders helmets, and a game-worn He Hate Me jersey.
The Tampa Bay Rays Rule. Several schools have announced they will allow only 20% of normal capacity at college football games. The Horseshoe in Columbus will look and sound weird, but others schools may see an attendance uptick over recent seasons, such as at Tennessee in Knoxville.
This is called the Tampa Bay Rays rule because the Rays always play at home in front of 9 fans. Now, the rest of MLB must do the same and while every other team will be thrown off their game without the fan energy, the Rays now have the equivalent of 60 consecutive home games!
Notable July 29 Birthdays:
Geddy Lee, Greatest Lead Singer/Bassist for Rush
Alexis DeTocqueville, French Writer Guy
Captain Lou Albano, Management Expert, Cyndi Lauper’s Dad
Ken Burns, Longwinded Filmmaker
Benito Mussolini, Actual Fascist Bastard
Sayaka Takahashi, Japanese Professional Badminton Champion
Harry Potter, Wizard
THE Commissioner, Supergenius
Finally, NY Jets coach Adam Gase is still a bozo, the Jets are still the NY Knicks with uglier uniforms. Their owner is at best an incompetent Ambassador to Great Britain and at worst a NFL owner. The Jets traded their best defensive player to Seattle for two first round picks which they will blow on cheese and grits.
In a year when everything is off, when change is sweeping the world, when there is no going back to the way anything used to be, it’s comforting to know that at least the NY Jets are still and embarrassing tire fire. It’s the last normal thing we have.
Welcome back to football.
Happy Masking,
The Commissioner
The Grover Picks 