A warning in advance1Mostly to my mom, who reads these and also doesn’t really care about sports in that way. Sorry ma!: we’re going very sports heavy today, because the sports world has gone heavy on its own. That prefaced, lemme check off the list of football stories in the last 48 hours:
- Pete Carroll is out as head coach of the Seahawks
- Nick Saban retires2Dan Lanning has already come out to say he’s staying at Oregon. I’m mildly concerned that Marcus Freeman might get poached for the gig, which would be a real gut-punch in a year that feels like Notre Dame might be lined up for a shot at the title.
- Bill Belichick “mutually separates” from the Patriots
- Mike Vrabel is fired from the Titans, a job no one thought he’d lose so much as potentially choose to leave if the previous point happened for that job
- Pat McAfee concludes his Aaron Rodgers segments through at least the end of the football season
2024 is gonna be one of those years, it feels like. Buckle up, we’re in for a long one!
Inputs
1: So, apparently, in order to give statues to the on-air talent for Emmy wins by the program (who are, by the rules for the award, ineligible to receive them), ESPN submitted fake names as parts of crews for College GameDay and other programs, then removed the name placards from the trophies and replaced them with the on-air talent. This story is both a bizarre and an amazing effort by the producers to circumvent Emmy rules to a) reward, and b) stoke the egos of, the people working on the show for, y’know, working on the show. In conclusion, awards are dumb and make people dumber3Which does not stop my wanting one. Because I am also dumb..
2: Stephen A Smith rode the wave off Katt Williams’ performance on Shannon Sharpe’s show and decided, fuck it, he’s opening the gates on “the fat bastard” for a full damned hour. Dan LeBatard has a great breakdown of the power dynamic behind this whole thing, with Smith coming up on contract renegotiations and the work he’s doing to build his own broadcasting empire as the legacy media continues to fracture and allow for a furthering of the Cult of Personalities era.
Broadcasting rights are essentially the glue holding a lot of these networks together, and as the personalities see this, there’s a scramble to build something for themselves that isn’t beholden to the network for continued existence. Whether sports is a precursor to a larger movement or is a special case due to inherent factors remains to be seen.
3: Ok, non-sports pivot: This story is going rather under the radar in the US, but has some significant lessons that we desperately need to learn, about privatization, the fallibility of algorithmic management, the continued need for common-sense actors to keep a hand on the tiller, and the, not merely deleterious, but actively damaging (to the tune of 4 suicides and hundreds of others convicted of erroneous crimes, their lives ruined, and the institution’s permanent stain). What happened? A poorly programmed algorithm was put in charge of the Post Office in the UK.
This article from 2021 does a good job of explaining some of the technological flaws, as does this appearance from its author on the YouTube series Computerphile. Essentially, entries into an accounting system weren’t handled correctly via software and human errors in how the entries were made into the system, leading to accusations of theft against the individuals running postal offices.
The new attention to the scandal comes at the premiere of a new series on ITV in the UK staring Toby Jones, which takes what is sort of a complex issue related to double-entry bookkeeping, database management, and CRUD issues in writing to said databases, and turns it into an accessible drama about the lives affected by this failure.
Projects In Progress
Actively fighting choice paralysis: the persistent condition of my life.
Notes:
- 1Mostly to my mom, who reads these and also doesn’t really care about sports in that way. Sorry ma!
- 2Dan Lanning has already come out to say he’s staying at Oregon. I’m mildly concerned that Marcus Freeman might get poached for the gig, which would be a real gut-punch in a year that feels like Notre Dame might be lined up for a shot at the title.
- 3Which does not stop my wanting one. Because I am also dumb.