Cavs Streaking, Dancing Sharks, and Big Burritos: While We’re Waiting…

The Bad News Browns have struck again! Wednesday afternoon, we learned the Browns could be in hot water for Ray Farmer’s Texts From the Press Box and that Kyle Shanahan made a THIRTY-TWO point Powerpoint justifying his exit from the organization. And all this on the heels of Johnny Manziel checking into treatment and Josh Gordon receiving a season-long suspension … again! The only thing the Browns haven’t copied from the Bad News Bears is hiring an alcoholic pool boy as a coach and going on a really tacky trip to Japan. Feels like it’s just a matter of time at this point.

But there are some good things going on in #TheLand…

Bring your green hat, because the Cavs are going streaking! For at least the next several hours, the Cleveland Cavaliers own the longest active winning streak in the NBA thanks to the Atlanta Hawks dropping their first game in 20 Monday night against the New Orleans Pelicans. At 11 games, the Cavs are only two wins away from tying their longest winning streak in franchise history.¹ In both 2009 and 2010, the Cavs went on 13 game winning streaks. So, if they beat the Los Angeles Clippers on Thursday night and the Indiana Pacers on Friday night, the Cavs would play for the franchise record Sunday afternoon at home against the Los Angeles Lakers and former coach Byron Scott, in what would make for an extra sweet non-football Sunday. If the Cavs are victorious Thursday night hosting the Clippers, celebrate like Govzilla and eat an entire pizza.²

Timo Mozgov is sitting in locker room eating a pizza. Not a piece of pizza. An ENTIRE pizza

— Jason Lloyd (@ByJasonLloyd) February 3, 2015

But a few more parting thoughts on the NFL’s season-ending celebration before football disappears for several months. Katy Perry’s trippy halftime show proved once again that the networks don’t totally know what to do with the halftime show for an event that millions of people would watch even if Tiny Tim sang “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” The leading school of thought appears to be finding a pop star that appeals to women and those disinterested in football, closely followed by finding a noncontroversial rock act that has been famous for decades (even if it’s well past its prime).

This year, NBCUniversal and the NFL brought in Katy Perry, a choice that I joked was the perfect choice if the goal was to “find a performer both preteen girls and perverted old men approved of.” And boy, did Ms. Perry deliver. She began the show by arriving on the field riding a giant robotic cat like a Zord from Power Rangers (which Wikipedia describes as “immense assault machines … [deployed] to overcome the periodic antagonists”). As the halftime show continued, things became increasingly wacky. Katy Perry repeatedly changed outfits and eventually joined a party onstage complete with beach balls and palm trees that had come to life and began dancing. The show had devolved into something that looked more like an H.R. Pufnstuf episode than a rock concert.

Some online establishments had props that allowed individuals to wager on whether Katy Perry would have more crotch grabs than Marshawn Lynch during the broadcast. If online gambling were legal, I may have wagered on one of these options—strictly as an academic exercise, of course. In case you needed any more proof that gambling is not a destructive vice but instantly entertaining and magical:

https://twitter.com/Sportsbook_com/status/562310599162736640

But regardless of how we remember Katy Perry at halftime of Super Bowl XLIX, the star of the show (and even the game) will always be the dancing sharks. On a day where the Super Bowl could only have been less enjoyable for Browns fans had Drew Carey had been the Patriots quarterback, thank you dancing sharks for being the funniest shit I have seen in a long time. Eat your heart out, Tom Brady.

But what about that play call? FiveThirtyEight’s Benjamin Morris explained why Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll and offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell’s decision not to run the ball with Marshawn Lynch on second-and-goal from the one with a chance to win the game was a reasonable decision. By now we’re all aware that the Seahawks threw the ball, the Patriots intercepted it, and the Seahawks lost in devastating fashion.

The planet then collectively lost its mind and decried the decision to do anything but give the ball to Lynch as the dumbest thing anyone has ever done in a game of football. Hindsight is always 20/20 (or at least 20/40), but most critics are acting like they could see the thing from a thousand miles away. Morris explains some of the flaws of that logic.

[Carroll s]ounds crazy, but he’s right: With 26 seconds left and only one timeout, the Seahawks couldn’t run Lynch three times in a row. If they rushed on second down, didn’t make it in, called timeout, rushed again, and still didn’t make it in, they’d probably be out of time before they could get off another play. So, the Seahawks had three downs to work with, but they could only run Lynch twice at most.

Thus the question isn’t whether the Seahawks should’ve called a run—we’ve already stipulated that. The question is when they should’ve called a run.

Exactly! Because the Seahawks only had one timeout, they only had a guaranteed two-way go (the option to run or pass) on second and fourth downs. But by running a conservative pass on second down (if it’s unsuccessful and not a turnover), then the playbook remains open on third and fourth downs. The pick/slant the Seahawks ran is generally a low-risk play that’s a touchdown or incompletion ninety-seven percent of the time. Had Carroll tried running it up the gut on second down, wasted his timeout, then ran it again on third or fourth unsuccessfully, everyone calls him an idiot for that. Malcolm Butler, who had zero interceptions in his career, simply made one of the best plays in professional football history—if he arrives .1 seconds later it’s a touchdown and if he arrives 0.1 seconds earlier it’s pass interference. Give Butler some credit and don’t mistake Carroll’s questionable call for an indefensible call.

Do you like burritos?³ Because Kyle Stock and Venessa Wong of Bloomberg Business compiled an excellent collection of tales on the burrito giant of giant burritos, Chipotle. The oral history—complete with Chipotle founder Steve Ells, several of the company’s present corporate officers, and former business partners—tells the story of a burrito shack started in Colorado by an aspiring chef and funded by his parents that improbably became a corporate powerhouse with over 1700 locations with the help of cultural converse McDonald’s.

The story is worth reading for a variety of reasons, but some of the stories are worth highlighting. First is founder Steve Ells’ conversation with his father and retired engineer Bob Ells as Steve neared the end of college.

Bob Ells: So fast-forward to the middle semester of his senior year at college. We were having dinner one night in Boulder, and I said, “Steve, what are you going to do when you graduate?”

Steve Ells: I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, and my friend Cyndi said, “You should go to cooking school.” I wasn’t thinking about a career, but I thought, “That’d be fun!”

History repeatedly proves that some of the boldest ideas come from people unwilling to consider the possibility of having a career. Working away a lifetime seems dull, so they just invent instead. Another memorable moment is when the folks running Chipotle went on their promotional tour prior to the launch of their IPO.

Jack Hartung (CFO, Chipotle; former CFO, McDonald’s Partner Brands): I remember feeling a little bit insecure. We hadn’t spent time with anybody on Wall Street. There was one meeting with a very large investor who came in and said, “This is like Taco Bell, right?” We had to do some explaining.

Steve Ells: On the roadshow, people said, “Who are your customers?” I just said, “People who are hungry, you know, people who like to eat.”

Monty Moran (Co-CEO, Chipotle; college friend of Steve Ells): We priced at $22 a share, and then the damn stock couldn’t open for like 90 minutes. It wouldn’t open until it was at $44 a share. It literally doubled on its first trade, which represented a huge loss of money to Chipotle. But obviously, it represented a pretty exciting time for us to see how loved our company was and how much demand there was for our stock.

1. Via Basketball-Reference.com. [↩]
2. Govzilla is the leader in the clubhouse for Timofey’s official nickname. The Mozgov Nicknaming Committee’s deliberations and procedures are top secret, but the Committee assures constituents that there are other great names in the running. [↩]
3. No movie review this week after the last two. But there will be something movie-related before the Academy Awards. [↩]