June 18, 2013

WFNY Podcast – 2012-12-05 – As much Brian Spaeth as you can handle

December 5, 2012 by 3 Comments

This is a very different kind of WFNY podcast. As opposed to when we talk Cleveland sports current events instead this time I grabbed Brian Spaeth to talk about whatever came up. Brian is an Internet staple and he has tons of projects out there that are worthy of promotion, so here goes… First and foremost you can find him on Twitter and you can also check out his website / Blog Brian23.com. You can subscribe to Brian’s podcast on iTunes. You can watch the kids Youtube show Turtlecalls that I did with Brian as well. Probably most importantly, if you want to read Brian’s most recent book you can find it at Amazon. Man that’s a lot of stuff, but all of it worthy of checking out.

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Former Brown Says Mangini “was a bad head coach.”

November 18, 2011 by 39 Comments

Vince Grzegorek at Scene posted a quote yesterday from a former “player” for the Cleveland Browns, Nate Jackson.  You don’t remember the tenure of Nate Jackson as a member of the Cleveland Browns?  I am guessing I might be able to find him if I search old roster moves on NFL.com, but he doesn’t have any stats applied to his name since 2008.  Apparently, though, he was on the roster of the Cleveland Browns last year in Eric Mangini’s final year in Berea.  Here’s the quote.

I was only in Cleveland for one week, but as I wrote last year, I was there long enough to figure out that his coaching style was so interactive as to be intrusive. He peppered his players with fourthdownulator-esque studies, made them memorize those figures, then called upon them in meetings and forced them to stand and recite them. Players were visibly shaken by the process. This was not the football they knew. They had notes scattered about their laps and desks, nervously hoping they wouldn’t be asked to stand and tell Mangini what percentage of the time field goals are made by a left-footed kicker from the right hash-mark facing south with an east-to-west wind in the second quarter of Thursday night games in November. It’s hard to play your best with these things on your mind.

Mangini was a bad head coach. He couldn’t reconcile his scientific approach to the game with the real-time lack of science that was needed to play it. He took it too far and lost his team. [Read more...]

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The Other Side of Deadspin’s NBA Financial Analysis

July 1, 2011 by 21 Comments

(Note: This was written before Deadspin corrected their post.  It largely remains accurate except that it now relies largely on some arbitrary numbers that Deadspin originally stated.  Still, conceptually it should work and the conclusions should be the same.)

Yesterday, Deadspin scored a coup when they obtained some financial records for the New Jersey Nets.  The title of that article is pretty eye opening. “Exclusive: How (And Why) An NBA Team Makes A $7 Million Profit Look Like A $28 Million Loss.”

It is a good article with a lot of interesting takeaways about how NBA financials work on the ownership end of things.  It turns out that there are some arcane tax laws that have been in place for a long, long time that allow NBA owners to claim giant losses on paper even as they make some money.  In the case of the New Jersey Nets from five years ago, it was a $7 million gain that was made to look like a $28 million loss.  That number apparently wasn’t totally correct, but let’s assume it is.  What we aren’t getting into here, is what kind of money an NBA owner should realistically expect to make from the investment.  That’s what I wanted to look at here. [Read more...]

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The Internet- my imaginary friend!

February 29, 2008 by 2 Comments

the_accordian_hero.jpgWelcome to the weekly best of the web. (By the way, my friend would kill at that game.)

So what has been going on this week…

Around here the Cavs won one, and lost two. LeBron scored his 10,000th point, and Mike Brown got ejected. Scott wondered what might have been if the Cavs went after Sam Cassell or Mike Miller. Rock looked forward to the return of Andy Varejao. I thought about the Indians, The Browns QB debate, and impending free agency.

Around the Cleveland sports scene-

The Indians got back to work, and won their first Spring Training game. These Tribe headlines speak for themselves- Peralta working on range, (I certainly hope so) Hafner thinks swing is corrected. (But really, what else is he gonna say?) [Read more...]

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